63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read

Jesse Ventura

Dick Russell

Copyright © 2011 by Jesse Ventura with Dick Russell

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ventura, Jesse.

63 documents the government doesn’t want you to read / Jesse Ventura, with Dick Russell.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

9781616082260

1. Official secrets--United States. 2. Government information--United States. 3. Government information--Access control--United States. 4. Conspiracies--United States. I. Russell, Dick. II. Title. III. Title: Sixty three documents the government doesn’t want you to read.

JK468.S4V46 2011

320.973--dc22

2011006218

Printed in the United States of America

To Congressman Ron Paul, the only federal elected official
who will stand up for America on the congressional floor.

INTRODUCTION

WHY YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK

“There is little value in insuring the survival
of our nation if our traditions do not survive
with it. And there is very grave danger that an
announced need for increased security
will be seized upon by those anxious to expand
its meaning to the very limits of official
censorship and concealment.”

—JOHN F. KENNEDY

This book is titled 63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read, lest we forget that 1963 was the year that claimed the life of our 35th president. The conspiracy that killed JFK, and the cover-up that followed, is the forerunner for a lot of what you’re going to read about in these pages. In fact, the idea behind this book came out of writing my last one, American Conspiracies. There I presented a close look at whether or not our historical record reflects what really went on, based on facts that most of the media have chosen to ignore—from the Kennedy assassination through the tragedy of September 11th and the debacle on Wall Street. In poring through numerous documents, many of them available through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), I came to realize the importance of the public’s right to know. And I decided to see what new picture might be revealed if you laid out certain documents that the powers that be would just as soon stay buried.

Everything in this book is in the public domain and, for the most part, downloadable from the Internet. I’m not breaking any laws by putting these documents in book form, although some of them were classified “secret” until WikiLeaks published them. I’ll get to my view on WikiLeaks in a moment, but let me begin by saying how concerned I am that we’re moving rapidly in the direction President Kennedy tried to warn us about.

According to a recent article in the Washington Post, there are now 854,000 American citizens with top secret clearances. The number of new secrets rose 75 percent between 1996 and 2009, and the number of documents using those secrets went from 5.6 million in 1996 to 54.6 million last year. There are an astounding 16 million documents being classified top secret by our government every year! Today, pretty much everything the government does is presumed secret. Isn’t it time we asked ourselves whether this is really necessary for the conduct of foreign affairs or the internal operation of governments? Doesn’t secrecy actually protect the favored classes and allow them to continue to help themselves at the expense of the rest of us? Isn’t this a cancer growing on democracy?

After Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, I was heartened to see him issue an Open Government Initiative on his first full day in office. “I firmly believe what Justice Louis Brandeis once said, that sunlight is the best disinfectant,” Obama said, “and I know that restoring transparency is not only the surest way to achieve results, but also to earn back the trust in government without which we cannot deliver changes the American people sent us here to make.” After eight years of Bush and Cheney’s secretive and deceitful ways, that sounded like a welcome relief. Obama ordered all federal agencies to “adopt a presumption in favor” of FOIA requests and so laid the groundwork to eventually release reams of previously withheld government information on the Internet.

Well, so far it hasn’t turned out the way Obama set forth. An audit released in March 2010 by the nonprofit National Security Archive found that less than one-third of ninety federal agencies that process FOIA requests had changed their practices in any significant way. A few departments—Agriculture, Justice, Office of Management and Budget, and the Small Business Administration—got high marks for progress. But the State Department, Treasury, Transportation, and NASA had fulfilled fewer requests and denied more in the same time period. “Most agencies had yet to walk the walk,” said the Archive’s director Tom Blanton.

Things went downhill from there. In June 2010, the New York Times carried a page-one story detailing how Obama’s administration was even more aggressive than Bush’s in looking to punish people who leaked information to the media. In the course of his first seventeen months as president, Obama had already surpassed every previous president in going after prosecutions of leakers. Thomas A. Drake, a National Security Agency employee who’d gone to the Baltimore Sun as a last resort because he knew that government eavesdroppers were squandering hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on failed programs, is today facing years in prison on ten felony charges including mishandling of classified information. An FBI translator received a twenty-month sentence for turning over some classified documents to a blogger. A former CIA officer, Jeffrey Sterling, has been indicted for unauthorized disclosure of national defense information. And the Pentagon arrested Bradley Manning, the twenty-two-year-old Army intelligence analyst, who for openers had passed along to WikiLeaks the shocking video footage of a U.S. military chopper gunning down Baghdad civilians.

In September 2010, the Obama Justice Department cited the so-called “state secrets doctrine” in successfully getting a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit on “extraordinary rendition” (a phrase that really means we send suspected terrorists to other countries to get held and tortured). In fact, Attorney General Eric Holder was hell-bent on upholding the Bush administration’s claims in two major cases involving illegal detention and torture.

Also in September, the Pentagon spent $47,300 of taxpayer dollars to buy up and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of Operation Dark Heart, a memoir about Afghanistan by ex-Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer Anthony A. Shaffer. We first interviewed Lt. Colonel Shaffer for American Conspiracies because his outfit (Able Danger) had identified Mohammed Atta as a terrorist threat long before he became the supposed lead hijacker on 9/11.

With Operation Dark Heart, publishing executives and intelligence outfits couldn’t remember another instance where a government agency set out to get rid of a book that was already printed. Some months earlier, the Army reviewers who’d asked for and received some changes and redactions said they had “no objection on legal or operational security grounds” to the final version. But when the DIA saw the manuscript and showed it around to some other spy operations, they came up with 200-plus passages that might cause “serious damage to national security.” By that time, several dozen copies of the book had already gone out to reviewers and online booksellers. (Those went on sale on eBay for between $1,995 and $4,995.)

So Operation Dark Heart was hastily reprinted with a number of paragraphs blanked out and, guess what, it became a best seller. Here are a few of the things that got canned, which the New York Times first pointed out. Everybody’s known for years that the nickname for the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade is “the Fort.” Censor that one! Another big secret—the CIA training facility is located at Camp Peary, Virginia. You can find that on Wikipedia but not anymore in this book! And did you know that SIGINT stands for “Signals Intelligence?” You don’t see that anymore in Operation Dark Heart. (I can’t wait for the censors to pull my book from the shelves for revealing all this.) Oh, and they removed a blurb from a former DIA director who called Shaffer’s “one terrific book.” Shaffer has now gone to court looking to have the book’s complete text restored when the paperback comes out.

To Obama’s credit, early in November 2010 he issued an Executive Order establishing a program to manage unclassified information that rescinded a Bush-era order designed to keep still more documents away from public scrutiny by putting new labels on them (“For Official Use Only” and “Sensitive But Unclassified.”)

But soon thereafter came WikiLeaks’ first releases of a claimed trove of 251,287 secret State Department cables. This followed the group’s disclosures earlier last year of 390,136 classified documents about the Iraq War and 76,607 documents about Afghanistan. As everybody knows, the politicians and the media commentators went ballistic over the cables being in the public domain—even though the New York Times, among others, was running front-page stories every day about their contents.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was for a moment our biggest bogeyman since Osama. Sarah Palin says he’s “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands” who should be pursued “with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.” She stopped short of saying he should be hunted down like the caribou she shoots in Alaska. Hillary Clinton calls what he’s done “an attack on the international community.” (I’ve never known Palin and Clinton to be this cozy in the same bed, so to speak.) Mike Huckabee called for the execution of whoever leaked the cables to WikiLeaks. Newt Gingrich referred to Assange as an “enemy combatant.” Joe Biden described him as “closer to being a hi-tech terrorist” than a whistleblower, and some liberal democrats would like to see Assange sent to prison for life. He’s also been labeled an old-fashioned anarchist, mastermind of a criminal enterprise and, at best, a control freak and a megalomaniac.

This smacks of worse than McCarthyism—we’re in a lynch-mob moment, folks. Didn’t Thomas Jefferson say that “information is the currency of democracy” and that, if he had to choose between government and a free press, he’d take the latter? Ron Paul is one of the only folks to have spoken up on Assange’s behalf. Paul made quite a statement on the floor of the House, when he asked his colleagues what had caused more deaths—“lying us into war or the release of the WikiLeaks papers?” He added, “What we need is more WikiLeaks…. In a free society, we’re supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, then we’re in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.”

Paul’s point is important. Nobody has died as a result of WikiLeaks’ disclosures, but maybe we’ve forgotten that the whole Iraq War was based on fake evidence manufactured by the Bush-Cheney White House and the Brits, resulting in 4,430 American troops dead and about 32,000 wounded as of early December 2010. In Afghanistan, the toll is climbing fast—close to 1,500 Americans dead and almost 10,000 wounded. This doesn’t take into account, of course, the hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. Do you think it’s possible, as one Internet columnist has written, that Julian Assange is the scapegoat for arrogant American officials who’d rather point the finger at someone else than admit the blood on their own hands?

Personally, I think Julian Assange is a hero. It’s a classic case of going after the messenger. Our diplomats get caught writing derogatory remarks and descriptions of foreign leaders, then turn around and accuse WikiLeaks of putting our country in danger. WikiLeaks is exposing our government officials for the frauds that they are. They also show us how governments work together to lie to their citizens when they are waging war.

Here are a few things we’ve learned from WikiLeaks’ document releases that we didn’t know before: The CIA has a secret army of 3,000 in Afghanistan, where the U.S. Ambassador in Kabul says there’s no way to fix corruption because our ally is the one that’s corrupt (one Afghan minister was caught carrying $52 million out of the country). In Iraq, there are another 15,000 civilian casualties that haven’t been brought into the light, and our troops were instructed not to look into torture tactics that our Iraqi allies were using. U.S. Special Operations forces are in Pakistan without any public knowledge, and our Pakistani “allies” are the main protectors of the Taliban in Afghanistan!

I mean, let’s face it: WikiLeaks exists because the mainstream media haven’t done their job. Instead of holding government accountable as the “fourth branch” the founders intended, I guess the corporate media’s role today is to protect the government from embassassment. Assange has pioneered “scientific journalism” (his term)—a news story is accompanied by the document it’s based upon and the reader can make up his own mind. WikiLeaks’ small team of reporters has unveiled more suppressed information than the rest of the world press combined!

Assange is the publisher, not the one who revealed the “classified information.” That’s apparently Private Bradley Manning, who somehow found a security loophole and now is being held in solitary confinement at our Quantico, Virginia base facing up to fifty-two years in prison. Are we surprised that the United Nations’ special investigator on torture is looking into whether Manning has been mistreated in custody? As for Assange, how our government wants to try him under the Espionage Act of 1917 is beyond me. Come on, he’s an Australian citizen and his Internet domain is in Switzerland. (By the way, he also received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in 2010, and the Amnesty International Media Award in 2009.)

And what about these cyberspace sabotage attacks against WikiLeaks that are being carried out across national borders by our government? As far as I can determine, these are illegal under both U.S. law and international treaties. Meantime, it blows my mind that students at Columbia and Boston University and probably other institutions of “higher learning” are being warned not to read any of these documents if they want to get a government job in the future. The Office of Management and Budget sent out a memo that forbids unauthorized federal employees and contractors from accessing WikiLeaks. The Library of Congress has blocked visitors to its computer system from doing the same. The Air Force started blocking its personnel from using work computers to look at the websites of the New York Times and other publications that had posted the cables. Instead, a page came up that said: “ACCESS DENIED. Internet Usage is Logged & Monitored.” Over in Iraq, our troops who’d like to even read articles about all this get a “redirect” notice on their government network telling them they’re on the verge of breaking the law. And a lot of these same soldiers have security clearances that would have allowed them to see the cables before they were leaked.

Given the close ties between the government and large corporations, I can’t say I’m surprised that Amazon, PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, and Bank of America took action to make sure that WikiLeaks could no longer receive any money through their channels. And I can’t say I’m upset that a group of young “hacktavists” calling themselves Anonymous have taken retaliatory action against some of those same companies. They call it Operation Payback. “Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets,” a fellow named Coldblood posted. “As an organization we have always taken a strong stance on censorship and freedom of expression on the internet and come out against those who seek to destroy it by any means. We feel that WikiLeaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs. the government.”

More than 500 “mirror sites” now possess all the cables, and Assange has said we ain’t seen nothin’ yet if he meets an untimely demise. As I write this a couple of weeks before the New Year in 2011, he’s living in a friend’s mansion in England and fighting extradition charges. I’m sure a whole lot more will have developed by the time this book is published. I say let the chips fall where they may as WikiLeaks puts the truth out there. If our State Department is asking diplomats to steal personal information from UN officials and human rights groups, in violation of international laws, then shouldn’t the world know about it and demand corrective action? Maybe if they know they’re potentially going to be exposed, the powers that hide behind a cloak of secrecy will think twice before they plot the next Big Lie.

I agree with Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. He faced charges, too, back in 1971, but they were thrown out by a judge. He’s called Private Manning a “brother” who committed “a very admirable act” if he’s the one who provided the documents to WikiLeaks. “To call them terrorists is not only mistaken, it’s absurd,” Ellsberg said.

The book you’re about to read is undertaken in the same spirit. I’ve divided the book into five parts, starting out first to show links between deeds our government perpetrated in the past and what’s going on today. If you don’t know your own history, you’re doomed to repeat it. Part One focuses on postwar deceptions, revealing some pretty scandalous behavior, including:

•   The CIA’s secret assassination manual and experiments to control human behavior with hypnosis, drugs, and other methods.

•   The military’s Operation Northwoods, a chilling attempt by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage a terror attack on our own citizens and make it look like Cuba was behind it—using a hijacked airliner, no less!

•   After President Kennedy was trying to get our troops out of Vietnam, the military faked the Gulf of Tonkin attacks in order to expand the war.

•   Our chemical and biological warfare capability back in 1969, leading you to wonder about the real origin of things like AIDS and lyme disease.

Part Two delves into a series of government, military, and corporate secrets, opening with excerpts from two recent reports on how our military and intelligence outfits put Nazi war criminals to work after World War Two. From there, you’ll see some eye-opening documents, including:

•   The CIA’s “Propaganda Notes” designed to shore up the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman conclusion.

•   How Oliver North collaborated with Panama’s drug-running dictator Manuel Noriega.

•   What America knew, and ignored, about the genocide happening in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.

•   How we still turn a blind eye to Gulf War Illness and our veterans.

•   The frightening background for our military to intervene in domestic affairs, set up “emergency relocation facilities” for our citizens, and establish a Civilian Inmate Labor Program.

•   How failed inspections and ignored science are impacting our food supply and our bees, while we push to promote Monsanto’s biotech agenda.

•   What our military really knows about the dangers of climate change.

•   How companies like Koch Industries promote their political agendas at the expense of the rest of us.

Part Three I’ve called Shady White Houses, starting with “Tricky Dick” Nixon and his astounding plan to bring peace to Vietnam by pretending to nuke the Soviet Union! You’ll also learn about:

•   How the Bush White House stole the presidential elections in 2000 and again in 2004.

•   The Obama State Department’s call for our own diplomats to spy on the United Nations.

•   Whether “cybersecurity” could mean the end of the Internet as we know it.

Part Four focuses in on a subject I’ve explored a great deal in recent years, and that’s whether we’ve been told the truth about the terrible events of September 11, 2001.

•   A think tank called the Project for a New American Century anticipating “a new Pearl Harbor” to promote its agenda for “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.”

•   Clear warnings the Bush administration ignored that something was coming.

•   The “Stand Down” order that kept our military from responding on 9/11.

•   Evidence that Building 7 was taken down by a controlled demolition.

•   The role of insider stock trading in advance of 9/11.

And finally, Part Five examines the so-called “war on terror” and the terrible price we’re paying in terms of our liberties and the lives being lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. You’ll first read excerpts from a long memo by Bush’s Justice Department that subverts the Constitution by shredding a number of civil rights, followed by Bush’s justification for America’s torture of “unlawful combatants.”

•   The “Media Ground Rules” that keep the truth hidden at Guantanamo.

•   The torture techniques, and medical experiments, being conducted there and the paper trail on the CIA’s destruction of ninety-two torture videos.

•   Decapitation of a detainee in Iraq, by our own troops!

• How the CIA “spins” the war in Afghanistan, and the fact that drugs are fueling that country’s economy.

•   A report by the Rand Corporation showing that military force has never worked in combating terrorism.

Following the 63 documents, you’ll find an epilogue of Internet resources to use in your own pursuit of the truth about what’s going on behind the scenes.

Here’s what should concern us all: if you look back at the U.S. Patriot Act that Congress passed almost unanimously in the wake of 9/11, the Bill of Rights was already in peril. Let me offer a brief outline of how things changed:

The First Amendment is about freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble. The Patriot Act says that the government is free to monitor religious and political institutions without any suspicion of criminal activity. The government can also prosecute librarians or the keepers of any other records (including journalists) related to a “terror investigation.”

The Fourth Amendment speaks to our right to be secure “against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The Patriot Act says the government can search and seize Americans’ papers and effects without probable cause.

The Sixth Amendment entitles anyone accused of a crime to “a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.” The Patriot Act says the government can jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.

The Sixth Amendment says an accused person has “compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.” The Patriot Act says the government can monitor conversations between attorneys and clients in federal prisons and even deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.

The Sixth Amendment also says an accused criminal must “be confronted with the witnesses against him.” The Patriot Act says Americans can be jailed without even being charged, let alone face any witnesses.

What troubles me more than anything is how Congress can simply vote to supersede the Constitution. They’re not allowed to do that, to vote in new rules arbitrarily. Changing the Constitution requires you to go through many hoops. How can we allow this kind of unprecedented change to happen? Now in response to WikiLeaks, Congress is considering a so-called Shield Bill, which would make it a crime for anybody to “knowingly and willfully” disseminate classified information “in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States.” That includes not just the leaker, but anybody who publishes it! First Amendment, so long!

At the same time, it’s recently been reported that our government is building up a huge domestic spying network to collect information on us all, involving local police, state and military authorities feeding information into a database on people who’ve never been accused of wrongdoing. Homeland Security has given billions of dollars in grants to state governments since 9/11, and there are now more than 4,000 organizations in the domestic apparatus. The FBI keeps the ultimate file, with profiles on tens of thousands of Americans reported to be “acting suspiciously.” (I’m sure I’m one of them.) Also the technologies we’ve developed for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are now being used by law enforcement agencies at home—handheld fingerprint scanners, biometric data devices, unmanned aircraft monitoring our borders with Mexico and Canada. And there are now 440,000 people on the goverment’s secret terrorist watch list, with no recourse to petition to get yourself taken off it or even find out if you’re listed on it.

In other words, we the taxpayers are funding our own government to keep tabs on what we do! This is outrageous, but it’s been a long time coming. Our tax dollars have paid for mind control experiments and assassination attempts and fake attacks to draw us into war. Our tax dollars have funded drug runners and “extraordinary rendition” of detainees. And they’ve not been used in places where they should be going—like to help our veterans cope with Gulf War Syndrome and to keep the nation of Rwanda from mass genocide. What right does the government have to abuse our money like that? This is diabolical!

I’ve put together this book because it’s become crystal clear that our democracy has been undermined from within and it’s been going on for a long time. We the people have got to wake up and start demanding accountability! Let’s never forget the words of Patrick Henry: “The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”

PART ONE

OUR SCANDALOUS POSTWAR HISTORY

1

ASSASSINATIONS

The CIA’s Secret Assassination Manual

What follows are excerpts from a nineteen-page CIA document that was prepared as part of a coup against the Guatemalan government in 1954 and declassified in 1997. Maybe they should change the name to the CIA’s “secret-first degree murder manual.” How is that we are allowed to kill other people if we’re not in a declared war with them? Clearly this is a premeditated conspiracy involving more than one person. My big question is, who makes the call on this? To arbitrarily go out in the world and kill someone without their being charged with a crime!

The thought of taking out another country’s leadership is so despicable, it makes me ashamed that I’m an American. But it later was revealed that, during the Cold War, the CIA plotted against eight foreign leaders, and five of them died violent deaths. The CIA’s “Executive Action” arm was involved for years in planning with the Mob and others to murder Fidel Castro.

Are we all to believe this is simply James Bond, where agents can arbitrarily knock off people and walk away? They actually had a manual that promotes throwing people from high buildings, with “plausible denial” ! One paragraph in particular gives me pause, when I think back to what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963. “Public figures or guarded officials may be killed with great reliability and some safety if a firing point can be established prior to an official occasion,” the manual instructed.

Here is the original document.

Here is a transcript of the most frightening excerpts:

CLASSIFICATIONS

The techniques employed will vary according to whether the subject is unaware of his danger, aware but unguarded, or guarded. They will also be affected by whether or not the assassin is to be killed with the subject. Hereafter, assassinations in which the subject is unaware will be termed “simple”; those where the subject is aware but unguarded will be termed “chase”; those where the victim is guarded will be termed “guarded.”

If the assassin is to die with the subject, the act will be called “lost.” If the assassin is to escape, the adjective will be “safe.” It should be noted that no compromises should exist here. The assassin must not fall alive into enemy hands.

A further type division is caused by the need to conceal the fact that the subject was actually the victim of assassination, rather than an accident or natural causes. If such concealment is desirable the operation will be called “secret”; if concealment is immaterial, the act will be called “open”; while if the assassination requires publicity to be effective it will be termed “terroristic.”

Following these definitions, the assassination of Julius Caesar was safe, simple, and terroristic, while that of Huey Long was lost, guarded and open. Obviously, successful secret assassinations are not recorded as assassination at all. [llleg] of Thailand and Augustus Caesar may have been the victims of safe, guarded and secret assassination. Chase assassinations usually involve clandestine agents or members of criminal organizations.

THE ASSASSIN

In safe assassinations, the assassin needs the usual qualities of a clandestine agent. He should be determined, courageous, intelligent, resourceful, and physically active. If special equipment is to be used, such as firearms or drugs, it is clear that he must have outstanding skill with such equipment.

Except in terroristic assassinations, it is desirable that the assassin be transient in the area. He should have an absolute minimum of contact with the rest of the organization and his instructions should be given orally by one person only. His safe evacuation after the act is absolutely essential, but here again contact should be as limited as possible. It is preferable that the person issuing instructions also conduct any withdrawal or covering action which may be necessary.

In lost assassination, the assassin must be a fanatic of some sort. Politics, religion, and revenge are about the only feasible motives. Since a fanatic is unstable psychologically, he must be handled with extreme care. He must not know the identities of the other members of the organization, for although it is intended that he die in the act, something may go wrong. While the assassin of Trotsky has never revealed any significant information, it was unsound to depend on this when the act was planned.

PLANNING

When the decision to assassinate has been reached, the tactics of the operation must be planned, based upon an estimate of the situation similar to that used in military operations. The preliminary estimate will reveal gaps in information and possibly indicate a need for special equipment which must be procured or constructed. When all necessary data has been collected, an effective tactical plan can be prepared. All planning must be mental; no papers should ever contain evidence of the operation.

In resistance situations, assassination may be used as a counter-reprisal. Since this requires advertising to be effective, the resistance organization must be in a position to warn high officials publicly that their lives will be the price of reprisal action against innocent people. Such a threat is of no value unless it can be carried out, so it may be necessary to plan the assassination of various responsible officers of the oppressive regime and hold such plans in readiness to be used only if provoked by excessive brutality. Such plans must be modified frequently to meet changes in the tactical situation.

TECHNIQUES

The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject. A human being may be killed in many ways but sureness is often overlooked by those who may be emotionally unstrung by the seriousness of this act they intend to commit. The specific technique employed will depend upon a large number of variables, but should be constant in one point: Death must be absolutely certain. The attempt on Hitler’s life failed because the conspiracy did not give this matter proper attention.

Techniques may be considered as follows:

1. Manual.

It is possible to kill a man with the bare hands, but very few are skillful enough to do it well. Even a highly trained Judo expert will hesitate to risk killing by hand unless he has absolutely no alternative.

However, the simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination. A hammer, axe, wrench, screwdriver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice. A length of rope or wire or a belt will do if the assassin is strong and agile. All such improvised weapons have the important advantage of availability and apparent innocence. The obviously lethal machine gun failed to kill Trotsky where an item of sporting goods succeeded.

In all safe cases where the assassin may be subject to search, either before or after the act, specialized weapons should not be used. Even in the lost case, the assassin may accidentally be searched before the act and should not carry an incriminating device if any sort of lethal weapon can be improvised at or near the site. If the assassin normally carries weapons because of the nature of his job, it may still be desirable to improvise and implement at the scene to avoid disclosure of his identity.

2. Accidents.

For secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.

The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. Bridge falls into water are not reliable. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly cased location. The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness”, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to ensure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.

Falls into the sea or swiftly flowing rivers may suffice if the subject cannot swim. It will be more reliable if the assassin can arrange to attempt rescue, as he can thus be sure of the subject’s death and at the same time establish a workable alibi.

If the subject’s personal habits make it feasible, alcohol may be used [2 words excised] to prepare him for a contrived accident of any kind.

Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing and can seldom be free from unexpected observation.

Automobile accidents are a less satisfactory means of assassination. If the subject is deliberately run down, very exact timing is necessary and investigation is likely to be thorough. If the subject’s car is tampered with, reliability is very low. The subject may be stunned or drugged and then placed in the car, but this is only reliable when the car can be run off a high cliff or into deep water without observation.

Arson can cause accidental death if the subject is drugged and left in a burning building. Reliability is not satisfactory unless the building is isolated and highly combustible.

3. Drugs.

In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. If the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care, this is an easy and rare method. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If not, two grains will suffice.

If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism.

Specific poisons, such as arsenic or strychine, are effective but their possession or procurement is incriminating, and accurate dosage is problematical. Poison was used unsuccessfully in the assassination of Rasputin and Kolohan, though the latter case is more accurately described as a murder.

4. Edge Weapons.

Any locally obtained edge device may be successfully employed. A certain minimum of anatomical knowledge is needed for reliability.

Puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached. The heart is protected by the rib cage and is not always easy to locate.

Abdominal wounds were once nearly always mortal, but modern medical treatment has made this no longer true.

Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region. This can be done with the point of a knife or a light blow of an axe or hatchet.

Another reliable method is the severing of both jugular and carotid blood vessels on both sides of the windpipe.

2

EXECUTIVE ACTION

U.S. Assassination Plots against Foreign Leaders

The pages that follow are an excerpt from the Church Committee’s 1977 congressional report on “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.” You’ll see that they’d refined the title into “Executive Action,” except the project code name is ZR/RIFLE. The full report is online at www.maryferrell.org.

The key CIA players here are Richard Bissell, William Harvey, and Richard Helms. They were all heavily involved in Cuban affairs and the targeting of Fidel Castro. (Bundy is apparently McGeorge Bundy, who was Kennedy’s national security adviser.) The CIA guys tried to make it look like they had approval of the White House all through the Kennedy years (1960–63), but in fact the Kennedys put a stop to any such talk and the CIA kept right on going in secret. Harvey eventually got canned. Some researchers think he then turned the tables on JFK and helped organize an “Executive Action” to get rid of the president.

3

SECRET EXPERIMENTS

U.S. Public Health Service Exposed Guatemalan Prostitutes, Prisoners, Soldiers to Sexually Transmitted Disease

This one boggles my mind. We knew about the horrifying Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment when the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) “observed” and experimented on 399 poor African-American men in the late stages of syphilis—basically watching them die over a forty-year period starting in 1932. This came to light in 1972.

Yet another study has been uncovered. In 2010, a researcher named Susan Reverby of Wellesley College discovered that the USPHS was also busy in Guatemala from 1946-1948, infecting nearly 1,000 Guatemalan citizens with venereal diseases. Why? To test antibiotics. Don’t believe me—here are excerpts from Findings from a CDC Report on the 1946-1948 U.S. Public Health Service Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Inoculation Study. If you want to view it yourself, go to www.hhs.gov/1946incoulationstudy/findings.html.

4 & 5 & 6

MIND CONTROL

The CIA’s Project ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA

At the same time the Guatemalan experiments were taking place, the just-formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was borrowing another page from 1930s Germany. I’d like to say that’s where these next documents originated, but no, this is our own government using people as guinea pigs. Their behavior-control programs were known as Project ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA.

Why the perpetrators were not brought to trial and justice is beyond me. If anyone in the private sector did something like this, they would go to jail and throw away the key. But I guess governments are immune from the same standards. Laws that apply to the general populace don’t apply to them. Lest we forget, isn’t the government made up of people too?

Nothing was publicly known about these grisly experiments until the mid-1970s, and guess who in the Ford administration was involved in helping keep the lid on the worst of what went on? None other than Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Dick Cheney. It seems the torture of detainees at Guantanamo—which we’ll examine later in this book—has deep roots in our secret history.

The three documents that follow are an excerpt from a 1975 CIA memo on some of what ARTICHOKE involved, a 1951 ARTICHOKE report on Sensony Integration (SI) and Hypnosis (H) on two unwitting girls, and a 1963 CIA “Report of Inspection of MKULTRA.”

7

A FAKE TERRORIST ATTACK

Operation Northwoods

At the end of April 2001, a little more than four months before 9/11, the startling fact that the American military had planned fake terrorist attacks on our own citizenry first came to light. The book Body of Secrets , by James Bamford, called it the “most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.” This was Operation Northwoods, which was approved by all the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 for action against Cuba.

Here was the background: at a White House meeting on February 26, 1962, when various covert action plans seemed to be going nowhere, Robert Kennedy ordered a stop to all such anti-Castro efforts. General Lyman Lemnitzer, the holdover chairman of the Joint Chiefs from the Eisenhower years, decided the only option was to trick the American public and world opinion into a justifiable war.

The document you’re about to read was presented to President Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, that March. Three days later, JFK told Lemnitzer that there was virtually no possibility of our using overt force to take Cuba. Within a few months, Lemnitzer had been transferred to a different job.

So Operation Northwoods remained secret for thirty-five years. Now you can download a PDF from the National Security Archive website, and it makes for pretty chilling reading. You could even think about it as establishing a precedent for the future. If something like this was on the table in 1962, wouldn’t it likewise have been in 2001? What Northwoods had on the drawing board, I believe 9/11 was.

It seems that all through history, wars and takeovers are started with false flag operations: the Reichstag fire, the Chinese supposedly attacking Japan, the Gulf of Tonkin incident with Vietnam. The list goes on and on. History has a way of repeating itself, like that old cliché: if it works once, let’s try it again.

8 & 9

THE VIETNAM SHAM

Kennedy’s Plans to Withdraw Troops from Vietnam

I enlisted in the Navy on September 11, 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War. As part of the SEAL’s Underwater Demolition Team, I spent time off the coast of Hanoi waiting with a Marine division for a Normandy-type invasion that never happened. Altogether I served seventeen months overseas, never questioning how we ended up in Vietnam to begin with.

Today, I know different. It was a sham from the get-go, trumped up by the military industrial complex. If President Kennedy had lived, we’d have started withdrawing troops by late 1963 and had all our servicemen out of there by the end of 1965. The idea that JFK was responsible for having escalated the war is simply bogus. It’s obvious his plans were to pull us out, but he’d said behind the scenes he had to wait until after the next election to do it.

When the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) official file from those years was declassified in 1997, it contained a memorandum concerning the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF in the document) conference on May 6, 1963, held at CINCPAC headquarters in Camp Smith, Hawaii. Let’s start with key excerpts from that one, and a follow-up memo from late October (less than a month before JFK was assassinated) that clearly show we were starting to get out of Vietnam and leave matters in the hands of the South Vietnamese, where they belonged. Unfortunately, this is again a case of misleading the people for years, by keeping the true thoughts of John F. Kennedy out of the public realm.

10

FLAWED INTELLIGENCE

What Really Happened at the Gulf of Tonkin

The official line was that, in August 1964, the North Vietnamese twice attacked U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. That was the incident that led to Congress passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and President Johnson’s dramatic buildup of our forces. As it turns out, according to top secret documents finally released by the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2005, the second attack never happened. Somebody involved in SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) skewed the data to make it look that way.

Some 58,000 of my generation were killed in the Vietnam War, and no telling how many Vietnamese, probably over a million but who knows? Again, all based upon fraudulence. How can our government have any credibility whatsoever when it’s always caught in these major lies?

An article in Naval History, a magazine published by the U.S. Naval Institute, first revealed the story in 1999 of Operation Plan 34A, a highly classified program of covert attacks against North Vietnam, including the raids on two offshore islands that forced their one (and only) retaliation against the USS Maddox.

As far back as 1972, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was pushing the NSA to release what its files contained on the Gulf of Tonkin. They stonewalled, even as late as 2004 when a FOIA request pushed for it. According to the New York Times, high-level officials at the NSA were “fearful that [declassification] might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq.” Oh really?

11

AGENT ORANGE?

U.S. Capabilities in Chemical and Biological Warfare

It’s hard to imagine today’s Congress holding this kind of hearing in anything but a closed-door top-secret session. But there seemed to be a lot more openness in our government as the sixties came to a close. I founda the transcript of this House Subcommittee to be a real eye-opener. Not only the transcript of this House Subcommittee to be a real eye-opener. Not only in terms of the R&D going on at the time—and I realize this was during the Cold War with the Russians—but of how “innocently” we were using herbicides in Vietnam. You won’t see Agent Orange mentioned, but clearly that’s what they’re talking about. The other part that blew my mind was how acceptable it was to dump “obsolete chemical agents” into the ocean.

It’s just appalling to know that we have this capability to use as we so desire. Is it truly survive-at-any-cost, where we have no moral high ground on anything? Maybe so. Because, as my Special Forces friend Dick Marcinko has said, at the end of the day it’s all about who’s still alive. That seems to be the mind-set here: we can have every weapon imaginable at our disposal but nobody else is allowed to be that way. I find it kind of ironic that the very thing we attacked Saddam Hussein over, we’d maintained in our arsenal for many years! The hypocrisy would be laughable if this weren’t such a serious matter.

Pay particular attention to the little section on “Synthetic Biological Agents.” Molecular biology was then just beginning and they’re saying here: “eminent biologists believe that within a period of 5 to 10 years it would be possible to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired.”

When did people start to die from AIDS? Ten years later, the early 1980s. What about lyme disease? The first cluster of cases occurred in 1976 at a Naval Medical Hospital in Connecticut, not far from the military’s Plum Island facility engaged in secret biochemical warfare experiments.

I don’t want to jump to any conclusions here. But after reading the transcript of this congressional hearing—and I’ve included most of it—I sure as heck wonder how far all this has developed over the last forty years.

PART TWO

GOVERNMENT, MILITARY, AND CORPORATE SECRETS

12

NAZIS IN THE U.S.

Putting War Criminals to Work for America

If you believe in things like making a pact with the devil, you might say that our intelligence agencies did just that at the end of World War Two. That’s when we started giving many of Hitler’s top henchmen not only sanctuary in our country, but putting these same Nazis to work for us. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was beginning—and the excuse was that we needed every bit of expertise, scientific and otherwise, that we could get.

It almost seems to me that the Cold War was staged so the weapons manufacturers and others could make money off it. Otherwise, how could we go from being allies with the Russians all through the war to their becoming our bitter enemies almost overnight? As Colonel Fletcher Prouty once said, “Nothing just happens, everything is planned.”

And I find it outrageous that some of the leading Nazis were brought over here because it was apparently more important to fight the Cold War than to hold them responsible for what they’d done. I don’t understand how the people making those decisions look only at the “big picture” and forget about collateral damage underneath. If they were absolutely sure no war crimes or atrocities had been committed, fine and dandy. But there should have been a thorough vetting done by this country—and not secretly but in public—so the American people knew which Nazis were coming and why.

The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations put together a massive 600-page report about all this, which they completed in 2006. A few years later, the National Security Archive (a nonprofit in Washington, D.C.) filed a Freedom of Information Act request. This got turned down, the excuse being that the report was only a “draft.” That was despite the Obama administration supposedly being committed to an “unprecedented” level of transparency. What could possibly be so sensitive after all these years?

Anyway, the National Security Archive filed suit in a federal district court, and the Justice Department then began to “process” the document for release. Well, they must have bought up pretty much all the Wite-Out left in the office supply. They could’ve issued a CD titled “My Blank Pages.” After the redacted report got turned over to the National Security Archive, somebody inside the Justice Department took matters into their own hands and leaked a complete copy to the New York Times.

If you want to read the whole thing, or compare the two versions, check out the National Security Archive website at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB331/index.htm. I’m including here a one-page sampler of the censored version with the actual—an example of the lengths our government will go to keep “secrets” under wraps more than sixty years after-the-fact. This is followed by a few of the more telling pages from the Office of Special Investigations’ report.

13 & 14 & 15

NAZI WAR CRIMES

More on U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis

Not long after the Justice Department’s 2006 report came out, along came another from the National Archives. This is based on 1.3 million Army files and another 1,110 CIA files. The New York Times had this to say about it: “After World War II, American counterintelligence recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans and Nazi collaborators to an even greater extent than had been previously disclosed and helped many of them avoid prosecution or looked the other way when they escaped…”

I’m including here the 100-page report’s introduction and conclusion, and sandwiched in between are three documents that caught my eye. One is an interview with a personal secretary to Hitler, who took his last will and testament, and who also related how the armored car carrying Martin Bormann was blown up. The second is about how the Germans supported a number of Arab leaders during the war, apparently based on expecting to later establish pro-German governments in the Middle East. And the third, signed by CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1952, shows the Agency looking to head off a criminal investigation into a Ukrainian nationalist leader that it wanted to keep using.

INTRODUCTION

At the end of World War II, Allied armies recovered a large portion of the written or filmed evidence of the Holocaust and other forms of Nazi persecution. Allied prosecutors used newly found records in numerous war crimes trials. Governments released many related documents regarding war criminals during the second half of the 20th century. A small segment of American-held documents from Nazi Germany or about Nazi officials and Nazi collaborators, however, remained classified into the 21st century because of government restrictions on the release of intelligence-related records.

Approximately 8 million pages of documents declassified in the United States under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act added significantly to our knowledge of wartime Nazi crimes and the postwar fate of suspected war criminals. A 2004 U.S. Government report by a team of independent historians working with the government’s Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), entitled U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, highlighted some of the new information; it appeared with revisions as a 2005 book.¹ Our 2010 report serves as an addendum to U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis; it draws upon additional documents declassified since then.

The latest CIA and Army files have: evidence of war crimes and about the wartime activities of war criminals; postwar documents on the search for or prosecution of war criminals; documents about the escape of war criminals; documents about the Allied protection or use of Nazi war criminals; and documents about the postwar political activities of war criminals. None of the declassified documents conveys a complete story in itself; to make sense of this evidence, we have also drawn on older documents and published works.

The Timing of Declassification

Why did the most recent declassifications take so long? In 2005–07 the Central Intelligence Agency adopted a more liberal interpretation of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. As a result, CIA declassified and turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) additional documents from pre-existing files as well as entirely new CIA files, totaling more than 1,100 files in all. Taken together, there were several thousand pages of new CIA records that no one outside the CIA had seen previously.

A much larger collection came from the Army. In the early postwar years, the Army had the largest U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence organizations in Europe; it also led the search for Nazi war criminals. In 1946 Army intelligence (G-2) and the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) had little competition—the CIA was not established until a year later. Even afterwards, the Army remained a critical factor in intelligence work in central Europe.

Years ago the Army facility at Fort Meade, Maryland, turned over to NARA its classified Intelligence and Security Command Records for Europe from the period (approximately) 1945–63. Mostly counterintelligence records from the Army’s Investigative Records Repository (IRR), this collection promised to be a rich source of information about whether the United States maintained an interest in war crimes and Nazi war criminals.

After preserving these records on microfilm, and then on a now obsolete system of optical disks, the Army destroyed many of the paper documents. But the microfilm deteriorated, and NARA could not read or recover about half of the files on the optical disks, let alone declassify and make them available. NARA needed additional resources and technology to solve the technological problems and transfer the IRR files to a special computer server. Declassification of these IRR files only began in 2009, after the IWG had gone out of existence.

This new Army IRR collection comprises 1.3 million files and many millions of pages. It will be years before all of these Army files are available for researchers. For this report we have drawn selectively upon hundreds of these IRR files, amounting to many thousands of pages, which have been declassified and are already available at NARA.

Intelligence Organizations and War Crimes

American intelligence and counterintelligence organizations each had its own raison d’être, its own institutional interests, and its own priorities. Unfortunately, intelligence officials generally did not record their general policies and attitudes toward war crimes and war criminals, so that we hunted for evidence in their handling of individual cases. Despite variations, these specific cases do show a pattern: the issue of capturing and punishing war criminals became less important over time. During the last months of the war and shortly after it, capturing enemies, collecting evidence about them, and punishing them seemed quite consistent. Undoubtedly, the onset of the Cold War gave American intelligence organizations new functions, new priorities, and new foes. Settling scores with Germans or German collaborators seemed less pressing; in some cases, it even appeared counterproductive.

In the months after the war in Europe ended Allied forces struggled to comprehend the welter of Nazi organizations. Allied intelligence agencies initially scrutinized their German intelligence counterparts for signs of participation in underground organizations, resistance, or sabotage. Assessing threats to the Allied occupation of Germany, they thought first of Nazi fanatics and German intelligence officials. Nazi officials in the concentration camps had obviously committed terrible crimes, but the evidence about the Gestapo was not as striking. The Allies started by trying to find out who had been responsible for what.

NOTES

1

Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Gertrude (Traudl) Junge, one of Hitler’s personal secretaries, stayed in the Reichschancellery bunker to take Hitler’s last will and testament before his suicide. Junge describes the perils in working her way through the Russian lines surrounding Berlin. She relates meeting Hitler’s chauffeur Kemka and of the deaths of Martin Bormann, Stumpfegger, and Naumann, when their armored car was blown up. RG 319, Records of the Army Staff.

German financial support of Arab leaders during the entire war was astonishing. The Grand Mufti Amin el Husseini and Raschid Ali El Gailani financed their operations with funding from the German Foreign Ministry from 1941–45. German intention in the Arab countries was based on an expectation of establishing pro-German governments in the Middle East. RG 319, Records of the Army Staff.

The CIA moved to protect Ukranian nationalist leader Mykola Lebed from criminal investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1952. RG 263, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency.

CONCLUSION

This report discusses only a sample of newly released records, hinting at their overall richness. The 1.3 million Army files include thousands of titles of many more issues regarding wartime criminals, their pursuit, their arrest, their escape, and occasionally, their use by Allied and Soviet intelligence agencies. These include files on German war criminals, but also collaborators from the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, and elsewhere. These files also include information on Allied and non-aligned states that had an interest in Axis personalities, including Great Britain, France, Italy, Argentina, and Israel.

The 1,110 re-released or newly released CIA name files are in most cases far more detailed than the files of the initial CIA release in 2001 and after. They contain a trove of information on Nazis who eventually worked for the Gehlen Organization or as Soviet spies after the war. They hold information about important Nazi officials who escaped and became figures of security interest in other countries spanning the globe from the Middle East to South America. Together, the Army and CIA records will keep scholars of World War II and the Cold War busy for many years.

The new files also have postwar intelligence on other subjects. The CIC kept close watch on other suspect groups, such as German communists, and kept thousands of files on them. They kept watch on politically active Jewish refugees in displaced persons camps. Indeed, there are many hundreds of newly released files concerning the remnant of European Jews who searched for a new life in Palestine or the United States. Thus the new records are of great interest to those researching a very broad range of topics from international Communism to the Jewish diaspora to the history of mass migration.

The declassification of intelligence-related material is a controversial subject, involving as it does the release of records formerly of national security interest. The current releases show, however, that the passage of years lessens the information’s sensitivity while providing researchers access to raw information that is simply not available elsewhere. By their very nature, intelligence agencies attain and record information that other government or non-government organizations cannot. None of the chapters in this report could have been written without declassified intelligence records, nor could the many articles and books that will emerge as a result of the current release. The funding for declassification and the assurance that intelligence records are opened to the public thus preserve key aspects of world history. In the interest of understanding our past Congress should, in our view, ensure that such openness continues.

16

WARREN COMMISSION

CIA “Propaganda Notes” on the Kennedy Assassination

This CIA memo of “Propaganda Notes” from 1964 is self-explanatory. They were going to make sure the Warren Report that concluded President Kennedy was assassinated by a lone nut named Lee Harvey Oswald got disseminated far and wide. The intention was to bury suspicions of conspiracy, part of a systematic government-promoted distribution of—they said it, not me—propaganda.

A great deal of the CIA’s job seems to be to “spin” whatever happens in the best light they can. And for the most part, spinning is done to cover up the truth: If we’ve done it, then it has to be right.

17

NORIEGA AND THE U.S.

Running Drugs with Dictators

The Reagan years are remembered, of course, for the Iran-Contra scandal that made a notorious celebrity (and future political hero to many) of Colonel Oliver North. He claimed that John Kerry’s 1988 Senateto Foreign Relations subcommittee report on the interplay between U.S. support for the Nicaraguan Contras and the drug trade was all wrong. “The fact is nobody in the government of the United States…ever had anything to do with running drugs to support the Nicaraguan resistance…I will stand on with running drugs to support the Nicaraguan resistance. . . I will stand on that to my grave.”

Well, North may still be standing but his credibility sure isn’t. His diary entries actually had numerous reports of drug smuggling among the Contras, none of which North alerted the DEA or other law enforcement agencies about. One mentions $14 million in drug money being funneled into an operation.

I have to laugh and, in the immortal words of Nancy Reagan, “just say no” to drugs. The hypocrisy of the double standard is ludicrous. All you can do is laugh, or cry. I guess it’s okay to deal drugs if it’s for the cause of war.

I’m including here an exchange between North and his boss, Admiral John Poindexter, about Manuel Noriega, the Panamian dictator who our government later overthrew. Noriega is still doing time for drug-running, and it turns out that he and North had “a fairly good relationship.” Poindexter said he had “nothing against him other than his illegal activities.” (He misspells “assassination.”)

For more details on all this, check out National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 113 on-line (February 26, 2004).

18 & 19

RWANDA ATROCITIES

America’s Blind Eye to Genocide

The callousness of our government—and how we’ll only put something on the line when our own self-interest is involved (think oil in Iraq)—is shockingly clear when you look back at the Clinton administration’s position on the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. For a three-month period starting in April that year, Hutu death squads slaughtered an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate members of their own tribe.

A few years later, when Clinton visited the Rwandan capital of Kigali, the president said: “It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”

I visited Clinton in the White House after I was elected governor of Minnesota, and we played golf together and enjoyed each other’s company. But I’ve got to be blunt: that statement he made in Rwanda was a bald-faced lie. The CIA’s national intelligence daily, a secret briefing that went to Clinton and Vice President Gore and hundreds of senior officials, had almost daily reports on what was happening in Rwanda. But let’s face it, this was a small country in central Africa with no minerals or strategic value.

Clearly, there was nothing in Rwanda for corporate America to profit from, and it seems today that’s the only time we get involved. If there’s no oil or lithium or what-have-you, we really don’t have time. Humanitarian reasons aren’t good enough, there’s got to be financial gain. So we turned our backs on one of the worst mass murders in history. Even our support for the United Nations’ initiatives was less than lukewarm.

In 2004, again thanks to a FOIA lawsuit by the National Security Archive, the government released a set of documents related to our Rwanda policy ten years earlier. These are highly educational, as to how things work in D.C., beginning with some talking points by the State Department for a dinner engagement with Henry Kissinger! This spells out, early on, how not-far we were willing to go—even though it was likely that “a massive (hundreds of thousands of deaths) bloodbath will ensue.” But be sure not to mention genocide, or we might be committed to “actually ‘do something.’”

The second memo takes up the subject of “Has Genocide Occurred in Rwanda?” (you bet!) and how best to keep our international credibility while doing zip.

20

SOLDIERS AS GUINEA PIGS

Military Experiments on Our Own Troops

As a veteran who served his country for six years (1969–75), I think I’ve earned the right to be outraged at how my fellow servicemen have been treated by our government. But I can’t say this surprises me. Our patriotism toward our veterans is appalling and actually laughable. I mean, we honor them at sports events, say the Pledge, thank them up and down for their service. But those thank-you’s ring pretty hollow when, behind the scenes, nothing much is done for the veteran who’s put his life on the line.

It’s been that way for every war in my lifetime. When we’re done using the soldier, we give him lip service but everything else is hastily forgotten—the injuries, the diseases, all of that we want to bury and pretend that it doesn’t exist. If you end up doing something for veterans, it costs money—and then we’d have to realize that there’s more to war than just dying. There’s a huge amount of collateral damage—of living death—that takes place after a war. Benefits, hospitalization, true care: all the things that should happen after a veteran is done serving, forget it! So all the praise for their service is, to me, utterly phony.

Take a look at the excerpt from a staff report prepared for the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on December 8, 1994. I hope this turns your stomach, as it did mine. (You can access the full Senate 103-97 report at www.gulfwarvets.com/senate.htm.)

103d Congress, 2d Session - COMMITTEE PRINT - S. Prt. 103-97
IS MILITARY RESEARCH HAZARDOUS TO VETERANS’
HEALTH? LESSONS SPANNING HALF A CENTURY
A STAFF REPORT PREPARED FOR THE COMMITTEE ON VETERANS’
AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
DECEMBER 8, 1994
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV, West Virginia, Chairman
DENNIS DeCONCINI, Arizona
FRANK H. MURKOWSKI, Alaska
GEORGE J. MITCHELL, Maine
STROM THURMOND, South Carolina
BOB GRAHAM, Florida
ALAN K. SIMPSON, Wyoming
DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii
ARLEN SPECTER, Pennsylvania
THOMAS A. DASCHLE, South Dakota
JAMES M. JEFFORDS, Vermont
BEN NIGHTHORSE CAMPBELL, Colorado
Jim Gottlieb, Chief Counsel/Staff Director
John H. Moseman, Minority Staff Director/Chief Counsel
Diana M. Zuckerman, Professional Staff Member
Patricia Olson, Congressional Science Fellow

FOREWORD

U.S. Senate,
Committee on Veterans’ Affairs,
Washington, DC, December 8, 1994

During the last few years, the public has become aware of several examples where U.S. Government researchers intentionally exposed Americans to potentially dangerous substances without their knowledge or consent. The Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, which I have been privileged to chair from 1993-94, has conducted a comprehensive analysis of the extent to which veterans participated in such research while they were serving in the U.S. military. This resulted in two hearings, on May 6, 1994, and August 5, 1994.

This report, written by the majority staff of the Committee, is the result of that comprehensive investigation, and is intended to provide information for future deliberations by the Congress. The findings and conclusions contained in this report are those of the majority staff and do not necessarily reflect the views of the members of the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

This report would not have been possible without the dedication and expertise of Dr. Patricia Olson, who, as a Congressional Science Fellow, worked tirelessly on this investigation and report, and the keen intelligence, energy, and commitment of Dr. Diana Zuckerman, who directed this effort.

John D. Rockefeller IV, Chairman

CONTENTS

I. Introduction

II. Background

• A. Codes, declarations, and laws governing human experimentation

• B. Mustard gas and lewisite

• C. Seventh-Day Adventists

• D. Dugway Proving Ground

• E. Radiation exposure

• F. Hallucinogens

• G. Investigational drugs

III. Findings and conclusions

• A. For at least 50 years, DOD has intentionally exposed military personnel to potentially dangerous substances, often in secret

• B. DOD has repeatedly failed to comply with required ethical standards when using human subjects in military research during war or threat of war

• http://www.gulfweb.org/bigdoc/dodC. DOD incorrectly claims that since their goal was treatment, the use of investigational drugs in the Persian Gulf War was not research

• D. DOD used investigational drugs in the Persian Gulf War in ways that were not effective

• E. DOD did not know whether pyridostigmine bromide would be safe for use by U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf War

• F. When U.S. troops were sent to the Persian Gulf in 1994, DOD still did not have proof that pyridostigmine bromide was safe for use as an antidote enhancer

• G. Pyridostigmine may be more dangerous in combination with pesticides and other exposures

• H. The safety of the botulism vaccine was not established prior to the Persian Gulf War

• I. Records of anthrax vaccinations are not suitable to evaluate safety

• J. Army regulations exempt informed consent for volunteers in some types of military research

• K. DOD and DVA have repeatedly failed to provide information and medical followup to those who participate in military research or are ordered to take investigational drugs

• L. The Federal Government has failed to support scientific studies that provide information about the reproductive problems experienced by veterans who were intentionally exposed to potentially dangerous substances

• M. The Federal Government has failed to support scientific studies that provide timely information for compensation decisions regarding military personnel who were harmed by various exposures

• N. Participation in military research is rarely included in military medical records, making it impossible to support a veteran’s claim for service-connected disabilities from military research

• O. DOD has demonstrated a pattern of misrepresenting the danger of various military exposures that continues today

IV. Recommendations

• A. Congress should deny the DOD request for a blanket waiver to use investigational drugs in case of war or threat of war

• B. FDA should reject any applications from DOD that do not include data on women, and long-term followup data

• C. Congress should authorize a centralized database for all federally funded experiments that utilize human subjects

• D. Congress should mandate all Federal agencies to declassify most documents on research involving human subjects

• E. Congress should reestablish a National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects

• F. VA and DOD should implement regular site visits to review Institutional Review Boards

• G. The Feres Doctrine should not be applied for military personnel who are harmed by inappropriate human experimentation when informed consent has not been given

Appendix -- Survey of 150 Persian Gulf War Veterans

IS MILITARY RESEARCH HAZARDOUS TO VETERANS’ HEALTH? LESSONS SPANNING HALF A CENTURY

I. INTRODUCTION

During the last 50 years, hundreds of thousands of military personnel have been involved in human experimentation and other intentional exposures conducted by the Department of Defense (DOD), often without a servicemember’s knowledge or consent. In some cases, soldiers who consented to serve as human subjects found themselves participating in experiments quite different from those described at the time they volunteered. For example, thousands of World War II veterans who originally volunteered to “test summer clothing” in exchange for extra leave time, found themselves in gas chambers testing the effects of mustard gas and lewisite. (Note 1) Additionally, soldiers were sometimes ordered by commanding officers to “volunteer” to participate in research or face dire consequences. For example, several Persian Gulf War veterans interviewed by Committee staff reported that they were ordered to take experimental vaccines during Operation Desert Shield or face prison. (Note 2)

The goals of many of the military experiments and exposures were very appropriate. For example, some experiments were intended to provide important information about how to protect U.S. troops from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons or other dangerous substances during wartime. In the Persian Gulf War, U.S. troops were intentionally exposed to an investigational vaccine that was intended to protect them against biological warfare, and they were given pyridostigmine bromide pills in an experimental protocol intended to protect them against chemical warfare.

However, some of the studies that have been conducted had more questionable motives. For example, the Department of Defense (DOD) conducted numerous “man-break” tests, exposing soldiers to chemical weapons in order to determine the exposure level that would cause a casualty, i.e., “break a man.” (Note 3) Similarly, hundreds of soldiers were subjected to hallucinogens in experimental programs conducted by the DOD in participation with, or sponsored by, the CIA. (Note 4), (Note 5) These servicemembers often unwittingly participated as human subjects in tests for drugs intended for mind-control or behavior modification, often without their knowledge or consent. Although the ultimate goal of those experiments was to provide information that would help U.S. military and intelligence efforts, most Americans would agree that the use of soldiers as unwitting guinea pigs in experiments that were designed to harm them, at least temporarily, is not ethical.

Whether the goals of these experiments and exposures were worthy or not, these experiences put hundred of thousands of U.S. servicemembers at risk, and may have caused lasting harm to many individuals.

Every year, thousands of experiments utilizing human subjects are still being conducted by, or on behalf of, the DOD. Many of these ongoing experiments have very appropriate goals, such as obtaining information for preventing, diagnosing, and treating various diseases and disabilities acquired during military service. Although military personnel are the logical choice as human subjects for such research, it is questionable whether the military hierarchy allows for individuals in subordinate positions of power to refuse to participate in military experiments. It is also questionable whether those who participated as human subjects in military research were given adequate information to fully understand the potential benefits and risks of the experiments. Moreover, the evidence suggests that they have not been adequately monitored for adverse health effects after the experimental protocols end.

Veterans who become ill or disabled due to military service are eligible to receive priority access to medical care at VA medical facilities and to receive monthly compensation checks. In order to qualify, they must demonstrate that their illness or disability was associated with their military service. Veterans who did not know that they were exposed to dangerous substances while they were in the military, therefore, would not apply for or receive the medical care or compensation that they are entitled to. Moreover, even if they know about the exposure, it would be difficult or impossible to prove if the military has not kept adequate records. It is therefore crucial that the VA learn as much as possible about the potential exposures, and that the DOD assume responsibility for providing such information to veterans and to the VA.

II. BACKGROUND

A. CODES, DECLARATIONS, AND LAWS GOVERNING HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION

The Nuremberg Code is a 10-point declaration governing human experimentation, developed by the Allies after World War II in response to inhumane experiments conducted by Nazi scientists and physicians. The Code states that voluntary and informed consent is absolutely essential from all human subjects who participate in research, whether during war or peace. The Code states:

The person involved should have the legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject, there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonable to be expected; and the effects upon his health and person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiments. (Note 6)

There is no provision in the Nuremberg Code that allows a country to waive informed consent for military personnel or veterans who serve as human subjects in experiments during wartime or in experiments that are conducted because of threat of war. However, the DOD has recently argued that wartime experimental requirements differ from peacetime requirements for informed consent. According to the Pentagon, “In all peacetime applications, we believe strongly in informed consent and its ethical foundations . . . . . But military combat is different.” (Note 7) The DOD argued that informed consent should be waived for investigational drugs that could possibly save a soldier’s life, avoid endangerment of the other personnel in his unit, and accomplish the combat mission.

More than a decade after the development of the Nuremberg Code, the World Medical Association prepared recommendations as a guide to doctors using human subjects in biomedical research. As a result, in 1964 the Eighteenth World Medical Assembly met in Helsinki, Finland, and adopted recommendations to be used as an ethical code by all medical doctors conducting biomedical research with human subjects. This code, referred to as the Declaration of Helsinki, was revised in 1975, 1983, and 1989. (Note 8) It differs from the Nuremberg Code in certain important respects. The Declaration of Helsinki distinguishes between clinical (therapeutic) and nonclinical (nontherapeutic) biomedical research, and addresses “proxy consent” for human subjects who are legally incompetent, such as children or adults with severe physical or mental disabilities. (Note 9) Proxy consent for legally competent military personnel who participate in military research is not considered appropriate under the Nuremberg Code or the Declaration of Helsinki.

On June 18, 1991, the Federal Government announced that 16 U.S. governmental agencies would abide by a set of regulations, referred to as the “Common Rule,” designed to protect human subjects who participate in federally funded research. (Note 10) The provisions of the “Common Rule,” first promulgated for the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) in 1974, described how federally funded research involving human subjects shall be conducted. However, local Institutional Review Boards (IRB’s) may revise or exclude some or all consent elements if the research exposes subjects to no more than “minimal risk,” meaning “that the probability and magnitude of harm or discomfort anticipated in the research are not greater in and of themselves than those ordinarily encountered in daily life or during the performance of routine physical or psychological examinations or tests.” (Note 11) IRB’s vary greatly in their interpretation of the risks of daily life.

There are three provisions governing research funded by DHHS that are intended to protect vulnerable populations, such as pregnant women and fetuses, prisoners, and children. (Note 12) There are no special Federal regulations to protect military personnel when they participate as human subjects in federally funded research, despite logical questions about whether military personnel can truly “volunteer” in response to a request from a superior officer.

Current law prevents the Department of Defense from using Federal funds for research involving the use of human experimental subjects, unless the subject gives informed consent in advance. This law applies regardless of whether the research is intended to benefit the subject. (Note 13)

21 & 22.

WAR’S REAL COST

Gulf War Illness and Our Veterans

Bringing things up-to-date, here are parts of two documents from 2010. The first comes straight from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and it has some pretty shocking statistics on how many veterans of the first Gulf War have suffered adverse health consequences. The second is testimony from Paul Sullivan, Executive Director of Veterans for Common Sense, given before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on September 30. I found his statement heart-wrenching. What’s it going to take for our leaders to consider the real cost of these endless wars?

23

MILITARY TAKEOVER

Operation Garden Plot: Our Military and “Civil Disturbances”

The curious thing is, a Civil Disturbance Plan called Garden Plot was in place more than ten years before 9/11. See if you agree whether this is a blueprint for the military taking over during any protest or “unrest” that might seem to be getting out of hand. In case you still think the Patriot Act couldn’t be applied to us.

Turning the military loose in our country to take care of things: Isn’t this what the National Guard is for, and doesn’t that fall under the jurisdiction of the states and their governors? It seems that the feds shouldn’t be coming in unless they’re asked. Which maybe they’d have to be now, because the National Guard is off fighting in foreign countries. It’s all ass-backwards. We’ve got the Guard in Iraq and they’re trying to turn the regular military loose on our own citizens. Again we owe that role reversal to George W. Bush.

I can understand occasions when federal help is needed, but this shouldn’t be top-down but bottom-up. You need to do this under great scrutiny, in very limited types of situations, to ensure that there are no abuses of power.

24 & 25

FREEDOMS FOR SAFETY?

“Emergency” Detention Camps and Civilian Inmate Labor Program

Are we ready for martial law? I think we are, because everybody’s sitting back and watching our freedoms being taken away and the handcuffs put on and “Newspeak” (read Orwell’s 1984 again, folks) being slowly put into practice. We can all proudly stand up as Americans and say, Guess what? The terrorists are winning because our country has changed in the last decade, and not for the good. We’re a country that’s now living in fear and so are willing to trade our freedoms for safety—which I stand against and will go to my grave stating: “I’d rather face the terrorists on a daily basis than lose any of my freedoms.”

So let’s look at how the government has been intent on keeping us safe. First, a press release issued by KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton (the company Cheney ran), early in 2006. It’s a joint deal they made with Homeland Security and Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), “in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs,” whatever that means. Did you know that the ICE already had detention centers in place since it was established in March 2003?

Second, the Army went on to establish a Civilian Inmate Labor Program back in 2005. “This regulation provides Army policy and guidance for establishing civilian inmate labor programs and civilian prison camps on Army installations.” The italics are mine. Would somebody tell me what this means, so I don’t have to worry so much about what it implies?

26

CONTINGENCY PLANNING

The Army’s Continuity of Operations Plan

Hours after the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration put “Continuity of Government” plans into operation for the first time in American history. These had actually been drawn up by Donald Rumsfeld earlier in the year, and when WikiLeaks published it, the document was affixed with a warning: “Destruction Notice: Destroy by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document.”

I guess something has changed since then, because the revised Army Regulation 500-3 issued in April 2008 is stamped UNCLASSIFIED. I’m ending this section with some excerpts, which seem like decent contingency planning on the face of it. Still, the emergency relocation facilities do give me pause, not unlike the KBR contract and the civilian prison camps.

In the wrong hands…I’d better stop there.

27

EMBASSY CABLES

The State Department Cable on Russia as a “Mafia State”

No doubt by the time this book appears, there will be whole volumes being assembled based on the WikiLeaks slow-but-steady release of U.S. embassy cables. I haven’t had time to do more than peruse some of the most intriguing of these, but I go back to what Congressman Ron Paul has to say about the whole WikiLeaks saga. What’s caused more deaths—“lying us into war [in Iraq] or the release of the WikiLeaks papers? . . . In a society where truth becomes treason, then we’re in big trouble.” He says it so eloquently, I have nothing more to add.

Here is the first of several of the U.S. embassy cables that caught my eye. It’s our State Department reporting about a senior Spanish prosecutor looking into organized crime, who says that Russia has become a virtual “Mafia state” with the Kremlin using mob bosses to carry out its wishes. I’ve only included excerpts here.

28

THE FDA’S BLIND SIDLE

Our Food Supply Imperiled by Lack of Inspections

I can’t say I was surprised to read in this report how little attention is being paid to what’s going on with our factory farms and feedlots. I’ve known about this problem since I was governor. The simple fact is, the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t I have the manpower. They tell you they’re conducting these inspections, but nobody is actually out there checking to conducting these inspections, but nobody is actually out there checking to make sure.

The reality is, the conditions by which our food is being supplied to us are very dangerous. Consider that more than half a billion eggs were recalled last year and a salmonella outbreak in August made about 1,700 people sick. Preventable food-borne illness hits about 76 million Americans every year—325,000 become hospitalized and 5,000 die from eating tainted food!

It all comes back to the same old thing: this is what happens when corporations, in this case agribusiness, take over. It simply becomes bottom line, money, and profits—everything else be damned. There is a staph infection that’s antibiotic-resistant and widely present in our vast hog and chicken factories. It’s called ST398, and the reason it’s a huge problem is because those animals are getting daily doses of antibiotics—which make them grow faster (more bang for the buck) and keep them alive in the stressful and unsanitary conditions where they’re raised.

You’d think that the federal regulators would want to keep tabs on this, but for years the FDA looked the other way and wouldn’t even calculate estimates of how much antibiotics the livestock industry is using. Finally, in December 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General released a report—it turned out to be 29 million pounds of antibiotics in 2009! And that, my friends, is a veritable shitload. Here are a few excepts from “FDA Inspections of Domestic Food Facilities” (April 2010).

BACKGROUND

Each year, more than 300,000 Americans are hospitalized and 5,000 die after consuming contaminated foods and beverages. Recent high-profile outbreaks of foodborne illness have raised serious questions about FDA’s inspections process and its ability to protect the Nation’s food supply. The Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry requested that the Office of Inspector General (OIG) review the extent to which FDA conducts food facility inspections and identifies violations.

FDA inspects food facilities to ensure food safety and compliance with regulations. During an inspection, FDA inspectors may identify potential violations of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act as well as other applicable laws and regulations. Based on the outcome of the inspection, FDA assigns a facility one of three classifications: official action indicated (OAI), voluntary action indicated (VAI), or no action indicated (NAI). In addition, FDA may choose to change a facility’s initial classification to another classification under certain circumstances.

FDA relies on several approaches to determine whether a facility corrected the violations found by inspectors. FDA may review evidence provided by a food facility describing any completed corrective actions. FDA may also reinspect a facility to verify that corrections were made.

FINDINGS

On average, FDA inspects less than a quarter of food facilities each year, and the number of facilities inspected has declined over time. Between fiscal years (FY) 2004 and 2008, FDA inspected annually an average of 24 percent of the food facilities subject to its inspection. Except for a few instances, there are no specific guidelines that govern the frequency with which inspections should occur. Further, the number of food facilities that FDA inspected declined between FYs 2004 and 2008, even as the number of food facilities increased. In addition, the number of inspections of facilities that have been designated by FDA as “high risk” has also declined. FDA officials noted that the overall decline in FDA inspections was largely due to a decline in staffing levels.

Fifty-six percent of food facilities have gone 5 or more years without an FDA inspection. FDA identified 51,229 food facilities that were subject to inspection and were in business from the start of FY 2004 until the end of FY 2008. Of these, 56 percent were not inspected at all, 14 percent were inspected a single time, and the remaining 30 percent were inspected two or more times. If FDA does not routinely inspect food facilities, it is unable to guarantee that these facilities are complying with applicable laws and regulations.

The number of facilities that received OAI classifications has declined over time. The number of inspected facilities that received OAI classifications decreased from 614 in FY 2004 to 283 in FY 2008. The percentage of facilities that received OAI classifications also dropped from nearly 4 percent to nearly 2 percent during this 5-year period. In addition, nearly three-quarters of the facilities that received OAI classifications in FY 2008 had a history of violations. Two percent of facilities that received OAI classifications refused to grant FDA officials access to their records.

FDA took regulatory action against 46 percent of the facilities with initial OAI classifications; for the remainder, FDA either lowered the classification or took no regulatory action. In FY 2007, a total of 446 facilities initially received OAI classifications. FDA took regulatory action against 46 percent of these facilities. For the remainder, FDA lowered the OAI classification for 29 percent and took no regulatory action for 25 percent.

For 36 percent of the facilities with OAI classifications in FY 2007, FDA took no additional steps to ensure that the violations were corrected. In FY 2007, 280 facilities received OAI classifications that were not lowered by FDA. For 36 percent of these facilities, FDA did not reinspect them within a year of the inspection or review other evidence provided by facilities to ensure that the violations were corrected.

29

THE EPA’S BLIND SIDE

Pesticides and Honeybees

We all learned in grade school how important the honeybees are to our food production. And we know that they’ve been dying off in droves over the past several years. Nobody’s yet determined exactly why, but the spraying of pesticides is one of the prime suspects.

At the end of 2010, some brave and outraged individual within the Environmental Protection Agency leaked an internal memo. It’s a lengthy new EPA study of a tongue-twister pesticide called clothianidin, which is manufactured by the German agrichemical giant Bayer. Their Bayer CropScience division had applied to use this particular pesticide as a seed treatment on cotton and mustard. It’s already widely used on corn, soy, wheat, sugar beets, sunflowers, and canola in the States. In 2009, Bayer took in about $262 million in sales of clothianidin.

This new study says flat out that the health of our nation’s honeybees is imperiled by this product. That’s actually been a concern for almost ten years, except the EPA under Bush granted “conditional registration” to clothianidin in 2003. Bayer’s own study in 2007 was rubber-stamped by the EPA as “scientifically sound.” And, in April 2010, the Obama administration’s EPA granted full registration to the pesticide. So how come Bayer is being treated with kid gloves? Why are tens of millions of acres of farmland going to bloom with clothianidin-laced pollen this year? And what’s this going to mean for the health of our little pollinator friends?

This ties in to something that happened when I took my TV show (Conspiracy Theory) to New Orleans to look into the Gulf oil spill. At the time, BP was applying a chemical called Corexit as a means of dispersing the millions of gallons of oil. A guy from BP looked at me and said, “Everything we’ve put into the water was approved by the EPA.” I said, “So what?! Doesn’t your common sense tell you that putting something in the water that has four lethal poisons in it, when you’ve already got all this oil, is not a good thing?” But his answer again was, “Everything we did was approved.” That told me right there that the EPA can be bought and sold.

Here are some excerpts from the EPA’s study on bees and pesticides, and you can read the whole thing at: www.panna.org/sites/default/files/Memo_Nov2010_Clothianidin.pdf.

30

EMBASSY CABLES

America’s Fight against Europe over Biotech Crops

In case you still imagine our government isn’t completely in bed with the mega-corporations, this WikiLeaked cable ought to make you think twice. Our former ambassador to France was a guy named Craig Stapleton, who before that used to co-own the Texas Rangers baseball team with George W. Bush. In 2007, he called for “moving to retaliation” against France for having the gall to ban Monsanto’s genetically modified corn, and against the whole European Union because they at the time had an anti-biotech policy. “In our view, Europe is moving backwards not forwards on this issue,” Ambassador Stapleton determined, as if somehow we had the right to tell them how to think!

31

MILITARY STUDIES CLIMATE

Climate Change as a Threat to National Security

Back in 2006, the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), a federally funded R&D center for the Navy and Marine Corps, brought together a Military Advisory Board of eleven retired three-star and four-star admirals and generals. Their task was to examine the impact of global climate change for future national security. The report came out in April 2007, and I’m reprinting the Executive Summary here. Its conclusion is that climate change represents a “a serious threat” that is likely to create “instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world.” (The entire report is viewable online at http://www.cna.org/reports/climate.)

I find it very chilling that the U.S. military would recognize this situation and begin preparations for how to deal with it, when many of our elected officials are still prepared to think climate change is some kind of hoax! I don’t think it’s such a good idea to have the military being out front on things like this, it isn’t their proper role. We’re the ones who should be leading them, not the other way around—unless we’re like the proverbial ostrich with its head buried in the sand.

32

CORPORATE INFLUENCE

Koch Industries Seminars for the Rich and Powerful

Ever since the Supreme Court decided last year (Citizens United v. FEC) to override Congress and allow unlimited secret cash from corporations—and even foreign governments—to influence American elections, following the money has gotten difficult. One mega-player, though, that we’ve found out a lot about is Koch Industries.

The Koch brothers, Charles and David from Wichita, Kansas, are each worth more than $21.5 billion. Charles has come right out and admitted that their major goal is to eliminate 90 percent of all laws and government regulations, so as to further the “culture of prosperity.” The Kochs are the biggest funder of right-wing front groups in the country.

Twice a year they bring together all the wealthy donors to talk about their game plan. A website called ThinkProgress somehow got hold of a memo that outlines what happened the last time Koch and company got together for a secret election-planning meeting, in June 2010 in Aspen, Colorado. You’ll notice that the agenda included a fair number of the conservative media stars like Glenn Beck.

PART THREE

SHADY WHITE HOUSES

33

NUKE THE RUSSIANS?

Nixon’s Vietnam Peace Plan

“Tricky Dick” had his own version of Operation Northwoods, and if this one had backfired, we would’ve been in a nuclear war. Lining up the bombers to look like we were attacking Russia is so far-fetched it was like reading a comic book when I first came across this. Amazingly enough, during Nixon’s first year in office, he and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, cooked up a plan to end the Vietnam War by pretending to launch a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.

They code-named the operation Giant Lance; I’m going to avoid speculating whether the sub-title was “Mine’s Bigger than Yours.” they set the whole thing in motion on October 10, 1969, when the Strategic Air Command received an urgent order to ready our most powerful thermonuclear weapons for immediate potential use against the Russkies.

According to an article in Wired magazine (February 25, 2008), on the morning of October 27, 1969, a squadron of 18 B-52s “began racing from the western U.S. toward the eastern border of the Soviet Union. The pilots flew for 18 hours without rest, hurtling toward their targets at more than 500 miles per hour. Each plane was loaded with nuclear weapons hundreds of times more powerful than the ones that had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki…The aircraft were pointed toward Moscow, but the real goal was to change the war in Vietnam.”

This was one of a bunch of military measures aimed at putting our nuclear forces on a higher state of readiness. We had destroyers, cruisers, and aircraft carriers doing all kinds of maneuvers in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Gulf of Aden, and Sea of Japan. This was all executed secretly but designed to be detectable—but supposedly not alarming—to the leadership of the Kremlin. And our commanders-in-chief (CINCs) had no idea why Nixon had ordered the “Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Readiness Test,” also to become known as the “madman theory.”

You can find the following document at the National Security Archive website (Electronic Briefing Book No. 81).

34

THE CIA VS THE PRESIDENT

Nixon’s Pursuit of the CIA’s Secret Files

In December 2010, a new release of documents relating to the Nixon years transpired at the National Archives. One that I found especially telling was this “Memorandum for the Record” by John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s deputy chief of staff, about the president’s attempt to pry out secret CIA files related to the Vietnam coup that overthrew Diem in 1963 as well the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis. Just why Nixon wanted all this material remains unknown to this day, but it seems he definitely wanted to get some “goods” on the Kennedy administration. And he may have had another motive—to find out what the CIA might have on why JFK was killed. Or on Nixon’s own involvement in the attempts to kill Castro, for example. There are a lot of redactions in these three pages, but one thing comes through crystal clear: there was a small war going on between Nixon and Richard Helms, director of the CIA.

Again, what people need to understand is that it appears the CIA answers to no one. They’re supposed to be the president’s arm on foreign intelligence, but the best way I can put it is: There’s been an amputation. That body part is not attached anymore. Time and again, the CIA thumbs its nose even at presidents. So who runs this agency if the president doesn’t?

35

RESTLESS YOUTH

How Nixon Wanted the CIA and FBI to Crack Down on Youthful Dissidence

I can’t leave the Nixon years without another tidbit released at the end of 2010. This shows clearly how Nixon was looking to bring the CIA and FBI together in 1970 to crack down on the antiwar protesters and other “restless youth.” Keep in mind that the CIA was forbidden by statute from taking part in such domestic operations, but that didn’t seem to make any difference. This is the basis of what later became known as the Huston Plan, after the author of the memorandum, Tom Charles Huston.

Having grown up in that era, though, this doesn’t really surprise me. Not when you learn about all the people the government had under surveillance, from Dr. King to Malcolm X to John Lennon. I thought we’d left those times behind, but everything seems to be circular. It’s worse than ever today, since 9/11, and we’ll get to that in a bit.

36 & 37

STOLEN 2000 ELECTION

The GES Emails and a CBS News Analysis

We all know how the Supreme Court awarded the disputed 2000 election to George W. Bush. What’s often forgotten is how, on election night, a computer “error” made it look like Al Gore had lost Florida—and prompted the media to announce prematurely that Bush was the winner. This happened in Volusia County, where an electronic voting machine company called Global Election Systems (GES) was tabulating things. GES turns out to have been run by Republicans who were only too eager to see Bush take over after eight years of Clinton. All of a sudden that night, 16,022 votes for Gore got subtracted from his total in Volusia County. It wasn’t until 2003, when a bunch of internal Global Election Systems memos got leaked, that it became clear company officials knew all about this at the time. “The problem precinct had two memory cards uploaded,” according to GES tech guy Tab Iredale in one memo. “There is always a possibility that ‘the second memory card’ came from an unauthorized source.” These emails follow.

I cry out to stop the electronic ballots, because any computer can be hacked into, as evidence clearly shows. I say, stick with handwritten ballots. If you can’t fill in the blank circle with a pencil, then you shouldn’t be voting because we’ve been doing that since the first grade! Maybe the ballots still need to be hand-counted, but at least you’d have a paper trail.

After persuing the emails, you’ll read a couple of pages from a report that CBS News prepared about the coverage of election night 2000—an apology, really, for going with the rest of the herd and calling the victory for Bush. This could be solved if something I’ve advocated was put in place, to allow no media coverage until the final polls close in Hawaii. Hell, they’re already predicting winners when it’s two o’clock in the afternoon in California. The polls are still open, but why do I need to go vote if I’m already told who’s going to be president? I suppose what I’m proposing infringes greatly on the First Amendment but what the heck, with all the documents you’re seeing in this book, what’s wrong with that?

CBS NEWS COVERAGE OF ELECTION NIGHT 2000

Investigation, Analysis, Recommendations

Analysis of the Call for Bush

The call was based entirely on the tabulated county vote. There were several data errors that were responsible for that mistake. The most egregious of the data errors has been well documented. Vote reports from Volusia County severely understated Gore’s actual total when a faulty computer memory card reported votes that were off by thousands. That precinct, Number 216, subtracted more than 16,000 votes from Gore’s total and added votes to Bush’s total. In addition, an apparent reporting error in Brevard County reduced Gore’s total by an additional 4,000 votes.

The mistakes, both of which originated with the counties, were critical, since there were only about 3 percent of the state’s precincts outstanding at this time. They incorrectly increased Bush’s lead in the tabulated vote from about 27,000 to more than 51,000. Had it not been for these errors, the CBS News call for Bush at 2:17:52 AM would not have been made. While the errors should have been caught by VNS and CBS News analysts through a comparison of VNS data with data from the AP or the Florida Secretary of State, VNS computers could also have had a more sophisticated program that would have constantly compared one set of numbers with the others and raised a warning signal. (Unlike the television networks, the Associated Press never called Florida for Bush, and, as we mentioned earlier, neither did VNS.)

There was another problem: the VNS end-of-the-night model uses a straightforward projection of the number of precincts yet to report in each county. It assumes that the outstanding precincts in each county will be of average size and will vote in the same way as the precincts that have already reported from that county. However, at 2:17 AM there were more as-yet-uncounted votes than the model predicted. In fact, in Palm Beach County, a heavily Democratic area, there were three times as many votes yet to be reported as the model predicted. Some of that appears to be accounted for by the late release by county election officials of a large absentee vote.

Conclusion

As we have seen above, the first Florida call for Gore was probably unavoidable, given the current system of projecting winners. Early in the evening, the sample that VNS selected to represent voters statewide overestimated Gore’s lead, and a call was made for him. As the tabulated vote started accumulating, Gore lost his apparent lead, and a decision was made to take back the call. The ongoing VNS reviews have determined that the exit-poll sample of precincts in this election did not adequately represent the state. The exit-poll sample estimated a significant Gore lead that never materialized. That fact remained unknown until the actual vote count. The sampling data and exit polling did not take into account the 12 percent of the Florida vote that was cast by absentee ballot, which also affected the quality of the data. The CBS News Decision Desk could not have known about these problems.

However, the second Florida call, the one for Bush, could have been avoided. It was based, as we have seen, on a combination of faulty tabulations entered into the total Florida vote, with an especially large error from Volusia County that exaggerated Bush’s lead. Later, in the early morning hours, reports from large precincts in Palm Beach were recorded, along with a surge of absentee ballots from that county. When the Volusia County numbers were corrected and the new numbers from Palm Beach taken into account, the Bush lead shrank, and a decision was made to take back the Bush call. The call might have been avoided, if there had been better communication between the CBS News Decision Desk and the CBS News studio and newsgathering operations, which had been reporting ballot irregularities and large numbers of potentially Democratic votes still outstanding, and if the VNS vote totals had been checked against the ones from the AP and the Florida Secretary of State’s Web site. The AP corrected the Volusia County error 35 minutes before VNS did, and one minute before CBS News made its call.

And, despite all the understandable focus on the Florida calls, they were not the only mistaken calls of the night.

38 & 39

STOLEN 2004 ELECTION

Fixing the Vote in Ohio

Ohio, as everyone knows, was the state that put George W. Bush over the top in the 2004 election. A comfortable 118,000-plus vote official margin in Ohio gave him a victory over John Kerry and a second term as president. There were plenty of rumors that Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell had connived with the Bush people to fix the vote, but Kerry’s people were unwilling to pursue this too far.

The story of what went on behind the scenes started to surface in a lawsuit brought by a group of citizens against Ohio officials in the summer of 2006. A well-known voting rights attorney named Cliff Arnebeck set out to charge Blackwell and his cronies with “election fraud, vote dilution, vote suppression, recount fraud and other violations.”

The first document you’re going to read here is a deposition taken of Stephen Spoonamore, an expert in computer systems who knew plenty about how electronic voting machines can be manipulated. The company he refers to, Diebold, bought the GES outfit that was involved in the Florida debacle in 2000. And the fellow he mentions at the end, Mike Connell, was Karl Rove’s IT guy. Connell was involved in developing important parts of the computer network, including the election results reporting server systems. The second document is a contract with the Ohio secretany of state’s office, dated November 20, 2003.

The Computer C “man in the middle” that Spoonamore is talking about was the property of a Chattanooga company called SMARTech. They were the subcontractor of GovTech Solutions, Mike Connell’s company, for purposes of hosting a “mirror site” on election night. This ensured that the Ohio election results could be observed and changed, using remote access through high-speed Internet.

If this were the private sector and something got diverted to an intermediary in Chattanooga that was clearly illegal, there would be an investigation for sure. Why does this situation get a pass? Again, I call for handwritten ballots!

The contract I mentioned that follows is somewhat complicated, but it’s back-up for what Spoonamore was talking about. Eventually Connell would most likely have talked about all this. Except that on December 19, 2008, Connell’s private single-engine plane crashed on the way back to his home in Akron. The man who could’ve blown the whistle on the biggest election fraud in American history was dead. I guess, as always, we’re supposed to attribute that to bad timing. Let me quote Colonel Fletcher Prouty again: “Nothing just happens, everything is planned.” If you’re interested in all the details, take a look at my previous book, American Conspiracies.

40

EMBASSY CABLES

Hillary Clinton’s Call for Diplomats to Spy on the UN

Who knew? Under Hillary Clinton, our State Department has been asking American diplomats around the world and at the UN to provide detailed technical information, including passwords and personal encryption keys, for communications networks used by UN officials. And we’re trying to take down WikiLeaks and throw Julian Assange in the clinker for life? The hypocrisy, once again, boggles the mind.

41

PROTECTING CYBERSPACE

An Internet “Kill Switch”?

A bill—“Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010”—was introduced in the Senate last June by Joe Lieberman. Note particularly the part under section 4: “Authorizes the President to issue a declaration of a national cyber emergency to covered critical infrastructure.” Would this give Obama, or any future president, the right to basically pull a “kill switch” on the Internet? Could, say, a huge leak of classified documents serve as a justification?

Because the bill is so long and convoluted, I only include part of it. Here also is a summary of the bill, written by the Congressional Research Service, a well-respected nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress.

42

MORE CYBERSECURITY

Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity Agreement with the Pentagon

Then last October, Homeland Security (DHS) and the Defense Department reached an agreement “regarding cybersecurity” whereby they’re planning to synchronize their efforts. “We are building a new framework between our Departments to enhance operational coordination and joint program planning,” DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and DoD Secretary Robert Gates said in a joint statement. And in December, the United Nations was asked to consider global standards for policing the Internet, specifically in reaction to things like WikiLeaks. Now the Commerce Department is looking to create an Internet ID, under the label of National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

Maybe this is all somehow to the good, but it makes me a bit queasy. Honestly I see Homeland Security as our United States Gestapo, our federal police. It’s this simple, people: Government can’t allow anything to exist that it does not control. One time as governor I asked my staff to think about something on their lunch break: “Come back and tell me one thing in your life that the government doesn’t regulate or control.” Well, they couldn’t come up with anything. One person said, “Sleep.” You know how I responded? Not true—there’s a warning label on your mattress. Even what you lay down on has some stamp of government control.

PART FOUR

9/11

43

A NEW PEARL HARBOUR

A Think Tank’s Anticipation of 9/11

In case you’ve never heard of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), it was a D.C. think tank that existed for less than ten years (1997–2006) but had probably more influence on American lives than any similar organization before or since. The founders were two neo-cons, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, and from the get-go they were pushing for “regime change” in Iraq. They argued in an open letter to President Clinton that Saddam Hussein was out to stockpile Weapons of Mass Destruction and that an invasion of Iraq would be justified by his defiance of the UN’s “containment” policy.

Then, in September 2000, a few months before George W. Bush became president, the PNAC published a ninety-page report called Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies and Resources for a New Century. It makes for instructive reading, given what’s happened since 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’ve excerpted four pages, and I’d ask you to pay particular attention to a statement made on the last one, which says: “…the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” Anybody think September 11th might just have been that?

The PNAC report seems like a complete game plan for the next decade, because for the most part it was followed. It should have been mandatory

44

9/11 WARNING I,

FBI Knowledge of Terrorists Training at Flight Schools

Two months before the events of September 11th, 2001, an FBI agent in Phoenix named Kenneth Williams sent a memo to the bureau brass in D.C. and New York. The agent was warning about an unusually high number of Muslims being trained at American flight schools, perhaps part of “a coordinated effort” by Osama bin Laden. His memo was ignored at the higher levels.

45

9/11 WARNING II

“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” Bush Was Told

A little more than a month before 9/11, the Bush White House received an intelligence digest from the CIA with a two-page section titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The president headed off for a month’s vacation to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, right after that.

What these warnings—and there were others—tell me is that (a) either the Bush Administration allowed 9/11 to happen; (b) took part in it happening, or (c) were the most inept administration we’ve ever had. These warnings were so plain and simple that, if you didn’t “get” them, you’d never win on Jeff Foxworthy’s show Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?

46

A CHANGE OF POLICY

The Pentagon’s “Stand Down Order” on 9/11

The question that’s haunted me from day one is how come the world’s biggest military superpower was somehow oblivious to rogue airliners in American air space for more than an hour, and our top brass seemed so befuddled in terms of dealing with hijackers apparently using these four planes as flying bombs. Why couldn’t our fighter jets intercept at least one of them?!

Well, here’s one possible explanation: Donald Rumsfeld, our Secretary of Defense, never gave the go-ahead. Why? On June 1, 2001, the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a new Instruction—superseding one from 1997—that required approval by the Secretary of Defense for any “potentially lethal support…in the event of an aircraft piracy (hijacking).”

I sure would like to know why the question of Rumsfeld doing this never came up with the 9/11 Commission. Doesn’t it seem important to have asked why that critical policy got changed only four months beforehand?

47

CONTROLLED DEMOLITION

The “Free Fall” of Building 7

The third skyscraper that got reduced to rubble on 9/11 was the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7, which went down late that afternoon. According to the government, the reason was fires caused by the collapse of the Twin Towers. What I wondered about from the front was, how come fires had never before destroyed a steel skyscraper?

The document you’re about to read sure makes it look to me like Building 7 was brought down by demolition charges from within. This comes from the final report of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, which looked into the 6.5-second plunge (a few tenths of a second longer than it’s said Oswald fired those three shots at JFK).

Here’s the rub: Building 7 came down so fast that it was at virtually the same rate as a free-falling object. Members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have been pointing this out for years. But that didn’t jive with the official story, because free fall can only take place when an object has no structural components below it. And the only way that could happen to a building would be to remove the lower structural components with an external force like explosives. Otherwise, you’d be defying Newton’s laws of physics.

So, not surprisingly, when the NIST Draft for Public Comment report came out in August of 2008, they claimed that the time it took for the 17 upper floors to crumble (the only floors visible on the videos they were using) “was approximately 40 percent longer than the computed free fall time and was consistent with physical principles.” There had been “a sequence of structural failures,” the NIST technical expert said.

I guess they weren’t counting on a high school physics teacher named David Chandler asking a question at the briefing. The teacher said this “40 percent longer” business contradicted an Internet-available video that clearly showed “for about two and a half seconds…the acceleration of the building is indistinguishable from free fall.”

NIST apparently took the teacher seriously. In their final report, published in November 2008, amazingly enough they admitted free fall. After dividing the descent of Building 7 into three stages, NIST called the second phase “a freefall descent over approximately eight stories at gravitational acceleration for approximately 2.25s[econds].”

A miracle apparently took place on 9/11. Like schoolteacher Chandler said, “Free fall can only be achieved if there is zero resistance to the motion.” Interestingly, the final NIST report no longer said anything about its analysis being “consistent with physical principles.” Of course, they didn’t admit anything about a professional demolition job either. But that’s the only way this could have happened. Building 7 didn’t come down because heat from fires caused the steel to weaken and collapse. It was assisted to the ground by some type of explosive device that could remove all resistance.

Pay close attention to the portions I’ve highlighted from the NIST report. Why the mainstream TV and press can get a report like this, and it isn’t leading the news cycle and on every front page the next morning, shows you just how controlled the corporate media are.

Also check out David Ray Griffin’s book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7, and the website for Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Here are excerpts from the “NIST Final Report: NIST NCSTAR 1-9: Structural Fire Response and Probable Collapse Sequence of World Trade Center Building 7.”

48

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Evidence for Insider Stock Trading Before 9/11

How many of you realize that, almost immediately after the events of 9/11, the FBI set up a team to look into insider stock trading that indicated foreknowledge of what was going to happen? That, of course, could have opened Pandora’s box in terms of a bigger conspiracy than just al Qaeda. This reminds me of the old cliché that goes back to Deep Throat in Watergate—follow the money. Generally if you want to find out who knew what, the money trail will lead you to the knowledge you desire. And 9/11 seems to be a classic example of that.

To set the stage, I’m reprinting with the author’s permission a mindblowing and extremely well-researched article by Kevin Ryan that appeared in the Foreign Policy Journal on November 18, 2010. It’s called “Evidence for Informed Trading on the Attacks of September 11.”

49

TURNING A BLIND EYE

The FBI’s “Briefing on Trading” for the 9/11 Commission

Now read the twelve-page memorandum titled “FBI Briefing on Trading” that was prepared in 2003 and declassified four years later by the 9/11 Commission. As you’ll see, the FBI went out of its way to say—more than once in the document—that no evidence existed to support such a nasty theory. Even when there were some “suspicious accounts the SEC turned over,” these were dismissed because their investigation “revealed no ties to terrorism.” You’ll even see a reference to the AIG Insurance Company in here. This document fascinated me both for what it says (certain leads that might yet be tracked down by an investigative journalist) and what it doesn’t say.

PART FIVE

THE “WAR ON TERROR”

50

SUBVERTING THE CONSTITUTION

The Justice Department’s Secret Plan

Six weeks after 9/11, Bush’s Justice Department wrote up a long memo with the subject line: “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.” As you’ll see from the excerpts, the whole concept basically shreds our Bill of Rights. In short, “legal and constitutional rules regulating law enforcement activity are not applicable.” The military could even “attack civilian targets, such as apartment buildings, offices, or ships where suspected terrorists were thought to be.” And later, “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.”

Where does it say that, if you call something “terrorism,” the Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be made null and void? All they’ve got to do is say the word and they can put you under surveillance without a warrant. To me, this smacks of an attack on the foundations of democracy that plays right into the hands of terrorists. It also sets a precedent for the kinds of tactics we went on to see at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere.

51

NO MORE RULE OF LAW

President Bush’s Justification for Torture

A few months after September 11, President Bush sent out a “mass memo” that lays out why the al Qaeda and Taliban detainees were “unlawful combatants” and so the Geneva Convention calling for humane treatment of POWs did not apply to them. Well, if they’re not covered by an international agreement, shouldn’t they be covered by the laws of the United States and our Constitution and Bill of Rights? My point being, this situation has to fall under somebody’s law. How they can come up with this limbo, inbetween, “make up your own rules” idea is beyond belief. But I guess that’s why you have lawyers, because every lawyer reads the law differently.

52

NO FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

The Military’s Astounding “Media Ground Rules” for Guantanamo

Talk about infringement on the freedom of the press! When I came across these Media Ground Rules that had to be signed off on before anyone can gain access to where the detainees are being held at Guantanamo, I was shocked. By the time you memorized all these rules-and-regulations, you’d be so uptight you squeaked. What “policy?” This is the biggest snow job I’ve ever seen. If the media has to follow those rules, they’re not even allowed to ask a question. The Guantanamo brass could have saved all that paper by taking one big sheet and stamping in large letters: MEDIA NOT ALLOWED.

I would have loved to adopt that identical policy when I was governor of Minnesota, with what I used to call “the Minnesota jackals.” Let me put those rules up right outside the governor’s reception room where the media comes in, all those pages as to what you have to abide by. How would that have gone over?

So forget about providing the public any insight into what’s really going on behind the gates of our Naval Station. Which, as you’ll see in the documents that follow, was enough to raise the hair on the back of anyone’s head. (Presuming the head was still intact.)

53 & 54

TORTURE TECHNIQUES

The Detainees at Guantanamo

We all saw the horrendous photos and videos from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Not as well known are the Department of Defense’s “Counter-Resistance Strategies” for the detainees being held at our Guantanamo base in Cuba. The first document here is DOD’s official request for approval of various methods under several categories. The second has Rumsfeld’s signature, along with his personal handwritten note that says: “However, I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” He’s a real stand-and-deliver guy, I guess.

I simply find this appalling that the United States of America would engage in the practice of torture. We’re supposed to be the country everyone else looks up to. When you participate in this kind of behavior, forget that! When it happens to us, we’ll have no reason to bitch, because if we practice torture the other side will too. The laws of humanity ought to be higher than the laws of war, don’t you think?

The card they’re playing, from Rumsfeld on down, is that somehow Guantanamo isn’t on this earth, because it’s not in the U.S. or I guess anywhere outside our base in Cuba. Is this some sort of Land of Oz? We treat Charles Manson better than we do the detainees at Guantanamo, and yet the detainees have never been convicted of anything. They never stood trial, never had their day in court. But I guess Manson’s different because he’s an American citizen.

55 & 56

DRUG ABUSE

A Medical Experiment on the Detainees

If you thought government experiments in behavior control ended in the 1970s, guess again. It’s recently come out that the Pentagon forced all the detainees at Guantanamo prison to take high doses of a drug called mefloquine. Supposedly it’s used to combat malaria, but that didn’t seem to make any difference. Our military brass knew that mefloquine had severe side effects, like suicidal thoughts, hallucinations, and anxiety.

To me, this shows the continuing influence of those “experts” we brought here from Germany after World War Two. Here you have doctors stating that you need to know the complete background of the patient before using this substance—and they’re injecting these people with this drug as soon as they’re checked in!

The first document here, from 2002, shows that “standard inprocessing orders for detainees” included 1,250 mg of mefloquine, five times higher than the dose given to people as a preventative. And it’s being given not for its intended purpose, but to study its intended side effects! I’m speechless. What ever happened to the physician’s oath to “do no harm”?

In 2010, Seton Hall University School of Law’s Center for Policy & Research released a study about all this, and I’m including the Executive Summary.

Drug Abuse: An exploration of the government’s use of mefloquine at Guantanamo

Seton Hall University School of Law

Center for Policy and Research

Executive Summary

Mefloquine is an antimalarial drug that has long been known to cause severe neuropsychological adverse effects such as anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations, aggression, psychotic behavior, mood changes, depression, memory impairment, convulsions, loss of coordination (ataxia), suicidal ideation, and possibly suicide, particularly in patients with a history of mental illness. A prescribing physician must exercise caution and informed judgment when weighing the risks and potential benefits of prescribing the drug. To administer this drug with its severe potential side effects without a malaria diagnosis and without taking a patient’s mental health history is not medically justified. Yet as a matter of official policy, the standard operating procedure implemented by the United States military at Guantanamo Bay was to administer high doses of mefloquine to detainees whether or not any use of the drug was medically appropriate and without consideration of the detainees’ mental health.

It is clear that the military employed a medically inappropriate treatment regime at Guantanamo Bay (GTMO). It is less clear why, although the available evidence supports several possible conclusions. In view of the continued and unexplained refusal of the government to release full medical records for all detainees, it is not possible to determine whether this conduct was gross malpractice or deliberate misuse of the drug. In either case, it does not appear plausible from the available evidence that mefloquine was given to treat malaria. This suggests a darker possibility: that the military gave detainees the drug specifically to bring about the adverse side effects, either as part of enhanced interrogation techniques, experimentation in behavioral modification, or torture for some other purpose. While this Report does not reach a conclusion about the actual motives for this course of conduct, it does explore the legal rules that would apply were it determined that mefloquine was administered not to treat malaria but rather to exploit the neuropsychiatric effects of the drug.

Findings:

This Report demonstrates that the U.S. military routinely administered doses of mefloquine to detainees upon their arrival at GTMO without medical justification:

■ 1250 mg of mefloquine was given to all detainees as a standard measure during inprocessing.

■ Mefloquine is used for treatment of malaria only in mild to moderate cases of infection with the p. vivax or p. falciparum parasite.

■ At GTMO, mefloquine was given to detainees before testing them for malaria, without regard for whether the detainee actually had malaria at all, let alone whether he carried one of the parasites treatable by mefloquine.

■ The standard of care rejects administering mefloquine to persons with a history of mental illness or a family history of mental illness, due to a greatly increased risk of severe adverse side effects for such persons.

■ At GTMO, mefloquine was given to detainees without regard to prior mental health history or family mental health history.

This Report further demonstrates that the U.S. military knew, and any competent medical professional would have known, of the severe side effects caused by mefloquine:

■ Mefloquine was first developed by the United States military.

■ Mefloquine is a quinolone, a drug family the CIA experimented with under a project called MKULTRA that studied psychotropic drugs for behavioral modification for use as a weapon and interrogation tool.

■ As of 2002, Roche USA, the manufacturer of mefloquine under the brand name Lariam, warned of its contraindications and at least some of its severe side effects on the drug’s package insert.

■ Beginning at least as early as 1990, multiple peer-reviewed medical studies documented the severe adverse effects associated with mefloquine.

While it is impossible to make definitive conclusions as to the purposes for this policy without additional information, particularly detainee medical records, the available evidence may support one of several possible conclusions:

■ Gross medical malpractice: If government intended this mefloquine regime for malaria treatment and control, it was done in a manner that jeopardized the health and perhaps the lives of the detainees and that violated basic standards of medical care.

■ Mefloquine was given in order to bring about the adverse effects for one of three reasons. Any of these would likely satisfy the legal definition of torture as articulated by the Department of Justice in 2002.

o As part of a program of enhanced interrogation, the psychotropic effects of mefloquine may have been intended as an aid to breaking a detainee’s resistance. This would be the psychological equivalent of waterboarding.

o As part of an experimental study to gather data on the side effects of mefloquine.

o As a punitive measure.

Methodology

This Report documents the administration of mefloquine to detainees and establishes that the U.S. military’s administration was a violation of normal standards of medical care. The Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall School of Law typically issues reports based on government documents. In this case, however, that has proved impossible because the government has continually refused to release detainee’s medical records to the detainees or their attorneys. The only medical record available is that of ISN 693.

Additionally, two pages of the inprocessing form for ISN 760 are available and were analyzed. In order to supplement these sources, the Center’s Research Fellows analyzed other publicly-available documents. These include contemporaneous statements by government authorities regarding malaria treatment practices at GTMO, Standard Operating Procedures, and published, peer reviewed medical studies.

***

I. Mefloquine was not given to detainees in a manner consistent with malaria treatment. Mefloquine is an antimalarial drug that can be used for prophylaxis or for treatment with different dosages and administration for each. The dosage administered and the timing of each dose of mefloquine to detainees suggests that the military may have used it for treatment purposes without first ascertaining whether the detainee actually had malaria. It is highly likely that the military was treating uninfected individuals with high doses of a dangerous drug.

The prophylactic dosage of mefloquine, 250 mg, is much smaller than the treatment dose given to GTMO detainees, 1250 mg, and is administered once per week as opposed to the single dose1 used for treatment purposes.² Severe adverse side effects do occur during prophylactic use, but adverse effects during use for treatment are far more common and more severe, probably due to the larger dosage. Use of mefloquine, even when used to treat a confirmed case of the disease, is contraindicated³ when the patient has a history of certain disorders.⁴

Detainees were given 1250 mg of mefloquine during inprocessing at GTMO; 750 mg as an initial dose and 500 mg 12 hours later.⁵ There is no indication that the routine administration of mefloquine to arriving detainees considered each detainee’s medical history.⁶ Administering the drug at the higher treatment dose without previously determining the need for any treatment was a dramatic departure from the accepted standard of medical care.⁷ Doctors have widely prescribed mefloquine, commercially sold as Lariam by manufacturer Roche USA, throughout the United States and elsewhere as a prophylactic against malaria infection. ¹⁰ Mefloquine can cross the blood-brain barrier,¹¹ and has a relatively long half-life at 15 to 33 days until elimination.¹² This means that the drug can enter brain tissue and remains in the body for a long period of time. As Dr. G. Richard Olds, an internationally recognized tropical disease specialist and Founding Dean of the University of California at Riverside School of Medicine, told the Center, “Mefloquine is fat soluble and as a result it does build up in the body and has a very long half-life. This is important since a massive dose of this drug is not easily corrected and the ‘side effects’ of the drug could last for weeks or months.” Dr. Olds’s view is well supported by the medical literature reviewed by the Center for this Report.

A. Side Effects Can Be Severe

Mefloquine, at any dose, is known to cause adverse neuropsychiatric effects such as anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations, aggression, psychotic behavior, mood changes, depression, memory impairment, convulsions, loss of coordination (ataxia), suicidal ideation, and possibly suicide.¹⁴ As many as 25% of persons who have taken mefloquine reported such severe side effects.¹⁵ These neuropsychiatric side effects are more prevalent and more severe in patients with a history of certain disorders and conditions or when taken in combination with certain medications, requiring careful prescribing that is dependent on a thorough and complete review of each patient’s medical history.16

***

II. Mefloquine Was Given to Detainees Without Regard for Necessity or Contraindications

Upon a detainee’s arrival at GTMO, military personnel administered 1250 mg of mefloquine to each detainee as part of standard in-processing orders, according to GTMO Medical Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).⁴⁸ This is corroborated in practice by government medical records for two detainees.⁴⁹ Very few medical records have ever been released for GTMO detainees, and those the government has released are heavily redacted and may be incomplete.⁵⁰ Based on the documents that are available, however, it is clear that detainees have been given a high dose of this powerful anti-malarial drug that potentially causes severe neuropsychological side effects. Since the dosage far exceeds the recommended dose for prophylactic purposes, the only medical justification would be particularized reason to believe the detainees were suffering from malaria. Further, while at least some detainees were tested for malaria, the mefloquine was seemingly administered in advance of and without regard to the results of the test. In any event, there does not appear to have been any individualized assessment of medical and psychological history prior to mefloquine administration for the purpose of avoiding administration to detainees with contraindications to mefloquine, which would render the administration of the drug inappropriate even if malaria infection were confirmed.

***

B. The Standard In-processing Orders Form

Mefloquine was given to each detainee as a matter of standard procedure without waiting for the results of any test for malaria. This is further made clear by an examination of the “Standard In-processing Orders” form, presumably applied uniformly for all detainees.⁶⁴ The form includes administration of mefloquine at the 1250 mg dosage, split into two distributions: “750 mg PO [taken orally] now, 500 mg PO in 12 hours.”⁶⁵

The form is structured as a checklist, with numbered items circled as they were completed. The first item on the list is “1. Mefloquine,” followed by the dosage.⁶⁶ On both ISN 693’s form and ISN 760’s form, number “1.” is circled, indicating the mefloquine dose was administered.⁶⁷

***

C. No Malaria In Cuba

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is no malaria in Cuba.⁹⁰ “Malaria is not a threat in Guantanamo Bay,” according to an official memorandum on the “Department of Defense Operational Use of Mefloquine.”⁹¹ U.S. military personnel and contractors are not prescribed any anti-malarial medication for assignment to GTMO.⁹²

57 & 58 & 59

ENHANCED INTERROGATION

The Paper Trail on the CIA’s Destruction of 92 Torture Videos

On April 15, 2010, a FOIA lawsuit filed by the ACLU managed to pry out of the CIA a series of documents related to the destruction of ninety-two videos of “enhanced interrogation” of al Qaeda detainees, in particular Abu Zabaydah, who’d been transferred to a “black prison” in Thailand in 2002. He ended up being waterboarded eighty-three times in a month, deprived of sleep for days on end, subjected to extreme cold while being held naked in his cell, and forced to listen to near-deafening levels of music.

What you’re about to read is an inside look at how and why the CIA decided that these videos had to be wiped out—even though the many redactions made by the Agency make you wonder what else is being covered up. The first memo is from October 2002, when the CIA began discussing the sensitivity of these “interrogation sessions.” The next document describes the destruction of the ninety-two video tapes that took place on November 9, 2005.

The next day, two emails were sent to CIA Executive Director Dusty Foggo by someone who’s never been identified. (Foggo later got convicted of bribery in the scandal involving California Congressman Duke Cunningham). The emails show, among other things, that the CIA interrogator was the very one who wanted the tapes destroyed.

All this is pretty self-explanatory. Clearly they could never allow the American people to see what they’re doing to these detainees so you destroy the evidence. But what looms even larger is that there was evidence, and of such a nature that required it to be destroyed. That tells you how bad it must have been.

The destruction of the tapes was approved by Jose Rodriguez Jr., who headed up Clandestine Services for the CIA. In November 2010, federal prosecutor John Durham announced he was not going to charge Rodriguez for authorizing the videotapes’ disappearance. Rodriguez’ attorney called his client “an American hero, a true patriot who only wanted to protect his people and his country.”

You be the judge.

60

AN ORDERED BEHEADING

Decapitation of a Detainee by U.S. Forces in Iraq

And you think these officially sanctioned policies didn’t rub off on our troops on the ground in Iraq? I wish I could say that was the case. When WikiLeaks released some 400,000 documents about the ongoing war in Iraq, they contained some pretty grim disclosures, including this one about American forces decapitating an Iraqi on order of their higher-ups. You can only go by what the document says as to whether this really happened or not, but it’s definitely disturbing to read and think about.

61

EMBASSY CABLES

The State Department’s Take on Drug Money Leaving Afghanistan

The WikiLeaks cache of State Department cables contains quite a few about our war in Afghanistan, but none more revealing than what our diplomats really know about the country’s president, Hamid Karzai. One secret cable talks about how he’d released 150 of the 629 detainees that the coalition had transferred to Afghan custody since 2007—and pardoned five border police who were caught with 273 pounds of heroin in their vehicle and already been sentenced to prison. Karzai’s brother is portrayed as a corrupt drug baron.

It’s time we faced facts: fighting the Taliban over there is at the same time propping up the biggest drug-based regime in the world. The cable I’m reprinting here is all about how the money gets smuggled out of Afghanistan to countries like Dubai. And be sure to catch point number 6, about how our Drug Enforcement folks got a bit suspicious of the Afghan vice president entering the country with $52 million early in 2009.

62

“AFGHANISTAN’S OPIUM ECONOMY”

A World Bank Report on Drugs

The World Bank issued a report in 2006 on “Afghanistan’s Opium Economy.” I’m just including the chapter summaries, but you can read the whole thing on the World Bank website, including “Prices and Market Interactions in the Opium Economy.”

Isn’t it interesting that we’re fighting a “war on drugs,” yet over there we have no problem with this? Certainly those drugs are going to get here eventually, again just follow the money. But obviously the Afghans involved can buy protection and continue doing their business.

63

RETHINKING THE “WAR ON TERROR”

The Rand Report on Terrorism

The Rand Corporation has been around forever, it seems, doing policy analysis for the government on all kinds of things. I mean, the government is always basing policies on what the Rand people say. Well, in 2008, Rand came out with a major study titled “How Terrorist Groups End,” look-Rand came out with a major study titled “How Terrorist Groups End,” looking at data on all such between 1968 and 2006.

Their findings apparently weren’t too heartening to our policy-makers, if they bothered to read the study. The whole war on terror notion needs to be rethought, according to Rand, because in simple terms “countering al Qa’ida has focused far too much on the use of military force.”

If the government follows Rand on other matters, why not give them due consideration on this? Supposedly this is their job and they’re the experts. I mean, realistically, the “war on terror” is the equivalent of trying to exterminate the Hells Angels. You don’t need the military to do it!

Here’s the two-page summary of the study, including how you can order the whole thing.

I hope after digesting all this—if you can stomach it, pardon the pun you’ll agree with me that it’s time to end these “phony wars on terror” and get down to the serious business of rebuilding our own democracy from the ground up. Let me close with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt, from his Progressive Party presidential platform in 1912:

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.”

EPILOGUE

RESOURCES FOR CURIOUS READERS

If you’re interested in following the document trail in the future, there are plenty of places to look, including those listed below. I found these links especially useful in putting together this book. It’s time we used the “information age” to our advantage, in reclaiming our democracy from the secret-keepers.

*WIKILEAKS: By the time this book is published, who knows where you’ll find Julian Assange’s team? Right now, you can look at www.mirror.wikileaks.info. They have a list of the growing number of “mirror sites” that plan to publish the State Department cables and other documents. WikiLeaks is a nonprofit organization that launched their website in 2006 and, within their first year of existence, had a database of over 1.2 million documents. They publish submissions of private, secret, and classified documents obtained from anonymous sources and news leaks.

*CRYPTOME: Their website has been around since 1996, hosted in the U.S.A. “Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance—open, secret and classified documents—but not limited to those.” They’ve hosted more than 54,000 files, including suppressed photos of American soldiers killed in Iraq, purported agents for Britain’s MI6, and much more. They have two DVDs loaded with hard-to-find documents leaked by whistleblowers both government and private, available for a $25 donation. Check out http://cryptome.org for some fascinating browsing.

*NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE: This is an independent research institute and library, located on the George Washington University campus. They are an amazing repository of government records listed by topic, historical and contemporary, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the war in Afghanistan and more. They get their documents by a variety of ways, including the Freedom of Information Act, Mandatory Declassification Review, collections of presidential papers, congressional records, and court testimony. The Archive was behind the groundbreaking legal effort to preserve millions of pages of White House email records from the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. Check out www.nsarchive.org to find the vast amount of material that they’ve gathered.

*GOVERNMENT ATTIC: This website posts electronic copies of hundreds of interesting federal government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. They recently revamped their document menu to consist of four distinct parts: Department of Defense; Department of Justice; Executive Branch Departments, the White House and Legislative Agencies; Independent Federal Agencies, Govt. Corporations and State/Misc. Records. Go to: www.governmentattic.org.

*PUBLIC INTELLIGENCE: Administrator Michael Haynes tells us: “This is an international collaborative research initiative working to facilitate equal access to information by enabling anyone to anonymously submit documents or information for online publication. In less than two years of operation, the site has published thousands of restricted documents related to issues of national security, the war in Afghanistan, banking and international finance, as well as government and corporate surveillance. The site maintains one of the largest collections of documents produced by U.S. fusion centers available to the public.” Go to: http://publicintelligence.net.

*THE MARY FERRELL FOUNDATION: This nonprofit is your best source for documents about the assassinations of the 1960s, the Watergate scandal, and the post-Watergate investigations into intelligence abuses. The digital archive contains over 1.2 million pages of documents, government reports, books, essays, and multimedia. Go to: www.maryferrell.org.

*OPEN THE GOVERNMENT: It’s a coalition composed of journalists, consumer and “good government” groups, library groups, environmentalists, labor and others coming together to make the federal government a more open place. They’re non-partisan and include progressives, libertarians and conservatives. Go to: www.OpenTheGovernment.org.

*OPENLEAKS: This is a new website scheduled to be up-and-running in 2011. Its founders have been closely linked to WikiLeaks in the past, but have since parted ways and are describing themselves as more of a technological service provider to media organizations than as a central hub for leaks. Go to: www.openleaks.org.

*DOCUMENTCLOUD: Program Director Amanda Hickman tells us: “DocumentCloud (http://www.documentcloud.org) is a catalog of primary source documents and a free and open-source tool that reporters use to annotate, analyze, organize, and publish documents they’re reporting on. DocumentCloud’s catalog, assembled by reporters, archivists, and researchers, includes everything from FBI files to sample ballots, Coast Guard logs to legistation, and court filings. The project is designed to help reporters publish more of their primary source documents online, and to make those documents accessible to the general public in an indexed catalog.”

*CIA: The Central Intelligence Agency has a digital database called CREST that consists entirely of declassified documents. A finding aid is located at: www.foia.cia.gov/search_archive.asp.

*OPEN SECRETS: This is your prime resource for tracking money in American politics and how it affects elections and public policy. It’s part of the Center for Responsive Politics. Go to: www.opensecrets.org.

*THE FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS (www.fas.org) offers a rich archive of resources on national security policy. The Federation’s Secrecy News blog (www.fas.org/blog/secrecy) produces original reporting on U.S. government secret policy and provides direct access to valuable official records that have been withheld, withdrawn or are otherwise hard to find.

*THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (www.archives.gov) is the repository for millions of government documents, and their Archive-It FOIA Collection lists sites that deal with FOIA requests at: www.archives.gov/ogis/foia-records.html.

Now get this—there are 407 million pages of classified documents waiting to be opened to the public at the National Archives. Mostly these consist of a backlog of historical records more than twenty-five years old and it’s a slow-moving process. But they do have a National Declassification Center that was created by President Obama’s Executive Order at the end of 2009. For example, the CIA still has around 50,000 pages of classified records related to the Kennedy assassination. What could the CIA still be protecting after almost fifty years?

Of course, you can always file Freedom of Information Act requests yourself, and this is an important tool of democracy. There’s a report called “Rummaging in the Government’s Attic: Lessons Learned from 1,000 FOIA Requests” from 2010, available at: www.governmentattic.org/3docs/Rummaging_2010.pdf.

And just in case you’re wondering what the feds might have on you, check out www.GetMyFBIfile.com.