Spooks at Mt. Holyoke College

edited by Alex Constantine

http://p216.ezboard.com/frigorousintuitionfrm13.
showMessage?topicID=142.topic

Teddy K almost died in plane crash in Holyoke, MA in 1970s ...
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Holyoke's "Understanding Government Project"

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:V3ONKlnMJ1MJ:
www.tcf.org/Publications/AnnualReport2000.pdf+holyoke+
college+and+%22intelligence+community%22&hl=en&gl=
us&ct=clnk&cd=41

A series of magazine articles about the CIA, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service aimed at promoting improved journalistic coverage of federal agencies, prepared under the guidance of Washington Monthly editor Charles Peters.
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John W. Gardner

John W. Gardner, 89, Founder of Common Cause and Adviser to Presidents, Dies

John W. Gardner, an eloquent voice for citizen participation who founded the Common Cause lobby, championed campaign finance reform and introduced Medicare as secretary of health, education and welfare in the heyday of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society, died Saturday at his home on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 89.... In the late 1930's, Mr. Gardner taught psychology at the Connecticut College for women in New London and Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He worked briefly for the Federal Communications Commission in 1942, then joined the Marine Corps. During World War II, he was assigned in Europe to the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, and left the service in 1946 as a captain. After the war, he went to work for the Carnegie Corporation of New York, one of the nation's oldest private philanthropic foundations, whose grants to colleges and research and educational institutions helped shape educational policies in America.

... Mr. Gardner was the only Republican in the Johnson cabinet. The Democratic-dominated 89th Congress had passed no fewer than 189 major domestic laws, with many falling under Mr. Gardner's sprawling agency, which touched the lives of almost every American, from preschoolers to the elderly. With characteristic wit, Mr. Gardner described his mission as "a series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems."...

JOHN GARDNER - CIA MIND CONTROL HISTORY
FROM THE SEARCH FOR THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks1.htm

More than 30 years after the war, Murray remains modest in his claims for the assessment system, saying that it was only an aid in weeding out the "horrors" among OSS candidates.

Nevertheless, the secret agency's leaders believed in its results, and Murray's system became a fixture in OSS, testing Americans and foreign agents alike. Some of Murray's young behavioral scientists, like John Gardner,[9] would go on to become prominent in public affairs, and, more importantly, the OSS assessment program would be recognized as a milestone in American psychology. It was the first systematic effort to evaluate an individual's personality in order to predict his future behavior. After the war, personality assessment would become a new field in itself, and some of Murray's assistants would go on to establish OSS-like systems at large corporations, starting with AT&T.

They also would set up study programs at universities, beginning with the University of California at Berkeley. As would happen repeatedly with the CIA's mind-control research, OSS was years ahead of public developments in behavioral theory and application.

FOOTNOTE 9: Gardner, a psychologist teaching at Mount Holyoke College, helped Murray set up the original program and went on to open the West Coast OSS assessment site at a converted beach club in San Juan Capistrano. After the war, he would become Secretary of HEW ...
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Jim Cavanaugh, Theater Dept.

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:uXo-kS4TkTAJ
:theatreschool.depaul.edu/pdf/tsn/TSN9-3.pdf+holyoke
+college+and+%22intelligence+community%22&hl=en&gl
=us&ct=clnk&cd=110

JIM CAVANAUGH (BFA, Directing, ”67) lives on an island off the coast of Georgia. In 1970 he founded the summer theatre program at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA, and now spends his time working regularly as a role-player for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia
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Mount Holyoke Mourns the Loss of Peter Viereck
Posted: May 16, 2006
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/news/obit_viereck.shtml

Peter R. Viereck, professor emeritus of history

The Mount Holyoke community is mourning the loss of one of its most distinguished members. Peter R. Viereck, professor emeritus of history, passed away Saturday, May 13, after a long illness. He was 89.
Born in New York City in 1916, Viereck is likely the only American scholar who has received Guggenheim Fellowships in both poetry and history. A member of the Mount Holyoke College faculty since 1948, Viereck retired in 1987 but continued through 1997 to teach his survey of Russian history. The recipient of many major awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for his first book of poems, Terror and Decorum: Poems 1940-1948, Viereck is the author of numerous articles, essays, and books of history, cultural and political analysis, and poetry. Among his books are Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler; Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt against Revolt, 1815-1949; and Strict Wildness: Discoveries in Poetry and History.

"Professor Viereck excelled in many fields. He was an excellent poet, a superb historian, and an extraordinary teacher who touched the lives of generations of Mount Holyoke students," said Mount Holyoke President Joanne V. Creighton. "He was a profound thinker who helped influence the course of American culture and political life. His contributions will not be forgotten--they have become part of the fabric of this institution. The Mount Holyoke community joins together in mourning his loss."

Viereck was educated at the Horace Mann School for Boys in New York City, graduated summa cum laude with an S.B. from Harvard University in 1937, performed graduate work at Christ Church, Oxford, as a Henry Fellow, and received both his M.A. (1939) and Ph.D. in history (1942) from Harvard. At Harvard he was one of few students in history to receive both the Garrison Prize for the best undergraduate verse and the Bowdoin Medal for the best prose.

After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II in Africa and Italy in the Psychological Warfare Intelligence Branch, earning two battle stars, Viereck taught German and tutored history and literature at Harvard University. From 1946 to 1947, he was a member of the Smith College faculty.

At Mount Holyoke College, Viereck was an associate professor from 1948 to 1955 and professor of history from 1955 to 1965. He held the Alumnae Foundation Chair of Interpretive Studies from 1965 to 1979, and from 1979 to 1987 was William R. Kenan, Jr., Chair of History. Upon his retirement from Mount Holyoke in 1987, he was lauded for his imagination, grace, discipline, and spirit and for teaching "generations of Mount Holyoke students all that is humane about the humanities." Around campus, Viereck was known during his many years here for his lengthy debates about politics and poetry in academic halls and his daily swim at the College's Kendall Sports and Dance Complex.

Viereck's interest in Soviet rebel writers made him instrumental in bringing Nobel prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky to Mount Holyoke. In 1995 Viereck's work Tide and Continuities opened with a rhymed foreword by Brodsky.

Recently, Viereck was the subject of a lengthy profile titled "The First Conservative: How Peter Viereck Inspired--and Lost--a Movement" in the October 24, 2005 New Yorker magazine. The piece was written by noted author and journalist Tom Reiss.

According to Reiss's article, Viereck was a seminal figure in the birth of American conservatism in the second half of the twentieth century, but he soon moved apart from mainstream conservatism. For example, he was a vocal critic of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his excesses.
Reiss wrote:

"Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. But, in a series of books published during the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties (which have recently been reissued by Transaction), he continued to develop his political philosophy. He gave the conservative movement its name and, as the historian George Nash, the author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, says, he 'helped make conservatism a respectable word.' Moreover, Viereck's belief that the United States could be a moderating influence, confronting the forces that threaten freedom and democracy without succumbing to liberal optimism, became a central tenet of conservative thought and, with the arrival of neoconservatives in positions of power in Washington, beginning in the nineteen-eighties, of American foreign policy.

"Yet Viereck never became a rallying figure. Conservatism remained largely an intellectual movement during its first several decades, from the late nineteen-forties to the late nineteen-seventies--a loose affiliation of scholars and writers who had little more in common than a hatred of liberalism and Communism, which they increasingly saw as indistinguishable. Even in this context, Viereck was an anomaly, insisting on a moral distinction between the moderate and the totalitarian left, and, as conservatives began to attain political influence, denouncing what he perceived as the movement's demagogic tendencies."

Viereck is survived by his wife, Betty Falkenberg Viereck; his son, John Alexis Viereck; his daughter, Valerie Viereck Gibbs; three grandchildren, Sophia Gibbs Kim, Stephanie Viereck Gibbs Kamath, and Jonathan Lowell Gibbs; and his great-grandson, Micah Kim. Viereck was predeceased by his first wife and mother of his children, Anya de Markov. ...

The family invites written remembrances about Dr. Viereck for presentation at the service; these can be mailed to the Office of the President, Mount Holyoke College, 50 College St., South Hadley, MA 01075.

Related Link:
New York Times Obituary, May 19, 2006
Boston Globe Obituary, May 19, 2006
Peter Viereck Profiled in New Yorker
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JANE GARVEY (head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on 9/11)
She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Mount Saint Mary College and a Master’s degree from Mount Holyoke College.... She holds several honorary degrees from institutions including Mt. Holyoke College and Cranfield University in England....

http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing7/witness_garvey.htm

Statement of Jane F. Garvey to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon The United States
January 27, 2004

Seventh public hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States ...
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Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao

http://www.iraqtimeline.com/bushcab.html

Chao's family, which moved to Taiwan in 1949 to flee the Maoist revolution, is closely tied to two of China's most powerful business families, the Tungs and the Hsuis, both particularly influential in Hong Kong. In 1958, her father came to the US, not "with nothing," as she likes to tell audiences, but as an assistant to a Tung shipping company. She is a beneficiary of the 1964 National Civil Rights Act, as was her father, who immediately opened a shipping company called Formost. (Chao is known as a vocal opponent of the 1991 Civil Rights Act.) As the US moved to normalize relations with China, the Chaos profited, moving to toney Westchester County and sending Elaine to one of America's most exclusive colleges, Mount Holyoke. (Persistent rumors of plagarism from her Mount Holyoke days have dogged Chao for years; the school refuses to discuss the matter, but Chao's name does not appear in the 1975 commencement program, the year that she graduated.) After attending Harvard Business School, she went to work for Gulf Oil, which had a Taiwan-based subsidiary, and then for Citicorp. Chao will lead the new administration's fight to roll back overtime laws, a proposal that, if enacted, would see police officers, nurses, firefighters, and tens of millions of American workers forced to work longer hours without overtime benefits.
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ALICE VAN ESS BREWER

http://www.dacorbacon.org/Bulletins/2006/April/April%20Bulletin.htm

ALICE VAN ESS BREWER, a former member of the Foreign Service and the wife of retired Foreign Service Officer and Ambassador William Dodd Brewer, died in on February 26, 2006, in Weymouth, Massachusetts. She was 86.

Mrs. Brewer was born into a family of American educational missionaries in Basra, Iraq. She was educated in India, Switzerland, and the US. She earned her BA from Mount Holyoke College in 1941. As a lieutenant (j.g.) in the US Navy during World War II, she served in the Supply Corps in New Orleans and San Francisco. In 1947, after joining the Foreign Service, she was assigned to Dhahran. In 1948 she was transferred to Beirut, where she met her husband. They were married in Basra in 1949.

Mrs. Brewer accompanied her husband and managed their household on his assignments to Jeddah (1949-1951), Damascus (1951-1955), Kuwait (1955-1957), and Kabul. She stayed in the Washington, DC area during his two tours of duty there. She served as his hostess during his service as Ambassador to Mauritius (1970-1973) and then as Ambassador to Sudan. He retired in 1978.

Ambassador and Mrs. Brewer settled in Los Angeles in 1978. Eight years later, they moved to Falmouth, Massachusetts. Last year they moved to Hingham, Massachusetts.

In addition to her husband, Mrs. Brewer leaves three children and five grandchildren.
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Professor Catherine McArdle Kelleher

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:RzFBJrKxqzgJ:php.dev.isn.ch/conferences/PreviousEvents/2004_newport_bios.pdf+holyoke+college+and+%22intelligence+community%22&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=60

Professor Catherine McArdle Kelleher is Professor and Director of Faculty Programs, Strategic Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies. U.S. Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. She came to that post after three years as the Director of the Aspen Institute, Berlin. She is also a Research Associate of the Watson Institute of International Affairs, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island....

In the Clinton Administration, Professor Kelleher held posts as the Personal Representative of the Secretary of Defense in Europe and as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia. Her other governmental posts include a position on the National Security Council staff during the Carter Administration and a series of consulting assignments under Republican and Democratic administrations in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Affairs, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the Department of the Army....Director of the Center for International Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), as well as a Professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland. She has been a research fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies in London, and a Kistiakowsky fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and has received research grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, NATO, the Council on Foreign Relations, the German Marshall Fund, and the Ford Foundation. She is the founder of Women in International Security program, a non-governmental organization dedicated to developing career opportunities for women in this field. Professor Kelleher has served as consultant to the Ford Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Program in Peace and International Cooperation.... She is Vice-Chairman of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Kelleher holds degrees from Mt. Holyoke College (A.B. and D.Litt) and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D.).
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Advocate/Greenwich Time article about Kim Hynes and the Howard Dean "Dozen"

http://www.blogforamerica.com/archives/004460.html

Some of the endorsed candidates share the distinction of having volunteered for Dean's unsuccessful bid for the White House, including Hynes, 37, a mother of four from Stamford.... A New Haven native who graduated from Mount Holyoke College and worked for Bayer Pharmaceuticals Corp. as a molecular biologist, Hynes singled out three issues to anchor her campaign platform -- campaign finance reform, universal preschool and doing more to solve the state's transportation problems. The political newcomer hopes to increase the size of her war chest from a "couple of thousand" dollars to $20,000 over the course of the race, enlisting the help of Dean's brother, a Fairfield resident, as a member of her fund-raising team.
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ARA WILSON

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:03xVOUuFIl4J:www.aaanet.org/ballot/images/AAA_candidates_book.pdf+holyoke+college+and+%22intelligence+community%22&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=150

ARA WILSON (PhD, City University of
New York, 1997) Positions Held: Assis-
tant Professor (1997-2003) and Associate
Professor (2003-present), The Ohio State
University; Research Associate, Mt.
Holyoke College (2005-06); Interests
and/or Activities: gender and sexuality in
relation to globalization and transnational
flows; Rockefeller, NEH fellowships; Sig-
nificant Publications: The Intimate
Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons and Avon Ladies in the
World City, University of California Press 2004

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/m-fem/2001m12/msg00034.htm

In 1999-2000 she was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University. Among her publications
are articles on Avon/Amway in Thailand (_Critique of Anthropology_) and an article on sexual rights in the forthcoming anthology, _Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights_ (Rutgers).
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THE RESIDENTS OF HOLYOKE DO NOT EXACTLY SHARE THE WORLD VIEW OF MANY AT THE COLLEGE

http://www.google.com/search?q=holyoke+college+and+%22intelligence+community%22&hl=en&lr=&start=140&sa=N

HOLYOKE, Mass. -- To drive through the mill towns and curling country roads here is to journey into New England's impeachment belt. Three of this state's 10 House members have called for the investigation and possible impeachment of President Bush. Thirty miles north, residents in four Vermont villages voted earlier this month at annual town meetings to buy more rock salt, approve school budgets, and impeach the president for lying about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and for sanctioning torture.
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http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itps/0798/ijpe/bios.htm

SUSAN J. KOCH

Dr. Susan J. Koch is Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Threat Reduction Policy. Her responsibilities include nonproliferation policy, multilateral and bilateral arms control, and the Cooperative Threat Reduction/Nunn-Lugar Program with the new independent states of the former Soviet Union.

Before assuming her present position, Dr. Koch was deputy head of the Defense Policy and Arms Control Directorate on the White House National Security Council Staff, from December 1991 to February 1993. There she worked on the full range of defense policy and arms control issues, with special emphasis on nuclear questions. From March 1990 to December 1991, Dr. Koch was Assistant Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency for Strategic and Nuclear Affairs, responsible for arms control issues related to strategic and theater nuclear forces and strategic defense.

Dr. Koch was with the Office of the Secretary of Defense from December 1982 until March 1990. From October 1988 until March 1990, she was the Principal Director for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy.

From 1975 to 1982, Dr. Koch held a series of analytical and supervisory positions in the Directorate of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, concerned with the study of NATO, European Community, and West European domestic political issues. She taught international and comparative politics at Mount Holyoke College and the University of Connecticut between 1970 and 1975.
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Marvin Ott
http://www.aei.org/events/contentID.20060518104912211/default.asp

Marvin Ott is a professor of national security policy at the National War College of the National Defense University. He served as a civilian in Vietnam (Banmethout, Darlac Province) in 1965. His professional positions have included associate professor at Mount Holyoke College, senior research and management positions at the Office of Technology Assessment (U.S. Congress), senior analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, consultant at the National Academy of Sciences, southeast Asia chairperson for the Foreign Service Institute, and deputy staff director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters as well as over a hundred op-eds, principally on east Asian and intelligence topics. He appears as a regular commentator on CNN's Business Asia.
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Joseph J Ellis

Ideas & Trends: Past Imperfect; The Untold Links Between Biographer and Subject
By EMILY EAKIN

Comment on relationships between biographers and their subjects, particularly in realm of history, discussed in light of revelations that Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J Ellis embellished lectures at Mount Holyoke College with lies about serving in Vietnam war; Ellis's explanation of his affinity for Jefferson and his writing about Jefferson's duplicity to achieve political ends quoted; photo
June 24, 2001
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/
organizations/m/mount_holyoke_college/index.html?
query=ETHICS&field=des&match=exact
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Stephen F. Jones
Professor of Russian Studies 
Chair, Ru

Russian and Eurasian Studies
Specialization 
Russia; Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan)

Stephen Jones has been a member of the Mount Holyoke College faculty since 1989. He is an expert on post-communist societies in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and regularly briefs the CIA and U.S. State Department on developments in Caucasia and the North Caucasus. He has briefed a number of U.S. ambassadors to Georgia.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/misc/profile/sfjones.shtml
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ON THE MT. HOLYOKE BOARD OF TRUSTEES ...
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/cic/about/trustees/
454.shtml

Anthony Lake
2005-2010

Anthony Lake is Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He served from 1993-1997 as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. From 1981-1992 Mr. Lake was Five College Professor of International Relations at Amherst and Mount Holyoke colleges. Mr. Lake joined the State Department in 1962, where he served until 1970 as a Foreign Service Officer, with assignments in Vietnam and on the NSC staff. After work with the Muskie Campaign, the Carnegie Endowment and International Voluntary Services, Mr. Lake returned to the State Department in 1977 to serve as Director of Policy Planning for President Carter, a position he held until 1981. In 1961, Mr. Lake received an A.B. degree from Harvard College. He read international economics at Trinity College, Cambridge and went on to receive his Ph.D. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1974. Mr. Lake is the author of a number of books.

Mr. Lake’s board and advisory memberships include the U.S. Fund for UNICEF (chair) and the Marshall Legacy Institute (chair).

From 1998 to 2000, as a White House Special Envoy, Mr. Lake facilitated the agreement ending the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Susan Bateson McKay '76
2005–2010

Currently, Ms. Bateson McKay serves as senior vice president, human resources, and as a member of the management committee of Human Genome Sciences, Inc. (HGS). She joined HGS in 1997. Ms. Bateson McKay served as director of human resources and administration at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, L.L.P., a law firm specializing in intellectual property, from 1994 to 1996. From 1983 to 1994, Ms. Bateson McKay was employed by J.P. Morgan & Co. Incorporated, where she was appointed vice president, human resources, in 1985 and worked in Morgan's offices in New York City, Wilmington, Delaware, and London, England. Prior to J.P. Morgan, Ms. Bateson McKay worked for Citibank, N.A., and Bankers Trust Company.

Ms. Bateson McKay is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Universities at Shady Grove, a regional higher-education center in Montgomery County, Maryland, and serves on the Biotechnology Steering Committee of the Governor's Workforce Investment Board (Maryland). She is an active member and lay leader of the Church of the Holy Comforter, an Episcopal Church in Vienna, Virginia. Ms. Bateson McKay also serves on the Major Gifts Committee of the greater Washington, D.C. area for Mount Holyoke. Ms. Bateson McKay grew up in Connecticut; she and her husband, Art McKay, reside in Vienna, Virginia.

Audrey A. McNiff '80
2002-2007

Audrey McNiff, Mount Holyoke Class of 1980, is a Managing Director and co-head of Currency Sales at Goldman Sachs in New York City, where she a member of the Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities Division's Career Development Committee and a founding member of the Division's Women's Network.

Ms. McNiff is the Goldman Sachs' firm-wide recruiting captain for Mount Holyoke and the women's champion for Yale recruiting. Ms McNiff joined Goldman Sachs in 1992 and became a Managing Director in 1997. Prior to Goldman Sachs, Ms McNiff worked in the financial markets at Nat West, Irving Trust and HSBC .

She received her AB in Economics from Mount Holyoke in 1980 and her MBA from NYU in 1989. Ms McNiff grew up in Massachusetts and resides in Greenwich, CT.

Margaret L. Wolff '76
2005-2010

Margaret L. Wolff is a Partner at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP. She concentrates in domestic and international transactional matters. She has extensive experience in both negotiated and contested acquisitions and divestitures. She also devotes significant time to general corporate and securities matters. Ms. Wolff includes among her clients Alcoa Inc., Cooper Industries, Inc., DaimlerChrysler AG, Chocoladefabriken Lindt & Sprüngli AG, and The May Department Stores Company. In addition, she regularly handles matters for several of the firm’s investment banking clients and provides legal services to the National Down Syndrome Society.

During the last few years, Ms. Wolff has represented Alcoa in its successful unsolicited acquisitions of Alumax Inc. and Reynolds Metals Company as well as its negotiated acquisition of Cordant Technologies Inc. and the subsequent buy-out of the public minority in Cordant’s subsidiary, Howmet International Inc. Ms. Wolff also assisted Alcoa with the purchase of The Fairchild Corporation’s fastener business and the sale of Latasa S.A. to Rexam plc and Alcoa’s Thiokol propulsion systems division to Alliant Techsystems Inc.

H. Jay Sarles
2004-2009

H. Jay Sarles is Vice Chairman of Bank of America Corporation and a special adviser to the CEO. Previously, he was Vice Chairman and Chief Administrative Officer of FleetBoston Financial.

Sheryl Y. McCarthy '69
2001-2006

Sheryl McCarthy was elected to the Board for a five-year term as an Alumna Trustee. She is a columnist for Newsday, the New York City/Long Island newspaper, and writes a twice-weekly opinion column on a wide variety of issues in the news....

Berlin Defector: Right-Wing Party wants Fourth Reich

Feb. 26, 2009

BERLIN, Feb 26, 2009 (UPI via COMTEX) -- A former board member of the German National Democratic Party said the group is a neo-Nazi organization that hopes to set up a "Fourth Reich."

Uwe Luthardt told the British newspaper The Telegraph that he joined because he wanted to do something for Germany but found that the NDP was more interested in "Greater Germany." He found that other party members were interested in seizing Silesia from Poland.

Many of the members are more interested in drinking and fighting than politics, he said.

"Many have an IQ close to my shoe size. Most of them are simply failures: failed pupils, people who dropped out of school or their apprenticeships, alcoholics that can't find a foothold anywhere else, thugs," he said. "But every local organization has three to five men who don't have criminal records. They're the ones sent to face the press or man information stands."

He said the organization provides guidance on how to behave in public, avoiding open references to the Nazis. Two major sources of funds are gifts from old Nazis still living in South America and income from skinhead concerts.

www.upi.com

Attending Physician: Jimi Hendrix was WATERBOARDED to Death w/Red Wine

Let's see - who practices waterboarding? ...

Maybe, "skeptical" Good Germans will argue, Hendrix waterboarded HIMSELF ... that is, after giving up their hold on the "heroin overdose" swag passed off by the media in the wake of the virtuoso's demise, and the host of shrugged equivocations I've heard over the years that most proles smugly pass off as truth these days to avoid facing reality ...

It's explained to me, a naive nabob, "Hendrix choked on his own vomit." And this is so - it's right there in the testimony of doctors who treated Hendrix in his terminal hour. I ask: "What did he choke on?"

A: Red wine. His stomach and lungs were FULL OF RED, RED WINE. His body rejected it. He threw up, choked to death. That's the long and short of it.

Hendrix DROWNED and he doesn't live today.

- AC
••••••
Chapter seven from "The Covert War Against Rock"
by Alex Constantine

"I don't believe for one minute that he killed himself. That was out of the question." — Chas Chandler, Hendrix Producer

"I believe the circumstances surrounding his death are suspicious and I think he was murdered." — Ed Chalpin, Proprietor of Studio 76

"I feel he was murdered, frankly. Somebody gave him something. Somebody gave him something they shouldn't have." — John McLaughlin, Guitarist, Mahavishnu Orchestra

He didn't die from a drug overdose. He was not an out-of-control dope fiend. Jimi Hendrix was not a junkie. And anyone who would use his death as a warning to stay away from drugs should warn people against the other things that killed Jimi—the stresses of dealing with the music industry, the craziness of being on the road, and especially, the dangers of involving oneself in a radical, or even unpopular, political movements. COINTELPRO was out to do more than prevent a Communist menace from overtaking the United States, or keep the Black Power movement from burning down cities. COINTELPRO was out to obliterate its opposition and ruin the reputations of the people involved in the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, and the rock revolution. Whenever Jimi Hendrix's death is blamed on drugs, it accomplishes the goals of the FBI's program. It not only slanders Jimi's personal and professional reputation, but the entire rock revolution in the 60's.
—John Holmstrom. "Who Killed Jimi?"(1)

As the music of youth and resistance fell under the cross-hairs of the CIA's CHAOS war, it was probable that Jimi Hendrix—the tripping, peacenik "Black Elvis" of the '60s—should find himself a target.

Agents of the pathologically nationalistic FBI opened a file on Hendrix in 1969 after his appearance at several benefits for "subversive" causes. His most cutting insult to the state was participation in a concert for Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Bobby Seale and the other defendants of the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial,(2) "Get [the] Black Panthers," he told a reporter for a teen magazine, "not to kill anybody, but to scare [federal officials]....I know it sounds like war, but that's what's gonna have to happen. It has to be a war....You come back to reality and there are some evil folks around and they want you to be passive and weak and peaceful so that they can just overtake you like jelly on bread....You have to fight fire with fire."(3)

On tour in Liesburg, Sweden, Hendrix was interviewed by Tommy Rander, a reporter for the Gotesborgs-Tidningen. " In the USA, you have to decide which side you're on," Hendrix explained. "You are either a rebel or like Frank Sinatra."(4)

In 1979, college students at the campus newspaper of Santa Barbara University (USB) filed for release of FBI files on Hendrix. Six heavily inked-out pages were released to the student reporters. (The deletions nixed information "currently and properly classified pursuant to Executive Order 11652, in the interest of national defense of foreign policy.") On appeal, seven more pages were reluctantly turned over to the UCSB students. The file revealed that Hendrix had been placed on the federal "Security Index," a list of "subversives" to be rounded up and placed in detainment camps in the event of a national emergency.

If the intelligence agencies had their reasons to keep tabs on Hendrix, they couldn't have picked a better man for the job than Hendrix's manager, Mike Jeffrey. Jeffrey, by his own admission an intelligence agent,(5) was born in South London in 1933, the sole child of postal workers. He completed his education in 1949, took a job as a clerk for Mobil Oil, was drafted to the National Service two years later. Jeffrey's scores in science took him to the Educational Corps. He signed on as a professional soldier, joined the Intelligence Corps and at this point his career enters an obscure phase.

Hendrix biographers Shapiro & Glebeek report that Jeffrey often boasted of "undercover work against the Russians, of murder, mayhem and torture in foreign cities....His father says Mike rarely spoke about what he did—itself perhaps indicative of the sensitive nature of his work—but confirms that much of Mike's military career was spent in 'civvies,' that he was stationed in Egypt and that he could speak Russian."(6)

There was, however, another, equally intriguing side of Mike Jeffrey: He frequently hinted that he had powerful underworld connections. It was common knowledge that he had had an abiding professional relationship with Steve Weiss, the attorney for both the Hendrix Experience and the Mafia-managed Vanilla Fudge, hailing from the law firm of Seingarten, Wedeen & Weiss. On one occasion, when drummer Mitch Mitchell found himself in a fix with police over a boat he'd rented and wrecked, mobsters from the Fudge management office intervened and pried him loose.(7)

Organized crime has had fingers in the recording industry since the jukebox wars. Mafioso Michael Franzene testified in open court in the late 1980s that "Sonny" Franzene, his stepfather, was a silent investor in Buddah Records. At this industry oddity, the inane, nasal, apolitical '60s "Bubblegum" song was blown from the goo of adolescent mating fantasies. The most popular of Buddah's acts were the 1910 Fruitgum Company and Ohio Express. These bands shared a lead singer, Joey Levine. Some cultural contributions from the Buddha label: "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy," "Simon Says," and "1-2-3 Red Light."

In 1971, Buddha Records' Bobby Bloom was killed in a shooting sometimes described as "accidental," sometimes "suicide," at the age of 28. Bloom made a number of solo records, including "Love Don't Let Me Down," and "Count On Me." He formed a partnership with composer Jeff Barry and they wrote songs for the Monkees in their late period. Bloom made the Top 10 with the effervescent "Montego Bay" in 1970. Other Mafia-managed acts of the late 1960s were equally apolitical: Vanilla Fudge ("You Keep Me Hangin' On," "Bang, Bang"),(9) Motown's Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Curtis Mayfield.(10) In the '60s and beyond, organized crime wrenched unto itself control of industry workers via the Teamsters Union. Trucking was Mob controlled. So were stadium concessions. No rock bands toured unless money exchanged hands to see that a band's instruments weren't delivered to the wrong airport.(11)

Intelligence agent or representative of the mob? Whether Jeffrey was either or both—and the evidence is clear that a CIA/Mafia combination has exercised considerable influence in the music industry for decades—at a certain point, Hendrix must have seen something that made him desperately want out of his management contract with Jeffrey.

Monika Dannemann, Hendrix's fiancé at the time of his death, describes Mike Jeffrey's control tactics, his attempts to isolate and manipulate Hendrix, with observations of his evolving awareness that Jeffrey was a covert operator bent on dominating his life and mind:

Jimi felt more and more unsafe in New York, the city where he used to feel so much at home. It had begun to serve as a prison to him, and a place where he had to watch his back all the time.

In May 1969 Jimi was arrested at Toronto for possession of drugs. He later told me he believed Jeffrey had used a third person to plant the drugs on him—as a warning, to teach him a lesson.

Jeffrey had realized not only that Jimi was looking for ways of breaking out of their contract, but also that Jimi might have calculated that the Toronto arrest would be an easy way to silence Jimi.... Jeffrey did not like Jimi to have friends who would put ideas in his dead and give him strength. He preferred Jimi to be more isolated, or to mix with certain people whom Jeffrey could use to influence and try to manipulate him.

So in New York, Jimi felt at times that he was under surveillance, and others around him noticed the same. He tried desperately to get out of his management contract, and asked several people for advice on the best way to do it. Jimi started to understand the people around him could not be trusted, as things he had told them in confidence now filtered through to Jeffrey. Obviously some people informed his manager of Jimi's plans, possibly having been bought or promised advantages by Jeffrey. Jimi had always been a trusting and open person, but now he had reason to become suspicious of people he didn't know well, becoming quite secretive and keeping very much to himself.(12)

Five years after the death of the virtuoso, Crawdaddy reported that friends of Hendrix felt "he was very unhappy and confused before his death. Buddy Miles recalled 'numerous times he complained about his managers." His chief roadie, Gerry Stickells, told Welch, "he became frustrated...by a lot of people around him."(13)

Hendrix was obsessed with the troubles that Jeffrey and company brought to his life and career. The band's finances were entirely controlled by management and were depleted by a tax haven in the Bahamas founded in 1965 by Michael Jeffrey called Yameta Co., a subsidiary of the Bank of New Providence, with accounts at the Naussau branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia and the Chemical Bank in New York.(14) A substantial share of the band's earnings had been quietly drained by Yameta. The banks where Jeffrey opened accounts have been officially charged with the laundering of drug proceeds, a universal theme of CIA/Mafia activity. (The Chemical Bank was forced to plead guilty to 445 misdemeanors in 1980 when a federal investigation found that bank officials had failed to report transactions they knew to derive from drug trafficking.(15) The Bank of Nova Scotia was a key investor in the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, BCCI, once described by Time magazine as "the most pervasive money-laundering operation and financial supermarket ever create," with ties to the upper echelons of several governments, the CIA, the Pentagon and the Vatican.(16)

BCCI maintained warm relationships with international terrorists, and investigators turned up accounts for Libya, Syria and the PLO at BCCI's London branch, recalling Mike Jeffrey's military intelligence interest in the Middle East. And then there were bank records from Panama City relating to General Noriega. These "disappeared'' en route to the District of Columbia under heavy DEA guard. An internal investigation later, DEA officials admitted they were at a loss to explain the theft.(17)

Friends of Hendrix, according to Electric Gypsy, confiscated financial documents from his New York office and turned them over to Jimi: "One showed that what was supposed to be a $10,000 gig was in fact grossing $50,000."

"Jimi Hendrix was upset that large amounts of his money were missing," reports rock historian R. Gary Patterson. Hendrix had discovered the financial diversions and took legal action to recover them.(18)

But there was another factor also involving funds.

Some of Hendrix's friends have concluded that "Jeffrey stood to make a greater sum of money from a dead Jimi Hendrix than a living one. There was also mention of a one million dollar insurance policy covering Hendrix's life made out with Jeffrey as the beneficiary." The manager of the Experience constructed "a financial empire based on the posthumous releases of Hendrix's previously unreleased recordings."(19) Crushing musical voices of dissent was proving to be an immensely profitable enterprise because a dead rocker leaves behind a fortune in publishing rights and royalties.

Roadies couldn't help but notice that Mike Jeffrey, a seasoned military intelligence officer, was capable of "subtle acts of sabotage against them," reports Shapiro. Jeffrey booked the Experience for a concert tour with the Monkees and Hendrix was forced to cancel when the agony of playing to hordes of 12-year-old children, and fear of a parental backlash, convinced him to bail out.

As for the arrest in Toronto, Hendrix confidantes blame Jeffrey for the planted heroin. The charges were dropped after Hendrix argued that the unopened container of dope had been dropped into his travel bag upon departure by a girl who claimed that it was cold medicine.(20)

In July, 1970, one month before his death, at precisely the time Hendrix stopped all communications with Jeffrey, he told Chuck Wein, a film director at Andy Warhol's Factory: "The next time I go to Seattle will be in a pine box."(21)

And he knew who would drop him in it. Producer Alan Douglas recalls that Hendrix "had a hang-up about the word
'manager.'" The guitarist had pled with Douglas, the proprietor of his own jazz label, to handle the band's business affairs. One of the most popular musicians in the world was desperate. He appealed to a dozen business contacts to handle his bookings and finances, to no avail.(22)

Meanwhile, the sabotage continued in every possible form. Douglas: "Regardless of whatever else Jimi wanted to do, Mike would keep pulling him back or pushing him back....And the way the gigs were routed! I mean, one nighters—he would do Ontario one night, Miami the next night, California the next night. He used to waste [Hendrix] on a tour—and never make too much money because the expenses were ridiculous."(23)

The obits were a jumbled lot of skewed, contradictory eulogies: "DRUGS KILL JIMI HENDRIX AT 24," "ROCK STAR IS DEAD IN LONDON AT 27," "OVERDOSE." Many of the obituaries dwelt on the "wild man of rock" image, but there were also many personal commentaries from reporters who followed his career closely, and they dismissed as hype reports of chronic drug abuse. Mike Ledgerwood, a writer for Disc and Music Echo, offered a portrait that the closest friends of Jimi Hendrix confirm: "Despite his fame and fortune—plus the inevitable hang-ups and hustles which beset his incredible career—he remained a quiet and almost timid individual. He was naturally helpful and honest." Sounds magazine "found a man of quite remarkable charm, an almost old-world courtesy."

Hendrix biographer Tony Brown has, since the mid-'70s, collected all the testimony he could find relating to Hendrix's death, and finds it "tragic" but "predictable":

"The official cause of death was asphyxiation caused by inhaling his own vomit, but in the days and weeks leading up to the tragedy anyone with an ounce of common sense could see that Hendrix was heading for a terrible fall. Unfortunately, no one close to him managed to steer him clear of the maelstrom that was closing in. Brown sent a report based on his own investigation to the Attorney General's office in February, 1992, "in the hope that they would reopen the inquest into Jimi's death. The evidence was so strong that they ordered Scotland Yard detectives to conduct their own investigation." Months later, detectives at the Yard responded to Sir Nicholas Lyle at the Attorney General's office, rejecting the proposal to revive the inquest.(24)

The pathologist's report left the cause of death "open." Monika Dannemann had long insisted that Hendrix was murdered. At the time of her death, she had brought media attention to the case in a bitter and highly-publicized court battle with former Hendrix girlfriend Kathy Etchningham. On April 5, 1996, her body was discovered in a fume-filled car near her home in Seaford, Sussex, south England. Police dismissed the death as a "suicide" and the corporate press took dictation. But the Eastern Daily Press, a newspaper that circulates in the East Anglian region of the UK, raised another possibility: "Musician Uli Jon Roth, speaking at the thatched cottage where Miss Dannemann lived, said last night: 'The thing looks suspicious. She had a lot of death threats against her over the years....I always felt that she was really being crucified in front of everybody, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.' Mr Roth, formerly with the group The Scorpions, said Miss Danneman 'is not a person to do something to herself.'" Roth threw one more inconsistency on the lot: "She didn't believe in the concept of suicide."

Devon Wilson, another Hendrix paramour, in Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell's view, "died under mysterious circumstances herself a few years later."(25)

Red, Red Wine

Was Hendrix murdered while under the influence? Stanton Steele, an authority on addiction, offers a seemingly plausible explanation: "Extremely intoxicated people while asleep often lose the reflexive tendency to clear one's throat of mucus, or they may strangle in their vomit. This appeared to have happened to Jimi Hendrix, who had taken both alcohol and prescription barbiturates the night of his death."(26)

Evidence has recently come to light clarifying the cause of death—extreme alcohol consumption aggravated by the barbiturates in Hendrix's bloodstream—drowning. Hendrix is said to have choked to death after swallowing nine Vesperax sleeping tablets. This is not the lethal dose he'd have taken if suicide was the intent—he surely would have swallowed the remaining 40 or so pills in the packets Dannemann gave him if this was the idea—as Eric Burdon, the Animals' vocalist and a friend of Hendrix, has suggested over the years.

Hendrix was not felled by a drug overdose, as many news reports claimed. The pills were a sleeping aid, and not a very effective one at that. The two Vesperax that Dannemann saw him take before she fell asleep at 3 am failed to put him under. He had taken a Durophet 20 amphetamine capsule at a dinner party the evening before. And then Hendrix, a chronic insomniac with an escalated tolerance level for barbiturates, had tried the Vesperax before and they proved ineffective. He apparently believed nine tablets would do him no harm.

At 10 am, Dannemann awoke and went out for a pack of cigarettes, according to her inquest testimony. When she returned, he was sick. She phoned Eric Bridges, a friend, and informed him that Hendrix wasn't well. "Half asleep," Bridges reported in his autobiography, "I suggested she give him hot coffee and slap his face. If she needed any more help to call me back." Dannemann called the ambulance at 18 minutes past eleven. The ambulance arrived nine minutes later. Hendrix was not, she claimed, in critical condition. She said the paramedics checked his pulse and breathing, and stated there was "nothing to worry about."

But a direct contradiction came in an interview with Reg Jones, one of the attendants, who insisted that Dannemann wasn't at the flat when they arrived, and that Hendrix was already dead. "It was horrific," Jones said. "We arrived at the flat and the door was flung wide open...."I knew he was dead as soon as I walked into the room." Ambulance attendant John Suau confirmed, "we knew it was hopeless. There was no pulse, no respiration."(27)

The testimonies of Dannemann and medical personnel at the 1970 inquest are disturbingly contradictory. Hendrix, the medical personnel stated, had been dead for at least seven hours by the time the ambulance arrived. Dr. Rufus Compson at the Department of Forensic Medicine at St. George's Medical School undertook his own investigation. He referred to the original medical examiner's report and discovered that there were rice remains in Hendrix's stomach. It takes three-four hours for the stomach to empty, he reasoned, and the deceased ate Chinese food at a dinner party hosted by Pete Cameron between the hours of 11 pm and midnight, placing the time of death no later than 4 am.(28) This is consistent with the report of Dr. Bannister, the surgical registrar, that "the inside of his mouth and mucous membranes were black because he had been dead for some time." Dr. Bannister told the London Times, "Hendrix had been dead for hours rather than minutes when he was admitted to the hospital."(29)

The inquest itself was "unusual," Tony Brown notes, because "none of the other witnesses involved were called to give their evidence, nor was any attempt made to ascertain the exact time of death," as if the subject was to be avoided. The result was that the public record on this basic fact in the case may have been incorrectly cited by scores of reporters and biographers. Tony Brown: "Even [medical examiner] Professor Teare made no attempt to ascertain the exact time of death. The inquest appeared to be conducted merely as a formality and had not been treated by the coroner as a serious investigation."(30)

In 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky (1996), Bill Henderson describes the inquest and its aftermath: "Those who followed his death....noticed many inconsistencies in the official inquest. It has been an open and shut affair that managed to hide its racist intent behind the public perceptual hoax of Hendrix as a substance abuser....As a result, millions of people all over the world thought that Hendrix had died that typical rock star's death: drug OD amid fame, opulence, decadence. But it seems that Hendrix could very well have been the victim not of decadence, but of foul play."(31)

Forensic tests submitted at the inquest have been supplemented over the years by new evidence that makes a reconstruction of the murder possible. In October, 1991, Steve Roby, publisher of Straight Ahead, a Hendrix fanzine, asked, "What Really Happened?": "Kathy Etchingham, a close friend/lover of Jimi's, and Dee Mitchell, Mitch Mitchell's wife, spent many months tracking down former friends and associates of Hendrix, and are convinced they have solved the mystery of the final hours." Central to reconstructing Hendrix's death is red wine. Dr. Bannister reports that after the esophagus had been cleared, "masses" of red wine were "coming out of his nose and out of his mouth." The wine gushing up in great volume from Hendrix's lungs "is very vivid because you don't often see people who have drowned in their own red wine. He had something around him—whether it was a towel or a jumper—around his neck and that was saturated with red wine. His hair was matted. He was completely cold. I personally think he probably died a long time before....He was cold and he was blue."(32)

Henderson writes:

The abstract morbidity of Hendrix's body upon discovery may indicate a more complex scenario than has been commonly held. Hendrix was not a red wine guzzler, especially in the amounts found in and around his body. He was known to be moderate in his consumption. If he was 'sleeping normally,' then why was he fully clothed? And how could the ambulance attendants have missed seeing someone who was supposed to be there? The garment, or towel, around his neck is totally mysterious given the scenario so widely distributed. But it is consistent with the doctor's statement that he drowned. Was he drowned by force? In a radio interview broadcast out of Holland in the early '70s, an unnamed girlfriend answered 'yes' to the question, 'Was Hendrix killed by the Mafia?'"(33)

Tony Brown, in Hendrix: The Final Days (1997), correlates the consumption of the wine to the approximate time of death: "It's unlikely that he drank the quantity of red wine found by Dr. Bannister.... Therefore, Jimi must have drunk a large quantity of red wine just prior to his death," suggesting that the quantity of alcohol in his lungs was the direct cause.(34)

The revised time of death, 3-4 am, contradicts the gap in the official record, and so does the revelation that Jimi Hendrix drowned in red wine. While it is common knowledge that Hendrix choked to death, it has only recently come to light that the wine—not the Verparex—was the primary catalyst of death. Hendrix was, the evidence suggests, forced to drink a quantity of wine. The barbiturates, as Brown notes, "seriously inhibited Jimi's normal cough reflex." Unable to cough the wine back up, "it went straight down into his lungs....It is quite possible that he thrashed about for some time, fighting unsuccessfully to gain his breath."(35) It is doubtful that Hendrix would have continued to swallow the wine in "massive" volumes had it begun to fill his lungs.

One explanation that explains the forensic evidence is that Jimi Hendrix was restrained, wine forced down his throat until his thrashings ceased. All of this must have taken place quickly, before the alcohol had time to enter his bloodstream. The post mortem report states that the blood alcohol level was not excessive, about 20mg over the legal drinking limit. He died before his stomach absorbed much of the wine. Jimi Hendrix choked to death. That much of the general understanding of his demise is correct, and little else.

The kidnapping, embezzling and numerous shady deceptions would make Jeffrey the leading suspect in any proper police investigation. And his reaction at the news of Hendrix's death did little to dispel any suspicions that associates may have harbored. Jim Marron, a nightclub owner from Manhattan, was vacationing with Jeffrey in Spain when word of the musician's death reached him. "We were supposed to have dinner that night in Majorca," Marron recalls.

Jeffrey "called me from his club in Palma saying that we would have to cancel....I've just got word from London. Jimi's dead." The manager of the Hendrix Experience took the news completely in stride. "I always knew that son of a bitch would pull a quickie," Jeffrey told Marron. "Basically, he had lost a major property. You had the feeling that he had just lost a couple of million dollars—and was the first to realize it. My first reaction was, Oh my God, my friend is dead."(36) But Jeffrey reacted coldly, comparing the fatality to a fleeting sexual romp in the afternoon.

His odd behavior continued in the days following the death of Hendrix. He appeared to be consumed by guilt, and on one occasion "confessed." On September 20, recording engineer Alan Douglas received a call from Jeffrey, who wanted to see him. Douglas drove to the hotel where Jeffrey was staying. "He was bent over, in misery from a recent back injury. We started talking and he let it all out. It was like a confession."

"In my opinion," Douglas observed, "Jeffrey hated Hendrix."

Bob Levine, the band's merchandising manager, was perplexed by Jeffrey's response to the tragedy. First, Hendrix's manager dropped completely out of sight. "We tried calling all of Jeffrey's contacts....trying to reach him. We were getting frustrated because Hendrix's body was going to be held up in London for two weeks and we wanted Jeffrey's input on the funeral service.

A full week after Hendrix's death, he finally called. Hearing his voice, I immediately asked what his plans were and would he be going to Seattle. 'What plans?' he asked. I said, 'the funeral.' 'What funeral?' he replied.

I was exasperated: 'Jimi's!' The phone went quiet for a while and then he hung up. The whole office was staring at me, unable to believe that with all the coverage on radio, print and television, Jeffrey didn't know that Jimi had died." As noted, Jeffrey had been notified and almost grieved, in his fashion. "He called back in five minutes and we talked quietly. He said, 'Bob, I didn't know,' and was asking about what had happened. While I didn't confront him, I knew he was lying."(37)

It was reported that Michael Jeffrey "paid his respects" sitting in a limousine parked outside Dunlap Baptist Church in Seattle. He refused to go inside for the eulogy.(38) Hendrix was buried at the family plot at Greenwood Cemetary in Renton.

Screenwriter Alan Greenberg was hired to write a screenplay for a film on the life of Jimi Hendrix. He traveled to England and taped an interview with Dannemann shortly before her death in April, 1996. In that interview, Dannemann sketched in more details of Jeffrey's skullduggery, which continued after Hendrix's death and has long been concealed behind a wall of misconceptions. On the Greenberg tapes, Dannemann denied allegations of heroin use, as do others close to Hendrix: "You should put that into the right perspective since all of the youngsters still think he was a drug addict.

The problem was, when he died, I was told by the coroner not to talk until after the inquest, so that's why all these wild stories came out that he overdosed from heroin." The coroner found no injection tracks on Hendrix's body. That he snorted the opiate, a charge advanced by biographer Chris Welch in Hendrix, is disputed by Jimi's closest friends. He indulged primarily in marijuana and LSD. The popular misconception that Hendrix was a heroin addict lingers on but should have been buried with him. One of rock's greatest talents was maliciously smeared by the press on this count.

At times, he public has been deliberately misled about Hendrix's drug habits. Kathy Etchingham, a former girlfriend, was deceived into giving an article about Jimi to a friend in the corporate media, and it was snatched up by a newspaper, rewritten, and the story that emerged depicted the guitarist as a violent and drug-infested lunatic. The editor later apologized in writing to Kathy for falsifying the record, but failed to retract in print.(39) Media swipes at Hendrix to this day are often unreasonably vicious, as in this transparent attempt to shape public opinion from London's Times on December 14, 1993:

Not only did [Hendrix] leave several memorable compositions behind him; he left a good-looking corpse. Kathy Etchnigham, a middle-class mother of two, who used to be one of Hendrix's lovers, still mourns his passing and is seeking to persuade the police that there is something suspicious about the circumstances in which he died. Quite why she should bother is hard to say. Perhaps she is bored.

Hendrix, we are advised, "lived an absurdly self-indulgent life and died, in essence, of stupidity."

Close friends of Jimi Hendrix suggest that Jeffrey was the front man for a surreptitious sponsor, the FBI, CIA or Mafia. In 1975, Crawdaddy magazine launched its own investigation and concluded that a death squad of some kind had targeted him: "Hendrix is not the only artist to have had his career sabotaged by unscrupulous sharks and leeches." The recent memory of the death of Average White Band drummer Robby McIntosh from strychnine-laced heroin circulating at a party in L.A. "only serves to update this fact of rock-and-roll life. But an industry that accepts these tragedies in cold blood demonstrates its true nature—and the Jimi Hendrix music machine cranks out, unencumbered by the absence of Hendrix himself. One wonders who'll be the next in line?"(40)

On March 5, as if in reply, Michael Jeffrey, every musician's nightmare, was blown out of the sky in an airplane collision over France, enroute to a court appearance in London related to Hendrix. Jeffrey was returning from Palma aboard an Iberia DC-9 in the midst of a French civil air traffic control strike. Military controllers were called in as a contingency replacements for the controllers. Hendrix biographer Bill Henderson considers the midair collision fuel for "paranoia."

The nature of military airline control "necessitated rigorous planning, limited traffic on each sector and strict compliance with regulations. The DC-9 however was assigned to the same flight over Nantes as a Spantax Coronado, which 'created a source of conflict.' And because of imprecise navigation, lack of complete radar coverage and imperfect radio communications, the two planes collided. The Coronado was damaged but remained airworthy; no one was injured. The DC-9 crashed, killing all 61 passengers and seven crew . . . ." There are [theories] that Jeffrey was merely a tool, a mouthpiece for the real villains lurking in the wings, that he was "the target of assassination."(41)

A quarter-century after Hendrix died, his father finally won control of the musical legacy. Under a settlement signed in 1995, the rights to his son's music were granted to 76-year-old Al Hendrix, the sole heir to the estate. The agreement, settled in court, forced Hendrix to drop a fraud suit filed two years earlier against Leo Branton Jr., the L.A. civil rights attorney who represented Angela Davis and Nat King Cole. Hendrix accused his lawyer of selling the rights to the late rock star's publishing catalogue without consent.

Hendrix, Sr. filed the suit on April 19, 1993, after learning that MCA Music Entertainment—a company rife with Mafia connections—was readying to snatch up his son's recording and publishing rights from two international companies that claimed to own them. The MCA deal, estimated to be worth $40 million, was put on hold after objections were raised in a letter to the Hollywood firm from Hendrix. By this time, Experience albums generated more than $3-million per a Ênnum in royalties, and $1-million worth of garments, posters and paraphernalia bearing his name and likeness are sold each year. All told, Al Hendrix received $2-million over the next 20 years.(42)

NOTES

1. John Holstrom, "Who Killed Jimi?" Lions Gate Media Works, http://lionsgate.com/Music/hendrix/I_ Dont_Live_Today.html.

2. John Raymond and Marv Glass, "The FBI Investigated Jimi Hendrix," Common Ground, University of Santa Barbara, CA student newspaper, vol. iv, no. 9, June 7, 1979, P. 1.

3. "Jimi Hendrix, Black Power and Money," Teenset, January, 1969.

4. Tony Brown, Hendrix: The Final Days, London: Rogan House, 1997, p. 43.

5. On Mike Jeffrey's undefined politics, see: John McDermott with Eddie Kramer, Hendrix: Setting the Record Straight, New York: Warner, 1992, p. 180.

6. Harry Shapiro and Ceasar Glebbeek, Jimi Hendrix, Electric Gypsy, New York: St. Martin's, 1990, p. 120.

7. Bill Henderson, "IT'S LIKE TRYING TO GET OUT OF A ROOM FULL OF MIRRORS," Jimi Hendrix web page, http://www.rockmine. music.co.uk/jimih. html.

8. Fredric Dannen, Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Industry, New York: Times Books, 1990, p. 164-5.

9. Shapiro and Glebbeek, Jimi Hendrix, Electric Gypsy, New York: St. Martin's, 1990, p. 294. The Fudge once booked a tour with Jimi Hendrixs, per arrangement between the band's mobbed-up management and Michael Jeffrey, Hendrix's manager.

10. Dannen, p. 165.

11. Shapiro and Glebbeek, p. 295.

12. Monika Dannemann, The Inner World of Jimi Hendrix, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 76-8.

13, John Swenson, "The Last Days of Jimi Hendrix," Crawdaddy, January, 1975, p. 43.

14. Ibid., p. 488 ff.

15. "Banks and Narcotics Money Flow in Suth Florida," U.S. Senate Banking Committee report, 96th Congress, June 5-6, 1980, p. 201.

16. Jonathon Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA, New York: Touchstone, 1987, p. 153.

17. Josh Rodin, "BANK OF CROOKS AND CRIMINALS?" Topic 105, Christic News, Aug 6, 1991.

18. R. Gary Patterson, Hellhounds on Their Trail: Tales from the Rock-n'-Roll Graveyard, Nashville, Tennessee: Dowling Press, 1998, p. 208.

19. Ibid.

20. Shapiro and Glebbeek, p. 473.

21. Shapiro and Glebbeek, p. 477.

22. Swenson. In Crosstown Traffic (1989), Charles Murray reports that Hendrix "began consulting independent lawyers and accountants with a view of sorting out his tangled finances and freeing himself from Mike Jeffrey" (p. 55).

23. Henderson Web site.

24. Brown, p. 7.

25. Mitch Mitchell with John Platt, Jimi Hendrix—Inside the Experience, New York: St. Martin's, 1990, p. 160.

26. Stanton Steele, "The Human Side Of Addiction: What caused John Belushi's death?" U.S. Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence, April 1982, p. 7.

27. David Henderson, 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, New York: Bantam, 1996, pp. 389-90.

28. Brown, p. 164.

29. Henderson, p. 392.

30. Brown, p. 163.

31. Henderson, p. 388.

32. Ibid., p. 392.

33. Henderson, 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, p. 393. If the Mafia did indeed participate, Hendrix wasn't the first African-American musician to have a contract on his head. In May 1955, jazz saxman Wardell Gray was murdered, probably by Mafia hitmen. Gray had toured with Benny Goodman and Count Basie in 1948. His remarkable recording sessions of the late 1940s, especially with Dexter Gordon, brought him fame. Bill Moody, a jazz drummer and disk jockey, published a novel in 1996, Death of a Tenor Man, based on the life and death of Grey. "It's strange," a publisher's press release comments, "that 1950s Las Vegas, a town in which the Mob and corrupt police worked hand in glove, became the home of the first integrated nightclub in the country. The Moulin Rouge was owned by blacks and had the honor of being the only casino hotel in Vegas that allowed African-Americans to mingle with white customers. On opening night, Nat 'King' Cole and Frank Sinatra sat in with Benny Carter's band. The second night, Wardell Gray, a black sax player in the Carter band with a growing reputation, was beaten to death. The police said he overdosed and 'fell out of bed,' dying later 'of complications.' Some suspected Gray's death was the Mob's way of telling the African-American businessmen who backed the Moulin Rouge that 'this town isn't big enough for the both of us.' Gray's murder has never been investigated. It "hung over the Moulin Rouge like a storm cloud" and remains unsolved. The casino went out of business a few months later.

And the 1961 attempt on the life of soul singer Jackie Wilson has never been rationally explained. Wilson was shot in the stomach by a fan supposedly trying to "prevent a fan from killing herself." He recovered from the assault and went on to release "No Pity (In the Naked City)," and "Higher and Higher."

The Halloween, 1975 murder of Al Jackson, percussionist for Booker T. and the MGs, at the age of 39, also appeared to be a premeditated hit. Barbara Jackson, his wife, was the sole eyewitness. She told police, according to Rolling Stone, that she "arrived home on the night of the shooting and was met by a gun-wielding burglar who tied her hands behind her back with an ironing cord." Al Jackson, who'd been taking in a closed circuit telecast of the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight, arrived an hour later. Any burglar would have collected valuables in the house and fled by this time, but he waited a full hour for Jackson to return home. Babara Jackson was freed from the ropes and the "burglar" ordered her at gunpoint to open the door for him. "After confronting Jackson and asking him for money, the intruder forced him to lie on the floor. He then shot Jackson five times in the back and left." (Rolling Stone, November 1975)

34. Brown, p. 165.

35. Brown, pp. 165-66.

36. McDermott and Kramer, pp. 286-87.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Shapiro and Glebeek, p. 474.

40. Swenson, p. 45.

41. Henderson Web site.

42. Chuck Philips, "Father to Get Hendrix Song, Image Rights," Los Angeles Times (home edition), July 26, 1995, p. 1. Also named as defendants were producer Alan Douglas and several firms that have profited from the Hendrix catalogue since 1974 under contracts negotiated by Branton: New York-based Bella Godiva Music Inc; Presentaciones Musicales SA (PMSA), a Panamanian corporation; Bureau Voor Muzeikrechten Elber B. V. in the Netherlands; and Interlit, based in the Virgin Islands.

Branton negotiated two contracts in early 1974—signed by Al Hendrix—that relinquished all rights to his son's "unmastered" tapes for $50,000 to PMSA and all his stock in Bella Godiva, his son's music publishing company, for $50,000."PMSA and the other overseas companies were later discovered to be part of a tax shelter system created by Harry Margolis," reported the L.A. Times, "a Saratoga attorney whom federal prosecutors charged but never convicted of tax fraud. The tax shelter plan collapsed after Margolis' death in 1987, and also [prompted] complaints from the estates of other entertainment clients, including singer Nat King Cole, screenwriter Larry Hauben as well as from followers of New Age philosopher Werner Erhard, who allegedly stashed revenues from his EST enterprise in the foreign account."

Jonestown, the CIA & Mind Control

AOL VIDEO: "The Truth about the CIA and JIM JONES"

Also see: "APPEALS COURT REBUKES C.I.A. IN JONESTOWN INFORMATION CASE," NYT, and "WHAT THE MEDIA WON'T TELL YOU: JIM JONES WAS A CIA OPERATIVE CONDUCTING MIND CONTROL EXPERIMENTS," and "The Black Hole of Guyana: The Untold Story of the Jonestown." Also: "THE FALSE MEMORY HOAX: CIA CONNECTIONS TO THE MIND CONTROL CULTS," and "The Jonestown Carnage: a CIA Crime," and "Was the People's Temple Tragedy at Jonestown a Government Experiment?"

[Excerpts from a CIA mind control briefing]
TOTSE
http://www.totse.com/en/conspiracy/mind_control/jjones.html

In 1973, just after the CIA's redirection in the next stage of testing and development of the M.K. ULTRA and related operations, it was decided that religious cults best represented a new and virtually fool-proof operations platform in which to further Mind Control technologies. Several religious "sects and cults" were examined by the Agency for their possible utilization by the CIA in Top Secret studies of Mind Control operations.

In late 1973, under this new focus of the CIA, Deep Cover Operative George Philip Blakey made the initial $650,000 deposit for purchase of what would become known as "The People's Temple" in Guyana, under the management of Reverend Jim Jones. During this period, Jones moved his People's Temple from California to Guyana, where the Agency felt it would be isolated and kept away from public or government scrutiny which might interfere with the operation.

Jones himself was already well known to many in California government. Among other things, he had been the Housing Commissioner of San Francisco. The CIA operations specialists were enthusiastic about the People's Temple operations. Like the abortive UCLA Center for the Study of Violent Behavior, The People's Temple membership was largely Black and impoverished, while the upper management under Jones was all White.

There was also help from within California state government to assist in building up Jones' power base. Among those assisting was Ukiah District Attorney Tim Stone, who was largely responsible for acquiring state mental patients, wards of the state, etc. and turning them over to the People's Temple to act as their Guardian.

Many of the same interests in the UCLA Center also displayed interest in the People's Temple operation. Dan Mitrioni was another key player who aided the Agency in its operations base of the People's Temple. Mitrioni was an associate of Jones in the early days of the temple. Mitrioni was a former mid-Western police chief who went to work for the CIA. He was involved in the instruction of torture, brainwashing and public terrorism to government soldiers and security teams in countries such as Bolivia, Uruguay and Brazil for the purposes of establishing and perpetuating the "fational Security State".

Jim Jones was known to have had a long history with Mitrioni as they were childhood friends and had grown up together. In addition, Jones was in Brazil in 1962 at the same time that Mitrioni was there instructing Brazilian Security Services in extraction of information from political prisoners, tortures etc. Th6ir friendship was rekindled during this period. Prior to this time together in Brazil, they had last been involved with each other in Evansville, Indiana where Jones made his start in religious evangelism by studying the methods and practices of a Black evangelist known as Father Divine. Father Divine was also known as a fraud and con man.

On November 18, 1978, more than 900 people allegedly committed suicide in Jonestown, leaving over 200 more people unaccounted for to this day as 1100 passports had been issued to temple members to travel to Guyana. officials later stated to the press that only 900 passports had been issued. of those 900 individuals, over two-thirds of them were either shot, strangled or showed injection or puncture marks on their bodies. Contrary to what all established media said at the time, very few actually died from self-administered, cyanide-laced KoolAid.

What was true was that the Jonestown massacre was indeed precipitated by the visit and consequent murder of the Congressman Leo Ryan of San Mateo, California. The reason was simple. The People's Temple and Jonestown were placed in Guyana for two reasons. The first and foremost was this operation was the Agency's long-nurtured test case for clandestine operational Mind Control away from the jurisdiction and scrutiny of the regular arm of the U.S. Government and the public. This operation served as an ideal controlled operations base for ULTRA programs.

The second reason is that the People's Temple was serving as the enforcers for the intelligence arm of the clandestine U.S. power bate to support an extremely unpopular government. The basic indigenous population of Guyana was intimidated by Jones and his followers, who openly supported the local government in power.

The U.S. Government's Deputy Chief of Missions in Guyana was an individual by the name of Richard Dwyer. Dwyer was also the CIA's Chief of Station for that area. Dwyer accompanied Leo Ryan's party on their visit to Jonestown. As far as Ryan was concerned, Dwyer was accompanying his group as a concerned representative of the U.S. Government. In reality, Dwyer was along to observe Ryan and his party and to oversee any interviews and investigations carried out by the groupf thereby ascertaining if any Agency interests or operations were discovered or were in danger of exposure by the congressman and his party.

In one of the tapes which were,recorded by the Reverend Jim Jones himself (as was his practice); it can clearly be heard in the Jonestown chaos as Congressman Ryan's group left for the airport, that several times Jones yells the order to his aides to "Get Mr. Dwyer out of heres quickly!" In actualityf Dwyer remained in Jonestown as Congressman Ryan's party as ambushed at the airport. It is also known that Dwyer observed the massacre that followed. It was well known in certain intelligence organizations of Deep Black Operations that several "Clean Teams" were summoned from nearby locations several hours prior to Congressman Ryan leaving Jonestown for the airport. As they watched the situation deteriorate rather quickly the previous nightf the Agency had decided to bring Clean Teams into the area.

The CIA operations agent, George Phillip Blakey, was also acting as Rev. Jones' top contact and aide. Blakey was instrumental in establishing Jones and his followers in Jonestownf away from the scrutiny of U.S. agencies or family members of the People's Temple cult. Blakeyf with CIA orders, helped arrange for and complete the purchase of the property that would become Jonestown. Blakey also worked for the Agency on assignment in Angola in 1975 with UNITA.

Blakey is also the husband of Debra Leyton Blakey who fled Jonestown. He is the brother-in-law of Larry Leyton who was the only cult member to be fully prosecuted for the killings. Layton's father was Dr. Lawrence Leyton, the former Chief of Biochemistry and Director of Chemical Warfare for the U.S. Department of the Armyf attached to the proving grounds located in Utah. Dr. Leyton later worked as the leading research scientist at the Western Regional Research Laboratory for the U. S. Department of Agriculture then located in Berkeley, Calif. According to Agency documents from the early and mid-1970's. Dr. Layton's particular Chemical Warfare Department had ULTRA contracts at that time. Dr. Leyton also worked for the U.S. Navy at Anapolis, Maryland.

Larry Leyton was later acquitted for his part as one of the gunman who killed members of Ryan's party at the airport. This acquittal was the result of the jury's belief in the Defense's contention that Leyton was a victim of drugs and brainwashing at the time of the shootings and therefore could not be held criminal responsible.

The Phillip family itself also has ties to this area. Lisa Phillip married Dr. Lawrence Leyton. She also became a member of the People's Temple. Lisa Phillip was originally from Germany where her father

was an attorney for the aforementioned I.G. Farben Cop the German chemical conglomerate which was an integral part of the Nazi War Machine.

One of the CIA's operatives involved in the People's Temple cover-up is a long-time CIA asset by the name of Mark Lane. Mr. Lane is a writer and is known to the Intelligence community as a "Vac" or vaccuum. His particular assignments deal with sucking up massive amounts of information from various concerned citizens and public researchers and then supplying these details to the particular intelligence agencies contractjng him. Lane also disperses cover information and "cut-outs", or stories that parrot the basic conspiracy well enough to gain the confidence of the civilian community. The cutout is completed with the insertion of "skids" or elements which are completely fabricated in order to mislead those who seek the truth. [See Agency file on same subject: Mark Lane and Contract Assignment History/CIA Central Files/2011.

Mr. Lane was the attorney representing the People's Temple as well as the attorney representing James Earl Ray during the House Select Committee on Assassinations Hearings on the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King. This assignment was during the time of the massacres at Jonestown. The House Select Committee was in the middle of hearing testimony regarding the King assassination when the massacre occurred. The King assassination hearings were instantly overshadowed by the Jonestown events.

Jim Jones was first targeted as a CIA asset in the late 1960's. After spending eleven months in Brazil doing various front operations work, he returned with the operation financing to start the "Mendocino Operation" of the People's Temple. It was the Hughes/Ryan Act of 1974 which ordered that all CIA overt activities must be reported in advance to the oversight committees. It is "ironic" that the coauthor of the act, Ryan, would be assassinated by a covert operation in danger of being exposed.

The action of Agency Clean Teams was to encircle the camp, recon the settlement and, upon orders, close in on the camp itself and liquidate assets. That was a contingency plan to help eliminate those who would not cooperate in ingesting the cyanide-laced KoolAid. The Clean Teams-used two small, specially equipped helicopters as "dusters" to deliver a sleeping gas to put the settlement under as quickly and quietly as possible. Clean Team squads were then sent in to administer lethal injections or, if necessary, to eliminate any individuals attempting to escape by the use of snipers and general small arms elimination.

The Agency's tight hold on the reins of this operation was the reason why no media was allowed into the Jonestown site for several days. The operation to "contain" the true nature of the activity at Jonestown was successful as the cover story was immediately accepted as fact by the U.S. media establishment. It was decided by the Agency experts that the story, as now accepted by the general public, was bizarre enough for anyone with conspiracy in mind to satiate themselves on the manufactured scenario.

This "manufacturing" was immediately apparent to the discerning eye as in the first hours and days of the story breaking, only 400 persons were reported to have been terminated and over 500 were reported to have fled into the surrounding jungle. In reality, bodies were littered over a 3-square-mile area instead of solely in the immediate camp area as was described by so-called "responsible" media.

When questions surfaced regarding the fact that only a few hundred bodies (at most) could be seen in all the camp photographs published in many different publications newspapers, the Agency and its front men dispersed the story that the bodies were literally piled five and six deep and it had taken those who had first arrived after the massacre several days to diicover this. This was a blatantly obvious fabrication as it is immediately apparent from all photographs of

the scene at the center of the camp that this is clearly not the case. There was no official explanation as to why a five-day operation was conducted in the jungle to find the remainder of the 900 who had fled. It is important to realize how easily media channels are manipulated by the Intelligence Community.

In addition to their status as a project ULTRA test group and "enforcers of U.S. interests in Guyana, the Jonestown settlement also assisted in Black Operations processing and shipments of drugs and supplies and operations for Black Fund Activities from that region. These operations were discreetly carried out, but it is known that many of Jones' closest followers were aware of the drug operations being carried out at the Jonestown settlement.

one additional item which the World media did not report on was the fact that Jonestown had a very modem and extensively outfitted hospital. This hospital served as a perfect cover for the actual administration of the drugs and therapy used in Mind Control. Almost every member of the cult was reporting daily to the hospital and they were required to ingest what the medical staff called "vitamins and supplements". In actuality, this was the control procedure, to keep detailed lists of drugs given, in what quantities they were dispensed, and to whom they were given.

It is also known from current classified documentation that basic mini-physicals were administered on a daily basis to the same individuals. On the documents and records themselves are elaborate notes taken on each individual regarding their vital statistics, with details of even the slightest variations of blood pressure, etc., etc.

The preceding briefing is to educate the reader on the Intelligence Community's use of Mind Control and Thought Manipulation that may be implemented today, as well as a few actual case scenarios of successful operations conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and, in some limited capacity, Intelligence Support Activities units.

The scenarios described in this briefing have been selected for their recognition factor for members of intelligence teams as "well known" events in recent history and for their direct involvements with various U.S. Intelligence agencies and selected operations connected to these events.

These manipulations and degrees of control are easily achieved after years of intensive research by both the CIA and the Office of Naval Intelligence. The methods cover the range of actual hypno-programmingr through either overt or covert methods as utilized by the agency concerned in the use of R.H.I.C., U.S.I.C., E.E.O.M. and E.D.O.M. techniques.

Flight 3407 Crash: ICE?

Edited by Alex Constantine

"Ice accumulation," repeated ad nauseum by the media as cause of the Flight 3407 crash, doesn't hold up so well under scrutiny ...

The "Mainstream" Media Perspective Immediately Following the Disaster in Buffalo:

The Crash of Flight 3407: Ice Buildup the Lead Theory
February 14, 2009

"Clarence Center, NY: While the investigation is ongoing, it appears that ice buildup on the wings remains the likely cause of the horrific plane crash in a town near Buffalo, New York February 12th that claimed the lives of 49 people in the air, and one on the ground. ... "
http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/articles/11900/Flight-Bombardier-Ice.html

A few days on, however, the "ice" theory was cracking ...

John Croft, at flightglobal.com, reported on February 18: "Ice only one factor in flight 3407 forensics" - "While icing was initially high on the list of potential causes of the loss of control of a Bombardier Q400 on approach to Buffalo Niagara International airport on 12 February, evidence emerging from on-board recorders and other aircraft in the vicinity at the time is hinting at a more complex chain of events. ... Information from the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder as well as air traffic control tapes paint a picture of a relatively normal winter flight for the north-east USA with ice and light snow. Soon after leaving New York Newark, the crew turned on the de-icing system, which uses pneumatic boots on the wing, fin and tailplane leading edges to clear ice. . ... "
http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2009/02/18/322739/ice-only-one-factor-in-flight-3407-forensics.html

"Ice?" - Sabotage Looking More Likely

Flight 3407's De-Icer had Fail-Safe Back-Ups

Someone disabled the de-icer. These don't become non-functional they have redundancy built in, and the light was on, but it obviously was not working, causing the crash as surely as if there was a bomb on board.

My verdict: Sabotage. They wanted to get rid of someone on that plane. So we have to ask ourselves: Who is it that they're not talking about...? That's the person they wanted to kill. My guess is it could have been the woman suing the government over 9-11. ...

http://engforum.pravda.ru/showthread.php?t=241337

Setting Up the "Pilot Error" Cover Story?

Now, in the account published on USAToday, "In December, the agency issued a safety alert because pilots have continued to make the same mistake as the Comair pilots 12 years ago: failing to switch on a plane's anti-icing equipment. ... "
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-02-13-ice-buffalo-crash_N.htm

Blaming the Pilots for "failing to switch on a plane's anti-icing equipment" is erroneous because, "according to the New York Times, 'It has several types of de-icing equipment, including systems for its wings, tail, propeller blades and windshield, which are prompted to operate by automatic sensors"

The De-Icing Systems were "On" when the Plane Crashed

"The NTSB confirmed through their spokesman, Steve Chealander, that the de-icing systems 'were in the ON position' before the aircraft commenced its descent from 16,000 ft to 2,300 ft and remained ON."

http://meltdown101.livejournal.com/26165.html

Pilot Statements re Ice

21:04 - ATC: Delta 1998, you getting any icing where you're at?

21:05 - Delta 1998: uh, we're picking up on the way down - i don't think we're building anymore here, but about uh 6500 down to 3500 maybe?

24:45 - ATC: delta 1998, 6 miles from KLUMP maintain 2300 until established on a localizer, clear to ils approach runway 2-3

24:54 - delta 1998: ILS 2-3 and we're still in the imc here, 2300 delta 1998

25:00 - atc: are you getting any kind of icing or anything there?

25:03 - delta 1998: uhh it doesn't appear to be building, we have a 1/2..1/4 inch from the descent that has remained this whole time.
•••
Continental Express Flight 3407 - Disturbing Parallels
by Andrew Hughes

... What we can gather from the ATC tapes and the flight recorder is that the pilots descended from 16,000ft to their outer marker approach altitude of 2300ft ready to intercept the Instrument Landing System beacon for runway 230 without any report of problems and both pilots evidently not under any stress according to the ATC tapes. Once the aircraft started to line up on approach, it simply vanished off the radar screens with no Mayday or any communication from the pilots. According to the Flight Director logs, once aligned for approach, the plane experienced violent pitching and rolling after the landing gear had been extended and the first stage of flaps had been set but still no communications from the pilots. This would seem to point to both a simultaneous, catastrophic failure in both the de-icing system and communications / transponder systems. There was no mention of any failure by the NTSB of any catastrophic failure recorded on the recovered black box. The de-icing system status indicator in the cockpit remained ON during the entire time. The Bombardier Dash8 Q-400 had been subject to an airworthiness directive in June 2008 about its de-icing system in aircraft built before April 2007. Flight 3047's Q-400 had been built after that date.

http://meltdown101.livejournal.com/26165.html
••
NTSB Claims it will take a FULL YEAR to Determine why the Plane Crashed

From "Investigators Finish Work At Flight 3407 Crash Site," NY1 News: "Although Although the National Transportation Safety Board finished its work at the scene, they are expected to spend at least a year determining the cause of the crash.the National Transportation Safety Board finished its work at the scene, they are expected to spend at least a year determining the cause of the crash."

http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/94342/investigators-finish-work-at-flight-3407-crash-site/Default.aspx
•••
Air Traffic Control Transcript

A transcript of the Air Traffic Control tapes was released shortly after the crash which confirmed that the pilots had not reported anything out of the ordinary. They were directed to 2300ft on a heading of 260 degrees for runway 230 with an Instrument Landing System Approach. One minute after the last acknowledgement from flight 3047 "the plane simply dropped off the radar screen". ...

Photo Gallery: The New U.S. Embassy in Iraq

See: http://www.wtv-zone.com/Mary/NEWUSEMBASSYINIRAQ.HTML

Mulroney Lashes Trudeau, Calls him a Nazi Collaborating Coward

REUTERS - SEPTEMBER 7, 2007

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who left office with his popularity at record lows, now accuses late rival Pierre Trudeau of being a bungling coward who failed to oppose the Nazis.

The attack was savage even by the standards of Mulroney, a man well known for his strong language and dislike of Trudeau.

Mulroney, the 68-year-old Conservative who ruled Canada from 1984 to 1993, made the comments in a memoir due out next Monday as well as a television interview due to be shown on Sunday. The Ottawa Sun newspaper published extracts on Thursday.

Trudeau, a Liberal, who was prime minister for a total of 15 years between 1968 and 1984, is best known for his colorful personal life and for a wide number of social and constitutional reforms.

Although by no means everyone supported or even liked him, polls show Trudeau is regarded as one of Canada's most important prime ministers. He died in 2000.

Mulroney noted that Trudeau had not volunteered to fight during World War Two and said he had also made speeches in which he minimized the Nazi threat.

"This is man who questioned the Allies when the Jews were being sacrificed and when the great extermination program was on, he was marching around (Montreal) on the other side of the issue," Mulroney told CTV. He said that while Trudeau had been entitled to decide not to go to war, "(that) doesn't qualify him for any position of moral leadership in our society."

Mulroney wrote that Trudeau was "opposed to enlightened policies designed to wipe out the curse of Nazism."

Mulroney has long complained that Canadians do not give him enough credit for his achievements, which include the creation of a North American free trade zone.

Trudeau's sons declined to comment on the attack. Liberal leader Stephane Dion said he regretted the remarks and questioned whether they were designed to sell books.

"While Mr. Mulroney's track record in politics may indeed explain his frustrations with Prime Minister Trudeau, they do not qualify him as a historian," he said.

Mulroney blames Trudeau for the failure of the Meech Lake accord, which was designed to end wrangling about national unity by offering constitutional concessions to French-speaking Quebec. Trudeau opposed Meech and described Mulroney as a weakling and a bungler who should have refused to deal with the "snivelers" demanding more rights for Quebec.

The accord died in 1990, triggering an upsurge in Quebec separatist sentiment that almost broke apart Canada.

"'Bunglers', 'cowards', 'snivelers' -- Trudeau knew whereof he spoke," wrote Mulroney, whose reputation is still decidedly mixed despite the passage of time.

He is embroiled in a legal battle with German-born arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber, who says he paid Mulroney C$300,000 ($285,000) after he left office as part of a business deal. And in 2005, a book based on a series of taped recordings with Mulroney showed him to be vain, spiteful and foul-mouthed.

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/story.html?id=06e2d0fe-4bdd-4094-89e2-c7fc45717cea

A Parmalat Scandal Connection to the Flight 3407 Crash

Also see: "Tragedy of the 9/11 Widow ... GenocideGate Ties ... Northrop Grumman and the Buffalo Crash ... and a PRIOR, Related Airplane Crash," and "Other Passengers of Note on Flight 3407/UPDATE - The Audio Reveals Ice was not a Factor in the Crash"

“'This is huge,' says Stuart Grant, plaintiffs’ counsel in the matter. ... "

John G. Roberts III was a passenger on Flight 3407. Roberts was a VP of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Private Limited - currently under investigation in New York for collusion in the Parmalat securities fraud scandal. "The judge found evidence that DTT exercised some control in particular over the Parmalat engagement." - but Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu has, as reported in the second entry below, claimed to have no connection whatsoever to the Parmalat securities fraud:

John G. Roberts III

Roberts, a native of Lewiston, N.Y., who lived in India, was returning home for an overdue visit with relatives. ...

Roberts received his master's degree from the University of Buffalo and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester. He served as a captain in the U.S. Army Reserves from 1985 to 1993, according to the Niagara Gazette.

At the time of the crash, Roberts was a vice president for the consulting and accounting firm Deloitte in Mumbai.

http://www.fresnobee.com/641/story/1204941.html
•••
New York Judge Puts Possible Bulls-eye on Deloitte Touche
Posted by Nathan Koppel
blogs.wsj.com
January 28, 2009

New York federal judge Lewis Kaplan issued a ruling yesterday in the Parmalat securities litigation which could have accountants quaking, and plaintiffs’ lawyers licking their chops.

Parmalat, an Italian dairy conglomerate, collapsed in 2003 following the discovery of a massive fraud in which the company allegedly overstated its assets by $16 billion. At issue in yesterday’s ruling was whether Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu potentially could be held liable for an allegedly defective Parmalat audit by its Italian member firm, Deloitte & Touche, S.p.a. Yes, Kaplan held, in denying a Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu’s motion for summary judgment. Here is the ruling.

“This is huge,” says Stuart Grant, plaintiffs’ counsel in the matter.

Accounting firms, he says, often assert that their foreign affiliates are legally separate, thus limiting the asset pool available to investors who file suit.

“They always argue that you can’t pursue the worldwide organization, sometimes successfully,” Grant says. “Judge Kaplan has finally made the law reflect reality. These accounting firms sell themselves as worldwide, seamless organizations. Now they are going to be held responsible in the same fashion.”

“Obviously, we are disappointed in the Judge’s decision, but we are confident of victory at any trial of this matter,” Deloitte said in a statement, adding that Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu “provided no services of any kind to any Parmalat entity.”

Whether Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu could be held liable turned on whether it had a “principal-agent” relationship with its Italian affiliate. In deciding that in the affirmative, Kaplan noted that “DTT exercised substantial control over the manner in which its member firms conducted their professional activities.”

But the reach of Kaplan’s decision is not yet clear, as it depended partly on the particular facts of the case. The judge found evidence that DTT exercised some control in particular over the Parmalat engagement.

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/01/28/new-york-judge-puts-possible-bulls-eye-on-deloitte-touche/?mod=googlenews_wsj
•••
More on the Parmalat Fiasco

In December 2003, the Italian food and dairy multinational Parmalat filed for bankruptcy in what would become the biggest-ever corporate failure in Europe. The scandal, also called “Europe’s Enron,” broke out when Bank of America announced that a document reflecting nearly €4 billion deposit in Parmalat’s Cayman Islands subsidiary, Bonlat Financing Corp., to be a counterfeit. Since the 1990s, Parmalat entered into the financial markets in a grand way, expanding its presence into 30 countries from 6 by financing major acquisitions with debt. It was discovered that Parmalat was using its assets to conceal its liabilities through a network of offshore and foreign companies, but the trouble was that these assets were merely imaginary. The fraud was so widespread that the company profit history may almost entirely be fabricated, having claimed that its subsidiary Bonlat had sold sufficient milk powder to generate 55 gallons of milk per capita in the small island nation of Cuba in one particular year.

The scandal created quite a shockwave throughout Italy and around the world affecting a mass of victims: Parmalat’s 36,000 employees in 30 countries lost their jobs; dairy farmers from as far as Brazil and Australia were not paid for milk delivered; and 70,000 to 90,000 investors unexpectedly found their holdings of the company’s stocks and bonds practically worthless (Parmalat had a stock market value of €1.8 billion before the scandal became public). Some major companies were also entangled by the scandal including accounting firms Grant Thornton and Deloitte and Touche, and banks–Bank of America and Citicorp. Bank of America had aided Parmalat acquire $170 million credit in Venezuela; while Citicorp found its uncollectibles abruptly increase by $1.5 billion.

Included among the 11 convicted in connection with the scandal were Calisto Tanzi, Parmalat’s founder and chief executive, who was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for market rigging and accounting fraud in December 2008; and Fausto Tonna, his chief financial officer, was given 2 ½ year sentence in 2005 for committing forgery and conceiving a web of offshore companies to hide the firm’s true liabilities.

http://bizcovering.com/major-companies/accounting-scandals/

Buffalo Crash Investigator once held Nuclear Codes

By LARRY NEUMEISTER

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — The public face of the probe into the crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 is a 62-year-old former Air Force fighter pilot and stunt flyer deemed so trustworthy he once carried the nuclear codes for President Ronald Reagan.

Steven Chealander found himself in his most high-profile role yet as one of five National Transportation Safety Board members who head to a crash site at a minute's notice.

He said his two years on the NTSB have allowed him to apply the lessons he's learned from air disasters to make flight safer — "the highlight reel" of his career, he said.

The past week, Chealander has served as the NTSB's link to the families of the victims of Flight 3407 and to the public through daily news conferences and talking to reporters. He's been the man behind the podium on all the television networks, speaking with authority about the crash that killed 49 people on the plane and one on the ground in Clarence, N.Y., near Buffalo. ...

The Dallas-area resident was an Air Force fighter pilot for 22 years, following in the path of his father who did the same in World War II. Chealander flew in the first Gulf War and was a member of the Thunderbirds, the Air Force's air demonstration team of elite pilots. ...

Chealander said he was inspired by Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger ...

Chealander attributed some of the people skills he's employed the past week in comforting survivors to time he spent with Reagan.

"Who I was changed after I worked for President Reagan," he said. "I was a better person. I was more attuned to other people."

He recalled the president as a grandfather figure who always found time for personal moments.

"He once told me he would have liked to shake hands with every American citizen if he could. He was that much of a people person," Chealander said.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ik7hklVW6e4-vqh4jGJTUXm5WAEAD96FEJGG0
••••
Chealander's Term on the NTSB Expired Over a Year Ago

"... Chealander hit age 60 in November 2006, and had to retire as a pilot under then existing federal rules. But former President George W. Bush nominated him to finish out an NTSB term in September 2006, and Chealander was sworn in as an NTSB board member Jan. 3, 2007.

"That term expired Dec. 31, 2007, and his appointment to a full five-year term is still pending before the U.S. Senate. ... "

http://aviationblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/02/ntsb-board-member-on-buffalo-c.html

Buffalo Call to Action: Stop hate group from tarnishing Flight 3407 victims

"'God cast the plane down,' read the protest schedule of the Westboro Baptist Church. 'At the First Baptist Dog Kennel of Lutz, Florida they are going to be worshiping a dead guy. What are they worshiping? Well the fact that he was behind the wheel throttle of the plane which landed on top of a house near Buffalo, N.Y. He's a hero, says the lying false prophet from this whore house, which is anything but Baptist.' ... "

spectrum.buffalo.edu
FEBRUARY 20th, 2009

While most everyone mourns the loss of those lost in the crash of Flight 3407, some have taken the tragedy and decided to use it as a platform for speaking their vision of "morality." These people are the members of the Westboro Baptist Church; the same people who claim 9/11 was necessary (God punishing America for enabling homosexuals) and protested Heath Ledger's wake because he portrayed a homosexual onscreen. They are also known for protesting the funerals of members of the armed forces killed overseas.

The church plans to protest the Allison Des Forges memorial service, taking place at St. Joseph University Church at 3275 Main Street, right past South Campus.

Instead of trying to explain these ignorant peoples' reasons for these sinful actions, it can be assumed that most reading this believe compassion and respect should be paid to this woman, a former UB professor and accomplished human rights activist, and all of the others lost in the tragedy.

Des Forges' friends and family should have the right to a peaceful memorial service at the venue of their choosing, and not have it interrupted by a hateful group of people who, in these situations, recall a less intelligent version of the KKK.

The service takes place at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday. The Spectrum is urging students to attend to peacefully prevent the Westboro Baptist Church from getting anywhere near shouting distance of the memorial proceedings.

The UB Freethinkers, a student group on campus, has planned to do exactly this at both the Zion Lutheran Church located at 9535 Clarence Center Road from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and the aforementioned St. Joseph University Church from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m. The group asks that those attending wear white, bring large signs with positive messages for the victim's families and, most importantly, maintain a non-confrontational mindset.

It is saddening that even an event as humbling as this cannot bring absolutely everyone together; that there are those still out there that feel the measure of a person is dictated by his or her sexual orientation, race, religion or gender.

However, this is also an opportunity to show these people that their actions will only produce more support and universality within the greater Buffalo community.

If you are able, please make time and help preserve the dignity of those lost in Flight 3407. Go to www.ubfreethinkers.org or search "UB Freethinkers" to get involved.

http://spectrum.buffalo.edu/article.php?id=39339
••••
Controversial church brings protest message to grieving community
JOANN PAN - Managing Editor
FEBRUARY 20th, 2009

... Protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church plan to be in Lutz, Fla., on Friday, as the family and loved ones of Marvin Renslow, the pilot of the Continental Flight 3407, gather to celebrate his life and mourn his death.

"God cast the plane down," read the protest schedule of the Westboro Baptist Church. "At the First Baptist Dog Kennel of Lutz, Florida they are going to be worshiping a dead guy. What are they worshiping? Well the fact that he was behind the wheel throttle of the plane which landed on top of a house near Buffalo, N.Y. He's a hero, says the lying false prophet from this whore house, which is anything but Baptist."

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church will be separated on Sunday between the West Coast and the East Coast, protesting in Los Angeles, and in Buffalo, spreading their message — that god is punishing the U.S. for its views on homosexuality and blasphemy by killing those in the armed forces, in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and most recently, in the Clarence Center plane crash, as acknowledged on the institute's Web site.

"Don't worship the dead," an online announcement read. "We will picket this non-denominational community prayer service. God will not hear your prayers at this hour..."

http://spectrum.buffalo.edu/article.php?id=39409

NY State Police Conduct Illegal Search for Video of Flight 3407 Crash, Illegally Confiscate the Camera and Delete Sections of Tape

This story is a bit sketchy, IMhO - obvious questions are left hanging by the reporter, to wit:

• Why didn't the police obtain a search warrant before entering John's home and frantically searching for the camera?

• The police claimed that John was on a nearby roof, allegedly accompanied by a 13-year-old boy, taping the wreckage safely beyond the police perimeter. Officials claimed that he shouldn't have been on the roof with a minor. All right. Was this such a deplorable "crime" that they went ballistic, immediately launched into an illegal search for the tape - to "prove" the boy had been on the roof? This is the stated reason for confiscating the video camera. And it's nonsensical - did it occur to these highly-trained law enforcement officials that an illegally-obtained video tape is inadmissable as evidence - the very reason given for confiscating John's camera in the first place?

Or ...

Did the police have ulterior motives for scrambling after the video camera, Delta Force-style ...

State Police Return Confiscated Camera
Man spotted by helicopter

George Richert
17 Feb 2009

CLARENCE, N.Y. (WIVB) - ... John from Clarence was on the roof of his apartment building with a video camera at the time the grieving families came to the crash scene, the State Police helicopter spotted him.

John said, "At that point there was troopers from all over the building saying 'look up there, look at the building,' started walking toward the building, they said 'there he is get him,' making threats like 'get down from the building.'"

Then police came to his door...

"He started rifling the luggage thinking we took luggage from the crash site which is ludicrous. And then they took the camera and said 'We're confiscating the camera, my captain wants to see it, and we'll see what happens from there.'"

State Police have been dilligent about protecting the privacy of the families, but they say the reason they moved in on John was because they noticed a 13-year-old boy with him on the roof.

New York State Police Captain Steve Nigrelli said, "They admitted to videotaping but they wouldn't indicate who was on the roof. At that point, we started looking at this from a child endangerment standpoint. I would have some concerns if a 13-year-old child was allowed to be on the roof. How did he get on the roof?"

State Police say they reviewed the tape and found no proof that a minor was on the roof, and Tuesday, a day later, they returned the tape.

It had images of the crash scene but not the grieving the families.

John's apartment is technically outside of the permimeter, but even if it was inside, civil rights attorney David Jay says he had a right to videotape.

Jay said, "Police meant to do well, but in the process did things they shouldn't have done..."

"When terrible events occur, even officers can make mistakes."

David Jay, and State Police and the FBI all agree that if you're standing where you're allowed to be, you are allowed to videotape whatever you see.

http://www.wivb.com/dpp/news/state_police_return_confiscated_camera_090217

Nazi Collaborator Alfred P. Sloan

Edited by Alex Constantine

" ... brought to you by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ... " - Daily advert heard on National "Public" Radio
•••
Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr. (1875-1966)
By Richard Sanders, Editor, Press for Conversion!
coat.ncf.ca

Sloan was a member, Advisory Council of the American Liberty League.

Son of a coffee and tea importer, Alfred Sloan, became America’s first great corporate celebrity. His greatest contributions to his class included the destruction of mass transit, the crushing of labour strikes at du Pont's General Motors (GM), arming Hitler before and during WWII and promoting President Wilson’s slogan that “What’s good for General Motors is good for the U.S.” (That’s GM president Charles Wilson, 1941-1953).

Armed with an MIT electrical engineering degree in 1895, Sloan was a machine shop president in 1899. His company merged with two others to form GM in 1918. Sloan was vice-president and then president (1923) and GM’s chairman (1937-1956). Under Sloan’s leadership, GM systematically bought up and destroyed America’s highly-efficient electric train, streetcar and tram infrastructure, and literally burnt the vehicles. Knowing the public preferred streetcars over fume-belching buses, GM bought up America’s largest bus operator (Omnibus) and largest bus manufacturer (Yellow Coach). Manhattan was their symbolic starting point. GM acquired controlling interest in its rail system and then dismantled it (1926-1936). Bus services were decreased and mass PR campaigns were launched selling the notion that what people really wanted was cars. Thus, Sloan “motorized” America for GM.

Sloan unceasingly propagated the myth that corporations are central to public happiness and prosperity. This helped cover up the fact that corporations will quickly sacrifice public interest in their selfish drive towards greater profits. David Farber, author of Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors (2002) said:

"There’s a lot I don’t like about Mr. Sloan. His steady opposition to making safer automobiles, his dismissal of workers’ rights, his inability to see Adolf Hitler as evil and dangerous..., and his general disregard for social justice and the common good make him a not very lovable figure. Those failings are usually not weaknesses in a corporate manager, even as they make Sloan less than a model of good citizenship. But good citizenship has little to do with maximizing corporate profits. Which makes it pretty obvious to me that putting corporate leaders in charge of our public good is ill-advised."

Farber also notes that GM destroyed Sloan’s files to protect itself from lawsuits regarding antitrust issues, the neglect of automobile safety and its investments in Nazi Germany.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, established in 1934, had assets worth over $1.3 billion in 2002.

GM is the world’s largest company. With operations in 104 countries and sales of $125 billion a year, GMs revenues are the equivalent of the world’s 6th largest country.

References:

Jill Rapaport and Scott Butek, General Motors and You: An Appreciation of James Klein and Martha Olson's "Taken for a Ride"
Google cache: http://www.interactivist.net/transportation/ride.html

An interview with David Farber, author of Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors, 2002.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/238040in.html

Source: Press for Conversion! magazine, Issue # 53, "Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism," March 2004. Published by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade.

http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/sloan.html
•••
Nazi Collaboration and GM's Lies

www.newworldencyclopedia.org: "In the 1930s GM—long hostile to unionization—confronted its workforce, newly organized and ready for labor rights, in an extended contest for control. Sloan was averse to violence of the sort associated with Henry Ford. He preferred the subtle use of spying and had built up the best undercover apparatus the business community had ever seen up to that time. When the workers organized a massive sitdown strike in 1936, Sloan found that espionage had little value in the face of such open tactics.

"Under Sloan's direction as CEO, General Motors is known to have made large profits off of the rearmament of the Third Reich. General Motors Overseas Corporation was led by director James Mooney, who held various business visits with Adolph Hitler, along with senior executives of GM's German division Adam Opel A.G. Both GM and Opel A.G. were eager, willing and indispensable cogs in the Third Reich's rearmament juggernaut, a rearmament that, as many feared during the 1930s would enable Hitler to conquer Europe and destroy millions of lives. For GM's part, it has steadfastly denied for decades, even in the halls of th U.S. Congress, that it actively assisted the Nazi war effort."

Edwin Black, "Hitler's Carmaker: The Inside Story of How General Motors Helped Mobilize the Third Reich," Global Research, May 5, 2007, Hitler's Carmaker Retrieved November 6, 2007.
•••
"The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM ... "

"A senior executive of General Motors also received a medal from Hitler, apparently for services rendered, and services to come. GM’s involvement in Germany began in 1935 with the opening of a truck factory near Berlin. Within a few years trucks produced by that factory would be part of German Army convoys rumbling through Poland, France and the Soviet Union.

"After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, GM Chairman Alfred P. Sloan commented that the Nazis’ behavior 'should not be considered the business of the management of General Motors.' The GM plant in Germany was highly profitable. 'We have no right to shut down that plant,' Sloan declared.

"The outbreak of war in September 1939 resulted inevitably in the full conversion by GM and Ford of their Axis plants to the production of military aircraft and trucks," according to a 1974 report printed by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. 'On the ground, GM and Ford subsidiaries built nearly 90 percent of the armored ‘mule’ 3-ton half-trucks and more than 70 percent of the Reich’s medium and heavy-duty trucks. These vehicles, according to American intelligence reports, served as ‘the backbone of the German Army transportation system.’

"'General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland,' says researcher Bradford Snell. 'Switzerland was just a repository of looted funds, while GM was an integral part of the German war effort. The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM.' ... Shamelessly, after the war both GM and Ford demanded reparations from the U.S. government for damage to their German plants caused by Allied bombing. In 1967, GM was compensated with $33 million from the U.S. government for the American bombing of its Russelsheim plant. ... "

http://www.ranknfile-ue.org/uen_nastybiz.html
•••
Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post
November 30, 1998; Page A01

Three years after Swiss banks became the target of a worldwide furor over their business dealings with Nazi Germany, major American car companies find themselves embroiled in a similar debate.

Like the Swiss banks, the American car companies have vigorously denied that they assisted the Nazi war machine or that they significantly profited from the use of forced labor at their German subsidiaries during World War II. But historians and lawyers researching class-action suits on behalf of former prisoners of war are busy amassing evidence of collaboration by the automakers with the Nazi regime.

The issues at stake for the American automobile corporations go far beyond the relatively modest sums involved in settling any lawsuit. During the war, the car companies established a reputation for themselves as "the arsenal of democracy" by transforming their production lines to make airplanes, tanks and trucks for the armies that defeated Adolf Hitler. They deny that their huge business interests in Nazi Germany led them, wittingly or unwittingly, to also become "the arsenal of fascism."

The Ford Motor Co. has mobilized dozens of historians, lawyers and researchers to fight a civil case brought by lawyers in Washington and New York who specialize in extracting large cash settlements from banks and insurance companies accused of defrauding Holocaust victims. Also, a book scheduled for publication next year will accuse General Motors Corp. of playing a key role in Hitler's invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union.

"General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland," said Bradford Snell, who has spent two decades researching a history of the world's largest automaker. "Switzerland was just a repository of looted funds. GM was an integral part of the German war effort. The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM."

Both General Motors and Ford insist that they bear little or no responsibility for the operations of their German subsidiaries, which controlled 70 percent of the German car market at the outbreak of war in 1939 and rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war materiel to the German army.

But documents discovered in German and American archives show a much more complicated picture. In certain instances, American managers of both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their plants at home.

After three years of national soul-searching, Switzerland's largest banks agreed last August to make a $1.25 billion settlement to Holocaust survivors, a step they had initially resisted. Far from dying down, however, the controversy over business dealings with the Nazis has given new impetus to long-standing investigations into issues such as looted art, unpaid insurance benefits and the use of forced labor at German factories.

Although some of the allegations against GM and Ford surfaced during 1974 congressional hearings into monopolistic practices in the automobile industry, American corporations have largely succeeded in playing down their connections to Nazi Germany. As with Switzerland, however, their very success in projecting a wholesome, patriotic image of themselves is now being turned against them by their critics.

"When you think of Ford, you think of baseball and apple pie," said Miriam Kleinman, a researcher with the Washington law firm of Cohen, Millstein and Hausfeld, who spent weeks examining records at the National Archives in an attempt to build a slave labor case against the Dearborn-based company. "You don't think of Hitler having a portrait of Henry Ford on his office wall in Munich."

Both Ford and General Motors declined requests for access to their wartime archives. Ford spokesman John Spellich defended the company's decision to maintain business ties with Nazi Germany on the grounds that the U.S. government continued to have diplomatic relations with Berlin up until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. GM spokesman John F. Mueller said that General Motors lost day-to-day control over its German plants in September 1939 and "did not assist the Nazis in any way during World War II."

For GIs, an Unpleasant Surprise

When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel -- a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary -- and flying Opel-built warplanes. (Chrysler's role in the German rearmament effort was much less significant.)

When the U.S. Army liberated the Ford plants in Cologne and Berlin, they found destitute foreign workers confined behind barbed wire and company documents extolling the "genius of the Fuehrer," according to reports filed by soldiers at the scene. A U.S. Army report by investigator Henry Schneider dated Sept. 5, 1945, accused the German branch of Ford of serving as "an arsenal of Nazism, at least for military vehicles" with the "consent" of the parent company in Dearborn.

Ford spokesman Spellich described the Schneider report as "a mischaracterization" of the activities of the American parent company and noted that Dearborn managers had frequently been kept in the dark by their German subordinates over events in Cologne.

The relationship of Ford and GM to the Nazi regime goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, when the American car companies competed against each other for access to the lucrative German market. Hitler was an admirer of American mass production techniques and an avid reader of the antisemitic tracts penned by Henry Ford. "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration," Hitler told a Detroit News reporter two years before becoming the German chancellor in 1933, explaining why he kept a life-size portrait of the American automaker next to his desk.

Although Ford later renounced his antisemitic writings, he remained an admirer of Nazi Germany and sought to keep America out of the coming war. In July 1938, four months after the German annexation of Austria, he accepted the highest medal that Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. The following month, a senior executive for General Motors, James Mooney, received a similar medal for his "distinguished service to the Reich."

The granting of such awards reflected the vital place that the U.S. automakers had in Germany's increasingly militarized economy. In 1935, GM agreed to build a new plant near Berlin to produce the aptly named "Blitz" truck, which would later be used by the German army for its blitzkreig attacks on Poland, France and the Soviet Union. German Ford was the second-largest producer of trucks for the German army after GM/Opel, according to U.S. Army reports.

The importance of the American automakers went beyond making trucks for the German army. The Schneider report, now available to researchers at the National Archives, states that American Ford agreed to a complicated barter deal that gave the Reich increased access to large quantities of strategic raw materials, notably rubber. Author Snell says that Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer told him in 1977 that Hitler "would never have considered invading Poland" without synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors.

As war approached, it became increasingly difficult for U.S. corporations like GM and Ford to operate in Germany without cooperating closely with the Nazi rearmament effort. Under intense pressure from Berlin, both companies took pains to make their subsidiaries appear as "German" as possible. In April 1939, for example, German Ford made a personal present to Hitler of 35,000 Reichsmarks in honor of his 50th birthday, according to a captured Nazi document.

Documents show that the parent companies followed a conscious strategy of continuing to do business with the Nazi regime, rather than divest themselves of their German assets. Less than three weeks after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, GM Chairman Alfred P. Sloan defended this strategy as sound business practice, given the fact that the company's German operations were "highly profitable."

The internal politics of Nazi Germany "should not be considered the business of the management of General Motors," Sloan explained in a letter to a concerned shareholder dated April 6, 1939. "We must conduct ourselves [in Germany] as a German organization. . . . We have no right to shut down the plant."

U.S. Firms Became Crucial

After the outbreak of war in September 1939, General Motors and Ford became crucial to the German military, according to contemporaneous German documents and postwar investigations by the U.S. Army. James Mooney, the GM director in charge of overseas operations, had discussions with Hitler in Berlin two weeks after the German invasion of Poland.

Typewritten notes by Mooney show that he was involved in the partial conversion of the principal GM automobile plant at Russelsheim to production of engines and other parts for the Junker "Wunderbomber," a key weapon in the German air force, under a government-brokered contract between Opel and the Junker airplane company. Mooney's notes show that he returned to Germany the following February for further discussions with Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering and a personal inspection of the Russelsheim plant.

Mooney's involvement in the conversion of the Russelsheim plant undermines claims by General Motors that the American branch of the company had nothing to do with the Nazi rearmament effort. In congressional testimony in 1974, GM maintained that American personnel resigned from all management positions in Opel following the outbreak of war in 1939 "rather than participate in the production of war materials."

However, according to documents of the Reich Commissar for the Treatment of Enemy Property, the American parent company continued to have some say in the operations of Opel after September 1939. The documents show that the company issued a general power of attorney to an American manager, Pete Hoglund, in March 1940. Hoglund did not leave Germany until a year later. At that time, the power of attorney was transferred to a prominent Berlin lawyer named Heinrich Richter.

GM spokesman Mueller declined to answer questions from The Washington Post on the power of attorney granted to Hoglund and Richter or to provide access to the personnel files of Hoglund and other wartime managers. He also declined to comment on an assertion by Snell that Opel used French and Belgian prisoners at its Russelsheim plant in the summer of 1940, at a time when the American Hoglund was still looking after GM interests in Germany.

The Nazis had a clear interest in keeping Opel and German Ford under American ownership, despite growing hostility between Washington and Berlin. By the time of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the American stake in German Ford had declined to 52 percent, but Nazi officials argued against a complete takeover. A memorandum to plant managers dated November 25, 1941, acknowledged that such a step would deprive German Ford of "the excellent sales organization" of the parent company and make it more difficult to bring "the remaining European Ford companies under German influence."

Documents suggest that the principal motivation of both companies during this period was to protect their investments. An FBI report dated July 23, 1941 quoted Mooney as saying that he would refuse to take any action that might "make Hitler mad." In fall 1940, Mooney told the journalist Henry Paynter that he would not return his Nazi medal because such an action might jeopardize GM's $100 million investment in Germany. "Hitler has all the cards," Paynter quoted Mooney as saying.

"Mooney probably thought that the war would be over very quickly, so why should we give our wonderful company away," said German researcher Anita Kugler, who used Nazi archives to trace the company's dealings with Nazi Germany.

Even though GM officials were aware of the conversion of its Russelsheim plant to aircraft engine production, they resisted such conversion efforts in the United States, telling shareholders that their automobile assembly lines in Detroit were "not adaptable to the manufacture of other products" such as planes, according to a company document discovered by Snell.

In June 1940, after the fall of France, Henry Ford personally vetoed a U.S. government-approved plan to produce under license Rolls-Royce engines for British fighter planes, according to published accounts by his associates.

Declaration of War Alters Ties

America's declaration of war on Germany in December 1941 made it illegal for U.S. motor companies to have any contact with their subsidiaries on German-controlled territory.

At GM and Ford plants in Germany, reliance on forced labor increased. The story of Elsa Iwanowa, who brought a class-action suit against Ford last March, is typical. At the age of 16, she was abducted from her home in the southern Russian city of Rostov by German soldiers in October 1942 with hundreds of other young women to work at the Ford plant at Cologne.

"The conditions were terrible. They put us in barracks, on three-tier bunks," she recalled in a telephone interview from Belgium, where she now lives. "It was very cold; they did not pay us at all and scarcely fed us. The only reason that we survived was that we were young and fit."

In a court submission, American Ford acknowledges that Iwanowa and others were "forced to endure a sad and terrible experience" at its Cologne plant but maintains that redressing such "tragedies" should be "a government-to-government concern." Spellich, the Ford spokesman, insists the company did not have management control over its German subsidiary during the period in question.

Ford has backed away from its initial claim that it did not profit in any way from forced labor at its Cologne plant. Spellich said that company historians are still researching this issue but have found documents showing that, after the war, American Ford received dividends from its German subsidiary worth approximately $60,000 for the years 1940-43. He declined a request to interview the historians, saying they were "too busy."

The extent of contacts between American Ford and its German-controlled subsidiary after 1941 is likely to be contested at any trial. Simon Reich, an economic historian at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on the German car industry, says he has yet to see convincing evidence that American Ford had any control over its Cologne plant after December 1941. He adds, however, that both "Opel and Ford did absolutely everything they could to ingratiate themselves to the Nazi state."

While there was no direct contact between American Ford and its German subsidiary after December 1941, there appear to have been some indirect contacts. In June 1943, the Nazi custodian of the Cologne plant, Robert Schmidt, traveled to Portugal for talks with Ford managers there. In addition, the Treasury Department investigated Ford after Pearl Harbor for possible illegal contacts with its subsidiary in occupied France, which produced Germany army trucks. The investigation ended without charges being filed.

Even though American Ford now condemns what happened at its Cologne plant during the war, it continued to employ the managers in charge at the time. After the war, Schmidt was briefly arrested by Allied military authorities and barred from working for Ford. But he was reinstated as the company's technical director in 1950 after he wrote to Henry Ford II claiming that he had always "detested" the Nazis and had never been a member of the party. A letter signed by a leading Cologne Nazi in February 1942 describes Schmidt as a trusted party member. Ford maintains that Schmidt's name does not show up on Nazi membership lists.

Mel Weiss, an American attorney for Iwanowa, argues that American Ford received "indirect" profits from forced labor at its Cologne plant because of the overall increase in the value of German operations during the war. He notes that Ford was eager to demand compensation from the U.S. government after the war for "losses" due to bomb damage to its German plants and therefore should also be responsible for any benefits derived from forced labor.

Similar arguments apply to General Motors, which was paid $32 million by the U.S. government for damages sustained to its German plants. Washington attorney Michael Hausfeld, who is involved in the Ford lawsuit, confirms GM also is "on our list" as a possible target.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm
•••
GM and the Nazis--Part Four: How Will History Remember General Motors’ Collaboration with the Nazis?
Edwin Black
June 30th 2008

The epilogue of the tumultuous saga of General Motors during the New Deal and Nazi era is still being written. That saga is the subject of a four-part investigative series that concludes with this story. Thousands of pages of decades’-old documents were scrutinized and re-examined to produce this series, which sheds new light on GM’s relationship with the Third Reich—and on the company’s activities in America. They reveal that even as GM and its president, Alfred P. Sloan, were helping jump-start the resurgent German military, they were undermining the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt and undermining America’s electric mass transit, and in doing so helped addict America to oil.

In 1974, a generation after World War II, GM’s controversial history was resurrected by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly. GM and Opel’s collusion with the Nazis dominated the opening portion of the subcommittee’s exhaustively documented study, which mainly focused on the company’s conspiracy to monopolize scores of local mass transit systems in the United States.

The report’s author, Judiciary Committee staff attorney Bradford Snell, used GM’s collaboration with the Third Reich as a moral backdrop to help explain the automakers’ plan in more than 40 cities to subvert popular clean-running electric public transit and convert it to petroleum-burning motor buses.

The Senate report, titled "American Ground Transport," was released shortly after the Arab-imposed 1973 oil shock—and it accused GM of significantly contributing to the nation’s petroleum woes through its mass-transit machinations.

GM had been convicted in 1949 of leading a secret corporate combine that funded a front company called National City Lines that systematically replaced electric trolleys with oil-guzzling motor buses across America. After Snell’s report was presented, GM immediately went on the counterattack, denying Snell’s charges about both its domestic conduct and its collusion with the Nazis, and demanding that the Senate Judiciary Committee cease circulating its own report. That, of course, did not happen.

But following the release of the Snell report, the automaker then created its own 88-page rebuttal report titled, “The Truth About American Ground Transport,” whose entire first section, as it turns out, had nothing to do with American ground transport. It was headlined: “General Motors Did Not Assist the Nazis in World War II.”

GM has also consistently denied domestic wrongdoing.

Thus, GM’s involvement with Nazi transportation in Germany juxtaposed with its conspiracy to convert electric mass transit at home became inextricably linked by virtue of the Senate’s investigation, the company’s own rebuttal and the compelling historical parallel between the company’s conduct in the United States and its conduct in Germany.

GM further demanded that the Senate never permit its own report, American Ground Transport, to be distributed without GM’s rebuttal attached. The Senate agreed—a rare move indeed. Snell, however, labeled the GM rebuttal a document calculated to mislead historians and the public.

Yet another generation later, in the late 1990s, GM’s collaboration with the Nazis was again resurrected when Nazi-era slave laborers threatened to sue GM and Ford for reparations. At the time, a GM spokesman told a reporter at The Washington Post that the company “did not assist the Nazis in any way during WWII.” The effort to sue GM and Ford was unsuccessful, but both Ford and GM, concerned about the facts that might come to light, commissioned histories of their Nazi-related past.

In the case of Ford, the company issued its 2001 report, compiled by historian Simon Reich, plus the original underlying documentation, all of which was made available to the public without restriction. Ford immediately circulated CDs with the data to the media. Researchers and other interested parties may today view the actual documents and photocopy them. The Reich report concluded, among other things, that Ford-Werke, the company’s German subsidiary, used slave labor from the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944 and 1945 and functioned as an integral part of the German war machine. Ford officials in Detroit have publicly commented on their Nazi past, remained available for comment, apologized and have generally helped all those seeking answers about its involvement with the Hitler regime.

As for GM, it commissioned eminent business historian Henry Ashby Turner Jr. in 1999 to conduct an internal investigation and report his findings. Turner, author of several favorably reviewed books, including “German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler,” was well-known, among other things, for his insistence that big business did not make a pivotal contribution to the rise of Hitlerism.

GM, however, declined to release Turner’s internal report or discuss the company’s Nazi-era or New Deal-era history or archival holdings when contacted by this reporter. In February 2006, corporate spokeswoman Geri Lama twice refused to give this reporter the location of the company archive. In November 2006, Lama was again asked for an on-the-record response. She said she was referring the question to “staffers,” but after more than a week, no reply had been received.

GM has maintained a special combative niche in the annals of American corporate history, achieving a reputation for suppressing books, obstructing access to archival records, and frustrating critics from Ralph Nader to Bradford Snell. GM attorneys even fought efforts by Alfred P. Sloan himself to publish his own memoirs, although the autobiography was finally published in 1964 after a long court fight.

In July 2005, Turner published the book “General Motors and the Nazis: The Struggle for Control of Opel, Europe’s Biggest Carmaker” (Yale University Press). The book features 158 chapter text pages of carefully detailed and footnoted information, plus notes, an index and a short appendix. Although the book has been reviewed, BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail book sales for the publishing industry, reported in late October that only 139 copies of the Turner book had been sold to the key outlets monitored by the service since the publication’s release.

In his book, Turner, relying on his work as GM’s historian, disputed many earlier findings about GM’s complicity with the Nazis, concluding that charges that GM had collaborated with the Nazis even after the United States and Germany were at war “have proved groundless.” Turner rejects “the assumption that the American corporation did business in the Third Reich by choice,” asserting, “Such was not the case.” Turner also states that GM had no option but to return wartime profits to its stockholders, since “the German firm prospered handsomely from Hitler’s promotion of the automobile and from the remarkable recovery of the German economy.”

However, Turner does state explicitly that “by the end of 1940 more than ten thousand employees at Opel’s Russelsheim plant were engaged in producing parts for the Junkers bombers heavily used in raining death and destruction on London and other British cities during the air attacks of the Battle of Britain.” Turner also condemns GM for taking the Opel wartime dividends, which included profits made off of slave labor. He writes, “But regardless of who [in the GM corporate structure] decided to claim that tainted money, its receipt rendered GM guilty, after the fact, of deriving profit from war production for the Third Reich made possible in part from the toil of unfree workers.”

Aware that questions would arise about his relationship with GM, Turner’s book states in its preface: “This book was not commissioned by General Motors. It was written after the documentation project was completed and without any financial support from GM. Its contents were seen by no one at GM prior to publication. It is therefore an independent undertaking by the author, who bears sole responsibility for its contents.”

Turner did not respond to voice mail and e-mail messages seeking information about his sponsored GM history project, his subsequent book, or other relevant topics.

The GM Opel documents assembled for the company’s probe and Turner’s commissioned examination were digitized on CD-ROMs and donated to Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, where the collection is categorized as being “open to the public.” In point of fact, the obscure collection can only be viewed on a computer terminal; print-outs or digital copies are not permitted without the written consent of GM attorneys.

Sterling reference librarians, who are willing to make the collection available, complained to this reporter as recently as October 2007 that they do not know how to access the digitized GM materials because of a complicated and arcane database never before encountered by them. One Sterling reference librarian answered a question about the document by declaring, “I have spoken to two reference librarians. No one knows anything about it [the GM Opel Collection], no one is in charge of it. No one knows how to access it.”

Yale archivist Richard Szary, who supervised the accession of the collection, said that for the approximate half-decade that the documents have been on file, he knows of only “one or two” researchers other than this reporter who have had access to the papers. Szary, who was previously said to be the only Yale staffer who understood how to access the materials, facilitated this reporter’s on-site access. He has since left Yale. By late November, however, in response to an inquiry by this reporter, a senior Sterling librarian said her staff would “figure out how to make it available” by reviewing technical details.

Simon Reich, who compiled Ford’s Hitler-era documents, bristled at the whole idea. “Ford decided to take a very public, open and transparent route,” he stated. “Any serious researcher can go into the [Henry Ford] archive, see the documents in paper form, and have them copied. Compare and contrast this with the fact that GM conducted a very private study and the original hard-copy documentation upon which the study was made has never been made available, and today cannot be copied without the GM legal department’s permission.”

Between the unpublished GM internal investigation, the restricted files at Yale, and the little-known insights offered in Turner’s book, the details of the company’s involvement with the Hitler regime have remained below the radar.

Nonetheless, GM’s impact in both the United States and the Third Reich was monumental.

On Jan. 15, 1953, company president Charlie Wilson was nominated to be Secretary of Defense, a job that would ultimately see him usher in the era of the interstate highway system. At Wilson’s confirmation hearings, Sen. Robert Hendrickson (R-N.J.) pointedly challenged the GM chief, asking whether he had a conflict of interest, considering his 40,000 shares of company stock and years of loyalty to the controversial Detroit firm. Bluntly asked if he could make a decision in the country’s interest that was contrary to GM’s interest, Wilson shot back with his famous comment, “I cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist.

Our company is too big.”

Indeed, what GM accomplished in both America and Nazi Germany could not have been bigger.

Edwin Black is the award-winning, New York Times and international bestselling author of IBM and the Holocaust, and six other books, as well as the forthcoming book, Nazi Nexus (Nov 2008 Dialog Press). He can be reached at www.edwinblack.com. This article is adapted from an award-winning series syndicated by the JTA based on Black's book Internal Combustion (St. Martin's Press) as well as additional research.
*****************************************************************
Edwin Black’s research for the four-part investigative series, “GM and the Nazis” involved the review of documents at Georgetown University; Georgia State University; Henry Ford Museum; Kettering University; National Archives repositories in Chicago and Washington, D.C.; New York Public Library Special Manuscript Collections; Yale University Sterling Memorial Library and other repositories in the United States and Germany. In addition, he had access to confidential FBI files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, period media reports from both Germany and America, secondary literature and other materials researched to produce his book Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives. His secondary sources also included the books: General Motors and the Nazis by Henry A. Turner; Sloan Rules by David Farber and Working for the Enemy by Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler and Nicholas Levis.

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•••

"Out of Babylon" (A. Constantine Demo)

All rights reserved

The Plot Against The Peace, by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn - Excerpts

That is, OUR peace. This book is a cornerstone of my library. I recall first pieing it in a used bookstore in Los Angeles over 20 years ago, when I was just waking up to the fact that America was, in reality, a fascist state. The title immediately caught my attention. I read the first page, bought the book, took it home and struggled with what it was telling me. The importance of this book is self-evident - with it, a foundation for comprehending the rise of fascism in America can be established (liberating the researcher from the revisionism of the corporate press), and it's all horribly fascinating.- AC

Dial Press, 1945 - hardcover
from pages 11 to 23

PART I

CHAPTER ONE
THE HIDDEN RESERVES

"Au revoir, in twenty years!" Colonel Hermann Kriebel of the German Armistice Commission, taking leave of the Allied representatives in 1919.

"One day we shall come back. Until then, à bientôt!" The last words of an anonymous German military spokesman over the Nazi radio in Brussels on September 1, 1944.

I. The Secret Plan: 1915-1945

THE German General Staff has always regarded military defeat as merely a temporary phase of war. The war goes on. Battle strategy becomes underground conspiracy; artillery is replaced by propaganda; wartime espionage becomes post-war political intrigue, terror, assassination, and secret preparation for new military attack.

"Even the final decision of war is not to be regarded as absolute," wrote Germany's former military theorist, General Karl von Clausewitz, in his celebrated treatise Vom Kriege (On War). "The conquered nation often sees it only as a passing phase, to be repaired in after times by political combinations."

These words have been deeply pondered by the German General Staff–the cabal of army officers, Junkers, and industrialists who are the real rulers of Germany.* They provided the German General Staff with the basis of a secret plan by which it successfully operated after the First World War. Today Germany's rulers are again operating on the basis of this secret plan in Germany and throughout the world. . . .

*It should be remembered that throughout this book the phrase German General Staff does not mean the German military leadership alone, but describes the entire political, economic, and military leadership of imperialist Germany. For a detailed characterization of the German General Staff, see Part II, Chapter Five.

The original form of this secret plan of the German General Staff was discovered in 1915 by William Seamen Bainbridge, an American representative in Berlin. After the First World War, seeking to warn America, Bainbridge wrote a detailed report on Germany for the United States Government. It appears as Document No. 26, Official Senate Documents, First Session of the 68th Congress of the United States. This little-known American document contains the most sensational forecast ever made regarding German policy.

Here is the five-point secret German General Staff plan as revealed to Bainbridge in 1915, three years before the end of the last war, by a German officer in a room in the Hotel Adlon, Berlin:

"(1) An armistice will come before any hostile army crosses Germany's frontier.

(2) There will be no scars on the Fatherland after this war.

(3) The immediate competitors in the economic and commercial world will be so crippled that, when it is all over, the Germans will be outselling them in the markets of the world long before they can get on their feet.

(4) Following the war, there will be economic hell, industrial revolution.
We will set class against class, individual against individual, until the nations will have pretty much all they can attend to at home and not bother with us.

(5) If need be, the Fatherland may dissemble into component parts and reassemble at the strategic time."

In concluding this extraordinary revelation, the German officer turned to Bainbridge and said with deliberate emphasis:

"The greatest struggle will come after the war. The weapon will be propaganda, the value of which we know. The Allies will be torn asunder, each will be put at the others' throats like a lot of howling gnashing hounds. And when they are all separated from France, Germany will deal with her alone."

This German postwar plan was successfully carried out by the German General Staff after the First World War. The Armistice came before any hostile army could cross Germany's frontier. The war left Germany's economic might unimpaired, and Germany's plants, mills, and mines unscathed. In the years following the war, Germany was able the challenge America, Britain, and France for the markets of the world. German intrigue and propaganda set Britain against France, America against Europe, and all the countries against Soviet Russia. . . .

In the Second World War the German General Staff has been unable to prevent the invasion of Germany's home territory. But the German plan today is otherwise almost identical with the plan it carried out with such amazing success following the last German debacle. As Marshal Stalin pointed out in 1942, the German General Staff is methodical and efficient; but it is not very imaginative. Once it has conceived a plan, it follows it step by step, again and again and again, no matter what happens. Like burglars who continually leave their "signatures" behind them at the scene of their robberies, the German General Staff conducts its conspiracy today precisely as it did thirty years ago.

On February 26, 1945, one of the most remarkable exposés of the Second World War appeared in the Soviet newspaper Pravda. It was an article revealing in full detail the plans of the German General Staff for converting the Nazi Party into an underground apparatus which would continue functioning after the military defeat of Nazi Germany and would carry on systematic preparations for a third world war.

Pravda reported that the German General Staff had already taken the following measures:

"(1) Creation of a powerful financial base for extensive subsidizing of underground work.

(2) Preservation of the main cadres of the party.

(3) Preservation of the economic base of the German war machine.

(4) The political preparation of revenge."

The article in Pravda stated that these activities were being carried on "both within and outside Germany," and that within Germany the Nazis were preparing to conduct their underground work chiefly along three lines:

organization of sabotage and terrorist bands; setting up of a widely ramified clandestine fascist organization; and sabotage of peace terms between Germany and the United Nations.

The article continued:

"At the present time, the German General Staff feverishly prepares plans for the operations of the fascist underground army, which must be centered chiefly in the hilly and wooded terrain of East Prussia, southern and southwestern Germany, in Tyrol and in Austria."

A special secret staff had already been selected to direct the operations of the Nazi underground machine. Pravda revealed the names of the men on the staff:

"To direct these operations, a special headquarters has been set up in Munich under Wilhelm Schepmann–one of the organizers of anti-Allied sabotage in the Ruhr in 1923. The members of Schepmann's staff are Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Gestapo chief and chief of the Military Intelligence Service; Hitler's personal friend, Werner von Alwensleben; senior officers of the Security Service and Obergruppen Fuehrer Schellenberg* and Melle."

The terrorist detachments of the Nazi underground army, stated the Soviet newspaper, "will consist of picked fascist cutthroats from SS units," which "at present . . . are studying future theatres of operations in the areas assigned to them."

Pravda went on to give a detailed description of the vast and intricate apparatus that had already been organized by the German General Staff:

"Simultaneously a ramified network of secret caches of arms, ammunition, clothing, provisions, secret signals, and communication lines is being laid out.

"Along with the preparation of terrorist bands, a huge underground apparatus is being set up to conduct various underground work and fascist propaganda–the so-called sixth column.

"The territory of Germany, divided into sectors and areas, is being covered with a dense network of clandestine Nazi party organizations, consisting of many thousands of secret cells. . . .

"This clandestine organization will serve to build up cadres for the future German Army."

The overall postwar strategy and tactics of this elaborate Nazi underground organization, concluded Pravda, were to be supervised from abroad by a "special General Staff" residing "in one of the neutral countries."

*Obergruppen Fuehrer Schellenberg was previously active as a secret Nazi agent in the United States. See page 169.

II. Conspiracies and Confessions

In the spring of 1943 the German General Staff started its contemporary application of the secret German postwar plan. Nazi Germany was face to face with catastrophe. The entire German Sixth Army under General von Paulus had been surrounded and annihilated by the Red Army at Stalingrad. That was the historic turning point of the Second World War.

In November 1943 the French resistance weekly, Combat, published in Algiers, printed the text of a secret German General Staff memorandum which had fallen into Allied hands after the German debacle in North Africa.

The author of the memorandum was General Otto von Stuelpnagel who ruled France for Hitler from 1940 to 1944.

This is what the German General wrote:

"What does a provisional defeat matter to us if because of the destruction of manpower and material which we will have been able to inflict on our enemies and neighboring territories, we have obtained a margin of economic and demographic superiority greater than before 1939? The conquest of the world will require numerous stages, but the essential is that the end of each stage brings us an economic and industrial essential greater than that of our enemies. With war booty which we have accumulated, the enfeebling of two generations of the manpower, the destruction of the industries of our neighbors and that which we can save of our own, we shall be better placed to conquer in twenty-five years than we were in 1939. The interval of twenty-five years is a limited interval, for that is the time which will be required for Russia to repair the destruction we have visited on her."

The memorandum mentioned some of the elaborate devices by which the rulers of Germany would seek to evade a just peace:

"We do not have to fear peace conditions analogous to those which we would have imposed because our adversaries will always be divided and disunited. Our enemies recognize already that the 1919 formula, 'Germany will pay,' lacked sense and worth. We will furnish them some brigades of workers, we will restore some art objects or out-of-date machines, and we can always say that those which we do not restore were destroyed by enemy bombardments. We should immediately prepare as camouflage a list of such objects destroyed by Anglo-American bombs."

The basic aim of the German plan, now as in 1918, is to secure a final peace settlement, no matter how severe it may appear on the surface, or how hard on the German people, which will leave German economic power intact.

With amazing consistency Germany's rulers are repeating the same strategy they employed in the past to obtain the kind of peace settlement suitable to their aims. In both instances, this strategy was mapped out long in advance. . . .

In his war memoirs, General Erich Ludendorff revealed that as early as 1916 the German General Staff decided that it could not win the First World War and that it then began its campaign for a negotiated peace. The peace intrigues went on steadily throughout 1916, 1917, and were intensified after the failure of Ludendorff's spring offensive in 1918.

Ludendorff tells of the hopes he placed in the Vatican as an intermediary for a negotiated peace. "I also entertained some hopes," continued Ludendorff, "of the efforts being made by the representative of the Foreign Office in Brussels, Herr von der Lancken, who sought to get in touch with French statesmen. He went to Switzerland, but the gentlemen from France stayed away."

Ludendorff reveals that the German General Staff was confident it could divide the Allied nations, play one against the other, and so secure the kind of final peace settlement that Germany wanted.

In August 1918, Ludendorff told the Kaiser: "The war must be ended."
But the Kaiser, like Hitler twenty years later, was unwilling to surrender his power and demanded the continuation of the hostilities.

At this juncture, when the German General Staff was frantically seeking peace so as to forestall complete Allied victory, the famous German steel magnate, August Thyssen, published an extraordinary "Confession" for all the world to read. It was the most sensational document of the last war.

August Thyssen, stating that German industrialists were prepared to sacrifice the Kaiser in return for peace, wrote:

"In 1912 the Hohenzollerns saw that the war had become a necessity to the preservation of the military system upon which their power depends . . . they, therefore, in 1912, decided to embark on a great war of conquest.

"But to do this they had to get the commercial community to support them in their aims. They did this by holding out to them hopes of great personal gain as a result of the war. . . .

"I was personally promised a free grant of 30,000 acres in Australia and a loan from a Deutsche Bank of £150,000 at 3 per cent . . . to enable me to develop my business in Australia. Several other firms were promised special trading facilities in India, which was to be conquered by Germany . . . a syndicate was formed for the exploitation of Canada. This syndicate consisted of the heads of twelve great firms; the working capital being fixed at £20,000,000, half of which was to be found by the German government.

"There were, I have heard, promises made of a more personal character . . . "

This astonishing document reached the United States in the early spring of 1918. It was published as a pamphlet entitled The Hohenzollern Plot by August Thyssen. It was reprinted many times, quoted in newspapers, inserted into the Congressional Record, and publicized especially in American business circles. It did much towards convincing American public opinion that peace could be made with the "sound, business interests" in Germany.

Meanwhile, although Thyssen's "Confession" had openly called for the removal of the Kaiser and the conclusion of the war, nothing was done by the Kaiser's Government to arrest Thyssen or stop the publication of his document. The steel magnate continued to live in Germany, unmolested and in full control of his vast industrial interests.

After the war, August Thyssen died, and the famous "Confession" was forgotten.

But the German plan had worked. The peace left German industry intact and in the hands of Fritz Thyssen, Krupp, Kirdorff, Stinnes, and their associates, the industrial representatives of the German General staff.

Twenty years later, in the summer of 1940, another astonishing and sensational "Confession" was made public by a German industrialist. With Poland conquered and France in its last throes, the German General Staff was again ready for peace in the West, so that it could prepare the next stage of the war: the invasion of Soviet Russia. This time the German "Confession" denounced Hitler, and stated that German industry was prepared to sacrifice Hitler in return for a favorable peace with the nations of the West.

The 1940 "Confession" was written by Fritz Thyssen, son of August Thyssen, and inheritor of his father's steel trust.

Fritz Thyssen wrote:

"I undertook to finance the N.S.D.A.P. (Nazi Party), together with von Papen, von Schroeder, Kirdorff, Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. We are, so to speak, the guarantors to Germany and the world for Hitler's good conduct . . .
"Hitler promised us the things we most wanted: to von Papen, power and honor; to Krupp, commissions and money, mountains of money; and to me, in particular, a peaceful period of German politics at home and abroad; and understanding with England; and understanding with the working classes who, through far-reaching social reforms, should be compensated for the loss of all political rights; the abolition of trade unions and the appropriation of their property. He promised us a sort of Christian state whose authority should be supported by the Church. . . . "

This second Thyssen "Confession" which burst like a bombshell in the summer of 1940 was immediately circulated throughout Europe and America, just as the first Thyssen "Confession" had been in 1918. The words of Fritz Thyssen were printed in various forms in the United States by Life, the New York Times, the American magazine, Time, Newsweek, were quoted on the radio, referred to in Congress, and, in general, given the widest possible publicity. Fritz Thyssen was reported to be a fugitive from the Gestapo, hiding somewhere as a miserable refugee in southern France.
Thyssen was actually living in a luxurious private villa at Cannes. On one side of his villa was the home of Pierre Etienne Flandin, the notorious French pro-Nazi politician and advocate of a Franco-German alliance against Soviet Russia. Flanking Thyssen's villa on the other side was the prewar residence of Sir Neville Henderson, former British Ambassador to Berlin, one-time friend of Goering and Ribbentrop, and ardent member of the British Cliveden Set.

After the Nazi occupation of France, Fritz Thyssen continued to live in his luxurious villa at Cannes surrounded on all sides by Nazi officials and high-ranking Nazi generals.

In 1943, as Hitler's armies faced disaster in Russia, Fritz Thyssen returned to Germany. He was last seen by a Swedish correspondent early in 1944 residing at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, still ready to make peace with Britain and America "to save Europe from Bolshevism."

Fritz Thyssen wrote in his famous "Confession":

"Peace is to be had. The price is not high. It is easy to arrange. . . . We still have men who hold the reins."

In January 1945, when the Red Army smashed through the crucial German defenses east of Berlin, German peace emissaries rushed frantically into Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal. Edmund Hugo Stinnes showed up in Stockholm. Franz von Papen appeared in Madrid. Dr. Hjalmar Schacht was in Switzerland. The Vatican was besieged by German couriers. In every case the reported peace offers were identical: Germany would get rid of Hitler; Germany would repay what she had stolen; Germany would disarm; Germany would disband the Nazi organizations and abolish the Nazi laws; Germany would transform herself, just as Thyssen had promised in 1940, into a "Christian state." So long as Germany could keep her economic power intact, Germany's rulers were ready to come to almost any terms with their enemies.

But precautionary steps had already been taken by the German General Staff and its Nazi and industrialist representatives to build hidden reserves of capital, cash, and investments in foreign countries.

III. Camouflaged Capital

In the fall of 1918, within a few months of the General Staff's decision to sue for peace, billions of marks had been smuggled out of Germany to Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, and other foreign centers of German commercial activity. The Neue Zuercher Zeitung in June 1919, estimated the figure of "emigrated capital" which German interests had cached in Switzerland at 35 billion marks. The Dutch aviation designer, Fokker, describes in his memoirs The Flying Dutchman how an entire military aviation plant in Germany was dismembered and secretly transported to Holland. The Dornier Airplane Company, with headquarters in Friedrichshafen, was moved across Lake Constance to Switzerland. The Rohrbach plant was transferred to Denmark; Heinkel and Junkers established themselves in Sweden. All these transfers were done at the request of the General Staff and accomplished with the aid of the German Army.

Admiral Canaris, of the Imperial Naval Intelligence, and subsequently of the Nazi Naval Intelligence, went to Spain to supervise German-controlled shipyards and submarine plants at Vigo.

Baron Manfred von Killinger, Imperial Army officer and subsequent Nazi Consul in the United States, established a company in Echevarria, Spain, to experiment with new types of submarines for Krupp.

The same thing is happening today.

A dispatch from Stockholm, Sweden, to the New York Times, January 30, 1945, revealed that German industrialists were placing huge capital foundations in Sweden by registering their patents at the Swedish State Patent Office to elude seizure by the United Nations. The Times dispatch read:

"A perusal of patent applications, which must be recorded in the Swedish Official Journal, reveals that a good 50 per cent of all patent applications hail from German firms. The latest ones come from such major German concerns as I.G. Farben, Zeiss-Ikon, Boch, and the Daimler-Bainz companies, besides the A.E.G. and Siemens."

This flight of German capital into neutral Sweden represents only a fraction of the capital investments which Germany had already secreted abroad.

As of February 1945 there were no less than 987 joint stock companies in Spain controlled completely by German capital. Two thousand Spanish companies, many of them with branches and affiliates in North and South America, have German directors on their boards.

As late as the summer of 1944, as the American journalist Ted Allan revealed in Collier's Magazine on February 3, 1945, the international German trust, I.G. Farben, built four new chemical plants in Madrid. In March 1944, I.G. Farben completed a synthetic oil plant in Pueblonuevo del Terrible near Córdoba. This plant had a Spanish name, Calvo Sotelo, and was supposedly controlled by Spaniards. It was owned completely by I.G. Farben. Also in the summer of 1944, I.G. Farben built a magnesium plant in Santander, Spanish northern port. Other German plants, steel, textile, munitions, and mines, exist in Catalonia, the Asturias, the Basque country, and in Galicia.

The Spanish multi-millionaire Juan March, who financed Franco's Fascist Falange to the tune of $60,000,000, was a German spy in the First World War, a Krupp agent and collaborator with Admiral Canaris, chief of the German Naval Intelligence. Today, March is providing commercial fronts for German capital smuggled into Spain and, through Spanish outlets, into South America.

Portugal is another center of German financial and industrial activity. An uncensored report printed in the New York Times on January 12, 1944, disclosed: "Like Spain, Portugal teems with German agents and in Lisbon they are as ubiquitous as bootleggers were during prohibition in America. Their red necks gleam in every bar and fine restaurant . . ." Through Portuguese commercial fronts, the Germans have also been able to penetrate South America.

Throughout the Americas, especially in Argentina, German agents have built important new plants, and gained control of mines, banks, railroads, aviation lines, chemicals, and steel works. Fritz Mandl virtually controlled the munitions industry in Argentina on behalf of I.G. Farben. Axel Wenner-Gren, the Swedish multi-millionaire adventurer, and intimate friend of Marshal Hermann Goering, has set up Krupp and I.G. Farben fronts throughout South America, and especially in Argentina. Alfredo Moll, who has been described as the "gray eminence" of the Nazis in Buenos Aires, is the son-in-law of the president of the Central Bank of Argentina. Moll is director of the firm of Anilinas Alemenas, branch of the I.G. Garben trust in Argentina.

Testifying before the Kilgore Committee on September 12, 1944, Sims Carter, Assistant Chief of the Economic Warfare Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, revealed:

"When the German guns are silenced in Europe, the principal German industrial combines plan renewed activity from bases in Argentina. Organizations and outlets of distribution have been maintained. Profits from sales at wartime prices made ample means available. All the machinery is ready for safeguarding German supremacy in the steadily expanding South American market."

The plan by which the German General Staff has operated in South America was drawn up many years before Hitler took power in Germany. If the German plan prevails, it will continue to operate many years after the smashing of the Hitler regime. This plan is directly aimed at the eventual German conquest of the United States.


Immediately after the First World War, the German secret infiltration of the Latin American countries by economic, political, and military agents went into high gear in preparation for the Second World War. Captain Ernst Roehm, organizer of the Nazi Storm Troops, showed up in Bolivia in 1925 as "special advisor" to the Bolivian Army. The German aviation officer Fritz Hammer went to Colombia, where he later organized Nazi espionage and economic infiltration under cover of Nazi aviation concerns. General Bohnstedt became head of the military academy in Salvador and official instructor to the Salvadorean Army. General Reinecke, General Kundt, and many other officer-agents of the German General Staff became active in Chile, Paraguay, and Peru, where they sought to influence the officers' corps and spread hatred of the United States.

from pages 35 to 42

CHAPTER TWO
THE NAZI UNDERGROUND

I. "Universal Chaos"

THE Nazi Party, as the chief political instrument of the German General Staff, has the task of fulfilling the political phase of the secret German postwar plan to sabotage United Nations' victory and peace.

In 1915, Point Four of the German General Staff's secret plan called for the stirring up of postwar international political and economic "hell," so that "the nations will have pretty much all they can attend to at home and not bother with us."

On January 30, 1945, in his speech commemorating the twelfth anniversary of the Nazi power, Adolf Hitler prophesied that after the Second World War "universal chaos" will consume the world.

The Nazi task is to set individual against individual, class against class, nation against nation, and thus to make impossible the consolidation of Allied victory and give the German General Staff an opportunity to rise again as a military threat to the world for a third time in this century.

On November 6, 1944 Marshal Josef Stalin warned the Soviet people and the world:

"After the defeat of Germany she will, of course, be disarmed, both in the economic and military-political respects. However, it would be naive to think that she will not attempt to restore her power and develop new aggression. It is known to all that the German leaders are already now preparing for a new war . . ."

Like German industry, the Nazi Party also has its hidden economic and political reserves for the postwar struggle against the peace. Statistics recently issued by the British Ministry of Economic Warfare estimate that the Nazis looted close to $27,000,000,000 from the conquered European nations. Most of this loot was appropriated by the Nazi Party, providing a massive secret fund for the financing of international Nazi underground activities for years to come. Besides this, the Nazi leaders have their personal financial caches. Since 1943, Nazi money, jewels, and other valuables have been streaming across the Reich frontiers and finding their way by clandestine channels into Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, and North and South America. In Switzerland alone, more than 300,000,000 gold francs, or approximately sixty million dollars, are known to have been banked to the private accounts of Nazi leaders. . . .

With these vast hidden sums at their disposal, the Nazis have already reconstituted and reorganized their wartime international Fifth Columns and set up new propaganda agencies and terrorist leagues for the postwar period. Already, in all countries of the United Nations, Nazi-financed and Nazi-inspired agitators are at work seeking to create the "chaos" which Hitler called for in January 1945. Terrorist attempts have been made on the lives of General de Gaulle of France, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, and other United Nations leaders. Race riots, separatist movements, wildcat strikes, putsches and political disorders of every kind are being deliberately incited by Nazi Fifth Column agents in an attempt to break the national and world unity of the United Nations.

In France, Paul Ghali revealed in a European dispatch to the Chicago Daily News on September 28, 1944, Joseph Darnand's notorious Militia and other French fascist organizations have been "reconstructed and rearmed" under the personal supervision of Heinrich Himmler to carry on underground "terrorism and fifth column activities in France after the war."

In Italy, former agents of the Fascist OVRA, trained by the Nazis, have been smuggled back into the liberated areas to build propaganda and terrorist agencies, to plot assassinations of anti-fascist Italian leaders and to spread anti-United Nations and other Nazi propaganda. A Rome dispatch to the New York Herald Tribune on February 10, 1945, by John Chabot Smith, warned of "the alarming degree of Fascist sympathy and Fascist underground which still exists in liberated Rome."

In Greece, Leland Stowe reported in February 1945, certain Nazi agents and Greek Fifth Columnists posing as "anti-Communists" and Greek "nationalists" had taken advantage of the confusion following the campaign against the Elas resistance movements to penetrate the Intelligence services, special police units, and even Greek government offices, and to carry on widespread terrorism and Nazi-fascist agitation.

In Finland, a few weeks after the German Army withdrew and the Finnish government signed peace with Soviet Russia, two Red Army officers were assassinated in a Helsinki park. Investigation by the Allied Control Commission revealed, according to a statement by Soviet officials in January 1945, that Nazi agents and Finnish Lappo fascists were spreading their propaganda throughout Finland and fomenting widespread underground "opposition to the United Nations and particularly the Soviet Union."

In Norway, in February 1945, Nazi leaders and Quislingites prepared for future underground struggle by destroying all records of their past activities and concealing their identities with false birth certificates. Lord Vansittart, spokesman for the British Intelligence Service, told the House of Lords on February 7, 1945, that he knew "the names of a good few of the worst Gestapo butchers and torturers in Norway who have their false papers ready," and who were planning to go underground in Norway after the Allied armies liberated that country "to organize sabotage and political assassination."

Similar Nazi-fascist terrorist and propaganda activities, or preparations for underground struggle, were going on in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere.
On February 24, 1945, at a session of the Egyptian Chamber of Deputies, during which Egypt declared war on the Axis, four fascist terrorists fired ten shots at Premier Ahmed Maher Pasha, fatally wounding the Egyptian leader. One of the assassins, Mahmond Essawy, had been previously interned for pro-Nazi activities.

In Spain, the Soviet newspaper Red Fleet revealed on February 7, 1945, German planes from Stuttgart and other German airports were arriving "every day in Barcelona with Hitlerites." From Spain, the Nazi agents were moving on to other countries in Europe and especially to South America, bringing with them funds and instructions for the potent Nazi Fifth Columns already operating in the Western Hemisphere.

In January 1945, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, sent out a nationwide alarm for three key German agents believed to have been secretly landed in the United States to make contacts with other agents already operating in the country. Each of these three German agents had previously been active in South America. Here are their records:

Max Christian Johannes Schneeman: forty-four years old; former resident of Pereira, Colombia, South America, born in Hoeehst, Germany; expert linguist, fluent in French, Portuguese, Spanish, and German; agent of the Nazi SS (Schutz Staffel or Elite Guards).

Hans Rudolf Zuehlsdorff: twenty-five years old; former resident of Bogotá, Columbia, where he was a commercial advertiser and sales representative for a German firm; born in Guestrov, Meke, Germany; expert linguist, fluent in German, English, and Spanish; described by the FBI as being "more American than German in his mannerisms"; agent of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry.

Oscar Max Wilms: thirty-seven years old; former resident of Managua, Nicaragua; fluent in Spanish, German, and English; born in Hamburg, Germany; former partner in a German export-import firm at Managua; agent of Nazi Propaganda Ministry.

The most important of all the German agents in South America has been General Wilhelm von Faupel, the German General Staff's leading expert on Argentina.

Faupel's work in the Americas has not been interrupted as a result of the defeat of the German Army in Europe. In fact, Faupel's work was specially designed by the General Staff to continue long after the end of the present war. Faupel's task has been to prepare the ground in South America for a third world war. If Germany's plans succeed, next time the United States will not be able to fight Germany in Europe; it will be fighting for its own existence in the Western Hemisphere.

Faupel's entire career as an agent of the German General Staff is in itself a revelation of the long-range planning of Germany's rulers. Before the First World War, from 1911-1913, Faupel was active in Argentina as a "professor" at the Military Academy in Buenos Aires. Thoroughly familiar with Latin American and Spanish affairs, he was recalled at the outbreak of war and sent into Spain to become chief of the German espionage and sabotage activities in the Mediterranean area. Then, immediately after Germany's defeat in 1918, Faupel was sent back to Argentina. Until 1927, he held the post of "chief adviser" to the Argentine General Staff. On the eve of the Nazi seizure of power, Faupel returned to Germany. He next appeared to public view as Director of the Nazi Ibero-American Institute, central clearing-house for German espionage and conspiracy in the Western Hemisphere.

Under Faupel's command, at the headquarters of the Ibero-American Institute, which Hitler housed in an imposing mansion at Number 7 Fuerenstrasse, Zehlendorff, Berlin, hundreds of German agents and American, Canadian, and South American fifth columnists were trained for work. The Spanish Fascist Falange was born in Faupel's headquarters, and Faupel personally organized the Nazi Condor Division which invaded Spain to suppress the Republican Government and help put Generalissimo Franco in power. In 1938, with Falangist Spain as a springboard, Faupel began his final preparations for the German conquest of South America.

The plan by which Faupel operated was not new. It had been the dream of the General Staff for generations to establish Pan-German hegemony over the South American republics as a prelude to the invasion and conquest of the United States. As far back as 1904, Ernst Hasse, precursor of Hitler, and President of the notorious Pan-German League in Berlin, wrote in a widely-publicized article:

"The Argentine and Brazilian republics and all the other seedy South American states will accept our advice and listen to reason, voluntarily or under coercion. In a hundred years, both South and North America will be conquered by the German Geist, and the German Emperor will perhaps transfer his residence to New York."

Like his successor, Hitler, Hasse was at first regarded outside of Germany as a crackpot. But the German General Staff, whose agent he was, considered Hasse a leading authority on German world policy, and soon acted directly on his advice regarding South America. At the outbreak of the First World War, all of Central and South America was infiltrated by German agents inciting hatred against the United States. German activities in the United States were chiefly designed to keep America out of the war, but in the event that effort failed the German General Staff had another plan.

In 1917 the German General Staff sought to involve Latin America, especially Mexico, in a secret military pact with Germany and Japan aimed at the invasion and conquest of the United States. At 3 A.M., Berlin time, on January 19, 1917, the following secret message was sent by wireless to Count von Bernstorff, German Ambassador in Washington, from the German Foreign Office in Berlin:

Berlin, January 19, 1917

"On the first of February we intend to begin submarine warfare unrestricted. In spite of this it is our endeavor to keep neutral the United States of America. If this is not successful we propose an alliance on the following basis with Mexico: That we shall make war together and together shall make peace. We shall give general financial support and it is understood that Mexico is to recover the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. The details are left to you for settlement. You are also instructed to inform the President of Mexico of the above in the greatest confidence as soon as it is certain that there will be an outbreak of war with the United States and suggest that the President of Mexico on his own initiative should communicate with Japan suggesting adherence at once to this plan; at the same time offer to mediate between Germany and Japan.
"Please call to the attention of the President of Mexico that the employment of ruthless submarine warfare now promises to compel England to make peace in a few months.

"(signed) Zimmerman."

Today, the German intrigue in Mexico goes on under cover of the Nazi-inspired Sinarquist movement which, intimately related to the Falange, has been devised by the German General Staff as a means of continuing German political influence in Mexico after this war. But the chief focus of German intrigue in South America today is in Argentina. Under German influence, Argentina has become a source of continuous unrest and anti-United States conspiracy in the Western Hemisphere.

In concentrating on Argentina, the German General Staff has again followed a plan which it elaborated many years ago. Before the First World War, Otto Tannenberg, the famous Pan-German propagandist and agent of the General Staff, wrote:

"Germany will take under its protection the republics of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay; furthermore, the southern third of Bolivia and the southern portion of Brazil."

On March 26, 1944, in his personal publication Das Reich, the Nazi Propaganda Minister Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels wrote:

"Argentina will one day be at the head of a tariff union comprising the nations in the southern half of South America. Such a focus of opposition against the United States of America will, together with Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, form a powerful economic bloc; and eventually, by way of Peru, it will spread northward to place the dollar colony of Brazil in a difficult position."

On June 10, 1944, ten weeks after Goebbel's pronouncement, Colonel Juan Peron, Vice-President and War Minister of Argentina, delivered his pro-Nazi speech which led to the breaking off of relations between the United States and Argentina. Here is what the Argentine War Minister said:

"In South America, it is our mission to make the leadership of Argentina not only possible but indisputable. . . . Hitler's fight in peace and war will guide us. Alliances will be the next step. We will get Bolivia and Chile. Then it will be easy to exert pressure on Uruguay. These five nations will attract Brazil, due to its type of government and its important group of Germans. Once Brazil has fallen, the South American continent will be ours. Following the German example, we will inculcate the masses with the necessary military spirit. . . ."

The voice was the voice of Colonel Peron, but the plan was that of the German General Staff. . . .

"Everywhere, in both Americas," reported the well-known American foreign correspondent, Sigrid Schultz, in 1944 in her significantly titled book Germany Will Try It Again, "they [the Nazis] have incited racial groups, anti-Semitic groups, university professors and students, and the numberless, formless, frustrated people who hope for advancement with Nazi help.

American newspapers have recorded case after case of arrests of Nazi and Japanese sympathizers in this country–air-raid wardens, professors' wives, heads of manufacturing concerns. But these were simply the individuals who were careless or reckless. We must anticipate that they are only a small part of the big whole. The Germans confidently count on their political influence increasing in the United States . . . Thus, the total-war strategists of Germany [and America] plan ahead not only for tomorrow but for generations to come.

The Nazi Fifth Column in the Americas remains a powerful, active, and lavishly financed instrument of the German General Staff's postwar conspiracy against the peace.

http://www.maebrussell.com/Plot%20Against%20The%20Peace/Plot%20Against%20The%20Peace.html

Columnist Ann Coulter Defends White Supremacist Group

By Mark Potok
February 13, 2009
www.huffingtonpost.com

... Despite denouncing school desegregation as a "spectacular" failure, Coulter has generally avoided bolstering white supremacist hate groups. Until now, that is.

In her latest foaming-mouth tome -- Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America, released on Jan. 6 -- Coulter spends the better part of three pages defending a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which The New York Times had described as a "thinly veiled white supremacist organization." Coulter begs to differ. The CCC, Coulter opines, is "a conservative group" that has unfairly been branded as racist "because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group." "There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation," she says. "Apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes -- the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media -- there is little on the CCC website suggesting" that the group is racist. Indeed, its main failing is "containing members who had belonged to a segregationist group thirty
years earlier."

Coulter could hardly be more wrong. And even if she can't find time to read beyond a page of the CCC's website, she really ought to know -- after all, the organization where she frequently speaks, the Conservative Political Action Committee, has publicly banned the CCC from its annual gathering because it is racist. Also in the late 1990s, Jim Nicholson, then-chairman of the Republican National Committee, asked GOP members to stay away from the CCC because of its "racist and nationalist views."

How could conservative Republicans be inspired to say such ugly things? Let us count the ways.
The CCC's columnists have written that black people are "a retrograde species of humanity," and that non-white immigration is turning the U.S. population into a "slimy brown mass of glop." Its website has run photographic comparisons of pop singer Michael Jackson and a chimpanzee. It opposes "forced integration" and decries racial intermarriage. It has lambasted black people as "genetically inferior," complained about "Jewish power brokers," called gay people "perverted sodomites," and even named the late Lester Maddox, the baseball bat-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, "Patriot of the Century."

One day, the CCC ran photos on its home page of accused Beltway snipers John Muhammad and John Malvo, 9/11 conspirator Zacharias Moussaoui and accused shoe-bomber Richard Reed. "Notice a Pattern Here?" asked a caption underneath the four photos. "Is the face of death black after all?" On another occasion, its website featured a photo of Daniel Pearl, the "Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter" who had just been decapitated by Islamic terrorists. In the photo, Pearl was shown with his "mixed-race wife, Marianne." The headline above the couple's picture was stunning even for the CCC: "Death by Multiculturalism?" The CCC Arkansas chapter ran an essay waxing nostalgic for the days "when racial separation was the norm."

But to Ann Coulter, there is "no evidence" on its website that the CCC "supports segregation." Mostly, she says, the group -- which was formed from the debris of the White Citizens Councils that Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall once called "the uptown Klan" -- is about "a strong national defense, the right to keep and bear arms, the traditional family, and an 'America First' trade policy." Indeed, she says, The New York Times and other critics of the CCC are simply liberals "who have no principles." ...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-potok/columnist-ann-coulter-def_b_166871.html

Son of Moon: Money, Guns and God

"... Justin [Moon] was born in Seoul, Korea, on July 17, 1970. Justin came to the U.S. in 1973 and has lived in the United States ever since. [He]graduated from Harvard University Magna Cum Laude with a B.A. in economics. Justin proudly states 'I proudly participate and support my church and my community. This is, after all, a free country. I cherish my First Amendment rights as well as my Second Amendment rights.' It is difficult to disagree with that. ... "
http://www.fortliberty.org/military-library/kahr-arms.shtml
•••••••••••
http://www.portfolio.com/careers/features/2007/09/17/Unification-Church?print=true

Money, Guns and God
by Christopher S. Stewart
October 2007

Inside the apocalyptic—and profitable—gun empire of Justin Moon, the C.E.O. who may someday lead the Unification Church.

On a blustery night in December 1999, Danny Guzman left his house in Worcester, Massachusetts, and headed downtown to Tropigala, his cousin’s nightclub. Tropigala occupied a bunkerlike, one-story brick building on Main South, a street that was home to shuttered storefronts, rooming houses, and a creeping underworld of drug dealing and prostitution, punctuated by the occasional shooting. Despite the upcoming holiday, Tropigala was packed with its usual, mostly Hispanic, crowd, and Guzman, a handsome 26-year-old with a muscular build and deep-olive complexion, settled in with a drink.

Just before 2 a.m., as the club shut down and crowds spilled onto the street, a man named Edwin Novas—a 20-year-old heroin dealer from the Bronx who sported a boyish mustache—started causing a disturbance. Details about what happened are murky, but Guzman was somehow drawn into the scuffle. Novas allegedly drew a 9-millimeter pistol from his waistband and fired, and Guzman was hit. Novas fled, followed by two friends. And at 2:12 a.m. on December 24 at Saint Vincent Hospital, Guzman was pronounced dead.

Four days later, in an empty, weed-choked lot around the corner from Tropigala, a four-year-old child found a loaded 9 millimeter with no serial number. Ballistics linked it to the shooting, and prosecutors, armed with eyewitness reports, accused Novas of murder. Immediately after the killing, his trail went cold, which is how it remains today. Years later, America’s Most Wanted featured the Tropigala murder, describing Novas as the Christmas Eve Killer, but the exposure didn’t help solve the case.

With no one in custody for the murder, investigators turned their attention to the murder weapon, and people in Worcester began whispering about the gun’s local manufacturer, Kahr Arms. We now know that the gun used to kill Danny Guzman was one of dozens that had been either lost or stolen and then sold into the underworld by rogue Kahr Arms employees, at least one of whom was a drug addict. Guzman’s family has since sued Kahr, accusing the company of negligence in connection with his death. A trial is pending. The $2 billion-a-year gun industry is watching the case with trepidation, fearing that a successful suit could prompt other victims’ families to bring similar cases against other gunmakers.

But Kahr Arms is more than just the manufacturer of some of the smallest and most lethal weapons on earth (including the tommy gun, made famous by Al Capone). It is run and mostly owned by a son of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the billionaire and self-proclaimed messiah who founded the Unification Church and controls a sprawl of businesses presumably intended to sustain and defend his followers when the world as we know it ends. The gun business, along with food companies, real estate, and other holdings, will serve to protect the fortress and keep sinners at bay, according to former members, as well as supply necessary provisions after the arrival of the new world order.

Not much is known about Moon’s 37-year-old son, Justin, or how Kahr Arms fits into the church’s teachings and the reverend’s plans for world domination. People who know Justin say he travels a lot, has a penchant for fast cars and big-caliber pistols, and spends stretches of time at various family and church mansions around the globe. He is also vigorously business-minded and has personally designed most of his company’s guns. He has grown Kahr Arms into one of America’s top privately owned handgun manufacturers, with sales of around $20 million a year and climbing at an annual rate of 30 percent.

Kahr’s success could influence the future of the church itself. With the True Father, as followers call Reverend Moon, slowing down, speculation about his heir has begun to emerge. Church watchers say the fact that Justin has built a company from the ground up makes him a front-runner in any possible succession race to lead the Moonies and run a church business empire valued in the billions of dollars.
But the son of the messiah doesn’t talk much, and the inner workings of Kahr are a jumble of shell companies. Like his father and the church, Justin Moon prefers to be an enigma, never granting a face-to-face interview—until now, finally unfolding his strange story of God and guns.


I meet Justin Moon for the first time in Orlando. We are at Shot Show, one of the biggest annual gun conventions on the planet, with 15 acres of exhibitions and N.F.L.-size crowds. At the Orange County Convention Center, not far from Disney World, Justin holds court at Kahr’s booth, where the company’s notorious super-subcompact pistols, each about the size of my hand, are on display. As I look down one of the guns’ six-inch steel barrels one afternoon, Justin slides over and shakes his head. “You don’t know much about guns,” he says, “do you.”

Justin is tall, clean-shaven, and well built, with a schoolboy part in his hair and an imperious presence. He wears a fitted gray pinstriped suit with a green-and-gray-striped shirt and matching green tie, perfectly knotted and speckled with what look like white terriers. I didn’t realize it then, but I’d inadvertently aimed the gun at his chest. I put it down.

“When you picked up the gun, your finger went right to the trigger,” he says, picking up one of his own weapons. It’s apparently immaterial that the gun isn’t loaded and is missing its firing pin, just like the countless other handguns, long-range sniper rifles, and shotguns on the convention floor. “When you present a firearm, you always make sure your finger is outside the trigger guard. You never put your finger on the trigger,” he continues, holding the pistol in his palm, “until you’re ready to fire.” Pointing it at the ground, he cocks the gun and pulls the trigger, which produces a metal snapping sound. “That is the only time you put your finger on the trigger,” he says. “When you are ready.”

He’s right. I know nothing about guns; they scare me. However, my grandfather was an F.B.I. agent, so I’d seen his Colt .38 around the house and had watched him fire it at raccoons in the yard.

Justin asks what I’m doing at Shot Show. Pointing to my badge, I tell him I’m a writer from New York. “A Democrat!” he declares, nodding, as if that says everything. “I have some Democrat friends,” he tells me, “but they don’t understand any of this. It’s another world to them.”

Earlier in his life, Justin Moon was known as Kook Jin, which is what his parents, Reverend Moon and Hak Ja Han, named him. He was born in South Korea in 1970, one of 13 children and the fourth of seven sons. Like his brothers and sisters, who sometimes called him Kookie, he was brought up to be a leader in his father’s religious kingdom. The Unification Church blends Christianity with Confucianism and anticommunism and divides the world into believers and nonbelievers. The duty of the believers, according to the church, is to conquer Satan and eradicate moral decay in the world, even if it means war with the infidels. The idea is that Reverend Moon, with God’s guidance, will one day take over the earth, restoring it to peace and love.

When the Moon family moved to America from South Korea in the 1970s, critics were already calling their followers the Moonies. They were portrayed by some as a brainwashing personality cult with a thing for mass marriages and strange ideas (a highway around the world or a modern Eden in a Brazilian swamp), whose leader had a reputation for living off the work of his followers. Depending on whom you asked, there were either thousands of followers or tens of thousands; the exact number remains a mystery. Among believers, Justin’s mother and father are known as the True Parents, an acknowledgment of the reverend’s distinctive relationship with God; he claims to have spoken to Jesus.

Justin and his siblings are considered just as holy. They are called the True Children, and they have lived their lives accordingly. “The Moon kids acted like royalty,” Graham Lester, who was a member of the Unification Church from 1979 to 1995, tells me. “From their viewpoint, everyone else was a different species. Other people were not a part of God’s realm.”

Home for the True Family was a guarded 18-acre mini-castle in Irvington, New York, a tony suburb located along a sweep of the Hudson River. Named East Garden, after Eden, the estate included two smaller houses and a three-story brick mansion with 12 bedrooms, seven baths, a bowling alley, and a dining room equipped with a waterfall and pond. There were other castles and mansions too—in South Korea, Germany, Scotland, England—and few expenses were spared. The children had tutors from Japan, purebred horses, motorbikes, sports cars, and first-class vacations with blank-check spending. “The kids got whatever they wanted,” says Donna Collins, who grew up in the church. “At one point, the Moon kids were each getting $40,000 or $50,000 a month for allowance. They had wads of cash. I remember once in London where [one of Justin’s sisters] spent like $2,000 a day; I saw a drawer filled with Rolexes and diamonds.”

Justin, however, doesn’t remember that kind of indulgence. “I got nothing when I was young,” he says. “I didn’t get one dollar. I drove a beat-up Datsun.”

The True Parents were rarely around; they were off building a religion, expanding businesses, and recruiting more followers to work at those businesses. Justin grew up among church members, though the adults around him acted less like elders and more like servants, bowing as he came and went, rarely looking him in the eye.


At times, his parents’ absence seemed to take a toll on him. “For me as a child, it was very difficult to understand why our True Parents have always been away,” he said in a speech to Unification members in the Philippines. “It is difficult not to be able to have time to share your difficulties with your parents.” Only after much “reflection,” he explained, did he understand why they “had to live their life.”

Justin attended Hackley, an elite prep school in Tarrytown, New York. Girls were verboten for the Moon boys; Reverend Moon had banned premarital sexual relations for all of the church’s adherents. The Moon brothers were athletic, good-looking, trained in martial arts, and suspicious of outsiders, according to former church members. Now and then, they got into scuffles on the playground, and on one occasion, Justin’s older brother Hyo Jin brought a BB gun to school and shot at students, for which he was expelled.

By the age of 14, Justin had become interested in guns. “My brothers introduced me to shooting,” he tells me. “We’d shoot pistols and rifles, go target shooting and hunting.” There was a range at the church’s seminary in Barrytown, New York, and the family took hunting trips to Alaska. “Hunting was a spiritual event for the Moons,” Graham Lester says. “The bigger the beast, the more evil killed.”

It was around this time that Tim Porter entered Justin’s life. From ages 16 to 20, Porter was considered one of Justin’s “expected” friends—local church members summoned to the Moon compound to keep the True Children company. “It was never friendship,” Porter recalls one night over drinks in Manhattan. “Think of it as a bunch of people meant to keep the prince happy. We were beneath him and there to serve, to laugh at his jokes, be abused by him, be his yes-men. It was a nightmare.”

Porter was born into the Moonie world, the son of high-ranking church members. When he was called to East Garden, he would join the Moon kids in target shooting, tackle football, wrestling. “Sometimes [Justin] would bring in his younger brothers and have them beat us up,” Porter says. “His point was that we were wussies and he wanted us to be stronger. It was like military training, getting us ready for the time when we would take on the unbelievers.” According to Porter, Justin regularly reminded him and the other members’ kids about his father’s elevated place in God’s drama. “He would always philosophize about the world ending,” Porter says, “and how great his father was. That’s why he did all this stuff with guns. He believes that they’re going to take over the world. He would say this all the time.”

Of the 13 children, Justin was considered the most transfixed by his father’s messianic claims—a view that would later make Moonie watchers think he could one day become the church’s leader.

Later on, there was the fight club. It was Justin’s idea, Porter says, and he held sessions at his parents’ compound in Seoul. “There were five or six of us, and we’d fight without gloves until we were bloody,” Porter says. Justin officiated and fought, but he didn’t always play by the rules. As one fight was starting, he unleashed a head kick. “This guy Isaac was just waiting for the fight to begin, and Justin leaped up and did this crazy swinging kick,” Porter remembers. “It landed in the guy’s face, and it looked like the guy was airborne forever, like he was levitating, until he finally dropped to the floor. It was cool. But it wasn’t an emotional thing with [Justin]. He was very calculated about his violence. He had to be the best.”

I ask Porter what would have happened had he refused to come one day when the True Family called. “You didn’t say no,” he says flatly.

Asked about the fight club, Justin acknowledges participating in martial arts training but says he “never officiated.” He adds that he isn’t sure about his brothers or sisters. “I’m one of 13 siblings. We all had our own lives, and I don’t know what they did.”

At 18, Justin got a license to carry a handgun, co-signed by one of his older brothers. He became obsessed with guns, especially the compact Walther PPK, the brand James Bond carried. Justin pored over trade magazines and sketched out his own designs. By his junior year of college, he had decided that he wanted to make his own weapons and that guns would be his future.

Over the next two years, he worked on the design and often traveled to Saeilo, the family’s precision-machine company in Queens, New York, where he began to build a prototype. He wasn’t an engineer, but that didn’t matter. In 1992, he graduated from Harvard magna cum laude, and soon after, the perfect pistol—the one that would get the tight-knit gun world talking—was complete. “He walked into the shop one day and said, ‘I got it, I got it,’ ” remembers David Konn, a longtime Kahr employee and a current member of the church. “That’s when it all started.” (Konn is no longer with Kahr. He now works in the alternative-medicine business.)

In 1993, Justin founded Kahr, taking for the name a made-up word that combined his affection for German engineering and fast cars. It is unclear what role his father had in the formation of the company, but many people familiar with Kahr believe the True Father was at the very least consulted. “I used the connections I had,” Justin replies when asked what part the church and his father had in the formation of the business. “I borrowed money.” What is known is that in his early twenties, the son of the True Father morphed from Kook Jin into Justin Moon, and right away his objective was clear. “I wanted to create the ultimate line of concealable pistols,” he tells me.

Justin’s prototype became Kahr’s first gun, a double-action steel 9 millimeter he called the K9. It weighed 25 ounces and was six inches long, about as big as a wallet. Although the world had seen small guns before, it had not seen small guns that fired large-caliber bullets and fit snugly, almost invisibly, in the pocket of a pair of beach shorts. Gun folks called it a pocket rocket, and some considered the design the closest thing to a Platonic ideal. “It was one of those hand-to-the-chin moments,” Greg Jones, a gun critic, says. “You see it and think, Why didn’t I think of that?”

One spring morning, Justin sends me out to shoot with Frank Harris, Kahr’s vice president of sales and marketing. We go to the Firing Line, a dingy basement shooting range under a general store in the hamlet of Pearl River, New York. Dimly lit, the range feels like a bomb shelter—low ceilings, gunpowder-blackened walls, damp air that reeks of cordite.

Harris is dressed like a movie commando, in black fatigues, black combat boots, and a black shirt. Before shooting, I put on safety goggles and earplugs while Harris sets up a paper bull’s-eye target five yards out. He hands over a .40-caliber subcompact Kahr. It feels like a toy, not much larger or heavier than my BlackBerry.

After 10 seconds or so, I raise the gun and aim at the target. “In a gunfight or survival situation,” Harris instructs, “you want to have both your eyes open.”

I squeeze the trigger. Time bends. The gun cracks, fire explodes from the muzzle, a bullet shell kicks out, and the gun’s recoil nearly knocks out my right shoulder. I squeeze the trigger four more times, the gun flaming and kicking, two of the bullets catching paper. It’s thrilling. My adrenaline is flowing. But when the smoke settles and silence returns, I can’t help thinking that such a small object can actually be used to kill someone—with ease. I tell Harris that the sound and violence of the gun’s action are much more dramatic than anything I’d seen on TV. “It’s very intense,” Harris admits. “I mean, I’ve taught women to shoot, and they would literally start crying afterward because they would realize how powerful this thing is. This definitely isn’t television.”

When Justin talks about his guns, he is calm and proud, like a professor eager to expound a bold new theory. Generally, he says, his guns are a reimagination of firepower. “They are designed for a specific application: self-defense. I mean, we don’t have a lot of excessive levers. The safety is internal. The only controls we have on the gun are the trigger—to fire the gun—and the magazine release. Any unnecessary features are removed.”

The design of Kahr’s line of pocket rockets is complicated, but basically it involves five patented methods of arranging the gun’s internal parts, reducing empty space and allowing the gun to contract in just the right places, while maintaining enough room for a larger-caliber bullet. Because of all the patents, it is difficult, if not impossible, for others to replicate its design.

When the K9 first appeared, critics of the gun industry howled. They considered the pocket rocket to have little value. Other than criminals sticking up liquor stores, who would need a gun so small and potent? Yet the K9 earned almost immediate cachet with the gun crowd, a difficult group to crack. Users tend to be resistant to change, and heavyweights like Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Colt, and Glock make up the bulk of the roughly 1 million handguns produced each year.

Kahr’s break was partly due to timing. In the late 1980s, America had entered a new age of hidden firepower, thanks to a movement led by the National Rifle Association championing self-reliance, freedom, and Second Amendment rights. It began in 1987, when Florida enacted laws allowing people to carry concealed weapons. Forty-one states followed suit, driving up the demand for smaller weapons. The market grew again in 1994 after a federal ban on the manufacture of guns that hold more than 10 bullets. (The prohibition expired in 2004.) As a result, guns shrank, and Kahr was there to take advantage of that trend. Justin’s guns had no pretense of being sporting weapons, Greg Jones says, “and this transparency of motive sits well with the pro-gun folks.”

In 1995, the K9’s first year of limited production, Kahr sold as many of the tailor-made guns as it could churn out, about 3,000. One magazine described the gun, which held seven bullets, as “short and light enough to permit excellent shooting, especially in fast combat-style scenarios.” That gun would later evolve into lighter and more lethal versions—.40 and .45 calibers. In 1998, the New York Police Department approved the K9 as a backup pistol. “People suddenly wanted to carry portable killing machines,” says Tom Diaz, author of Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America, “and Kahr cornered that market.”

Despite the buzz about Kahr the newcomer, questions began bubbling up. There was something suspicious about Justin Moon, though no one could immediately put a finger on what it was. “I knew there was someone behind Kahr,” Jones says. “There was no way that [Kahr] was self-supporting.” Massad Ayoob, a writer for the trade magazines American Handgunner and Gunweek, wondered at the time if Justin was “gonna get a ton of prepaid orders, cash the checks, and disappear.”


Then people started making the connection, and the conversation turned to God.

Larry Zilliox was one of the first to connect Kahr Arms to Reverend Moon’s Unification Church. A private investigator from Bristow, Virginia, with a knack for the hardboiled, he’d spent almost two decades sniffing around the church’s kingdom—first for a cult-awareness group and then out of his own curiosity. “I became obsessed with finding out how Moon’s businesses all fit together,” he tells me. “It was a big puzzle, with lots of interlocking and moving parts.”

Exploring Reverend Moon’s empire is a lot like embarking on an archaeological dig—with the prospect of finding stuff that you’d never imagine and stuff that makes no sense at all. But Zilliox was diligent. He marshaled hundreds of pages of documents, business papers, press clippings, and government filings. He found that Moon’s business world is one vast, byzantine, global network of cultural, religious, and for-profit companies that includes (among other things) manufacturing, publishing, fishing, and real estate concerns, as well as enormous tracts of land in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The empire could be worth hundreds of millions, but more likely billions of dollars. “There are hundreds of companies,” Zilliox says. “Some are active; some are dormant and then active and then dormant again. Every time I look, I find out something new.”

Zilliox traced Kahr, one of more than a dozen Moon family companies in the U.S., through an intricate chain of firms to a mothership holding company called Unification Church International, which he says was formed to support and perpetuate the Unification movement. U.C.I. shares a building in Falls Church, Virginia, with its single subsidiary, One Up Enterprises, the central holding company of some of Reverend Moon’s most prominent and influential businesses. Among these are True World Group, a global seafood business run by Motoo Furuta, a church member; News World Communications, owner of U.P.I. and the Washington Times, led by Chung Hwan Kwak, another Moon follower; and Saeilo, which has offices in Japan and the United States, among other places. Saeilo lists Justin Moon as its C.E.O. and president.

How much money passes from Kahr to the church is hard to pinpoint, mainly because business names and relationships shift, and untraceable rafts of cash are sometimes used for major transactions. The unorthodox use of cash in the family businesses was highlighted in Nansook Hong’s tell-all memoir, In the Shadow of the Moons, published in 1998. Married to Justin’s older brother Hyo Jin for 15 years, she went underground after filing for divorce. In her book, she described beatings, emotional abuse, and days when Hyo Jin would stay locked in the master bedroom “snorting cocaine and watching pornographic videos.” But she also recalled how one day her husband came to her with Bloomingdale’s shopping bags filled with a million dollars in cash. The money was earmarked for his recording studio, Manhattan Center, though Hong alleges that Hyo Jin skimmed off $400,000 for his drug addiction. (While the Moon family has long disputed Hong’s allegations, many former members have corroborated her claims. A lawyer for Hyo Jin denied the accusations.)

When I question former church members about Reverend Moon’s conglomerate, they say he seems to have four goals in mind: He wants to disseminate his spiritual program; elevate his global status as messiah; buy power in myriad cultural, political, and business spheres; and procure the necessary resources to create a self-sustaining, economically viable sanctuary for himself and his believers when the world crumbles. In other words, he means to create a world according to Moon. “When I was a leader in the group,” claims Steven Hassan, a former member who says he now counsels ex-cultists, “Moon talked about how when the global economy falls apart, then we’ll have the infrastructure—we’ll have the food, we’ll have the media, the businesses, the banks, and everyone will need to come to us.”

So how do Justin’s guns fit into Reverend Moon’s plans? One theory is simple and innocuous: The reverend is just a rich father indulging his kid. One Moon daughter got a horse farm; another, the private Kirov Academy of Ballet. Hyo Jin got the New York recording studio. Yet a number of former church members sense something more sinister. “The church says it’s for peace, but that’s all a part of the deception,” says Hassan. He notes that another Moon company, Tongil Group, produces M16s and antiaircraft guns. Justin is now the chairman of Tongil Group. Among other things, the South Korea-based Tongil is in the business of making cars in North Korea, once the ideological enemy of the True Father. Reverend Moon years ago “told us he was making air rifles,” ­Hassan says. “He’s a liar. Kahr Arms is a part of Moon’s plan for taking over the world.” Of Tongil, Larry Zilliox adds, “Can you imagine what the conservative guys buying Kahr guns would think if they knew that the owner of Kahr is doing business with a communist country in the axis of evil?”


Gordon Neufeld, another ex-church member who wrote Heartbreak and Rage: Ten Years Under Sun Myung Moon about his experience, expands on this. “His idea has always been that the world would become so corrupt and disorderly that Moon and his movement would end up being the only hope remaining for beleaguered mankind,” Neufeld says. And when the world breaks apart, guns will play a role. “The purpose of the guns,” he continues, “would be, in theory, to protect the people that Moon has gathered to him from the general chaos. But by logical extension, it could also include using those weapons to ‘save’ other people by defeating the warlords or evil people who hold them captive.”

When pressed about Kahr’s connection to his father and the church, Justin will say only that he is the majority shareholder in Kahr, the weapons maker, as well as a proud member of the Unification Church. “I’m my father’s son, but I’m also my own man,” he says. “Being my father’s son, there are disadvantages. I’ve had to work my butt off to get away from the negativity.”

Justin has three children of his own and divides his time among houses in South Korea, New York State, and Miami Beach. Many Moonie watchers predict that, after the reverend’s death, the church’s attention will shift toward business, and the son who is perceived as the most adept businessman will take the throne. Given that Justin is the only Moon heir to have started his own business from scratch, his success with Kahr could persuade his father to hand him Moon Inc. While some speculate that Justin’s mother will act as interim leader after the True Father’s death, other insiders are bracing for an all-out family war over money and power, perhaps involving all 13 children, but most likely centered around Justin and his older brother Hyun Jin, who is known as Preston. As Nansook Hong wrote, “The failure to designate and groom a successor all but guarantees a familial bloodletting after Reverend Moon’s death.”

Meanwhile, Justin has trudged ahead. In 1999, he purchased Auto-Ordnance, maker of the tommy gun, the notorious mobster machine gun that featured a 50-bullet drum-shaped magazine. Although the gun was conceived for use by American soldiers in World War I and known as a “trench broom” for its rapid, sweeping fire, it earned its enduring fame in the 1920s netherworld, thanks to bad guys like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson.

Next came another pocket rocket, this one with some parts made of a polymer. Justin called it the P9, and Harris refers to it as a breakthrough. Glock had come out with a small, partly plastic gun, and Kahr needed to keep a lock on its self-defense niche. It succeeded. The P9 had the body of the K9 but weighed less: just over a pound. Sales climbed from a few thousand in 1995 to 7,067 in 1999. And for a time, it seemed that the family scandals and the talk of how Justin fit into his father’s alternative reality were, in fact, falling away.

Then Danny Guzman was killed.

The Kahr arms factory is a nondescript low-lying brick-and-glass building on the edge of Worcester. Up close, it appears more like just another building in a dreary office park than a place that produces some of America’s deadliest weapons. Trees poke up around the back and sides, with manicured shrubs around the front, and a sign that reads “Saeilo” is stuck into the neatly trimmed green lawn.

For a while, no one paid much attention to what went on behind the building’s brick facade. The trouble began when the company hired Mark Cronin to be a gunsmith in March 1999. Cronin was a 28-year-old high-school dropout who lived in the basement of his mother’s house. He had a well-documented crack habit and a history of violence. Not long after he landed a job on the factory floor, he noticed that Kahr had no metal detectors and no visible security cameras. That’s when he started stealing guns and selling them for cocaine.

Cronin smuggled the guns out in pieces. Typically, he said in documents filed in Massachusetts Superior Court, it took him about a week to sneak out enough components for a complete gun. He started with the smallest parts, such as the trigger and springs, which were stored in a plastic 10-drawer cabinet at his workbench. He stuffed the pieces into a ziplock bag, slipped the bag into his pants pocket, and walked out with it at the end of the day. The bigger parts, including the frame and the slide, were snuck out of the factory one at a time. “I just took them home,” he testified, “and built them.”

Cronin’s stolen guns were exceptionally valuable. Having bypassed the serial-number-stamp stage at the factory, they were untraceable, perfect for criminals. Although it’s not clear when Cronin began unloading his wares on the streets, he sold the gun that would kill Danny Guzman sometime in November 1999. It was a 9 millimeter, and the buyer was an old friend named Robert Jachimczyk, a former high-school tennis star who’d recently dropped out of community college. Cronin traded the gun for two half-grams of cocaine, valued at about $80 at the time. Jachimczyk turned around and sold the gun to Edwin Novas, the alleged shooter, for $200 worth of cocaine. Feeling that the relationship had potential, Cronin told Jachimczyk that he stole guns “all the time” and that he “can just walk out with them,” according to the court documents.


The next deal didn’t go down as planned. Several weeks later, Cronin traded Jachimczyk another gun for cocaine—a Kahr .40 caliber without a serial number. As Jachimczyk was on his way to sell it to Novas, police pulled him over, found the gun, and arrested him. Police didn’t make the connection until later. But when Jachimczyk heard about the Christmas Eve murder and the stolen 9-millimeter gun linking him to the crime, he told lawyers, “I shit my pants.”

By the time of the shooting, Kahr was already in the spotlight. Not only did police learn about Cronin’s activities; they discovered that another employee had walked out of the factory with a 9 millimeter and an extra pistol slide and that there were dozens more lost guns. Captain Paul Campbell, a detective for the Worcester police, said that going back more than a year, “as many as 50 weapons manufactured at the plant may be missing.” Campbell also condemned Kahr’s “shoddy” bookkeeping and questioned its security measures. The implication seemed to be that Kahr might as well have been handing out guns to anyone.

Cronin eventually pleaded guilty to federal charges of stealing just two guns, leaving the whereabouts of other missing weapons unresolved. During the year that Cronin worked at Kahr, four or five other company-made guns, all without serial numbers, turned up in connection to local crimes. This means that either Cronin lied to investigators or that there were other people with access to Kahr’s facility who were dealing guns.

Two years later, the lawsuit against Justin Moon and Kahr Arms threatened not only to derail the company but also dredge up stuff the Moon family would rather leave alone. Guzman’s mother hired a scrappy Worcester lawyer named Hector Piñeiro, who had an office within eyeshot of the Tropigala. Soon afterward, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence joined the fight. Together, they filed a class-action suit for wrongful death against Kahr, accusing the company of negligence.

At the outset, it seemed like an open-and-shut case: If a gun manufacturer can’t keep track of its wares and has a drug-addict employee stealing and selling its products, shouldn’t that company be held liable? But it’s not that straightforward. While it is illegal for a known drug user to handle guns, no federal law requires gun companies to secure their facilities or track their inventory, except when shipping a completed firearm. “Most gun companies have security set up,” says Daniel Vice, a lawyer for the Brady Campaign. “You can’t really check this, because all but two—Smith & Wesson and Ruger—are private. But I think most believe that it’s not profitable to let guns leave the factory.”

Vice argues that Kahr’s is an exceptional case. It was not simply a question of the company’s bad hiring policies and slipshod security. The argument is that its lax practices created an atmosphere that endangered the Worcester community and resulted in the death of Guzman. The plaintiffs aimed for a settlement in the millions and hoped to make an example out of Kahr. “We have 32 gun homicides every day in this country,” Vice says. “Certainly it is not too much to ask a gunmaker not to hire drug addicts with criminal records to work in its unsecured manufacturing plant.”

Justin went dark. When questions came from the press, he let his attorneys do the talking. Kahr filed to dismiss the case, but the judge refused. For a stretch, things looked bad for Kahr, until Congress, with help from the lobbying power of the N.R.A., intervened. In October 2005, President Bush signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. A coup for the gun industry, the act protected manufacturers and dealers from liability for crimes committed with their products, saving them from what they described as frivolous lawsuits that threatened to bankrupt them. Kahr filed to dismiss again, citing the new law, but Piñeiro and Vice argued that the law didn’t apply. Most prominently, Vice pointed out that the law only applied to guns “shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce” and the murder weapon in this case was manufactured in Worcester and used in Worcester, thus never crossing Massachusetts state lines.

When I ask Chris Cox, the chief lobbyist for the N.R.A., if manufacturers should ever be held accountable for insufficient security measures and poor hiring practices that result in guns being stolen and getting into the hands of criminals, he says, “We’ve been very clear that if a gun manufacturer violates a state or federal law, it should be prosecuted to the fullest extent.”

The case drags on. Eight hearings have already been postponed, the latest in April, though Vice expects the matter to finally move forward this fall. Of course, you won’t hear anyone talking about this in Orlando.

Back at Shot Show, tens of thousands of law enforcement types, soldiers, hunters, and other gun enthusiasts roam the hangarlike space, eyeing the latest hunting and tactical equipment: $180,000 Perazzi shotguns, military-ready sniper rifles with ranges of up to four miles, foot-long knives that can cut through car hoods. Most of the attendees are men—some in camouflage, others in golf shirts—though there are a few mothers with strollers. One afternoon, presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and his wife, who was dressed in a leopard-print top, glad-hand the gun vote.


When I see Justin, on the second day, he recognizes me right away. “There’s the Democrat,” he calls out. Here, Democrats are tree huggers, greenies, urbanites—a demographic lost on the gun cause. “People living in the Northeast, especially Manhattan,” Justin says at one point, “they don’t understand the rest of the country. The rest of the country shoots guns. But when you get into Manhattan, it’s like a gun is evil.” (Justin must know that New Yorkers’ views of guns weren’t helped when New York City councilman James Davis was murdered with a Kahr weapon.) Kahr now markets 25 types of guns, with prices ranging from $533 to $1,012. The newest models are a .45 caliber that fires man-stopper bullets and an economy series of pocket rockets known as the CW line, aimed at giving the inexpensive Glock a run for its money. Frank Harris tells me the company is surging, thanks in part to a new age of fear stemming from 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. “People know more than ever that they need to protect themselves,” he says. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives reported that, in 2005, Kahr had produced 39,973 pistols and tommy guns. To keep up with demand, the company recently expanded its Worcester production facility to 15,000 square feet.

About a half dozen gun enthusiasts surround Justin. One stout, mustached man who trains police officers and the military says he has owned his Kahr for 10 years and has carried it with him every day. “I’m a believer,” he proclaims. Other people step up and ask Justin what the company plans next. “There are always new things,” he says coyly.
As I stand with Justin, I find it perplexing to try to reconcile Justin, the gun guy, with Kook Jin, the apocalyptic-church heir. “You will never see the Justin I know,” former church member Donna Collins warned me before I left for Orlando. “He has two faces, a public one and a church one.” Tim Porter and others said similar things. And maybe it’s true. I have never seen his church face, at least the one other people described to me. And this makes me curious as to what other people at Shot Show know. Does anyone have any idea that he’s the son of the Moonies’ messiah?

Most know nothing beyond the fact that he designs guns. The one person who seems to have a clue is Tom Gresham, who hosts Gun Talk, a popular three-hour show on Sirius satellite radio. He suggests that it makes sense that a Moonie is in the gun industry. “Self-defense is a critical part of many religions,” he explains one afternoon at a table in the pressroom. “It’s in the Old and New Testaments. It’s in the Muslim tradition. Religion’s whole thing is ‘Don’t hurt others; we want peace.’ But most religions understand that there are people who don’t want peace.”

The only time that Justin really gets agitated and even slightly aggressive is when the conversation shifts to the subject of who should be able to carry his guns and exactly why they should have that privilege. Does everyone who has a gun really know how to use it? I ask. And how do they know when the time is right to shoot a gun? A sour look engulfs Justin’s face. “There are two ways to get security,” he says, eyes narrowing. “One is to get someone else to do it, which is expensive, or you can do it yourself, with a gun.”

According to Justin, there are bad people in the world who will try to take your belongings or kill you, and if the time comes, you need to protect yourself against them. I hear this argument time and again at Shot Show: By the time the cops reach the scene, the crime is already over.

Justin is looking to make me see things his way. The more we talk, the more I feel as though I—“the Democrat”—am actively being opposed. But Justin isn’t atypical of the Shot Show crowd. Many of the people I approach express similar opinions and go on the offensive when questioned. Truth is, the gun world is constantly under attack—a lot like the Unification Church.

I have one last question before I leave. “Are you armed?” I ask Justin. He doesn’t respond at first. Then he smiles. Not now, he says. That’s prohibited in the convention center. Otherwise, he’d have his PM9 on him. “I always carry my gun locked and loaded in a holster. Quick access,” he declares, pointing to where he keeps it on his belt. “If you need it, you gotta be ready.”

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http://www.portfolio.com/careers/features/2007/09/17/Unification-Church

"Theatre of the Absurd": Ben Bernanke's Love Song for Fascist Economist Milton Friedman/Friedman & the Politics of ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

Investment tip: Once Bernanke ravages ... ah, salvages the economy, he may try to sell you a peanut butter factory in Georgia. Politely but firmly say, "thanks but no thanks," because it's rude to trade in toxic assets, and only a dupe acquires them. - Miss Manners

"Rational choice, when propounded by economists such as Milton Friedman, provided the theoretical foundation for the deregulation of markets, lifting of trade barriers, and rush to privatization that began under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and continues to this day. When you see the so-called shadow banking system meltdown and the subprime financial disaster, when you see the deregulation of finance, oil, tariffs and environmental standards, think of rational choice. When you see Islamic radicals launching jihad against the United States and its allies, think of them as corrections to the self-seeking precepts of rational choice. ... " - Alex Abella, History News Network

"The corporation cannot be ethical. its only responsibility is to make a profit." - Milton Friedman

"I think it is true Theatre of the Absurd that Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, paid direct homage to Milton Friedman and one of Milton Friedman's theories." - dailyreckoning.com.au

Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke /Conference to Honor Milton Friedman, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

On Milton Friedman's Ninetieth Birthday
November 8, 2002

I can think of no greater honor than being invited to speak on the occasion of Milton Friedman's ninetieth birthday. Among economic scholars, Friedman has no peer. His seminal contributions to economics are legion, including his development of the permanent-income theory of consumer spending, his paradigm-shifting research in monetary economics, and his stimulating and original essays on economic history and methodology. Generations of graduate students, at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, have benefited from his insight; and many of these intellectual children and grandchildren continue to this day to extend the sway of Friedman's ideas in economics. What is more, Milton Friedman's influence on broader public opinion, exercised through his popular writings, speaking, and television appearances, has been at least as important and enduring as his impact on academic thought. In his humane and engaging way, Milton Friedman has conveyed to millions an understanding of the economic benefits of free, competitive markets, as well as the close connection that economic freedoms such as property rights and freedom of contract bear to other types of liberty. ...

Bernanke's speech continues

ALSO SEE (for more of Bernanke's admiration of Friedman's destructive economic policies): "Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke
At the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Conference on the Legacy of Milton and Rose Friedman's Free to Choose, Dallas, Texas, October 24, 2003"

Economic Catastrophe
www.commonprejudice.com
December 13, 2006

With the death of Milton Friedman a couple of weeks ago and the overdue death of Augusto Pinochet somewhat appropriately on International Human Rights Day last Sunday, the debate over Friedman's and Pinochet's economic policies in Chile during the 1970s and 1980s has been a prominent topic this week.

While I have already made a couple of comments, given the confusion over the issue I feel I should expound a little bit, utilizing a couple of valuable articles on the subject. I was especially inspired to do this after reading the egregious editorial (apparently by Fred Hiatt) in the Washington Post yesterday. This editorial is the very worst example of journalism, clearly illustrating the vapid state of American media and is just one more of the countless examples disproving the dimwitted claims of liberal bias. Here are some of the appalling, illogical and nonsensical claims:

...It's hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America. In the past 15 years, Chile's economy has grown at twice the regional average, and its poverty rate has been halved. It's leaving behind the developing world, where all of its neighbors remain mired...

...Like it or not, Mr. Pinochet had something to do with this success. To the dismay of every economic minister in Latin America, he introduced the free-market policies that produced the Chilean economic miracle -- and that not even Allende's socialist successors have dared reverse...

...In Dictatorships and Double Standards, a work that caught the eye of President Ronald Reagan, Ms. [Jeanne, former US ambassador to the UN] Kirkpatrick argued that right-wing dictators such as Mr. Pinochet were ultimately less malign than communist rulers, in part because their regimes were more likely to pave the way for liberal democracies. She, too, was vilified by the left. ...

What is perhaps most outrageous is how the editorial makes claims about the "past fifteen years" when Pinochet has been out of office for 16 years. Additionally the offensive claptrap about right wing brutal murderers leading somehow to liberal democracies - as opposed to left wing dictatorships - is remarkably ahistorical. Many Eastern European dictatorships are now functioning democracies while the editorial fails to note that before Pinochet's military coup Chile had one of the longest functioning democracies in Latin America and the president that Pinochet overthrew, Salvador Allende, had been part of electoral politics since the beginning of his career.

But what I really want to go into here is the claim of an economic miracle in Chile in the late 1970's brought on by Pinochet and the "Chicago Boys" implementation of an extremely rigid and doctrinal version of neo-liberalism.

(Much of this post relies on information from the outstanding article (PDF) "The Uses of Chile: How Politics Trumped Truth in the Neo-Liberal Revision of Development," by Public Citizen, along with Greg Palast's article, "Tinker Bell, Pinochet and The Fairy Tale Miracle of Chile" and Steve Kangas's piece, "Chile: The Laboratory Test")

To term whatever economic success Chile has had post-Allende (1973) as proof of the success of neo-liberalism can only be termed generously as a wild mischaracterization. Let's look at some figures.

From the 2005 UN Developmental Report we see that Chile finishes very near the bottom in terms of income inequality at 113th place just a few places above Nambia (Interestingly the United States is also near the bottom in 92nd place). Real wages fell consistently during Pinochet's rule while still today there are periods of high unemployment due to the seasonal nature of its export orientated primary product economy. From 1970 to 1989 labour's share of the national income fell from 52.3% to 30.7% while real wages declined by 40% under military rule.

In the typical manner of right wing ideologues who never have to worry about where their next paycheque will come from, the Chicago Boys purposely followed policies that kept unemployment high so as wages would stagnate, profits would remain high and there always would be a healthy (irony intended) supply of underpaid workers willing to work for whatever they could get. Unemployment averaged 15.7% during the Pinochet period, the worst in all of Latin America.

Poverty reduction did not occur until the 1990s when the pure neo-liberalism previously practiced was abandoned. By 1989 the poverty rate was 41.2% with those at the indigent level equaling a third of this total.

Palast notes, "In 1970, the daily diet of the poorest 40 percent of the population contained 2,019 calories. By 1980 this had fallen to 1,751, and by 1990 it was down to 1,629." It was policies that were directly at odds with ones promoted by Friedman et al, including increased taxes and a great increase in social spending that led to a reduction of the poverty rate to less than one in five in the 1990s.

Ninety per cent of Chile's exports have been primary products (i.e. natural resources) which, along with having a much lower value-added component and whose extraction is often very detrimental to the environment, are by their very nature, non sustainable. The Public Citizen article cites one study which estimates that the supply of the very basis of Chile's export economy, copper, could be exhausted by 2020. In terms of industrialization, manufacturing in Chile has fallen from 30% in the 1970s to a low of 18% in 2000.

Close to 200 industries were privatized by Pinochet. Public Citizen, citing another study, comments on the so-called efficiency of unregulated privatized utilities in Cuba:

The study goes on to show that, contrary to the conventional neo-liberal "wisdom," the privatized utilities that were the most strongly regulated post-privatization experienced larger improvements in efficiency and profitability than those that were less regulated - showing that regulations is not incompatible with improvements in corporate performances." [note: the Public Citizen piece gives good examples of the dangers rampant in privatizing such sectors as water, education, health and the pension system) Ironically though (or perhaps not), the one sector vital to Chile's economic success, the export of copper, has remained in state hands. As Palast notes, Copper has provided 30% to 70% of the nation’s export earnings. This is the hard currency which has built today’s Chile, the proceeds from the mines seized from Anaconda and Kennecott in 1973 - Allende’s posthumous gift to his nation.

Further:

Agribusiness is the second locomotive of Chile’s economic growth. This also is a legacy of the Allende years. According to Professor Arturo Vasquez of Georgetown University, Washington DC, Allende’s land reform, the break-up of feudal estates (which Pinochet could not fully reverse), created a new class of productive tiller-owners, along with corporate and cooperative operators, who now bring in a stream of export earnings to rival copper. “In order to have an economic miracle,” says Dr. Vasquez, “maybe you need a socialist government first to commit agrarian reform.”

It is often the record of economic growth, especially between the years 1978 to 1981 which the neo-liberalists hang their hat on. It was Friedman himself termed this period the "economic miracle in Chile," as Chile averaged 6.6% growth per year. (By the way growth in Venezuela the last two years has been around 9-10%. Funny you don't hear a lot about the Venezuelan economic miracle in the North American press) But the problem with conclusions like this, besides overlooking a host of other economic and social issues and indicators, don't take into account, as Kangas succinctly points out, the difference between actual growth and potential growth nor the expanding, yet cyclical nature of world economies. His words:

Two economic concepts are useful to understand this phenomenon. The first is that the economy grows in the long run, as both the population expands and each worker produces more per hour, thanks to improving technology and efficiency. This long-term growth experiences mild swings in the form of recessions and recoveries, of course. But if the economy grows in the long run, then deep recessions are going to be followed by even steeper recoveries.

The second concept is the distinction between actual productivity and potential productivity. "Potential" is a somewhat misleading term, since it implies something imaginary, but this productivity does indeed exist.

Potential productivity reflects our nation's productive capacity (in the form of our workers, factories, etc.). Actual productivity reflects how much of that capacity is actually being used. For example, a factory may have the potential to turn out 3,000 cars a month. During a recession, however, its actual productivity may fall to only 1,500 cars a month. Actual growth would occur if the factory returned to a full capacity of 3,000 cars. Potential growth would occur only if a second factory were built.

During a recession, actual productivity drops as millions of workers are laid off and factories sit idle. But all the potential productivity is still there.

During a recovery, actual productivity climbs closer to its potential, as millions of laid-off workers return to empty factories. This gives the appearance of growth — and we should note that this type of growth is relatively quick and easy to achieve. But what happens when all the workers have returned? Then any further growth will have to involve potential growth — that is, the construction of factories and the birth of new workers. As you might imagine, this type of growth is considerably more difficult to achieve.

So this is all that happened that during Chile's "Economic Miracle" — laid-off workers returned to their old jobs. When you take both the recession and recovery into account, Chile actually had the second worst rate of growth in Latin America between 1975 and 1980. Only Argentina did worse.

As I have cited before, Kangas notes that between 1972 and 1987 (more or less the period that Pinochet governed) the GNP per capita fell 6.4% and as late as 1993 this figured was still below the 1973 total. Further, "Only five Latin American countries did worse in per capita GDP during the Pinochet era (1974-1989)." Additionally, Chile's GDP grew between 1.8 and 2.0% between 1970 and 1989, a figure lower than the growth the nation experienced during the 1960s.

Public Citizen's article also details policies enacted in Chile which are in fact directly contrary to the tenets of neo-liberalism including:

* "duty drawbacks" used to reimburse exporters (especially small and medium sized ones dealing with alternative exports) for necessary imports of capital or other inputs

* government agency to help private exporters find international markets
government subsidies and a partially state-owned venture capital organization for the funding of high tech and other favoured industries

• substantial government investment in the development of infrastructure
capital controls in the financial market

Of course, the structural adjustment programmes and the slashing of public spending as traditionally advocated by the the IMF would make most of these undertakings impossible. The Free Trade Agreement between the U.S. and Chile has put many of them at risk, including anything that can be termed an economic subsidy or any of the capital controls instituted by the Chilean government. (Not to mention the elimination of environmental regulations).

Finally one other note. In the last couple of days many have stated or at least acknowledged that while there is little doubt in regards to the bloodthirsty nature of Pinochet's regime there is much debate over the economic success of Pinochet's policies. (Excluding of course the neanderthal and Pinochet apologist Fred Hiatt at the Washington Post who seeks to downplay Pinochet's massive human rights violations). However, in many ways the violations of the human rights and the neo-liberal economic policies of shook therapy and "structural adjustments" taken to the extreme in Chile can not treated as distinct issues. As Kangas states:

Shortly after the 1975 conference, the Chilean government initiated the Economic Recovery Program (ERP). The first phase of shock therapy was reducing the money supply and government spending, which succeeded in cutting inflation to acceptable levels. However, it also caused unemployment to rise from 9.1 to 18.7 percent between 1974 and 1975, a figure on par with the U.S. Great Depression. Output fell 12.9 percent — making this Chile's worst recession since the 1930s.

Meanwhile, to prevent the political consequences of such a shock, the Pinochet regime began cracking down on potential opposition leaders. Many just "disappeared." ... suffice to say, workers "accepted" this austerity program at gunpoint.

To sum up; unadulterated neo-liberalism was a catastrophic failure in Chile, making the rich much richer, the poor much poorer and was paid for with the blood of those brave Chileans that resisted. To offer up the tripe that appeared on the Washington Post's editorial page yesterday is an utter disgrace.

http://www.commonprejudice.com/latin_america/index.html

Mirrored with commentary at - http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2008/09/deregulation-is-nazi-policy-as-ive.html

Springfield, MO: Nazi Women Gather at Library

Also see: "Neo-Nazi group joins litter fight" (Springfield News-Leader)
•••
" ... 'Every day is white day in school,' said Art Hodge. One person asked what the group wanted to do to Jewish people. Are they to all be sent to Israel? Group leaders wouldn't address that question. ... "

CORY DE VERA
www.news-leader.com
JANUARY 18, 2009

Nazi Ami Bostwick

Around 30 members and supporters of the National Socialist Movement came to the Library Station on Saturday night to listen to speeches and take questions from opponents and potential recruits.

Springfield resident Cynthia Keene led the group in a pledge -- "We must secure the existence of our people and the future for white children" -- and then the Pledge of Allegiance. Other members read poetry or gave speeches explaining the group's beliefs, and several times members gave one another the Nazi salute.

Around 20 people who were not members of the group sat in the back, listening quietly. Reporters representing CBS and the Women's Entertainment Network, as well as filmmakers from France, were on hand to follow the group. NSM leaders have said the WE network came to highlight women in the group.

NSM leaders addressed the economy and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza. But they also talked about what they say is a need to develop pride among whites.

"You look at these young people right here in front of us, and what is being shoved down their throats every day at school?" said Steven Boswell, head of the Missouri unit. "Hatred of being white. People telling them they are wrong because they are white."

Christina Drake of Jefferson City told the group that when she first joined the movement it was not very family-oriented. Now, the group does a lot with younger people, she said.

But she wanted specifically to address the handful of people who were outside the library protesting the group's meeting. Some of those people came inside.

Their signs say they are fighting for diversity, but Drake said it is NSM that really wanted diversity.

"You are fighting for the mixing of the races," she said. "If all races mix, there will be no diversity."

Discussion that followed after the speeches was civil, with some non-members conceding that the speakers made points they support about wars or the economy.

But there was laughter at the suggestion that there should be a White History Day or month.

"Every day is white day in school," said Art Hodge.

One person asked what the group wanted to do to Jewish people. Are they to all be sent to Israel?

Group leaders wouldn't address that question.

Their literature's "25 points of American National Socialism" makes it clear that the group would like some people to leave. "All non-White immigration must be prevented," says point number seven. "We demand that all non-Whites currently residing in America be required to leave the nation forthwith and return to their land of origin: peacefully or by force."

Point number four declares that no "Jew or homosexual may be a member of the nation."

At the front of the room was a table with literature, though one group leader decided to remove literature that featured a racial slur on its cover.

Earlier in the day, group members cleaned up the section of highway on West Bypass that they had adopted.

Member Ami Bostwick of Iowa said the effort went well, though there was one "small problem" with passers-by stopping to complain about them. The sheriff's office was on hand to help keep order, she said.

http://www.news-leader.com/article/20090118/NEWS01/901180378

Thalidomide 'was Created by the Nazis'

Nazis developed Thalidomide and tested it on concentration camp prisoners, author claims

By Andrew Levy
Daily Mail
8th February 2009

Ten thousand babies were born with physical deformities and brain damage caused by Thalidomide

Thalidomide was developed by the Nazis and tested on prisoners at concentration camps, it has been claimed. The drug, which was prescribed to expectant mothers between 1957 and 1961 for morning sickness led to thousands of babies being born deformed.

It was supposedly invented in the early 1950s by German firm Chemie Grunenthal. But documents unearthed by Dr Martin Johnson, director of the Thalidomide Trust, suggest it was created as a antidote to nerve toxins including sarin and was developed by Otto Ambros, a Third Reich scientist. Dr Johnson claims the drug was worked on by Ambros before he went to Grunenthal after the war.

'It is now appearing increasingly likely that thalidomide was the last war crime of the Nazis,' Dr Johnson said.

Grunenthal's 1954 thalidomide patent indicated it had already been tested on humans - before official tests began, he added.

Another document, found by an Argentinian writer Carlos De Napoli, appears to show the drug was tested in the death camps. The claim could have implications for the compensation of surviving victims, including 457 in the UK, if the German government is held liable for their condition.

Thalidomide was prescribed in dozens of countries between 1957 and 1961 despite inadequate tests being carried out to test its safety. A total of 10,000 babies in Europe and Africa were born with physical deformities and brain damage.

The company insists it was invented in 1953 but a document suggests it had previously purchased the trade name Contergan, and therefore presumably the drug, from a French firm which had been controlled by the Nazis. The firm, Rhone-Poulenc, registered 14 drugs from 1942, all ending with 'ergan'. No other company used the suffix and the drugs often had distinct similarities with thalidomide.

'Not only is the name typical of the Rhone-Poulenc brand names of the 1940s - the action of thalidomide also belongs to this range of products,' Dr Johnson told the Sunday Times.

In a separate development, Argentinian author Carlos De Napoli says he has discovered a November 1944 document from German pharmaceutical company IG Farben which refers to a substance with the same chemical formula as thalidomide.

In his book Hitler's Laboratories, he states company director Fritz ter Meer sent a memo to Karl Brandt, an SS general who ran Hitler's euthenasia programme. The memo refers to the drug by a number - 4589 - and adds it has been tested and is ready for use.

'There is absolutely no doubt of the Nazi development of, and experimentation with, thalidomide in the World War Two camps,' he said.

Grunenthal has claimed to have lost documents relating to drug trials but Dr Johnson said its 1954 patent for thalidomide indicated it had already been tested on humans - before official tests began.

He concludes in a report: 'The patents suggest that thalidomide was probably one of a number of products developed at [chemical laboratory] Dyhernfurth or Auschwitz-Monowitz [a synthetic rubber and petrol processing plant which used labour from concentration camps] under the leadership of Otto Ambros in the course of nerve gas research.'

Grunenthal insisted it had not worked with Rhone-Poulenc to develop the drug.

A spokesman said: 'Three Grunenthal employees discovered thalidomide and Grunenthal is the sole inventor on the patent.'

Sanofi-Aventis, which has taken over the French firm, said it was investigating the claims by looking at documents in its archives.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1138955/Nazis-developed-Thalidomide-tested-concentration-camp-prisoners-author-claims.html#

Spain's Lebensborns: The "Lost Children" of Francoism

" ... The regime's leading military psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Najera had been influenced by the German Nazi ideology, according to political science professor Vicenc Navarro, [and] believed Marxists to be mentally ill people whose children could, however, be purified of their inferior characteristics if they were raised to become Francoists and conservative Catholics. ... Not only did the regime try to exterminate its opponents, but it also sought to eradicate their ideology by turning their children against them. ... "

By Sinikka Tarvainen
www.monstersandcritics.com
Feb 8, 2009

Madrid - ... Many ageing Spaniards are still looking for their lost relatives, while others are not even aware of their real identities.

'How many people in this country are not who they believe they are?' novelist Benjamin Prado asked as the drama of the 'lost children' began to unfold in its full horror.

Some 30,000 children are estimated to have been 'stolen' from their parents, especially from mothers in jail, in the aftermath of the civil war. The figure includes children who were repatriated from France or other countries, where they or their entire families had been evacuated or gone into exile.

Stories of babies being torn from the arms of their screaming mothers, of parents who were executed and of siblings who were separated from each other have begun to emerge. The children were given out for adoption or placed in orphanages or other institutions, where they were often ill-treated, according to judge Baltasar Garzon who tried to investigate their fate.

However, Garzon's inquiry into that and other alleged human rights abuses by the Franco regime was blocked, and Spain remains divided over the need to discuss those times. Franco's policy concerning 'red' children was not only aimed at meeting the needs of childless couples, but obeyed the racist ideas of his right-wing regime.

The regime's leading military psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Najera had been influenced by the German Nazi ideology, according to political science professor Vicenc Navarro, [and] believed Marxists to be mentally ill people whose children could, however, be purified of their inferior characteristics if they were raised to become Francoists and conservative Catholics.

Not only did the regime try to exterminate its opponents, but it also sought to eradicate their ideology by turning their children against them, according to critics of the dictatorship.

Some of the families taking in republican children, however, used them as servants instead of focusing on their education, writes Prado, who researched the subject for one of his novels.

The lives of many 'lost children' or their relatives have been overshadowed by anxiety over the fate of their loved ones, and many of them have died without reuniting with their original families.

After Franco's dictatorship ended with his death in 1975, a democratic Spain tried to turn a new page by granting his collaborators a collective amnesty, and it was not until the recent years that his abuses began to be discussed widely in public.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist government passed a law to restore the honour of Franco's victims in 2007, and Garzon tried to launch an investigation into the alleged killings of more than 100,000 people by Francoists during and after the war.

The judge's inquiry would have included the fate of the 'lost children,' but he was forced to drop it after state prosecutors argued it had no legal basis.

The prosecutors' views were close to those of the conservative opposition, which rejects probes into the Franco era and accuses the government of reviving old social divisions.

Some of the 'stolen children' or their relatives have resorted to DNA testing in attempts to locate missing family members, and groups representing Franco's victims asked Garzon to arrange for more such tests for people in danger of dying before completing their quests.

The judge recently rejected the request, after transferring the responsibility of investigating Franco's crimes to regional courts.

Those will now have to decide whether the dictatorship's abuses can be classified as crimes against humanity, as Garzon argued, in which case they would not come under the statute of limitations.

Full, unredacted story

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/features/article_1458184.php/The_"lost_children%22_of_Francoism_haunt_Spain__Feature__

Remembering Idaho's Favorite Nazi

By Steve Crump
www.magicvalley.com

There's a lot we still don't know about the Gem State's most celebrated stormtrooper.

But more details are slowly emerging about the life of Count Franz Felix Schaffgotsch, an Austrian nobleman chartered by American railroad magnate Averell Harriman to roam western America and pick a site for the country's first ski resort ...

Late in the winter of 1935-36, Schaffgotsch settled on a remote, high-desert Idaho sheep town called Ketchum ... (The name Sun Valley didn't exist then; it was invented later by publicist Steve Hannigan) ...

By that time, the count - a dilettante, skilled skier and lady's man of international repute who counted Harriman and British actor David Niven as friends - was an enthusiastic admirer of Adolf Hitler and a supporter of "Austrofascism," the right-wing, anti-Semitic political movement that dominated his homeland before Hitler's troops overran the nation in 1938 ...

How enthusiastic? ... Schaffgotsch enlisted in the Waffen-SS soon after it was created in 1939, and was commissioned as an officer ...

The SS was an elite military organization personally local to Hitler that served as shock troops for the German army throughout World War II, and Schaffgotsch was the equivalent of a first lieutenant in either the Wiking division (an armored unit made up mostly of volunteers from the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and Denmark) or the Florian Geyer division (a cavalry outfit composed largely of ethnic Germans from outside Germany) ...

He was almost certainly on the front lines when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and family records show that he was killed at Kurganaja in what's now southern Russia on Aug. 11, 1942 ... He was 38 years old ...

At the time of his death, Schaffgotsch was part of Operation Edelweiss - a campaign by the German army to capture the oil-rich Caucuses Mountains region ... Ten days after he was killed, a German unit raised the flag on Mount Elburus, a three-mile-high peak that's the summit of the Caucuses ... But the Germans could advance no farther east, and six months later were routed at Stalingrad ...

Schaffgotsch was one of few Austrians with anything to do with Sun Valley who ended up on the wrong side of history ... Many of the German and Austrian ski instructors who were in Blaine County when Germany declared war on the United States in December 1941 - interned during hostilities - returned to Idaho after the war ...

Steve Crump is the Times-News Opinion editor.

http://www.magicvalley.com/articles/2009/01/30/news/local_state/153924.txt

The Very First CIA Assassination

THE GEORGE POLK CASE

CIA Has Lost Records on CBS Reporter Murdered in Greece in 1948, And Destroyed FOIA File on Case

National Security Archive Update, August 10, 2007

For More Information Contact:
William Burr: 202/994-7000

Washington DC, August 10, 2007 – The Central Intelligence Agency has lost documents concerning its investigation of the mysterious 1948 murder of CBS reporter George Polk, and destroyed its file on FOIA requests for Polk documents, according to a letter from Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein. In June 2006, the Archive asked the CIA and the National Archives to investigate the possibility that the CIA had lost or destroyed records on the Polk case.

Polk, a CBS reporter based in Greece at the height of its left-right civil war, was murdered by unknown assailants in 1948. At the request of members of the Polk family, the National Security Archive had asked the CIA to re-review CIA documents on the Polk case that had been released during the 1990s. The CIA found a number of documents for re-review but in December 2005 informed the Archive that nine of the documents, including memoranda to the Agency’s director, had been destroyed. According to CIA Information and Privacy Coordinator Scott Koch’s letter, “The original documents had been destroyed in accordance with approved National Archives and Records Administration records schedules.” It was the CIA’s response that prompted National Security Archive director Thomas S. Blanton to write letters to the Archivist of the United States and the Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency asking them to investigate the destruction of documents on the Polk case.

Last week, Dr. Weinstein informed the National Security Archive that the CIA is “unable to locate the original documents or information about their disposition.” As the letter explains, the CIA FOIA case file had been destroyed in accordance with the records schedule; what has gone missing are the original file copies of the Polk-related documents (and whatever collection to which they belonged). That the CIA has determined that the documents cannot be found (and may well have been destroyed) raises troubling questions about CIA’s historical records preservation policies. Why is the CIA losing what should have been permanent records? If the Polk documents were part of a larger system of records that was destroyed, what other historically significant records no longer exist? That the FOIA file which contained copies of the now-missing documents had also been destroyed also raises questions about this standard practice at federal agencies.

www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB226/index.htm
•••
BOOK REVIEW

The Polk Conspiracy: Murder and Cover-up in the Case of CBS News Correspondent George Polk

By Jim Miller

It is more than 40 years since CBS radio correspondent George Polk was murdered in Salonika, Greece. But as Kati Marton shows in her compelling new account of the Polk case, the life and death of this young reporter still epitomize the struggle between journalists committed to discovering the truth and governments determined to manipulate it.

Polk died in May 1948, apparently the victim of a civil war between an unusually harsh right-wing oligarchy and battle-hardened left-wing guerillas led by the Greek Communist party. His murder posed a potential diplomatic problem. In its effort to contain communism, the United States under the Truman Doctrine had thrown it support to the Greek rightists. In his coverage Polk had fearlessly documented the brutality and corruption of the Greek elite, despite a stream on anonymous death threats and expressions of unhappiness from American officials. It it had come out that the reporter had been murdered on the orders of the Greek regime, it might well have weakened domestic support for U.S. policy.

Polk's death led to several investigations, one headed by the columnist Walter Lippmann and directed by General William (''Wild Bill'') Donovan, former head of the OSS. The FBI and CIA were drawn in as well. A suspect was finally produced by the Greek police, and a ''confession'' extracted (through the use of torture, it later turned out). In a show trial, this suspect testified (falsely, as Morton confirms) that he had helped local Communist guerillas murder Polk.

Lippmann and Donovan — who were both in position to know better — were pleased with this politically expedient outcome. But doubts about the Polk case lingered. In 1977, Col. James Kellis, a U.S. investigator who had been abruptly removed from the case in 1948 at he behest of diplomats in Athens and Washington, swore in an affidavit that Polk's death had been arranged by ''a handful of right-wing fanatics and their British allies,'' and that American officials had colluded in a cover-up.

This is a conclusion that Marton upholds in her absorbing chronicle. Drawing upon letters, journals, interviews, and previously classified government documents, she also penetrates the Byzantine workings of the ''legal, paralegal, and illegal security services,'' both Greek and American, involved in the case. Her chapters on the mysterious theft of Polk's files after his death give her narrative the pace and texture of an espionage thriller.

The Polk Conspiracy is also surprisingly timely. Once again the United States is embroiled in a foreign conflict; once again the State Department and the military are making an effort, in the name of national security, to control the flow of news. Though George Polk belongs to a more innocent era of American journalism, he remains a model of courage, idealism, and blunt honesty. A-

http://www.williambowles.info/nsa/2007/nsa100807.html

CIA's Nazi Angel of Death Josef Mengele 'Created Twin Town in Brazil'

One in five pregnancies in the small Brazilian town have resulted in twins - most of them blond haired and blue eyed

By Nick Evans in Buenos Aires
www.telegraph.co.uk
23 Jan 2009

The steely hearted "Angel of Death", whose mission was to create a master race fit for the Third Reich, was the resident medic at Auschwitz from May 1943 until his flight in the face of the Red Army advance in January 1945.

His task was to carry out experiments to discover by what method of genetic quirk twins were produced – and then to artificially increase the Aryan birthrate for his master, Adolf Hitler.

Now, a historian claims, Mengele's notorious experiments may have borne fruit.
For years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed.

But residents of Candido Godoi now claim that Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, posing at first as a vet but then offering medical treatment to the women of the town.

Shuttling between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, he managed to evade justice before his death in 1979, but his dreams of a Nazi master race appeared unfulfilled.

In a new book, Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America, the Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa, a specialist in the post-war Nazi flight to South America, has painstakingly pieced together the Nazi doctor's mysterious later years.

After speaking to the townspeople of Candido Godoi, he is convinced that Mengele continued his genetic experiments with twins – with startling results.

He reveals how, after working with cattle farmers in Argentina to increase their stock, Mengele fled the country after fellow Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, was kidnapped by Israeli agents.

He claims that Mengele found refuge in the German enclave of Colonias Unidas, Paraguay, and from there, in 1963, began to make regular trips to another predominantly German community just over the border in Brazil – the farming community of Candido Godoi.

And, Mr Camaras claims, it was here that soon after the birthrate of twins began to spiral.

"I think Candido Godoi may have been Mengele's laboratory, where he finally managed to fulfil his dreams of creating a master race of blond haired, blue eyed Aryans," he said.

"There is testimony that he attended women, followed their pregnancies, treated them with new types of drugs and preparations, that he talked of artificial insemination in human beings, and that he continued working with animals, proclaiming that he was capable of getting cows to produce male twins."

The urbane German who arrived in Candido Godoi was remembered with fondness by many of the townspeople.

"He told us he was a vet," said Aloisi Finkler, a local farmer interviewed by Mr Camarasa. "He asked about illnesses we had among our animals, and told us not to worry, he could cure them. He appeared a cultured and dignified man."

Another farmer, Leonardo Boufler, said: "He went from farm to farm checking the animals. He checked them for TB, and injected those that were infected. He said he could carry out artificial insemination of cows and humans, which we thought impossible as in those days it was unheard of."
But the Nazi eugenicist did not concentrate on animals alone.

A former mayor and town doctor, Anencia Flores da Silva, set out to try to solve the town's mystery. He interviewed hundreds of people, and discovered one character who crept on cropping up: an itinerant medic calling himself Rudolph Weiss.

Dr da Silva said: "In the testimonies we collected we came across women who were treated by him, he appeared to be some sort of rural medic who went from house to house. He attended women who had varicose veins and gave them a potion which he carried in a bottle, or tablets which he brought with him. Sometimes he carried out dental work, and everyone remembers he used to take blood."

The people of Candido Godoi now largely accept that a Nazi war criminal was an inadvertent guest of theirs for several years in the early 1960s. The town's official crest shows two identical profiles and a road sign welcomes visitors to a "Farming Community and Land of the Twins". There is also a museum, the House of the Twins.

While the twins birthrate varies widely in different countries, it is typically about one in 80 pregnancies – a statistic that has left Mr Camarasa certain in his claim that Mengele was successfully pursuing his dreams of creating a master race, a real-life Boys from Brazil.

"Nobody knows for sure exactly what date Mengele arrived in Candido Godoi, but the first twins were born in 1963, the year in which we first hear reports of his presence," he said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/brazil/4307262/Nazi-angel-of-death-Josef-Mengele-created-twin-town-in-Brazil.html