ANNIE YOUDERIAN - November 17, 2010

(CN) - A federal magistrate judge in San Francisco ordered the CIA to produce specific records and testimony about the human experiments the government allegedly conducted on thousands of soldiers from 1950 through 1975.

Three veterans groups and six individual veterans sued the CIA and other government agencies, claiming they used about 7,800 soldiers as human guinea pigs to research biological, chemical and psychological weapons.

The experiments, many of which took place at Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick in Maryland, allegedly exposed test subjects to chemicals, drugs and electronic implants. Though the soldiers volunteered, they never gave informed consent, because the government didn’t fully disclose the risks, the veterans claimed. They were also required to sign an oath of secrecy, according to the complaint.

The veterans filed three sets of document requests to find out who was tested, what substances they were given, and how it affected them. Between October and April, the government produced about 15,000 pages of heavily redacted records, most of which related to the named plaintiffs only.

The CIA argued that much of the information requested was protected under the Privacy Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

U.S. Magistrate Judge James Larson acknowledged that some of the requests were too broad and ordered the veterans to be more specific and to reduce the total number of requests.

For example, Larson said the plaintiffs’ definition of “test program” is “overbroad,” as it not only named experimental programs like “Bluebird,” “Artichoke” and “MKUltra,” but also included “any other program of experimentation involving human testing of any substance, including but not limited to ‘MATERIAL TESTING PROGRAM EA 1729.’”

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Kurt Nimmo - September 26, 2010

The editors of the Economist have declared constitutionalists mentally ill. “Indeed, there is something infantile in the belief of the constitution-worshipers that the complex political arguments of today can be settled by simple fidelity to a document written in the 18th century,” the editors wrote on September 23. “When history is turned into scripture and men into deities, truth is the victim.”

The Economist is owned by members of the Rothschild banking family of England. It is run by the Economist Group, a known CIA front.

According to the Economist, the framers were aristocrats who “did not believe that poor men, or any women, let alone slaves, should have the vote.” The Constitution does not address the “hard questions thrown up by modern politics,” namely should gays be allowed to marry?

The Economist argument against the Constitution is the same one used by liberal academics. The document is antiquated, the product of a bygone era. The founders were afraid of “democracy taking hold,” so they crafted a document designed to exclude the common people and preserve their aristocratic position.

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New book provides details of campaign to discredit — or even kill — Jack Anderson

Michael Isikoff - 9/13/2010

Nearly 40 years before the Obama White House denounced the WikiLeaks website for publishing classified documents, another president, Richard Nixon, was even more obsessed with the same phenomenon.

Only Nixon and his top aides went to far greater lengths to deal with the problem: They launched an extraordinary campaign to smear and discredit the journalist who, more than anyone else, was bedeviling them by publishing government secrets: newspaper columnist Jack Anderson.

The White House obsession with Anderson — whose “Washington Merry Go-Round” column was the WikiLeaks of its day — is detailed in a new book being published this month, “Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture,” by journalism professor Mark Feldstein. The book relies in part on newly unearthed tapes from the National Archives that document how Nixon’s aides plotted to destroy Anderson by planting forged evidence with him and spreading false rumors about his sex life and that of one of his associates.

Feldstein also has uncovered new evidence that documents one of the more outrageous schemes of the Nixon presidency: a plot to assassinate Anderson by either putting poison in his medicine cabinet or exposing him to a “massive dose” of LSD by smearing it on the steering wheel of his car. While the aborted scheme to murder Anderson has been reported — and disputed — before, Feldstein found new corroboration: A confession before his death by ex-White House “plumber” Howard Hunt.

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Mark Ames - September 10, 2010

So far, the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero has unfolded along predictable lines, with the man at the center of the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, drawing attacks from the right painting him as a terrorist sympathizer with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

But meanwhile, links between the group behind the controversial mosque, the CIA and U.S. military establishment have gone unacknowledged.

For instance, one of the earliest backers of the nonprofit group, the Cordoba Initiative, that is spearheading the Ground Zero mosque, is a 52-year-old Scarsdale, New York, native named R. Leslie Deak. In addition to serving on the group’s board of advisors since its founding in 2004 by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Deak was its principal funder, donating $98,000 to the nonprofit between 2006 and 2008. This figure appears to represent organization’s total operating budget—though, oddly, the group reported receipts of just a third of that total during the same time period.

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Kevin Ryan - 09/03/2010

World Trade Center (WTC) security company Stratesec has been a topic of considerable discussion among independent 9/11 investigators. One point of discussion has been the possible familial relationship between Stratesec’s CEO, Wirt Dexter Walker III, and its director Marvin Bush, whose brother was President of the United States on 9/11. Although Wirt and Marvin are distant relatives, these ties are inconsequential relative to each man’s family connections to old drug money, deep state operatives, and the wealthy, powerful people who have controlled such money and operatives over the last two centuries.[1]

Stratesec was a company that provided security services for several facilities that were central to the crimes of 9/11. In the years leading up to 9/11, the company had security contracts with the organization that managed Dulles Airport, where Flight 77 took off that day, and with United Airlines, which owned two of the other three hijacked planes.[2] Stratesec had also run security for Los Alamos National Laboratories, where, at the time, scientists were developing super-thermite explosives of the type that have been found in the WTC dust.[3],[4] Stratesec worked at the WTC and was developing the security system for the buildings in the period leading up to, and including, the day of 9/11. These connections are important considering the substantial evidence that insiders were involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Investigation into this company has revealed that the Chief Operating Officer, Barry McDaniel, came to Stratesec from a subsidiary of The Carlyle Group called BDM International, which specialized in “black projects.”[5] The Carlyle Group was managed by several Bush cabal insiders including James Baker and former deputy director of the CIA, Frank Carluccci. Carlyle was funded by investors that included the bin Laden family.[6] Prior to working for BDM, McDaniel had worked as a military ordnance distributor at Fort Belvoir, a facility with many links to 9/11 including the terrorist tracking program Able Danger and the terrorist trainer Ali Mohammed.[7]

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JAMES RISEN and MARK MAZZETTI - September 3, 2010

WASHINGTON — Blackwater Worldwide created a web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part to obtain millions of dollars in American government contracts after the security company came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq, according to Congressional investigators and former Blackwater officials.

While it is not clear how many of those businesses won contracts, at least three had deals with the United States military or the Central Intelligence Agency, according to former government and company officials. Since 2001, the intelligence agency has awarded up to $600 million in classified contracts to Blackwater and its affiliates, according to a United States government official.

The Senate Armed Services Committee this week released a chart that identified 31 affiliates of Blackwater, now known as Xe Services. The network was disclosed as part of a committee’s investigation into government contracting. The investigation revealed the lengths to which Blackwater went to continue winning contracts after Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007. That episode and other reports of abuses led to criminal and Congressional investigations, and cost the company its lucrative security contract with the State Department in Iraq.

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MARIA DINZEO - August 27, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - The Vietnam Veterans of America asked a federal judge to impose sanctions on the Central Intelligence Agency, for failing to produce documents on the CIA’s testing of hundreds of kinds of drugs - including sarin and phosgene nerve gas and LSD - on thousands of soldiers.

The Vietnam Veterans of America sued the CIA in January 2009, claiming the agency had experimented on soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick, Md., testing the effects of mind-controlling drugs.

The VVA says soldiers were treated “in the same capacity as laboratory rats or guinea pigs.” The underlying federal complaint claims that at least 7,800 soldiers were subjected to “at least 250, but as many as 400 chemical and biological agents.”

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H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Dr. Jeffrey S. Kaye - 11 August 2010

Excerpt:

In 1955 and1956, Dr. Bender began hearing glowing accounts about the potential of LSD for producing remarkable results in children suffering mental disorders, including autism and schizophrenia. Bender’s earlier work with electroshock therapy had brought her into contact with several other prominent physicians who, at the time, were covert contractors with the CIA’s MK/ULTRA and Artichoke projects. Primary among these physicians were Drs. Harold A. Abramson, Paul Hoch, James B. Cattell, Joel Elkes, Max Fink, Harris Isbell and Alfred Hubbard. Some of these names may be familiar to readers. Dr. Abramson, a noted allergist who surreptitiously worked for both the US Army and CIA since the late 1940s, was the physician Frank Olson was taken to see, shortly before his murder in New York City in November 1953. About a year earlier, Drs. Hoch and Cattell were responsible for injecting unwitting New York State Psychiatric Institute patient Harold Blauer with a massive dose of mescaline that killed him. Dr. Elkes was one of the earliest physicians in Europe to experiment with LSD, having requested samples of the drug from Sandoz Chemical Co. in 1949. Elkes was a close associate of Dr. Abraham Wikler, who worked closely with Dr. Harris Isbell at the now-closed Lexington, Kentucky, prison farm, where hundreds of already drug-addicted inmates were given heroin in exchange for their participation in LSD and mescaline experiments underwritten by the CIA and Pentagon. Elkes worked closely with the CIA, Pentagon and Britain’s MI6 on drug experiments in England and the United States.

RANDY HERSCHAFT and CRISTIAN SALAZAR (AP) – Jul 29, 2010

NEW YORK — It was a night in early November during the infancy of the Cold War when the anti-communist dissidents were hustled through a garden and across a gully to a vehicle on a dark, deserted road in Budapest. They hid in four large crates for their perilous journey.
Four roadblocks stood between them and freedom.

What Zoltan Pfeiffer, a top political figure opposed to Soviet occupation, his wife and 5-year-old daughter did not know as they were whisked out of Hungary in 1947 was that their driver, James McCargar, was a covert agent for one of America’s most secretive espionage agencies, known simply as the Pond.

Created during World War II as a purely U.S. operation free of the perceived taint of European allies, the Pond existed for 13 years and was shrouded in secrecy for more than 50 years. It used sources that ranged from Nazi officials to Stalinists and, at one point, a French serial killer.

It operated under the cover of multinational corporations, including American Express, Chase National Bank and Philips, the Dutch-based electronic giant. One of its top agents was a female American journalist.

Now the world can finally get a deeper look at the long-hidden roots of American espionage as tens of thousands of once-secret documents found in locked safes and filing cabinets in a barn near Culpeper, Va., in 2001 have finally become public after a long security review by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The papers, which the Pond’s leader tried to keep secret long after the organization was dissolved, were placed in the National Archives in College Park, Md., in 2008 but only opened to the public in April. Those records plus documents obtained by The Associated Press in the past two years from the FBI, CIA and other agencies under the Freedom of Information Act portray a sophisticated organization obsessed with secrecy that operated a network of 40 chief agents and more than 600 sources in 32 countries. The AP has also interviewed former officials, family members, historians and archivists.

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See also: “Another Herbert O Yardley Mystery“

H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Zoe Martell, 21 July 2010

With little fanfare on July 13, Florida officials released the findings of a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study conducted recently in the Key West area revealing that about 10 percent, or 1,000 people, of the coastal town’s population are infected with the dengue fever virus.

While the July 13 release made little mention of it, the CDC study was provoked by an earlier 2009 report that a woman in New York State, who had returned from a Florida Keys’ visit, had contracted dengue fever. Within a few weeks of this initial report, two additional cases were discovered in people who had returned from Key West. Over the next three months of 2009, an additional 26 cases were identified, all tied to visits to the town.

Because of these reported cases, the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District conducted greatly increased aerial spraying to control mosquitoes. Following the spraying, a small amount of other cases were reported, including that of a 41-year-old Key West man who found blood in his urine and had severely aching joints. Following these additional reports, the CDC launched its study of antibodies in Key West residents and found that 5 percent of the town’s residents have been exposed to the dengue virus. Said CDC dengue expert, Dr. Christopher J. Gregory, “The best estimate from the survey is that about 5 percent of [residents] was infected in 2009 with dengue.” Gregory also stated, “We have known for a while it is a possible risk, but this outbreak shows it is more than possible: It is something that did happen and could happen again.”

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Daniel Hopsicker, August 4 2010

The American owner of record of the DC9 airliner from St Petersburg busted in Mexico carrying an astonishing 5.5 tons of cocaine was the subject of a drug trafficking investigation back in 1995, we have learned.

According to a DEA report on the DC9 sent to Venezuela’s National Anti-Drug Office, Frederic Geffon was investigated by US Customs in Tampa, Florida in 1995, after being identified as an aircraft-broker-dealer working with drug traffickers.

“Frederic J. GEFFON DOB: 08.02.1948, home address 10316 Paradise Blvd, Treasure Island, Florida, was the subject of an investigation by US Customs in Tampa, Florida in 1995,” stated a DEA report on the highly-publicized DC9 incident in the Yucatan to Luis Correa, the Director of Venezuela’s National Anti-Drug Office. “GEFFON was identified in 1995 as an aircraft-broker-dealer working with drug traffickers.”

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Antifascist, July 20, 2010

When investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker broke the story four years ago that a DC-9 (N900SA) “registered to a company which once used as its address the hangar of Huffman Aviation, the flight school at the Venice, Florida Airport which trained both terrorist pilots who crashed planes into the World Trade Center, was caught in Campeche by the Mexican military … carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine destined for the U.S.,” it elicited a collective yawn from corporate media.

And when authorities searched the plane and found its cargo consisted solely of 128 identical black suitcases marked “private,” packed with cocaine valued at more than $100 million, the silence was deafening.

But now a Bloomberg Markets magazine report, “Wachovia’s Drug Habit,” reveals that drug traffickers bought that plane, and perhaps fifty others, “with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.,” Wachovia and Bank of America.

The Justice Department charge sheet against the bank tells us that between 2003 and 2008, Wachovia handled $378.4 billion for Mexican currency exchanges, “the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history.”

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Thwarted by the American government on compromise with Taliban, Karzai has begun openly defying his patrons

by Eric Margolis, April 11, 2010

Henry Kissinger once observed that it was more dangerous being America’s ally than its enemy.

The latest example: the U.S.-installed Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who is in serious hot water with his really angry patrons in Washington.

The Obama administration is blaming the largely powerless Karzai, a former CIA “asset,” for America’s failure to defeat the Taliban. Washington accused Karzai of rigging last year’s elections. True enough, but the U.S. pre-rigged the Afghan elections by excluding all parties opposed to western occupation.

Washington, which supports dictators and phoney elections across the Muslim world, had the chutzpah to blast Karzai for corruption and rigging votes. This while the Pentagon was engineering a full military takeover of Pakistan.

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