Thursday, April 7, 2016
CLINTON CAMPAIGN CHIEF'S FIRM
LOBBIES FOR RIGHTS ABUSERS
LOBBIES FOR RIGHTS ABUSERS
Podesta Group's client named in Panama Papers
Combined from Free Beacon and Public Integrity reports
A firm with ties to senior members of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign registered to lobby on behalf of a major Russian bank just weeks before a massive leak exposed the bank’s role in a web of secret financial dealings that have enriched members of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
The “Panama Papers” are being called “the Wikileaks of the mega-rich.” Corporate documents leaked from the law firm Mossack Fonseca show how world leaders have used offshore tax havens to hide their involvement in lucrative companies and business deals around the world.
Among those companies is the Russian Sberbank, whose U.S. investment banking branch recently enlisted the services of the Podesta Group. According to its lobbying registration form, the firm will work on banking, trade, and foreign relations issues.
One of the three lobbyists working on the account is Tony Podesta, a bundler for the Clinton campaign and the brother of campaign chairman John Podesta, who co-founded the firm.
Politico reported last month that Podesta and two of the firm’s other lobbyists would be working to affect “the scope of U.S. sanctions against Russia for its role in the Ukraine conflict and whether relief is possible.”
And Podesta Group took $7,067,891 from 'worst' violators of human rights, records show.
The firm was paid to spruce up the image of Azerbaijan, a country whose government represses political activists, human rights advocates and journalists.
Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison after being convicted on charges including tax evasion and abuse of power — charges widely condemned by human rights groups and journalism organizations. Ismayilova is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Center for Public Integrity. The consortium unleashed the Panama Papers scandal.
Podesta Group characterized Azerbaijan’s 2013 election as a step in “strengthening its democratic society.” The human rights group Freedom House issued a report which said the election was “marred by candidate and voter intimidation … and other serious irregularities.”
Podesta Group has represented Azerbaijan since 2013, receiving $1.9 million for its services since then.
Other nations, such as communist Vietnam, along with Thailand and Egypt, have also hired Podesta Group.
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Cruz ignoring Obama gag order
And Americans don't seem to mind...
Would that more public figures would blow off idiotic federal no-talk rules applied for political reasons.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has deep-sixed a probe into whether Ted Cruz revealed classified information when, during a presidential debate, he discussed the government’s ability to monitor phone records.
“The committee is not investigating anything said during" a Republican presidential debate, top committee members have revealed.
Thus far, Cruz has suffered no political fallout among the electorate for his purported indiscretion on national television.
The Cruz campaign justifies breaking the federal gag order on grounds that it is absurd to stay silent about anything that has already been "widely reported." This view seems consistent with the perspective of the woman or man in the street, though the liberal news commentary organization MSNBC tried to make an issue of the technicality.
“There’s nothing that Senator Cruz said" during December's debate "that wasn’t widely reported and saturated in the public domain,” a campaign spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, told NBC News.
The intelligence committee's bipartisan brush-off of the "scandal" came after panel chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) said that his staff would look into whether Cruz violated a gag order on discussing NSA surveillance. The issue came up when GOP rival Marco Rubio (R-FL) implied that Cruz had violated a secret arrangement to refrain from public mention of certain matters.
“The old program covered 20 percent to 30 percent of phone numbers to search for terrorists; the new program covers nearly 100 percent,” Cruz said of the NSA's metadata surveillance system, adding that “that gives us greater ability to stop acts of terrorism."
Rubio began his response to Cruz by saying, “Let me be very careful when answering this, because I don’t think national television in front of 15 million people is the place to discuss classified information.”
And, Rebecca Glover Watkins, a top spokeswoman for Chairman Burr, tweeted just after the exchange: "Cruz shouldn’t have said that."
But, as intelligence panel lawmakers understood, Cruz's judgment was to prove accurate: Federal gag orders based on technicalities get little respect from the voters.
Rubio has since dropped out of the race.
Would that more public figures would blow off idiotic federal no-talk rules applied for political reasons.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has deep-sixed a probe into whether Ted Cruz revealed classified information when, during a presidential debate, he discussed the government’s ability to monitor phone records.
“The committee is not investigating anything said during" a Republican presidential debate, top committee members have revealed.
Thus far, Cruz has suffered no political fallout among the electorate for his purported indiscretion on national television.
The Cruz campaign justifies breaking the federal gag order on grounds that it is absurd to stay silent about anything that has already been "widely reported." This view seems consistent with the perspective of the woman or man in the street, though the liberal news commentary organization MSNBC tried to make an issue of the technicality.
“There’s nothing that Senator Cruz said" during December's debate "that wasn’t widely reported and saturated in the public domain,” a campaign spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, told NBC News.
The intelligence committee's bipartisan brush-off of the "scandal" came after panel chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) said that his staff would look into whether Cruz violated a gag order on discussing NSA surveillance. The issue came up when GOP rival Marco Rubio (R-FL) implied that Cruz had violated a secret arrangement to refrain from public mention of certain matters.
“The old program covered 20 percent to 30 percent of phone numbers to search for terrorists; the new program covers nearly 100 percent,” Cruz said of the NSA's metadata surveillance system, adding that “that gives us greater ability to stop acts of terrorism."
Rubio began his response to Cruz by saying, “Let me be very careful when answering this, because I don’t think national television in front of 15 million people is the place to discuss classified information.”
And, Rebecca Glover Watkins, a top spokeswoman for Chairman Burr, tweeted just after the exchange: "Cruz shouldn’t have said that."
But, as intelligence panel lawmakers understood, Cruz's judgment was to prove accurate: Federal gag orders based on technicalities get little respect from the voters.
Rubio has since dropped out of the race.
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Sy Hersh's blemished record
Seymour M. Hersh still regards himself as an investigative reporter. In a London Review of Books article published in May, he quoted an intelligence source who trashed the White House account of the killing of Bin Laden. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/
Hersh's report was derided because only one anonymous source was used. In his defense, I observe that one true insider is worth a dozen anonymous sources who are less well placed. The issue is whether Hersh believed his source and whether the reporter had an ax to grind.
On the other hand, Hersh, whose specialty is investigative reporting, spent five years looking into John F. Kennedy's foibles and in the process concluded that JFK had been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald and that Jack Ruby was another deranged loner. The murder of Kennedy, a man with many powerful enemies, and the silencing of Oswald were non-conspiratorial, according to Hersh.
From Hersh's book, The Dark Side of Camelot (Little Brown, 1997):
"Over the next thirty-five years, the nation would remain obsessed with the Kennedy assassination. Hundreds of books would be written, full of feverish speculation about Oswald and Ruby and their possible links to organized crime or Soviet intelligence. In five years of reporting for this book, I found nothing that would change the instinctive conclusions of Julius Draznin, or the much more detailed findings of the Warren Commission -- Oswald and Ruby acted alone."
Hersh cites one source, Draznin, who was an expert on the Chicago mob, for this conclusion, though hundreds of important sources were still available to be interviewed in the 1990s. Hersh fails to mention the investigations of congressional committees in the 1970s which did not affirm the Warren report. Hersh discredited hundreds of books with one phrase, as if none of those writers could have been fairly good investigators.
Hersh implies that because some books are of poor quality, they must all be bad. However, I have read many of those books and found that though some are amateurish, many are highly accurate. That doesn't mean that within thousands of details there might not be slip-ups or misinterpretations. But the weight of the evidence is overwhelmingly against the Warren Commission.
Curiously, soon after the 9/11 attacks, Hersh quoted an intelligence source as saying someone appeared to have laid a false trail for "useful idiot" FBI agents to follow.
Hersh's report was derided because only one anonymous source was used. In his defense, I observe that one true insider is worth a dozen anonymous sources who are less well placed. The issue is whether Hersh believed his source and whether the reporter had an ax to grind.
Seymour M. Hersh
Surely it is disturbing that all photographs of events inside the Bin Laden compound were either deliberately destroyed or handed off to the CIA, which, unlike other federal entities, does not have to make them public under freedom of information statutes. The fact that the body was ditched at sea rather than brought back for autopsy and secret burial on some military base adds to the aura of mystery.
So one may be inclined to give Hersh the benefit of the doubt.I would add that much of the controversy in the 1970s followed the line set by James Angleton, a top CIA man, that Cuban intelligence deployed Oswald as the shooter. However, CIA people involved in anti-Castro activities kept surfacing in connection with the Dallas murder.
As to possible Soviet intrigue, it is faintly possible that Hersh was ignorant of or had forgot the fact that Angleton, the CIA man who controlled what the Warren panel knew, was later named by his top aide as a probable Red mole. Oswald was blamed for turning over U2 secrets to the Soviets but Angleton already knew that a CIA mole had betrayed those secrets before Oswald "defected." Like his friend, the British arch traitor Kim Philby, Angleton controlled the mole hunt.
James Angleton, left, and Kim Philby
It was Hersh who was tipped by a high-level intelligence source that Angleton had been running illegal programs to spy on Americans. Hersh's December 1974 report forced Angleton out without the CIA having to disclose that he had been identified in 1974 by his aide, Clare Edward Petty, as a probable Soviet agent.
Petty was forced to retire immediately on alerting agency bosses. Yet later, the CIA chief at the time, William Colby, said that "I couldn't find" that Angleton's unit had "ever caught a spy" and "that really bothered me."
The books that absolve the CIA of a role in Kennedy's murder and the ensuing coverup tend to misrepresent important details. Somewhere (hopefully) I have notes that point this out.
It may of course be relevant that Hersh has long had high-level intelligence agency sources. Perhaps these sources led him around by the nose. It's a favored game among intelligence professionals to lay a trail for a "useful idiot" reporter to follow. It's also routine for reporters, as with police and intelligence people, to obtain information from people with unsavory motives, though the information still has to be checked. Curiously, soon after the 9/11 attacks, Hersh quoted an intelligence source as saying someone appeared to have laid a false trail for "useful idiot" FBI agents to follow.
At any rate, Hersh's handling of the JFK slaying issue tells us that we should read The Dark Side of Camelot and his other reports with great caution.
Saturday, September 19, 2015
Thursday, September 17, 2015
A son's suspicion about his CIA dad's role in a murder
Am almost finished reading Mary's Mosaic (2012) by Peter Janney, the psychologist son of Wistar Janney, a former high-level CIA officer.
The younger Janney is convinced that the CIA murdered a friend of his family, Mary Pinchot Meyer, an offspring of the powerful liberal Pinchot family and one of JFK's girlfriends. Further, Peter recalls discrepancies in his dad's behavior on the day of the murder of the socialite, who was estranged from top CIA man Cord Meyer. Specifically, after talking to his mother and brother and examining later accounts of what occurred, Janney came to believe that Wistar Janney knew Pinchot Meyer was dead before the police had tentatively identified the body.
Janney's idea is that she was killed to silence her about what she knew about JFK's assassination.
Janney has done a service by drawing together much disparate information and by contributing his own discoveries, which include the fact that a "Pentagon officer" who was a witness at the ensuing murder trial shows signs of having been a professional intelligence operative, in particular the witness has what seems to be an unverifiable legend about his past.
The government's case against the poor black suspect was weak, and he was acquitted. Nevertheless, "reasonable doubt" doesn't mean that Ray Crump wasn't a strong suspect, though Janney doesn't accept that point.
Janney, who is fully focused on the fact that the coup d'etat against the Kennedy brothers could only have been pulled off by the CIA, extends this awareness to the case of Mary Myer, whom he knew personally during his childhood. Interestingly, the CIA official who had obtained propagandistic control of much of the U.S. media was none other than Cord Myer.
The fact that James Angleton was on the spot trying to retrieve Mary's diary is explicable on grounds that he was friends with Mary's sister in law, Tony Pinchot Bradlee, and her husband Ben Bradlee, the noted Washington journalist. Yet, as various 1970s inquiries discovered, Angleton had been handling the CIA's work with the Warren commission and went on to try to sell the spin to credulous writers that Lee Oswald was the shooter, but that he may have been reporting to the Cubans or the Soviets.
The fact that an intelligence operative witness materialized to bolster the case against Crump may be seen in another light. Pinchot Meyer was a powerful Washington socialite. Her friends in the Georgetown set might have used their reach to have the intelligence system provide a false witness so as "not to let that bastard get away with murder."
But what of Wistar Janey's phony behavior when he that evening feigned surprise on getting a phone call that Mary had been killed? (In fact, Peter discovered, Wistar had earlier that day telephoned Ben Bradlee and Cord Myer with the bad news.) I can imagine this scenario: a CIA Washington unit kept tabs on the police radio in the event of anything coming up that might be of intelligence interest. Hearing that a woman had been killed on a Georgetown tow path, the CIA scrambled some people to get down to the scene and get photos. When the photos were examined, she was quickly recognized and Wistar was notified because he was close friends of Cord and the Bradlees.
The identification was withheld for several hours to allow for a CIA crew to remove from Mary's apartment and art studio anything pointing to CIA connections (Cord's identity was not yet public knowledge).
The senior Janney may have been following security protocols when he played dumb about his initial knowledge of the slaying.
One more point. A tow truck driver reported the shooting after being called to repair a stalled Nash Rambler. While the police activity was in progress, the Rambler went missing and the service station hadn't yet made any records of the incident.
One possibility is that, during the confusion, the owner returned to the scene, got in his vehicle, tried it, and found that it started (perhaps it had only been "flooded"), allowing him to drive it off. Or, perhaps the CIA confiscated the car in order to have its experts go over it looking for clues. Police know not to challenge "national security" orders. (After all, this woman was a CIA official's estranged wife.)
And Janney has not put much attention on one other possibility: An angry husband. The husband is usually a chief suspect in a wife's murder. Certainly Meyer and a few associates had the means to have Pinchot Meyer killed. This would not imply a CIA conspiracy to kill her, but rather implies a small rogue operation. I do not suggest this is what happened. However, I am hesitant to endorse Janney's conspiracy theory, despite much excellent work.
So, unless I happen upon another nugget in Janney's book, I would say he has not offered a compelling case that the CIA had Pinchot Meyer hit. In fact, Janney's speculation as to how a hit crew would have operated raises a number of puzzles that I won't entertain at this point.
Nevertheless, Mary Pinchot Meyer was slain some seven months after Kennedy's killing -- a period of sudden deaths of a number of persons with possibly important knowledge concerning the JFK assassination.
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Obvious discrepancies in Oswald photos
Use contol + to blow up pictures. Or go to
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu8Xq4oWI-oYCIdKJoL-QcnO3LnXFUAvPfNcx5DLZPUAJHp06vxmuRF2BodTuyW8UbUCReCnLdx4Gyv3xZ3f7yw6Kv5H5mZOeWf_9Y-vlVrUX1-y2JXKTw055pE_4spsdJKuGR5LCD6iA/s530/Oswald-Backyard-Photos.jpg
C133A is on left, C133B in middle, C133C on right.
C133A: Oswald's feet are slightly forward of a sandbag under the staircase.The top of his head is substantially above the top of the fence behind him.
C133C: Oswald's feet are in almost the same place as in A, but in C the top of his head is even with the top of the fence behind him.
C133C did not appear in Warren Commission exhibits.
There doesn't seem to be enough of a difference in the positions of the feet to account for the difference in head positions. The closer a person being photographed is to the fence, the more the perspective changes.
The pistol on Oswald's hip matches the fence background exactly in C133A and C133C, but his head is not even close.
The change in head perspective might be accounted for if the photographer stood at different distances from Oswald for C133A and C133C. However, the staircase perspective seems to be about the same in A and C, though A's staircase shows less than C's.
If one were to push up C so that the feet are on the same horizontal line as the feet in A, then the staircase perspectives would be identical.
House assassinations committee experts connected to the FBI said that differences were attributable to changes in photo shooting angle.
Sunday, March 8, 2015
CIA's rogue crazy unit abolished
Clandestine Services scrapped as revamp
brings agency to heel under Obama's man
The Intercept's story
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/06/spies-now-cia-director-announces-major-restructuring/
Babylon the Great is fallen! The sinister arm used for shadowy aims of unruly power freaks has perished. Shock waves circle the globe as power elites everywhere reassess their positions.
Next miracle we hope to see: The revitalized agency getting more honest about -- or at least walking back -- the official malarkey about the 9/11 and anthrax attacks.
Desperate efforts to project an illusion of power can be expected from the the disgruntled top command of the junked division, which has been a fixture of the CIA since its creation in the late 1940s. During that period it became notorious as a law unto itself, its brass hats routinely sneering at presidents and lawmakers.
How will the corporate media react? Many of the rotten division's flunkies in media must be out of their minds with fear. In the meantime, expect jostling for plum jobs as those who have been overly cozy with the junked unit become vulnerable to rivals seeking their jobs.
CIA description of revamp
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/2015-press-releases-statements/message-to-workforce-agencys-blueprint-for-the-future.html
Clandestine Services scrapped as revamp
brings agency to heel under Obama's man
The Intercept's story
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/06/spies-now-cia-director-announces-major-restructuring/
Babylon the Great is fallen! The sinister arm used for shadowy aims of unruly power freaks has perished. Shock waves circle the globe as power elites everywhere reassess their positions.
Next miracle we hope to see: The revitalized agency getting more honest about -- or at least walking back -- the official malarkey about the 9/11 and anthrax attacks.
Desperate efforts to project an illusion of power can be expected from the the disgruntled top command of the junked division, which has been a fixture of the CIA since its creation in the late 1940s. During that period it became notorious as a law unto itself, its brass hats routinely sneering at presidents and lawmakers.
How will the corporate media react? Many of the rotten division's flunkies in media must be out of their minds with fear. In the meantime, expect jostling for plum jobs as those who have been overly cozy with the junked unit become vulnerable to rivals seeking their jobs.
CIA description of revamp
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/2015-press-releases-statements/message-to-workforce-agencys-blueprint-for-the-future.html
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