Bush Aides can't Snub Subpoenas

BY KENNETH R. BAZINET
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
July 31, 2008

WASHINGTON - A federal judge ruled Thursday that White House aides can't ignore subpoenas from Congress, setting up a constitutional showdown that likely won't be settled until after President Bush is out of office, legal experts predicted Thursday.

In a first-of-its-kind case brought by Congress, U.S. District Judge John Bates ordered former White House Counsel Harriet Miers to testify about the firing of nine federal prosecutors. White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten also must hand over documents requested by a congressional oversight panel.

"We disagree with the District Court's decision," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Adamant that aides not be forced to testify, the Bush administration is expected to pursue a leisurely appeals process.

"They can run out the clock on their administration by appealing," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the legal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Congressional Democrats say the ruling also could force Bush's ex-political guru Karl Rove to testify in the probe into whether the White House orchestrated the firings of the U.S. attorneys, allegedly because they didn't like their politics. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi left open the prospect of a full House vote on a contempt citation against Rove, who defied his subpoena to appear before the Judiciary Committee on July 10.

"It certainly strengthens our hand," she said of Bates' ruling.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2008/07/31/2008-07-31_bush_aides_cant_snub_subpoenas.html

Sleeping with the Enemy: New Book Claims Frenchwomen Started a Baby Boom with Nazi Men During Vichy Regime

By GLENYS ROBERTS
Daily Mail
17th July 2008

Paris in the month of May was in full aphrodisiac bloom.

The girls were swinging along the boulevards in their short, flowery skirts, their hair flowing loose behind them. On the radio, the singer Tino Rossi - France's answer to Rudolph Valentino - belted out his latest romantic favourite. But a few short weeks later, on June, 14, 1940, the German army marched into the capital and occupied it for four years.

Everyone was surprised the tall, blond invading newcomers did not set about raping the population as the French had expected. Instead, they handed out bread and tarts. Moreover, they were so handsome and so brave in comparison with the drunken French soldiers who had surrendered the fight.

Soon, every French child was crying out that he wanted to be German, while every young French girl was lusting after the newcomers as though they were allies, not enemies, offering them oranges and standing on tip-toe to look into the plush interior of their limousines.

And French housewives, deprived of companionship while their soldier husbands were held prisoner, were happily sleeping with the enemy. The French have long sought to draw a veil over these aspects of the occupation, claiming heroic acts of resistance during the period when, in fact, they were little more than collaborators.

Now, with uncharacteristic daring, Patrick Buisson, director of France's History Channel, TF1, has set the record straight by writing a book, whose titillating title - 1940-1945: The Erotic Years - shows the extent to which his fellow countrymen actually enjoyed their wartime experiences.

The revelation comes at a time when Paris is being asked to come to terms with a series of unsettling memories of the era. An exhbition of photographs on show at the city's History Library depicts Parisians enjoying themselves immensely during the occupation - and some people are finding it distinctly distasteful.

Indeed, the deputy mayor of Paris said he wanted to be sick on seeing the pictures of well-dressed citizens shopping next to a market piled high with fruit and veg, giving no inkling of the wartime hardship France usually likes to complain about.

One photograph shows punters crowding into the nightclubs. Others show women wearing bikinis frolicking in a swimming pool, or wearing fancy hats at Paris's most fashionable racecourse. Everything gives the impression that far from being a time of hunger, fear and resistance, life during the war was one big party.

And although one picture depicts two Jews wearing the obligatory yellow Star of David brought in by the Vichy government in 1941, there is no acknowledgement that the French sent 76,000 Jews to their deaths while their countrymen were making merry.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1035804/Sleeping-enemy-New-book-claims-Frenchwomen-started-baby-boom-Nazi-men-Vichy-regime.html

George Soros Betrays the Left/National Endowment for Democracy (NED) Connections

Excerpt: "The Soros Media 'Empire' - The Power of Philanthropy to Engineer Consent"
by Michael Barker
Full article: http://www.swans.com/library/art14/barker02.html

Soros's 'progressive' media sinews

As George Soros is a liberal (not conservative) philanthropist it is entirely fitting that he would distribute some money to a handful of progressive (some might even say radical) media organizations. Thus progressive American groups that benefit from Soros's largesse include the Center for Media Education, Free Press, the Independent Media Institute (whose best known service is AlterNet), Pacific News Service, and Proteus Fund Inc. (In the past, MediaChannel has also received Soros funding). Given that most of Soros's philanthropy is linked to a democracy-manipulating agenda that is similar to that promoted by the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED), it could be argued that by lending his support to such well-respected progressive groups he helps further shield his less democratic work (which is where most of his money goes) from critical enquiry. Thus I will now provide a non-exhaustive list of Soros-funded media projects to illustrate the range of organizations that Soros makes use of to manipulate democracy worldwide.

US-based projects:

• Youth Media Council: a group that was formed in 2001 to "increase the media strategy and capacity of the youth organizing sector" that has helped to build national networks like the Media & Democracy Coalition and the Media Action Grassroots Network.

• Public Radio International (PRI): a group that was created in 1983 to "give listeners greater choice in radio programming than had been available" (FAQs, 2007). As well as receiving funding from a range of liberal foundations (e.g., in 2005 they received a US$1.25 million grant from the Ford Foundation), PRI's work is also funded by the antidemocratic US Institute of Peace. (28) Moreover, their former president of 17 years, Stephen L. Salyer, is now the president of the elite planning group, the Salzburg Seminar.

National projects:

• Al-Quds Educational Television (also known as the Institute of Modern Media): an Israeli-based "nonprofit media organization dedicated to strengthening the educational, culture, social and environmental well being of all Palestinians." The Institute is headed by Daoud Kuttab who founded it "with encouragement from the president of Al-Quds University Professor Sari Nusseibeh" -- an individual who is well known as an Israeli collaborator. Other 'democratic' funders of their work include Internews, the Westminster Foundation (which is the British version of the National Endowment for Democracy), and two groups that have received NED funding in the past, the Palestinian Center for Democracy and Elections, and the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy.

• CubaNet: a Cuban-based group which according to their Web site is a "non-profit organization that fosters free press in Cuba, assists its independent sector develop a civil society and informs the world about Cuba's reality," but significantly also receives funding from both the NED and the US Agency for International Development.

• Instituto Prensa y Sociedad: a Peruvian and Venezuelan-based democracy manipulator that receives strong support from the NED.

• ZaMir: an important Bosnian activist media network during the 1990s, which was supported by the NED.

International media groups:

• ARTICLE 19: a British-based group that has in the past obtained funding from the Westminster Foundation, and Rights and Democracy (the Canadian version of the NED). Gara LaMarche, the vice president and director of US programs for Soros's Open Society Institute, serves on ARTICLE 19's international advisory board.

• Committee to Protect Journalists: a US group that was created "in response to the often brutal treatment of their foreign colleagues by authoritarian governments and other enemies of independent journalism."

• Global Forum for Media Development: a group that receives funding from the NED and Ford Foundation amongst others.

• International Center for Journalists: a US group that was formed in 1984 to "improve[e] the quality of journalism worldwide." They are also supported by the NED.

• International Communications Forum (ICF) was founded in 1991 and is "devoted to media ethics and freedoms of expression and information." In 2003 their annual conference was sponsored by the Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation amongst others: two of this group's six vice presidents are linked to Soros's media network as Rafael Marques de Morais (who worked as a representative in Angola for the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa), and Frances Pinter (who is the former publishing director for the Soros Foundation).

• International Journalists' Network: a US-based group which aims to "help connect journalists with the opportunities and information they need to better themselves and raise journalism standards in their countries." Primary support for their work is provided by the Open Society Institute, the NED, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

• Media Diversity Institute: a London-based charity that "mobilises the power of media to lessen inter-group conflict, advance human rights." Their work obtains funding from the Westminster Foundation.

• The New Press: a "not-for-profit publishing house" that was set up in 1990 to act as a "major alternative to the large, commercial publishers." In addition to receiving ongoing support from the Open Society Institute they are funded by a range of liberal foundations including both the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. ...

http://www.swans.com/library/art14/barker02.html

Blackwater? More Like Murky Water

pogoblog.typepad.com

According to the Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of Inspector General, Blackwater may have improperly received numerous contracts set aside for small businesses. In a July 25th memorandum, the Inspector General raised concerns that the SBA did not adequately address several ambiguities and discrepancies that could have disqualified Blackwater from receiving small business contracts.

Although media reports frequently discuss Blackwater, the meaning of the name is complicated. "Blackwater" in its common usage describes several affiliated companies that operate under the umbrella business name of "Blackwater Worldwide." Many of these affiliates do not have "Blackwater" anywhere in their name, and many of the Blackwater contracts in question were awarded to the affiliate company Presidential Airways. To add to the confusion surrounding Blackwater's name, "Blackwater Worldwide" was, until recently, "Blackwater USA."

A recent exchange of letters between POGO and Blackwater provides an excellent example of just how complicated the naming issue is. POGO sent a letter addressed to "Blackwater USA" and received a reply from the General Counsel of "Blackwater Lodge and Training Center," who used "Blackwater Worldwide" stationery and referred to www.blackwaterusa.com. According to this letter, "Blackwater USA" is a "fictitious business name."

Just knowing what companies constitute "Blackwater" is difficult; however, the SBA's decision to consider Presidential Airways a small business was equally perplexing. In making a size determination for any Blackwater company, the SBA had to consider the cumulative revenue and employment of all Blackwater affiliates. Whether or not the SBA should have determined that Presidential was a small business largely depends on whether approximately 1,000 security personnel Blackwater provided to the Department of State and other government agencies should have been categorized as independent contractors or employees.

The SBA originally treated these personnel as contractors and consequently ruled that Blackwater had fewer than the upper limit of 1,500 employees for a small business. The Inspector General did not endorse this assessment, writing that "the SBA size determination did not, in our opinion, present a clear explanation for why the Agency concluded that the security personnel performing the [Department of State] contract were independent contractors."

The Inspector General questioned other aspects of the SBA's decision as well, including its neglecting to explain major discrepancies between the number of Blackwater employees reported by Presidential Airways and the number stated by Dun & Bradstreet, a firm that provides commercial information. The SBA also did not consider that Blackwater security personnel were treated as employees for the purposes of the Defense Base Act.

Blackwater's troubles with investigations are far from over. The SBA IG has referred the matter to the Inspectors General of the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs, which awarded the small business contracts to Blackwater. In addition, the review was only one of several requested by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who also asked for investigations into whether Blackwater has violated tax and labor laws. In the meantime, Blackwater appears to have tired of intense media scrutiny and is planning to scale back its often criticized security operations.

-- John Cappel

http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2008/07/blackwater-more.html

Video: Dennis Kucinich on Impeachment

Video: http://www.kucinich.us/
Articles: http://kucinich.us/impeachment/articles.pdf

Re "Alex Constantine Returns"

By Alex Constantine

Once again, the Conservative Voice, a mine of ringing right-wing propaganda, is taking me to task for debunking the "Islamo-fascism" red herring.

Paul Krugman is correct: "There isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination."
http://neveryetmelted.com/index.php/no-islamofascism/

Neocons parroting Bush, badly in need of a dictionary, promote the "islamo-fascism" line, eg. Raymond Ibrahim, editor of the Al Qaeda Reader, an omelet of texts written by Islamic extremists, and compares the words of Al Qaeda to Mein Kampf.

Ibrahim performs this service at David Horowitz's FrontPage site.

It's fairly well-known that Horowitz receives generous funding from Richard Mellon Scaife - a CIA propagandist since the early days of the cold war. (The intelligence connection runs in the family: "During World War II, while Richard and Cordelia's father, Alan Scaife, served in Europe in the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, the Scaife family lived in Washington."
- http://www.salon.com/news/1998/04/07news.html)

Scaife supports a phalanx of organizations that, like the FrontPage site, distribute fascist propaganda. They all have ties to the CIA:

American Enterprise Institute
Atlas Economic Research Foundation
David Horowitz Freedom Center
Federalist Society
Foundation for Economic Education
Free Congress Foundation (headed by Paul Weyrich)
Freedom House
GOPAC (headed by Newt Gingrich)
Independent Women's Forum
Intercollegiate Studies Institute (which operates the Collegiate Network)
Judicial Watch
Landmark Legal Foundation
Media Research Center (headed by Brent Bozell)
Pacific Legal Foundation
Pittsburgh World Affairs Council
Reason Foundation

http://www.answers.com/topic/richard-scaife

Most of these CIA-subsidized propagandists are towing the "Islamo-Fascism" clunker. Krugman: " ... a bunch of lightly armed terrorists and a fourth-rate military power — which aren’t even allies — pose a greater danger than Hitler’s panzers or the Soviet nuclear arsenal ever did. ... "
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/10/29/krugman-no-such-thing-as-islamofascism/

Blogger Steve Benen comments, "The politics of fear might be more effective if it were grounded in reality."

Why point the finger at the Middle East, when actual fascism is corporate and would probably not exist without the capitalistic impetus that flows internationally from the United States?

Fascism is unbridled capitalism - it is a feature of American life. It elevates thugs and criminals to positions of power. It is inherently conspiratorial and engages in acts of destruction to advance itself. Scapegoating "Islamo-fascists" - when American corporations in league with their corallaries in Germany, Japan, Italy, etc., make fascism possible and feed the geo-genocidal beast. The Arabs may have had Nazi collaborators, as did America itself, many more, but make no mistake about it, the U.S. is the beating heart of it all.

• IBM counted the Jews at Auschwitz - not shieks from Araby.

• GM mechanized the Blitzkrieg - not desert camel drivers.

• Standard Oil had a secret pact with the Reich - not fig farmers in Iraq.

• Coca-Cola had Nazi contracts - not the water-carrier out on the oasis.

• BTW, what kind of shoes do "conservatives" wear at Conservative Voice? What music do they listen to? Could be pertinent ...

Fascism is all-American - all-capitalist, corporate. Those who babble about "Islamo-fascism" echo George Bush, who hails from a family with reasonably well-known Nazi financial connections.

The finger-pointers are turned in the wrong direction. America's ruling elite are the fascists, and they are bringing the country to its ragged knees.

Corporate America and the Rise of Hitler

The hidden History of World War II
Part I: Corporate America and the Rise of Hitler
By Bill Doares

May 8 [was] the 50th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. United States President Bill Clinton, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Russian President Boris Yeltsin [gathered] in Moscow to commemorate that event.

Between 1933 and 1945, Hitler's Nazi regime conquered most of Europe and North Africa. It unleashed a war that took over 50 million lives. It forced tens of millions of people into slavery. And it carried out the biggest mass murder campaign of the 20th century. Six million Jewish people, half a million Romany and Signi people, and millions of Slavic people were poisoned in gas chambers, shot, deliberately starved or tortured to death in fiendish »scientific« experiments. Hundreds of thousands of disabled people, gay people and Communists, socialists and other anti-Nazis--many of them German--were also murdered by Hitler. These crimes were carried out in the name of »Nordic racial purity.«

The nightmare came to an end on April 30, 1945. Hitler blew his brains out as victorious Soviet troops closed in on his underground bunker in Berlin. His closest ally, Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, had been executed by Italian Communist fighters a day earlier. On May 9 the Nazi armies surrendered. Clinton, Kohl and Yeltsin are sure to recount all this on the anniversary. They will say the horrors must never happen again. But it will all be hypocrisy. They will conceal the class character of World War II. They won't say that Hitler and the Third Reich were creations of the capitalist profit system. They won't say that the millions of Soviet soldiers who gave their lives to defeat the Nazi war machine were fighting under the red flag of socialism. And they won't denounce the giant banks and corporations that financed fascism and profited from the Holocaust it unleashed.

Corporate America was pro-fascist

Hitler was made Germany's chancellor in 1933, at the height of the global crisis of capitalist overproduction known as the Great Depression. In Germany, one out of every three workers was unemployed. In the 1932 elections 13 million Germans had voted for Socialist or Communist candidates. Germany's wealthiest capitalists--the Krupps, Thyssens, Kirkdorfs, etc.--had funded the Nazi Party for nearly a decade. Now they wanted it in power.

On Jan. 3, 1933, Hitler was summoned to a meeting at the home of Reinhard Shroeder, a wealthy German banker, and asked to form a government. Within a year he was proclaimed fuehrer--absolute leader. Mussolini's Fascist Party had come to power in a similar fashion 11 years earlier. Germany and Italy weren't the only countries where big corporations financed fascist and racist movements during the Depression. In the United States half a dozen corporate magnates sat on the board of the pro-Hitler America First Committee.

The Du Pont dynasty that controlled General Motors and U.S. Rubber subsidized the fascist American Liberty League. It also funded the black-hooded, Klan-like Black Legion, which bombed union halls and murdered dozens of Black people, immigrants and pro-union auto workers in the Midwest. Among the Legion's victims was the Rev. Earl Little, Malcolm X's father.

In 1934, the Du Ponts and Morgans tried to hire former Marine Gen. Smedley Butler to stage a fascist coup against the liberal Roosevelt administration. Butler told Roosevelt, and the plan fizzled. Gen. Douglas MacArthur was named in the plot. There was a Senate investigation. But it is a measure of the power of big business that no one was ever prosecuted.

Contract on Germany

The social crisis in Germany was deeper than in the U.S. and other capitalist countries. Germany was Europe's most industrialized country. But it had been defeated in World War I. Britain had seized its African colonies, and with France had carved up its »spheres of influence« in the Middle East, eastern Europe and China. British and French monopolies were raking in profits from the unpaid labor of millions of miners, plantation workers, oil workers and railway builders in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and eastern Europe. U.S. capital was expanding in Latin American and Asian countries, often behind Marine Corps bayonets. World War I had put all of Europe in Wall Street's debt. But German bankers and business owners had only the surplus value produced by Germany's own workers at their disposal. And much of that had to be forked over to their rivals as »war reparations.«

The carnage of World War I, which killed 20 million people, had unleashed a revolutionary upsurge in Europe. It began in Russia in 1917, with the world's first socialist revolution. In 1919 the German working class rose in insurrection. The revolution was betrayed and defeated--but it scared the capitalists into making concessions. German workers won the eight-hour day, unemployment insurance and other rights in 1919. In the 1930s, U.S., British and French corporations and their governments felt they could give concessions to labor and still make money. But Germany's capitalists saw only one way to reverse their declining fortunes--war.

War against the working class at home, and war abroad in pursuit of new colonies and cheap labor. That was Hitler's job. Hitler's first acts were to smash the unions and the Communist and Socialist Parties. The right to strike and collective bargaining were abolished, and wages fell. The Hitler regime also launched a massive military buildup. And it opened a vicious anti-Jewish campaign to confuse, divide and misguide the people, especially the frustrated middle class. Corporate profits soared.

Persecution and Profits

Not only German capitalists hailed Hitler. Big U.S. corporations like Ford, General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil, Texaco, International Harvester, ITT and IBM, had invested $1.5 billion in Germany during the 1920s. Their owners were as eager as their German counterparts to see the labor movement and working-class parties smashed in Germany. And they wanted to profit off the Nazi military buildup. Most of these companies continued to operate in Germany during the war--and many used concentration-camp slave labor. Henry and Edsel Ford, Irenee du Pont, GM bosses James Mooney, William Knudsen and Alfred Sloan, Charles Wilson and Philip Reed of General Electric, IBM founder James Watson, Standard Oil's Walter Teagle and James Farish, ITT's Sosthenes Behn, oil billionaire J. Paul Getty and Kennedy family patriarch Joseph Kennedy were among the many U.S. »captains of industry« who openly supported Hitler. So did James Forrestal and Paul Nitze of Dillon, Read and Company, and John Foster Dulles of the corporate law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. Both companies were involved in floating loans for the Third Reich. GM's Knudsen called Nazi Germany »the miracle of the 20th century.« In 1939 Dulles told the Economic Club of New York: »We have to welcome and nurture the desire of the New Germany to find for her energies a new outlet.«

Dulles later became secretary of state under the Eisenhower administration. His brother Allen--who as a young Foreign Service agent helped install Europe's first fascist regime, that of Miklos Horthy in Hungary in 1921--became the CIA's first director. In 1932 both Dulles brothers boycotted their sister Eleanor's wedding because the bridegroom was Jewish. Forrestal went on to become the first U.S. secretary of defense. His career ended in 1949 when he threw himself from the window of Bethesda Naval Hospital after screaming that »Jewish Communists« were coming to get him.

Henry Ford and GM's James Mooney became personal friends of Der Fuehrer, who awarded them both the Order of the German Eagle, the Third Reich's highest honor, in 1938. Ford was singled out for praise in Hitler's book »Mein Kampf.« Ford's pro-Nazi sentiments reached beyond his pocketbook. He wrote a vicious anti-Semitic tract called »The International Jew« that was reprinted by the Nazis. His plants in Germany adopted an »Aryan-only« hiring policy in 1935, before Nazi law required it. In 1936 Ford dismissed its German manager, Erich Diestel, because he had a Jewish ancestor.

Still, there were frictions between Wall Street and the Third Reich. Hitler represented German, not U.S., capital. He outraged U.S. investors by restricting repatriation of profits and canceling Germany's bond payments. Nonetheless, there were still profits to be made. U.S. investment in Germany grew by nearly 49 percent in the 1930s. It fell everywhere else in continental Europe.

Besides, Wall Street's and Washington's attitude toward Hitler wasn't guided solely by concern for immediate profit. It was clear that Nazi Germany was preparing for war--and that it was casting covetous eyes on eastern Europe, which German capitalists have always viewed the way Wall Street views Latin America. Wall Street and Washington--and London and Paris--wanted to ensure that the Nazi war drive went even further east. They wanted to use Hitler to destroy the country that every capitalist hated: the socialist Soviet Union.

[Sources for information confirming the ties between U.S. big business and the Nazis include the diaries of U.S. Ambassador to Germany William Dodd, 1934-38; the war diaries of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau; and »The Collapse of the Weimar Republic« by David Abraham.]

Reprinted from the May 4, 1995, issue of Workers World newspaper.
For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@wwp.blythe.org.

http://www.wildcat-www.de/zirkular/16/z16histo.htm

Friday's House Judiciary Hearing on Impeachment: A Victory and a Challenge

by Dave Lindorff
baltimorechronicle.com/

Tue, 07/29/2008 Impeachment activists need to now redouble their efforts to make Congress do its Constitutional duty, and initiate a formal impeachment proceeding.

The dramatic hearing on presidential crimes and abuses of power held on Friday by the House Judiciary Committee was both a staged farce, and at the same time, a powerful demonstration of the power of a grassroots movement in defense of the Constitution. It was at once both testimony to the cowardice and self-inflicted impotence of Congress and of the Democratic Party that technically controls that body, and to the enormity of the damage that has been wrought to the nation’s democracy by two aspiring tyrants in the White House. ...

While the hearing was strictly limited to the most superficial airing of Bush administration crimes and misdemeanors, the fact that the session—technically an argument in defense of 26 articles of impeachment filed in the House over the past several months by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)--was nonetheless a major victory for the impeachment movement. It happened because earlier in the month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has sworn since taking control of the House in November 2006, that impeachment would be “off the table” during the 110th Congress, called a hasty meeting with Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Rep. Conyers, and Rep. Kucinich, and called for such a limited hearing.

It was no coincidence that shortly before Pelosi’s backdown, peace activist and Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan announced that her campaign had collected well over the 10,000 signatures necessary to qualify for listing on the ballot as an independent candidate for Congress against Pelosi in the Speaker’s home district in San Francisco. Sheehan has been an outspoken advocate of impeaching both Bush and Cheney. “Pelosi is trying to throw a bone to her constituents by allowing a hearing on impeachment,” said Sheehan, who came to Washington, DC to attend. “It’s just like her finally stating publicly that Bush’s presidency is a failure—something it has taken her two years to come to, but which we’ve been saying for years.”

So determined were Pelosi, Hoyer and Conyers to limit the scope and intensity of the hearing that they acceded to a call for Republicans on the Judiciary Committee to adhere to Thomas Jefferson’s Rules of the House, which prohibit any derogatory comments about the President, which was interpreted by Chairman Conyers as meaning no one, including witnesses or members of the committee, could suggest that Bush had lied or deceived anyone. Since a number of Rep. Kucinich’s proposed articles of impeachment specifically charge the president with lying to Congress and the American People, this made for some comic moments, with witness Bruce Fein, a former assistant attorney general under former President Ronald Reagan, saying he would have to reference his listing of crimes to the “resident” of the White House, without naming him.

In the end, the ludicrous rule imposing a gag on calling the president a criminal fell by the wayside, with witness Vincent Bugliosi, a former Los Angeles deputy district attorney, accusing Bush of being guilty of the murder of over 4000 American soldiers and of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians because he had “lied” the country into an illegal and unnecessary war, and with committee member Shirley Jackson Lee (D-CA) suggesting that the president may have committed treason in invading Iraq, and that he appeared to be preparing to commit it again with an unprovoked invasion of Iran.

Conyers also acquiesced in a Republican effort to minimize public monitoring and involvement in the hearing, allowing the minority party to fill most of the available seats in the hearing room with office staffers who showed little interest in the proceedings. Only a few dozen of the hundreds of pro-impeachment activists who had come to the Rayburn Office Building at 7 am in order to get seats in the Judiciary Committee hearing room were allowed in, with the rest having to remain in the hall or go to two remote “overflow” rooms to watch the proceedings on a TV hookup. Conyers also went along with a call by Republican members of the committee to have some of those who did make it into the hearing ejected simply for wearing buttons on their shirts calling for impeachment (the Republican members referred to these as “signs”), though such small personal tokens are routinely allowed in congressional hearing rooms.

It was clear that this was to be a tightly controlled and strictly limited hearing.

It was also clear that it was intended to go nowhere.

At one point, after hearing witnesses like Fein, Bugliosi, former representative and Nixon impeachment committee member Elizabeth Holtzman, former Salt Lake City mayor and impeachment activist Rocky Anderson, former House Clinton impeachment manager Bob Barr, former Watergate Committee counsel and current senior counsel of the Brennan Center for Justice Frederick A.O. Schwartz, and Elliott Adams, president of the board of Veterans for Peace, lay out the administration’s crimes and abuses of power—which included charges of usurping the legislative powers of Congress, violating international treaties, war crimes, lying to Congress, an illegal war, felony violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment, defying Congressional subpoenas, obstruction of justice and more, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), chair of the Constitution subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, appeared convinced that the abuses were real and serious.

But Nadler, who for two years has been a major obstacle on the Judiciary Committee to any efforts to move impeachment to a formal hearing, said, “No president has been removed from office through impeachment.” He asked the witnesses, “How would you approach impeachment today so it would be a viable option?”

Former Rep. Holtzman responded, “The real remedy to a president who believes he is above the law is impeachment. There is no running away from that.” She said, “An impeachment inquiry, handled fairly, could work. Maybe I’m a cockeyed optimist, but I believe it could work.”

The basic point, made by Holtzman, by Fein and by many others, including this writer, is that worrying about the political opposition to impeachment, both in the House, and in the Senate, not to mention among the broader public, is completely wrongheaded. Even when impeachment articles were first filed against Nixon, the public and the bulk of the Congress were solidly against the idea (unlike Bush, who has a 19% approval rating, Nixon had just won an epic landslide re-election victory in 1972 against George McGovern). It was during the hearings that the tide turned, as evidence of malfeasance, criminality and abuse of power became evident through hearing testimony. The same would certainly happen in the case of President Bush and/or Vice President Cheney. Most Americans don’t even know that the president made up evidence to justify the war against Iraq out of whole cloth. They don’t know what the Geneva Conventions are with regard to torture. They don’t know why Congress passed the FISA act, which Bush has been feloniously violating to spy on them (it was passed because Nixon was using the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without judicial warrants--exactly what Bush is now doing!). They don’t know that Bush has been refusing to enact laws passed by the Congress. Public hearings by an impeachment panel would make all these high crimes and misdemeanors clear on national TV to all sentient Americans. Moreover, as Holtzman pointed out, the president would not be able to use the claim of “executive privilege” to withhold testimony from aides in an impeachment inquiry, the way he has done when they have been subpoenaed by other House and Senate committees. Impeachment would be about violations of the very executive actions he would be claiming privilege on. As well, an impeachment committee, unlike any other committee of the Congress, is specifically sanctioned and empowered in the Constitution, meaning that even strict “constructionist” Federalists on the bench would have a hard time backing presidential obstruction.

As Holtzman noted, “There is no executive privilege in impeachment, because refusing to testify is itself an impeachable offense.”

Committee Republicans, aided by two law professors they had brought in to testify, Stephen Presser of Northwestern University School of Law and Jeremy Rabkin of George Mason University School of Law, tried to argue that impeachment was only meant for crimes in which the official in question, or the president, was seeking personal gain. This nonsense was knocked down by most of the speakers, who quoted numerous founders who had made it clear that what high crimes referred to were actions—even taken with the noblest of intentions—that undermined the Constitution or abused the powers of the office. As Rep. Nadler said, “Impeachment has nothing to do with intentions or with good faith. Impeachment has to do with abuse of power which weakens the balance of power.”

In the end, the hearing petered out, taking no action of any kind—exactly the result that Pelosi, Hoyer and Conyers cynically intended.

Now it is up to the public and the impeachment movement to call the Democratic leadership's bluff and take impeachment to the next level. Noting that even Rep. Conyers ended the hearing by saying, “We are not done yet, and we do not intend to go away until we achieve the accountability that Congress is entitled to and that the American people deserve,” Rep. Kucinich and five other co-sponsors of his articles of impeachment (Robert Wexler, Tammy Baldwin, Keith Ellison, Maurice Hinchey, Sheila Jackson-Lee, and Hank Johnson) are calling on all Americans to contact their representatives (202-224-3121) and urge them to join in co-sponsoring those articles and in calling for a formal impeachment hearing.

They are also calling on everyone to contact their local and national media, nearly all of whom have blacked out news of impeachment. Incredibly, the New York Times, for example, has not even reported on Friday’s hearing, even as a news “brief.” Those news organizations, like the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer, that did report on the hearings did so only in short, inside articles. Though the hearing was aired in full on C-Span (and is still available for download), many Americans don’t even know it happened.

Time is short, but even at this late date, it would be a simple matter to impeach the president on some issues. As several of Friday’s witnesses pointed out, President Bush has essentially dared Congress to act, admitting that he openly violated the FISA law—a felony, and openly admitting that he has refused to enact laws passed by the Congress, claiming a power—unitary executive authority—not even mentioned in the Constitution. He has openly admitted to having known about, and approved, “enhanced interrogation techniques” devised by his subordinates—techniques like waterboarding which clearly violate the Geneva Conventions and US law. No hearings would be required to establish these high crimes and misdemeanors. They could simply be voted on by an Impeachment Committee and sent to the full House for a vote.

Even if there were no time for a Senate trial, the simple act of impeaching the president for one or more abuses of power would serve notice on future presidents that future such abuses would not be tolerated. Failure to do so, and allowing this administration to leave office unimpeached, would send the opposite message: that Congress is no longer a co-equal branch of government, but is merely a consultative body, at best, and that a president is in effect a dictator.

That Pelosi buckled and permitted a hearing on impeachable crimes by the Bush/Cheney administration is a major victory for the impeachment movement, but it must not be the end of the line. Impeachment activists need to now redouble their efforts to make Congress do its Constitutional duty, and initiate a formal impeachment proceeding.

As former Republican representative Bob Barr, now the Libertarian candidate for president, told Friday’s hearing, “We had a nuclear clock during the Cold War. In the ‘90s we had a debt clock. Now we have a Constitution Clock.”

That clock is getting close to midnight, and it is ticking.
••••••••
About the author: Philadelphia journalist Dave Lindorff is a 34-year veteran, an award-winning journalist, a former New York Times contributor, a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, a two-time Journalism Fulbright Scholar, and the co-author, with Barbara Olshansky, of a well-regarded book on impeachment, The Case for Impeachment. His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

Jewish group condemns Nazi funeral

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) — The funeral of a former Nazi concentration camp commander was used to celebrate his crimes, a Jewish human rights group said Tuesday and urged Croatia's president to investigate.

Dinko Sakic's funeral was an "outrageous display of unrepentant racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia," the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israeli branch director, Efraim Zuroff, said in a letter addressed to President Stipe Mesic and faxed to The Associated Press.

Sakic died at age 87 on July 20 while serving 20 years in prison for war crimes he committed as head of the notorious Jasenovac camp, the worst of about 40 camps run by the then Nazi puppet regime of Croatia.

Mesic said in a statement that he has repeatedly condemned Nazi crimes, including Sakic's.

Zuroff said the funeral was used to glorify the World War II regime and urged authorities to investigate.

Sakic was buried wearing the uniform of the Ustasha, the local pro-Nazi movement, according to the Croatian daily Vecernji. It said a priest called Sakic a "model for all Croatians."

The funeral was private, attended by family and several minor right-wing politicians.

"What Croatian society needs is a clear and unequivocal reminder that Dinko Sakic was a mass murderer ... (and) that one of Croatia's greatest achievements was his prosecution and punishment," Zuroff wrote.

Sakic fled Croatia when the pro-Nazi state was crushed in 1945. He was extradited from Argentina in 1998 to face trial in Croatia, where he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats were killed in Jasenovac.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hRzxud8ft-TCqLb3gMypJzCwCRdQD927MFO00

YouTube Video: US 'escalates covert Iran missions'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4FkZfRXLGA&eurl=http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&q=cia+disinformation&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&start=10

Related article: "Cheney Trying to Create Casus Belli, Direct Special Ops in Iran, and Provoke the Entire Shiite World," by Gary Leupp, Dissident Voice, July 3rd, 2008:

"In his latest New Yorker piece Seymour Hersh connects the resignation of Adm. William Fallon as CENTCOM commander in March to his efforts to control “Special Operations” conducted by CIA and U.S. military personnel within Iran. These operations, designed to produce regime change in Iran, have been conducted outside the normal chain of command and beyond the pale of congressional oversight, although the Democratic leadership in Congress (including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes) has accepted the presidential “Finding” that authorizes them. ... "

James Randi, CIA, Mind Control, FMSF, Selective Human Breeding, Rockey & Pellwinkle and the Pariahs Behind the Ritual Abuse of Children

James Randi

The following letter is from my old research partner Richard "Cloudrider" Farley, a humble country reporter who investigated CIA mind control activity for years and hounded the perps constantly with brilliant, rambling, labyrinthine, sarcastic e-mails to let them know that he was on to them. Every letter was a data trove and a joy to read if you happened to be researching mind control and ritual abuse. This note was written in 1996. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation to which he refers is a CIA mind control front.

Peas,
- AC

FALSE MEMORY SPINDROME

Here's the list forwarded to me the other day of the FMSF's advisory board, from their most recent online version of their False Memory Syndrome Foundation newsletter. I've simply been "watching" these folks for a while. Some of these names are VERY interesting given their research histories. Well known, many are.

So...here's what's happening:

UCLA identifications: Louis Jolyon West; John Hochman; Rochel Gelman.
Others at Berkeley (Singer; Crews; Ofshe). Stanford & Harvard, of course. (Odd, yes, that being John Mack's baliwick, too?

The "Amazing" James Randi (of CSICOP and CIA" consultant on magic and debunk/disinform fame). His presence sort of gives away who and what this FMSF scam is about.

Odd also, yes, that Randi got into a "pi**ing" contest with former Navy signals scientist Eldon Byrd recently (1992-1993) and the two fought it out in a slander suit Byrd filed against Randi? Something to do with Byrd's alleged plea bargain to some kind of mail-porn charge, which Randi allegedly had hyped up publicly to be more than that. Byrd won, but Randi pleaded "destitution" and Eldon got an award of $1.00. (It was tried in Baltimore, back in 1993. Baltimore Sun reported it, and Byrd told me about it over dinner at C. B. "Scott" Jones home one evening of several we spent together back in '92 and '93 there.)

Byrd said that Uri Geller put up $10,000 for his legal costs. Byrd and Geller are good friends, from back in the '70s, and Geller and Randi's bitter adversarial relationship is well known and goes way back, too. (You might want to read Andrijah Puharich's "URI" if you've not yet.)

Byrd says he had been "set-up" by postal inspectors, part of some initiative to discredit him because he was too public with his personal interests in "psi," etc. He'd allegedly had some Navy security clearance issues dog him, which contributed to his early retirement as one of their senior most civilian scientists.

Of course, he could have been "living his cover," much as Jones allegedly was doing when he retired from active Navy Intelligence duty in the mid-1970s to create his "new" identity as fatherly "Professor Jones," of the Psi-Institute for Hot Oil Massages.

Even more bizarre: When he was still with the Navy, Dr. Byrd was the contract manager for some of the research Michael Persinger did (see FMSF list below), on "neuro-impacts" of various EMFs and ELFs. Something about wave-propagation and influences on submariners if somebody "beeped" them with mind-influencing EMF signals, etc., that kind of thing. Pretty small club, these folks. "Mind-benders" all.

The Orne's are now at Penn, of course. Most government "mind-influencers" we (the taxpayers) funded have now turned their mis-shapen medical ethics to work for the Dark Side. You've seen them in your Psych-Lit data base searches I suggested? Their work is funded by the big foundations (Hughes, etc.) and is buried so arcanely in technomedbabble as to be difficult...but
not impossible...to excavate.

Not to omit the aforementioned Michael Persinger, up at Laurentian University, in Canada, where MUCH of this kind of work has been undertaken ... (no pun intended) ... because of Canada absence of a Bill of Rights and First Amendment, not to mention a more restrictive National Security apparatus regarding disclosures. He was previously funded by Navy, and is/was a big buddy of C. B. Jones (Jones says) and other gov't signal propagation experts...for whom Persinger does/did work on "receptivity" and neuro-effects of external signals. See Psych-Lit and other refs.

The "web" of slime balls who have diddled with the knobs on the planetary consciousness is laid out here. But: Sunlight is the best disinfectant! There it is.

Best,

Dick (cloudrider@aol.com)

P.S. - Did you see the tantalizing "blurb" on Rather Dan's CBS News last night? It was a "read only" story with a graphic, about "researchers have mapped auditory hallucinations in the brain." Dan showed a computerized brain-scan "of a normal person," and then one of the distributed activity of "a schizophrenic while hearing voices." That was it. Hmmm. Do you have a citation for what that may have been drawn from?

Due to the Powell Colin-ectomy from the Newt-onian Presidential Campaign, Rather Dan apparently truncated the brain piece. My guess is it came from a journal "press release," but he didn't say which one. No other info given.

Interestingly, immediately following that little tid-byte, Rather had a story about "subliminals" in computer games (and other "retail" places). A new CD-game entitled "EdorFUN" was featured, and a benign history of the field was presented. ("Oh, 'Brave New World' that has such people in it.")

The "Eye on America" segment reported in some depth about (it said) "alleged" subliminals. I was amused to see a couple of identifiable "experts," saying the stuff doesn't work, etc., etc. We were left by CBS "not to worry" about yet one more scientific uncertainty with "unlimited market potential."

No surprises there.

But lingering out in the "aethers," there WAS that BBC news report back in April 1993, which was shot when we (Human Potential Foundation...the Pell/Jones thing fueled by Larry Rockeybucks) had a couple of visiting Russians over to demonstrate their "Psychocorrection" software for a bunch of intell types.

Included at that private but unclassified symposium we threw (in Tyson's Corners, at offices of Systems Integration Research, who were competing to get the Russians' "brokers" to set up a U.S. defense-intell deal to exploit this technology), were guys like Dr. Richard Nakamura (sp?), the head neuro-guy (there's another pun) from the NIH/NIMH. Also some CIA guys (Pandolfi & Green, who's ex-agency); some "Star Wars" office types; and of course your usual smattering of blue-suiters from USAF & DOD.

(Both Newt and Al Gore, not to mention the White House, are very aware of all of this. Given that it was a Rockey and Pell-Winkle Adventure, what might that tell you? Right! Especially given the Rockey-funded "UFO" Initiative trying to set up the Clintonistas, and Larry's funding and advocacy for "alien
abductions" guru John E. Mack up at Hahvahd Yahd. Not to worry.

It's still America because WE say it's still America. By the way, anybody SEEN Alien Ambassador Steve Greer lately?)

The BBC came and shot a separate segment of the Russians' "subliminal attitude adjuster" for their 12-minute segment on "Non-Lethal Weapons" and doctrine, (a la John Alexander, Janet & Chris Morris, etc.) which was all the rage during the earlier Clintonista period as "dueling defense budgets" evolved. Les Aspin died for our sins, so that debate is VERY black now, with
Deutch of MIT and Sheila Widnall, also of MIT, carrying CIA and USAF. (Funny, that Bosnian-Serb party going on over at Wright-Patterson AFB, in Dayton. Maybe old "Hangar 18" is going to be the new Geneva, and the "Gray/EBEs" invited the Serbs in for some strawberry ice cream?)

The Russians said "it works." And "our side" was quietly amazed that the Russky doctors had apparently "figured out the algorithm" we've spent gazillions working on. And these ex-Soviet scientists had it working on an IBM-386 platform (at least the version they showed us). The later stuff was "at home" on another board.

Of course, the Russians said THEY had refused KGB funding, and their work was aimed at helping bend the minds of alcoholics and drug addicts back to the sanity of service to the state. But OTHER scientists, former colleagues of these guys, had NOT been so "ethical," the Russkies said, and had indeed gone ahead and helped the KGB guys with their nefarious experiments. Right.

That's why Rockefeller was funding Cdr. C. B. Jones to showcase this little bit of what they called "subliminal negotiation" technology to the intell community. Just think...millions and millions of little school kids, watching "Channel One" and having their plastic mind "Newt-ralized." Voila! No more pesky consumers with consciousness, let alone citizens with conscience.

A marketer's (and corporate labor negotiator's) dream? Truth is what is believed, right? And people will fight and die...and even kill...for what they can be made to believe. Just ask the Rabins.

Did you ever see that BBC segment? It ran all around the world but here in the US of A. That's a tad odd, isn't it? That the whole world was watching us think about "non-lethal" doctrine except ourselves? Ah, yes. The most effective kind of "mind control" is simply to control the flow of information. Then, while the people believe they are making "choices," it is the "gatekeepers" who are setting the agenda and presenting the alternatives, guided by their "enlightened self interest."
-----
[brace yourself for FM-SPINdrome Foundation spammage -d4]
(From the FMSF newsletter...last few pages...as forwarded to me. Can't vouch authenticity.)

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation is a qualified 501(c)3 corporation with its principal offices in Philadelphia and governed by its Board of Directors. While it encourages participation by its members in its activities, it must be understood that the Foundation has no affiliates and that no other organization or person is authorized to speak for the Foundation without the prior written approval of the Executive Director. All membership dues and contributions to the Foundation must be forwarded to the Foundation for its disposition.

WHAT IF?

WHAT IF, parents who are facing lawsuits and want legal information about FMS cases, had to be told, "I'm sorry, there isn't any such thing available?"

WHAT IF, your son or daughter began to doubt his or her memories and called FMSF only to get a recording, "This number is no longer in operation?"

WHAT IF, a journalist asks you where to get information about the FMS phenomenon, and you had to answer, "Sorry, I don't know?"

WHAT IF, you want to ask a question that only an expert, familiar with FMS can answer, and find out that FMSF can no longer provide that information? Where would you turn?

WHAT IF the False Memory Syndrome Foundation did not exist? A frightening thought, isn't it? Please support our Foundation. We cannot survive without your support!

Reprinted from the August 1994 PFA (MI) Newsletter

YEARLY FMSF MEMBERSHIP INFORMATION

Pamela Freyd, Ph.D., Executive Director

[and of course, the cocktail-party list]

FMSF Scientific and Professional Advisory Board,

November 1, 1995:

o AARON T. BECK, M.D., D.M.S., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

o TERENCE W. CAMPBELL, Ph.D., Clinical and Forensic Psychology, Sterling Heights, MI

o ROSALIND CARTWRIGHT, Rush Presbyterian St. Lukes Medical Center, Chicago, IL

o JEAN CHAPMAN, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI

o LOREN CHAPMAN, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI

o FREDERICK C. CREWS, Ph.D., University of California,

Berkeley, CA

o ROBYN M. DAWES, Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

o DAVID F. DINGES, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, The

Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, PA

o HENRY C. ELLIS, Ph.D., University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM

o FRED FRANKEL, M.B.Ch.B., D.P.M., Beth Israel Hospital, Harvard

Medical School, Boston, MA

o GEORGE K. GANAWAY, M.D., Emory University of Medicine, Atlanta, GA

o MARTIN GARDNER, Author, Hendersonville, NC

o ROCHEL GELMAN, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, CA

o HENRY GLEITMAN, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

o LILA GLEITMAN, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

o RICHARD GREEN, M.D., J.D., Charing Cross Hospital, London

o DAVID A. HALPERIN, M.D., Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York,

NY

o ERNEST HILGARD, Ph.D., Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

o JOHN HOCHMAN, M.D., UCLA Medical School, Los Angeles, CA

o DAVID S. HOLMES, Ph.D., University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS

o PHILIP S. HOLZMAN, Ph.D., Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

o JOHN KIHLSTROM, Ph.D., Yale University, New Haven, CT

o HAROLD LIEF, M.D., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

o ELIZABETH LOFTUS, Ph.D., University of Washington, Seattle, WA

o PAUL McHUGH, M.D., Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

o HAROLD MERSKEY, D.M., University of Western Ontario, London,

Canada

o ULRIC NEISSER, Ph.D., Emory University, Atlanta, GA

o RICHARD OFSHE, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, CA

o EMILY K ORNE, B.A., University of Pennsyllvania, The Institute

of Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, PA

o MARTIN ORNE, M.D., Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, The

Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, PA

o LOREN PANKRATZ, Ph.D., Oregon Health Sciences University,

Portland, OR

o CAMPBELL PERRY, Ph.D., Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

o MICHAEL A. PERSINGER, Ph.D., Laurentian University, Ontario,

Canada

o AUGUST T. PIPER, Jr., M.D., Seattle, WA

o HARRISON POPE, Jr., M.D., Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA

o JAMES RANDI, Author and Magician, Plantation, FL

o HENRY L. ROEDIGER, III, Ph.D., Rice University, Houston, TX

o CAROLYN SAARI, Ph.D., Loyola University, Chicago, IL

o THEODORE SARBIN, Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz, CA

o THOMAS A. SEBEOK, Ph.D., Indiana Univeristy, Bloomington, IN

o LOUISE SHOEMAKER, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania,

Philadelphia, PA

o MARGARET SINGER, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, CA

o RALPH SLOVENKO, J.D., Ph.D., Wayne State University Law School,

Detroit, MI

o DONALD SPENCE, Ph.D., Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center,

Piscataway, NJ

o JEFFREY VICTOR, Ph.D., Jamestown Community College, Jamestown, NY

o HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD, M.A., Institute of Psychological Therapies,

Northfield, MN

o LOUIS JOLYON WEST, M.D., UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA.

-------

Date: October 24, 1995
To: Frontline (frontline@wgbh.org)
From: Dick Farley (cloudrider@aol.com)

Re: "In Search of Satan" / Satanic Ritualistic Abuse, etc.

Air Date: Tuesday, October 24, 1995, at 9 p.m. EDT.

As a journalist who has spent several years examining the various threads which make up the very bizarre tapestry of "SRA" and "alien abuctions," as well as alleged MPD and "induced multiples/alters-as-secret agents for _____", I was saddened that you folks apparently were so easily led astray. Unless, of course, Washington "intelligence personality" Dan Smith is
correct and some of your contractual producers and on-board staffers are what he has called "company men," i.e., having CIA or other intelligence community connections. I'll leave all that for Dan and his Capitol Hill friends to sort out.

By way of brief background in this field, I am a journalist and public policy professional, having a varied background in non-profits doing environmental and science policy work. I won the Associated Press "Mark Twain" Award for Investigative Reporting

in our Mid-Atlantic region, in 1990. I worked for several years with an organization called the "Human Potential Foundation," chartered in Washington, DC and based in Falls Church, Virginia. It was founded by U. S. Senator Claiborne Pell and funded primarily by Laurance S. Rockefeller as one of his several current philanthropic initiatives seeming to promote alternative religious and psychiatric/psychological paradigms, including so-called "UFOs" and "abductions," having "Global Mind Change" potentials. Rockefeller put more than $700,000 through the "HPF" from 1991 to 1994, as Common Cause Magazine recently reported (Fall, 1995. Page 7). The network of allied scientists and medical experimenters runs throughout
academic, military/intell and government-related specialists in mind-influencing, psychobiology, "political psychiatry" and "exceptional human performance," and makes efforts at reaching into the highest echelons of our elected government...with dubious intentions and reprehensible ethics.

You will see my name (listed as C. Richard Farley, Jr.) in the acknowledgements of the 1993 book about purported "alien abductions" by John E. Mack, M.D., of Harvard. Although I have been portrayed variously by some of the principals of the "HPF" and Rockefeller minions as a "disgruntled ex-employee," that is not the case. I was working for the organization, after being recruited, as Director of Project Development, addressing the various scientific and educational paradigm-shifting foci the organization's principals espoused in their IRS filing and their brochure and internal documentation. I took myself "off" the so-called Rockefeller "UFO Initiative" to the White Houes (on which I worked from Oct. 1992 through April, 1994).

Later, the HPF reduced its staff and laid all paid employees off, moving
operations to the Falls Church basement in the home of Jones. Incidental to your program of tonight, and my purpose for writing this, is that I worked from August, 1991 through at May, 1994, the HPF and its President, who is retired naval intelligence officer Cdr. C.B. "Scott" Jones, Ph.D. Jones also was a contractual consultant (KamanTEMPO, Inc.) to the Defense Nuclear Agency (1981-1985) before next working for Senator Pell as Special Assistant (1985-1991), ostensibly looking after Pell's "paranormal" interests. (Jones is also listed in Mack's book, as is L.S. Rockefeller.)

During part of that period and after I'd left the organization (Oct. 1992 through May, 1995), Cdr. Jones and what was left of the HPF (after he got rid of his only two full-time staffers, and with Pell eventually resigning as we have "closed in" on these guys), focused almost all of his public energy on Mr. Rockefeller's purported fascination with so-called "UFOs" and purported "alien abductions." Rockefeller is alleged, based on credible online data and published information, to have made a contribution of prestige and perhaps money to help Harvard's Dr. Mack resist efforts there to censure him for his "alien abduction" beliefs, as he claims is his "diagnosis" of the experiences of his "exceptional experiencers." But that's not all of it, and this certainly isn't about a doddering billionaire with a fascination for the bizarre. It's about power and abuse.

Basically, what tickled me about your program this evening was your reference to Ms. Gloria Steinem, whose magazine published an early and influential report about purported SRA, as your film revealed. What was fascinating is that you did not pursue this high-profile person's involvements further, back to her funding sources and political linkages, which lead to the same sources that have funded "alien abduction research, and the promotion of such scenarios by what "UFO" critic (and top space and reconnaissance technical writer) Philip Klass has repeatedly said is a "highly placed UFO cult."

What you also missed, and what I do know from my personal contacts with some of your "consultants" like Mr. Gus Rousseau in the Washington area, and others, is that Frontline has a deep understanding and much primary information about the range of phenomena and cross-linkages often termed "UFOs," as well as "recalled memories," etc. Your recent repeat of your earlier "debunking" of recalled memories and MPD, in which you had featured a well-known CIA-related psychiatrist purporting to "plant" MPD identities in the Hillside Strangler, I believe, was fairly transparent, especially if one knows the actual history of that psychiatrist. One would almost be led to conclude that your intention was "creative deflection" of mainstream public scrutiny of these phenomena...not as "metaphysicalities," but rather as techniques and applications of technologies in human hands. Hopefully you have thought all of these choices through?

Gloria Steinem's "friendship" with the afore-mentioned Cdr. C.B. Jones, who demonstrably is and has been one of the higher placed "connections" among so-called paranormal researchers and "street-level" uses of what is termed in tradecraft as "applied anomalous phenomena," would have borne examination, especially given the reported "timing" of the appearance of SRA on the psychiatric scene. Whether "agents" or "assets," all of these folks are very closely connected and "inter-locking." Funding for the work of Dr. Braun at Rush-Presbyterian also would have been of more than passing interest to Frontline's viewers, as would have been a more circumspect examination of the so-called "Greenbaum" lectures and Cory Hayward's
allegations. There is independent corroboration of some of what he asserts, some of it from government publications or "gray literature" that is low-profile, but certainly not secret. Although I'm certain you have known of it and have decided to pursue "other threads," I must also call your attention to the reports of legal cases emanating from CIA's admitted abuses of
psychiatric patients at Allen Memorial Institute, in Canada, by CIA-sponsored (and Rockefeller-funded) practitioner, the late Dr. Ewen Cameron...who once was president of the World Psychiatric Association. Who funds Dr. Braun? Let me guess.

See: Thomas, Gordon. "Journey Into Madness." Bantam. 1989 (hardback) and 1990 (paper). Page 200-201 in the latter, will get you started just fine. Basically, other literature alleges that some of the "cult-like" contexts of so-called memory induction (allegedly to stimulate MPD's and "coded access" to
these so-called personality fragments by hypnotic suggestion) has been routinely used to protect couriers and operatives who are destined for insertion behind enemy lines, or who have had exposures to highly (dangerously) classified information which is so sensitive that extreme psychological protection measure such as that alleged is, at least theoretically, justifiable.

Also, the film's dismissive references to pre-WWII funding of "Nazi" (more accurately, Nazi-influencing) psychiatry and mental-health related "eugenics" practices, in Germany and in the U. S. before and after the war, can readily be traced to the Rockefeller funding. This is consistent with that family's long- standing interest in "selective breeding" of the human race,
supposedly to eliminate the "useless eaters" and other rif-raff among us, who apparently don't measure up to their econometric standards of "citizenry." Often, according to some published accounts, justifications for these kinds of beliefs have come from one or another of "occult doctrines" or trendy belief-systems frequently dabbled in by self-styled "elites."

Suffice it to say that some of us who have been analyzing the apparent Frontline strategies of related topics getting your "treatment" were not disappointed, at least insofar as our analyses are concerned. Journalistically, that's another story.

But "if you bring the football, you can make the rules," and your wealthy patrons, who funded the films you have packaged on these topics to the exclusion of a serious and balanced inquiry into human victimizations, and the intentions of whoever it is allegedly victimizing these folks, do get what they've paid for.

That you seemed to paint the alleged SRA excesses reported on tonight's program as motivated by financial greed was also a most clever disinformational strategy. To those of us who have seen the primary documentation, and interviewed many of these victims of some of these alleged mind-influencing experimental programs...and who also have documentation that links prominent people and their minions to such abuses, your reluctance to probe more deeply remains sadly frustrating.

It's understandable, considering your money sources and your vulnerabilities to political manipulation, particularly there in Boston where Harvard has been so desperate to keep its sordid complicities under wraps. But it's disappointing, nonetheless.

While I wish that the phenomena you "exposed" in tonight's program were indeed as ephemeral as you (and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, "CIA" and various psychiatric perpetrators) wish it might be, the actuality is even more sad.

Various techniques of hypnosis, personality reformulation and technological / pharmacological enhancements, which are not supposed to exist, have been used...and abused...in the name of science and "national security." That our enemies certainly did the same...and prompted at least some of our national response... is also clear. But for Frontline to maintain the cover-up in the disguise of an "expose'," is a very slippery slope for us all.

We'll hope that more information and additional courage will come your way. Until then, some of us just wanted you to know we're "out here" as X-Files alludes, wrestling with "the truth."

For you, it appears that, "Truth is what is believed." That is an unfortunate and cynical world-view. May it not come to haunt.

Best regards,

Dick Farley
P.O. Box 106
Frostburg, MD 21532

cloudrider@aol.com

Preacher gets prison for quoting Bible

“ ... It’s a KKK county, a group of organized crime, a criminal ring,” she said describing the Berrien Court system, county government and the control Whirlpool Corp. exercises over all. ... "

ACLU to represent Pinkney
By Teresa Kelly
The Michigan Citizen

BENTON HARBOR — Quoting Deuteronomy 28:14-22 to a Berrien County Judge will bring down the wrath of the judicial system.

Rev. Edward Pinkney learned that lesson the hard way. The Benton Harbor Assistant pastor has gone from the bowels of the Berrien County jail to Jackson prison to serve 3-10 years for quoting Deuteronomy to Berrien Chief Judge Alfred M. Butzbaugh.

“I didn’t feel threatened by Pinkney but his connection to God,” the judge said at the June 26 sentencing, according to attorneys and supporters.

Pinkney’s trial attorneys, Hugh “Buck” Davis and Elliott Hall, the first African American Vice President of Ford Motor Company, have filed a 115-page appeals brief raising 13 arguments why Pinkney’s conviction is invalid and unconstitutional, Davis said. Although the limit is 65-pages for an appeal, the Appeals Court agreed to accept the excess with the free speech and freedom of religion issues in the case.

“As far as I know he’s the first preacher in America to get put into prison for quoting the Bible,” Davis said on a radio show.

Now, the ACLU has formally taken up Pinkney’s case, a case likely to rise from current obscurity to national interest.

Pinkney’s conviction for quoting Scripture was an “execution,” said Marian Kramer, Welfare Rights Organization and organizer of a meeting at Hannah House in Detroit, July 25 to plan a strategy for freeing Pinckney.

Dorothy Pinkney, the Reverend’s wife, provided an update on the case which begins back in 2004.

“It’s a KKK county, a group of organized crime, a criminal ring,” she said describing the Berrien Court system, county government and the control Whirlpool Corp. exercises over all.

She reminded listeners that Rev. Pinkney had been fighting injustices of the Berrien court system for years. For example, every Tuesday, wearing a t-shirt listing each Berrien County judge under the headline of Berrien County’s “Most Wanted,” Rev. Pinkney organized a picket in front of the courthouse located on the St. Joseph side of the river.

SUCCESSFUL RECALL LED TO ARREST

Pinkney’s legal problems date to 2005 when BANCO (Black Autonomy Network of Community Organizations), which he heads, successfully recalled Benton Harbor City Commissioner Glen Yarbrough.

Yarbrough, part of a historic Black family with close ties to Berrien County government but with cloudy reputations in the community—including persistent reports of substance abuse, rumors of drug dealing to minors, and known physical attacks on others—survived the recall despite rejection by voters 297-246.

He was saved because county authorities challenged the results of the recall election, raided the Benton Harbor city clerk’s office and seized the voting records at the county clerk’s office. A month later Berrien Judge Paul Maloney threw out the election as tainted by fraud.

The city council fired city clerk Jean Nesbitt who was responsible for the election.

Because Nesbitt had communicated with Rev. Pinkney during the election about the election and because he had handled absentee ballots through her office, county authorities arrested him April 18, charging him with vote fraud.

Pinkney’s first trial on voter fraud charges March 2006 was declared a mistrial when the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict.

A year later, March 2007, Berrien County retried Pinckeny on the same three felony charges of improper possession of absentee ballots, one felony count of influencing voters while they were voting and a misdemeanor charge of influencing voters with money.

An all white jury—Benton Harbor is 93 percent Black, Berrien County, 20 percent—found him guilty on all counts.

The local newpaper, the Herald-Palladium said, “justice was served” and concluded, “and now he’ll pay for it.”

Two months later, May 15, Judge Butzbaugh sentenced Pinkney to one year in jail as part of a five-year probation, but suspended the actual jail time, ordering him to stay home, on a tether and observe certain conditions of probation. He was required to refrain from political campaigning, to avoid threatening and intimating behavior, to not use a cell phone and to not associate with any person known to have a criminal conviction.

JAILED FOR CALLING JUDGE RACIST

Pinkney remained on house arrest until Dec. 21, 2007, when Butzbaugh issued a warrant for his arrest. A sentence that appeared in an article in the November 2007 issue of The People’s Tribune, a Chicago-based monthly infuriated the judge.

“We must fight for justice for all any time you have a judge like Alfred Butzbaugh, who is a racist,” Pinkney wrote and added that he had been denied due process “by the dumb judge and prosecutor....I support the constitution of the United States and the State of Michigan; we are still waiting on this racist corrupt judge to do the same.”

Butzbaugh ruled the writing violated the terms of the probation and contained threats not protected by the constitution. He ordered Pinkney serve the jail term that had been held in abeyance for almost a year.

From Berrien County jail, Pinkney waged a new campaign for justice revealing the inhumane conditions of the jail. Outraged at the conditions the inmates—overwhelmingly Black and from Benton Harbor—had to endure in the jail, Pinkney turned to scripture and wrote a letter to the judge quoting Deuteronomy 28:14-22. The passage recites the evils God will measure out to those in high places and who have great responsibility if they mistreat the people they are chosen to serve.

Butzbaugh recused himself from the June hearing on Pinkney’s parole violations saying he and his family were the target of Pinkney’s biblical threats and the case was heard by former Prosecutor Dennis Wiley.

Wiley is known for his own racism in Benton Harbor.

The night 16-year old African American Eric McGinnis disappeared in all-white St. Joseph over a decade ago only to be pulled from the river days later, Wiley was one of the three men—all Berrien County officials—to last see McGinnis alive. The three men said they watched the youth run down a street as they entered a bar on Main Street in St. Joseph.

For Pinkney, Wiley ruled the parole violation did occur and imposed a prison sentence from three to 10 years since Pinkney two prior felony convictions over a decade ago.

NEXT WEEK: Whirlpool Corp.’s beach front land grab that is the basis of Rev. Edward Pinkney’s legal issues.

Detroit Pastor, Union Theological Seminary graduate and Biblical scholar Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellerman testifies to Biblical meaning of Deuteronomy 28.

Deuteronomy 28:14-22:
“But if you do not hearken to the voice of the LORD, your God, and are not careful to observe all his commandments which I enjoin on you today, all these curses shall come upon you and overwhelm you:

“May you be cursed in the city, and cursed in the country!

“Cursed be your grain bin and your kneading bowl!

“Cursed be the fruit of your womb, the produce of your soil and the offspring of your livestock, the issue of your herds and the young of your flocks!

“May you be cursed in your coming in, and cursed in your going out!

“The LORD will put a curse on you, defeat and frustration in every enterprise you undertake, until you are speedily destroyed and perish for the evil you have done in forsaking me.

The LORD will bring a pestilence upon you that will persist until he has exterminated you from the land you are entering to occupy.

The LORD will strike you with wasting and fever, with scorching, fiery drought, with blight and searing wind, that will plague you until you perish.

http://www.michigancitizen.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=1&twindow=&mad=&sdetail=6302&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1070&hn=michigancitizen&he=.com

Infamous Auschwitz Tattoo Began as an IBM Number

IBM's Pivotal Role in the Holocaust
Edwin Black
www.thecuttingedgenews.com
July 28th 2008

In August 1943, a timber merchant from Bendzin, Poland, arrived at Auschwitz. He was among a group of 400 inmates, mostly Jews. First, a doctor examined him briefly to determine his fitness for work. His physical information was noted on a medical record. Second, his full prisoner registration was completed with all personal details. Third, his name was checked against the indices of the Political Section to see if he would be subjected to special punishment. Finally, he was registered in the Labor Assignment Office and assigned a characteristic five-digit IBM Hollerith number, 44673.

The five-digit Hollerith number was part of a custom punch card system devised by IBM to track prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, including the slave labor at Auschwitz. ...

Story continues

Tennessee: Church Gunman says he Acted Out of 'Hatred for the Liberal Movement'

"Conservatives" have worked it all out - liberals are "Nazis." The left eschews homophobia, bashes Bush, opposes wars founded on false premises - Third Reich stuff. They are "Nazis." Freedom-loving "conservatives," on the other hand, are creatures of "principle," and endorse concentra ... ah, detention camps, mass starvation by embargo, torture, coerced confessions, the bombing of civilian targets, mass surveillance, secret trials, shrapnel mines, warfare as a means of personal enrichment, The "Bell Curve," genocide, "rendition" (disappearances), foreign intervention and coups, and other policies embraced by the Founding Fathers (beloved icons of Democracy/sinister, conspiratorial Freemasons) and Jesus. Commie-Nazi-humanist liberals just make no sense at all and must be taught the error of their ways ... - AC

Police say a man opened fire at a Knoxville, Tenn., church yesterday because he couldn't find a job and "his stated hatred for the liberal movement."

blogs.usatoday.com
July 29, 2008

Two people died in the shooting spree. Jim Adkisson, 58, faces first-degree murder charges. He's being held on $1 million bond

"It appears he was acting alone," Chief Sterling Owen IV tells reporters. "In his written statement, he does not describe any affiliation with anybody and the sub search at his residence shows that it appears he was operating alone."

The chief say Adkisson fired three times with a 12-gauge shotgun. They recovered 76 shotgun shells at the Tennessee Valley Universalist Church. The gun was purchased last month at a pawn shop.

"I do not believe he expected to leave there alive," Owen says.

Owen says officers were at the church within minutes of receiving a call for assistance.

The FBI and ATF are assisting with the investigation.

Knoxville News Sentinel reports that the four-page letter that investigators recovered from Adkisson's truck "indicates he had been planning the shooting for about a week."

"It appears he did choose that church intentionally," Owen says.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2008/07/chief-church-gu.html
•••••••
Real estate exec among church shooting victims

blogs.knoxnews.com

An executive at a local commercial real estate firm is in intensive care after Sunday's shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church.

Tammy Sommers is the office manager and chief operating officer at NAI Knoxville, a West Knoxville commercial real estate firm. According to Maribel Koella, a principal in the firm, Sommers is a member of the church and is a married mother of two boys, ages 3 and 5.

Koella said Sommers was an educator before joining NAI and said she is very involved in the church and in the Knoxville Chamber's initiative to improve local education.

http://blogs.knoxnews.com/knx/flory/2008/07/real_estate_exec_among_church.html
•••••••
Slain church member remembered as hero in shooting

The Associated Press
Monday, July 28, 2008

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.: A slain Tennessee church member was remembered as a hero for shielding others from a gunman who opened fire during a children's performance Sunday.

Witnesses said Greg McKendry, 60, blocked others behind him at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church from being hit by a shotgun blast.

McKendry "took the blast to protect the rest of us," church member Barbara Kemper told The Associated Press. ...

Victims and police were trying to find out why the gunman attacked the church known for its work promoting social issues like desegregation, women's and gay rights and civil liberties. ...

"It was hateful words. He was saying hateful things," she said, but refused to elaborate.

Police said the FBI was assisting in case the shooting turned out be a hate crime, but no motive was known. Police were taking statements from witnesses and collecting video cameras from church members who taped the performance. ...

http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=14818862

U.S.: Iraqi civilians killed by soldiers were unarmed

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• U.S. military officials originally said an Iraqi civilian was shooting at troops
Military initially said a weapon was found in car, but now says there was no gun

• Investigation found troops shot three unarmed, "law abiding citizens of Iraq"

• U.S. military: Initial description based on troops reporting they were fired upon

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Investigators have determined three Iraqi civilians were unarmed and attacking no one when U.S. soldiers fatally shot them in western Baghdad last month, the U.S. military said Sunday.

U.S. military officials initially said at least one of the three Iraqis, who were riding in a car approaching the soldiers, started shooting, and that the soldiers returned fire. The military also initially said a weapon was later found in the car, and bullet holes were found in two of the soldiers' humvees.

But an investigation found the soldiers shot and killed three "law abiding citizens of Iraq," and that no weapon was found in the vehicle, a military release stated.

Also, the investigation determined only one humvee had a bullet hole, and that the bullet hole's source isn't known, said Lt. Steve Stover, a military spokesman.

Still, investigators determined "neither the soldiers nor civilians involved in the incident were at fault," the release said.

"This was an extremely unfortunate and tragic incident," said Col. Allen Batschelet, chief of staff for Multi-National Division-Baghdad. "Our deepest regrets of sympathy and condolences go out to the family.

"We are taking several corrective measures to amend and eliminate the possibility of such situations happening in the future."

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The shooting happened June 25 in the civilian area of Baghdad International Airport. U.S. soldiers "perceived the rapidly approaching vehicle as a threat" and opened fire "after the driver failed to respond to soldiers' warning measures," according to the military statement.

The Iraqi Interior Ministry countered the U.S. military's initial account of the incident, saying U.S. soldiers killed a male banker and two female employees as they were driving to work.

On Sunday, the U.S. military said its initial account "resulted from the numerous soldier witnesses who strongly believed they were being fired upon from the vehicle."

During initial questioning, the soldiers in the convoy said they "felt threatened and believed they saw flashes coming from the front passenger window," Stover said.

The military also said Sunday its initial report about a weapon in the victims' car came from a mistaken belief that Iraqi police had found one.

Mohammed Hafez, son of the slain bank director, said he was shocked by the findings of the investigation.

"My father was a good man. He was a very good man," he said. "I lost not only a father, he was also my friend."

The platoon involved in the incident was banned from conducting military operations during the course of the investigation, Stover said. The platoon returned to duty about two weeks ago after the investigation was approved.

Hafez said he wants the soldiers to stand trial. He said the U.S. military has apologized to his family, meeting with them twice and offering them $10,000 and a condolence letter. Hafez said his family turned down the money.

Stover confirmed the meetings, but not the offer of money.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/07/28/baghdad.shooting/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

Maryland: Documents show state police monitored peace, anti-death penalty groups

Spying uncovered

Full story and streaming video

Also see: "Police Spied on Activists In Md. - Officers Infiltrated Groups During Ehrlich Years," Washington Post, July 18, 2008; Page A01
http://dcist.com/2008/07/18/police_spied_on_freedomhating_puppy.php

By Nick Madigan
Baltimore Sun, July 17, 2008

Undercover Maryland State Police officers repeatedly spied on peace activists and anti-death penalty groups in recent years and entered the names of some in a law-enforcement database of people thought to be terrorists or drug traffickers, newly released documents show.

The files, made public Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, depict a pattern of infiltration of the activists' organizations in 2005 and 2006. The activists contend that the authorities were trying to determine whether they posed a security threat to the United States. But none of the 43 pages of summaries and computer logs - some with agents' names and whole paragraphs blacked out - mention criminal or even potentially criminal acts, the legal standard for initiating such surveillance.

State police officials said they did not curtail the protesters' freedoms.

The spying, detailed in logs of at least 288 hours of surveillance over a 14-month period, recalls similar infiltration by FBI agents of civil rights and anti-war groups decades ago, particularly under the administration of President Richard M. Nixon.

David Rocah, a staff attorney for the ACLU in Baltimore, said at a news conference Thursday that he found it "stupefying" that more than 30 years later, the government is still targeting people who do nothing more than express dissent.

"Everything noted in these logs is a lawful, First Amendment activity," Rocah said. "For undercover police officers to spend hundreds of hours entering information about lawful political protest activities into a criminal database is an unconscionable waste of taxpayer dollars and does nothing to make us safer from actual terrorists or drug dealers."

The ACLU obtained the documents from the state Attorney General's Office through a Maryland Public Information Act lawsuit.

Col. Terrence B. Sheridan, superintendent of the Maryland State Police, said in a statement Thursday that the department "does not inappropriately curtail the expression or demonstration of the civil liberties of protesters or organizations acting lawfully."

"No illegal actions by state police have ever been taken against any citizens or groups who have exercised their right to free speech and assembly in a lawful manner," Sheridan said. "Only when information regarding criminal activity is alleged will police continue to investigate leads to ensure the public safety."

Nothing in the documents indicates criminal activity or intent on the part of the protesters, ACLU officials said.

Nonetheless, the state police's Homeland Security and Intelligence Division sent covert agents to infiltrate the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance, a peace group; the Baltimore Coalition Against the Death Penalty; and the Committee to Save Vernon Evans, a death row inmate.

Using a fake e-mail address and an alias, an undercover agent joined the e-mail list of the death penalty group, the documents say.

Agents also monitored the group's organizational meetings, public forums and events in churches, as well as rallies on Lawyers Mall in Annapolis and in Baltimore outside the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, known as "SuperMax."

Most of the spies' reports were innocuous. After an Aug. 24, 2005, gathering of the Evans group, an undercover officer wrote in a log: "The meeting concluded with members talking about trying to get the man running for Baltimore County State's Attorney to commit to his plans regarding the death penalty in the county."

Baltimore County was responsible for more capital punishment cases than any other Maryland jurisdiction at the time.

Another entry about the Evans group revealed that agents had spent 50 hours of "investigative time" shadowing its members in March, April and May 2005. The entry mentioned that a May 25, 2005, meeting of the group was attended by Max Obuszewski, a former Peace Corps member and longtime activist who moved to Baltimore in 1983, and Terry Fitzgerald, who heads the anti-death penalty coalition and established the Evans group.

Both attended Thursday's news conference.

State police appeared to have been specifically tracking Obuszewski's activities. His name, the documents show, was entered into the Washington/Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database, even though there was "not a scintilla of evidence" that he deserved to be listed, said Rocah, the ACLU attorney.

"Mr. Obuszewski has devoted his entire life to peace," Rocah said. "If there is anyone in the world who is further from a terrorist, it is hard for me to imagine."

Obuszewski agreed. "You cannot get more insulting than to call me a terrorist," he said. Besides, he went on, the groups he belongs to hold open meetings and publicize their schedules. "Why would someone come to those meetings and pretend to be someone else? Why are government agencies targeting pacifists?"

Story continues: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-report0717,0,240195.story