If Americans Only Knew Discussions - 12160 Social Network2024-03-19T02:44:55Zhttps://12160.info/group/ifamericansonlyknew/forum?feed=yes&xn_auth=no20% Of Your Genes Are Patented And Owned By Private Corporationstag:12160.info,2015-05-30:2649739:Topic:15619712015-05-30T12:23:35.759ZCentral Scrutinizerhttps://12160.info/profile/H0llyw00d
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<div id="page-body-header" class="extra-wrapper"><div id="page-header-556333e1e4b0630863190045" class="sqs-layout sqs-grid-12 columns-12"><div id="yui_3_17_2_1_1432959601701_171" class="row sqs-row"><div id="yui_3_17_2_1_1432959601701_170" class="col sqs-col-12 span-12"><div id="block-a4037b6d03f5d33be670" class="sqs-block html-block sqs-block-html"><div id="yui_3_17_2_1_1432959601701_517" class="sqs-block-content"><p id="yui_3_17_2_1_1432959601701_516"><strong id="yui_3_17_2_1_1432959601701_515"> Are you aware that 20% of your genes are patented and owned by private corporations? This fact alone was enough to spark our interest and inspire us to find out more from German documentarian, Hannah Leonie Prinzler. Almost six years ago, Hannah set out to investigate the nefarious world of patents in her riveting documentary, <a href="http://thepatentwars.org/" target="_blank">The Patent Wars</a>. The stories told throughout this film have complex and potentially sinister implications for all of us.</strong></p>
<p><strong>There is a very real war going on right now hidden from plain view, and it concerns each and everyone of us. We sat down with Hannah to discuss why patents effect us all and, more so, why we need to pay very close attention to them if we want to keep sovereignty over our own future.</strong></p>
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<div id="yui_3_17_2_1_1432959601701_190" class="main-content"><div id="page-556333e1e4b0630863190045" class="sqs-layout sqs-grid-12 columns-12"><div id="yui_3_17_2_1_1432959601701_189" class="row sqs-row"><div id="yui_3_17_2_1_1432959601701_188" class="col sqs-col-12 span-12"><div id="block-ebec01d3bb92853cdb62" class="sqs-block html-block sqs-block-html"><div class="sqs-block-content"><p><strong>THE INSIGHT</strong>: Why did you decide to cover a story about patents?</p>
<p><strong>HLP</strong>: I came across the issue when I was researching another project on nanotechnology and the social impact of high-tech. I suddenly realised that the uncanny feelings that arose are not only provoked by what these technologies might do to us but by who owns and controls them. I learned that, especially in areas like the biotechnology and nanotech sectors, there are a lot of companies out there which research mainly in order to apply for patents, hoping that they will cover very broad and basic principles of a new technology and rake in a lot of money with their patents subsequently. I immediately felt that this was a very questionable practice and I thought, “Why don’t we know about this? Why is nobody discussing this?” To fill that gap was my main motivation when I started to work on the film about six years ago.</p>
<p><a href="http://govtslaves.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/genes.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-47205" src="http://govtslaves.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/genes-580x326.jpg" alt="genes" width="580" height="326"/></a></p>
<p><strong>THE INSIGHT</strong>: Your documentary is a fascinating one with many implications. Very political and complex. Firstly, I think watching this movie dissuaded me from ever inventing anything or filing a patent!</p>
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<div id="block-yui_3_17_2_2_1432711773927_65652" class="sqs-block html-block sqs-block-html"><div class="sqs-block-content"><p>Just the sheer insanity of it all didn’t make this an attractive world. Were you yourself amazed at the complexity and financial scale of it all? What would you say to someone who was young, ambitious and wanted to create something, perhaps like James Dyson?</p>
<p><strong>HLP</strong>: The patent system is just another example of the many things that are going into a totally wrong direction. It’s just that most people aren’t aware of it.</p>
<p>If I were a young, ambitious, inventor – like James Dyson was about 30 years ago – I would probably not consider to file a patent today, but look for alternative means of protection and licensing systems like Creative Commons. I would also ask myself, ‘What do I expect from a patent?’ A patent is first of all a legal tool that gives you the right to sue your infringers. But, that costs a lot of money. So, unless you want to attract huge investments into your business and build up your own intellectual property department, a patent is probably hard to enforce for a small company anyway. I would ask myself, ‘Where is the value of the idea or the product that I invented? Can I come up with a business-model that does not rely on the intellectual property? If it is a great social innovation, isn’t it desirable to be copied as quickly and widely as possible anyway?’</p>
<p>But, unfortunately, there is still the risk that another company would come and sue me for infringement of their patents. So I might still need to go through the arduous and expensive process of filing a patent just to protect myself in anticipation of a possible attack. And that’s were this whole business gets really messy.</p>
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<div id="block-yui_3_17_2_3_1432578767336_11570" class="sqs-block html-block sqs-block-html"><div class="sqs-block-content"><p><strong>THE INSIGHT</strong>: How did you decide to approach this as it became more complex, as there are a lot of moving parts to this story?</p>
<p><strong>HLP</strong>: The film is a mosaic, a collection of smaller stories and examples. I deliberately decided to look into a broad range of different areas – computer technologies, genes, medicines, seeds and traditional indigenous knowledge – because I wanted to give an overview of the patent system as a whole by addressing the multiple problems and conflicts within that system. At a certain stage in the process, I decided to use myself as a guide through the film, so the narrative arc follows my research and my journeys to places like the Silicon Valley, to India or Geneva. To discover this indeed complicated world through the eyes of a curious outsider – myself – hopefully helps the viewer to be drawn into the topic emotionally.</p>
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<blockquote><p>“Why don’t we know about this? Why is nobody discussing this?”</p>
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<div id="block-yui_3_17_2_2_1432755954258_51056" class="sqs-block html-block sqs-block-html"><div class="sqs-block-content"><strong>THE INSIGHT</strong>: What was the biggest thing that surprised you about making this documentary?<p></p>
<p><strong>HLP</strong>: I was very surprised and deeply moved by the Indian protagonists of the film. We shot in the U.S. first and went to India afterwards. I had of course expected that there is a big difference between Americans and Indians and their perspective on patents and intellectual property.</p>
<p>Still, I was very touched by the humanist approach of the Indian protagonists. All of them argued that you have to balance the rights of an inventor with the needs of a society to grow and develop, whereas in the U.S. the debate seems to be exclusively focused on staking claims, protecting investments and making profits.</p>
<p>To me, the Indian view seems to be a lot more sustainable and socially desirable. I think we need their criticism and opposition in order to understand how shortsighted and selfish the route is that we are taking. There were probably some good intentions when modern patent laws were introduced to the Western world in the 18th and 19th centuries. But they have been lost over history, especially with the patent practice of the last decades – as David Martin, a U.S. American Intellectual Property analyst argues in my film.</p>
<p><a href="http://govtslaves.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/countries.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-47206" src="http://govtslaves.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/countries-580x326.jpg" alt="countries" width="580" height="326"/></a></p>
<p><strong>THE INSIGHT</strong>: You state on your website as an introduction for the movie, “Did you know that you can patent colours, numbers, plants and animals – and that 20% of your genes are patented and owned by private corporations?”</p>
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<div id="block-yui_3_17_2_3_1432578767336_13230" class="sqs-block html-block sqs-block-html"><div class="sqs-block-content"><p>Do you think many people know this is a reality?</p>
<p><strong>HLP</strong>: I am sure most people aren’t aware of that! But the European Patent Office in Munich has issued about 1000 patents on genetically modified animals like mice and even great apes. Countries like the U.S., until recently, allowed patents on genes and still grant patents on stem cells. All of this raises severe ethical questions. I think we better start discussing if we as a society really want to grant those rights to individual private companies – are the benefits really worth the risk?</p>
<p><strong>THE INSIGHT</strong>: The AIDS drugs issue in India was interesting, it just showed how many people potentially suffer because of patent laws.</p>
<p><strong>HLP</strong>: In Europe, where we have a more or less functioning health insurance system, people usually have no idea how much their insurers pay for certain drugs. The social costs of medical patents suddenly gets very obvious in countries like India. If a drug is patent-protected and can’t be copied in the local pharmaceutical industry, it is simply unavailable to people because they have to pay for the drugs themselves. When the first AIDS drugs came onto the market in India in the 1990s, they cost almost 10.000 USD – an amount that only very few Europeans would have been able to pay for, too!</p>
<p>There is a general human right to medicines. I don’t really understand the logic that allows us to say, ‘For you guys in Africa, unfortunately this drug will only be available after the end of the patent term in 20 years – or maybe only in 40 years if the pharmaceutical company is ingenious in finding ways to prolong the term.’</p>
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<blockquote><p>“If I were a young ambitious inventor – like James Dyson was about 30 years ago – I would probably not consider to file a patent today”</p>
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<div id="block-yui_3_17_2_2_1432755954258_52999" class="sqs-block html-block sqs-block-html"><div class="sqs-block-content"><p><strong>THE INSIGHT</strong>: I was amazed to learn that developing nations pay more in licensing fees for patents than they receive in development aid – quite an alarming fact. How do you think it got this point? What can developing nations do to avoid this? This relates to big pharmacy drugs etc. and the like.</p>
<p><strong>HLP</strong>: We got to this point because industrialised countries and the representatives of their industries decided to export their concept of intellectual property to developing countries. When the World Trade Organisation was founded in the mid-1990s, it became a membership requirement to sign an agreement that forced countries to introduce intellectual property laws similar to U.S. and European standards. So, instead of just being able to copy things freely for their local markets, developing countries need to import products or buy licenses in order to use a wind turbine, for example. It is hard to find statistics, but I talked to some experts who really made me understand how hypocritical this system really is; on the one hand we give development aid as a charity, on the other hand those countries and their governments have to buy technologies and medicines from companies in the western world – often at a totally overrated price. It would probably be much more helpful for their development if they could build up their own industry by copying freely.</p>
<p>David Martin, who runs a patent & IP analysis firm in Virginia, wants to overcome this dependency. He counsels governments like that of Mongolia or Papua New-Guinea. With the help of special databases and software, he can evaluate if a technology – like a wind turbine – is really worth the price that is being asked. Or if there are similar technologies that are no longer patent protected in the country that is seeking the technology.</p>
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<div id="block-yui_3_17_2_3_1432578767336_16273" class="sqs-block html-block sqs-block-html"><div class="sqs-block-content"><p><strong>THE INSIGHT</strong>: Another great point raised in the film was by the Italian, Michele Boldrin; he said<strong> </strong>the patent system is in crisis and represents a “[state] of recession, or that western society has becomes less innovative”. What do you think of this?</p>
<p><strong>HLP</strong>: I included his statement in the film because I felt that he reminds us of something very important: we have to be very careful that we are not drowning our creative aspirations as a society with a purely money-oriented system. The patent system, or the intellectual property system in general, turns knowledge into a commodity so that you can attach a price to it and create a market for it. This works because something that can be shared indefinitely by its nature, like knowledge, is being restricted through a monopoly right. This is quite an artificial operation and a relatively recent “invention”. We shouldn’t forget that many non-Western cultures, especially indigenous ones, don’t know or strongly oppose the concept of individual private ownership of ideas, inventions or art.</p>
<p>We should also remember that the majority of things in the history of humanity have certainly not been invented for the sake of money. I believe it was more likely the joy of creating, the hope for a better future, the spiritual aspiration to create something of greatness, the wish to help others in the community or simply love that made people rise above themselves and create something of value to society.</p>
<p>If there is no other reference or incentive left but money, I fear that this will put our Western societies not only into an economic crisis but a crisis of identity and meaning.</p>
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<blockquote><p>“When the first AIDS drugs came onto the market in India in the 1990s, they cost almost 10.000 USD – an amount that only very few Europeans would have been able to pay for, too!”</p>
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<div id="block-yui_3_17_2_2_1432755954258_53935" class="sqs-block html-block sqs-block-html"><div class="sqs-block-content"><p><strong>THE INSIGHT</strong>: There is a part in the movie where you feature a group in the U.S. building cars on their own. Costing materials being less than $10,000USD. This sentiment perhaps is a little idealistic? The Commons trend has been around for some time but never really gained popularity, why?</p>
<p><strong>HLP</strong>: Maybe it’s true that the Commons movement has often been seen as a bunch of idealists, but this is definitely not true for Local Motors. Since we shot the story at their headquarters in Arizona, they have made huge headlines in the U.S. after developing the world’s first 3D-printed electric car. They are currently setting up a factory in Berlin as well as other places all over the world. In Berlin, they have been commissioned to develop a study of the city’s future transportation system in a crowd-sourced innovation process. They’re proving that open innovation is a serious business model.<img class="thumb-image loaded aligncenter" src="http://static1.squarespace.com/static/546ccf26e4b0383c05e7b7fb/t/5564a6f9e4b004a8dfd04100/1432659710973/Film+Still+Hannah+researching.jpg?format=750w" alt="© Rasmus Sievers & Filmkantine UG"/></p>
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<div id="block-yui_3_17_2_2_1432711773927_38308" class="sqs-block html-block sqs-block-html"><div class="sqs-block-content"><p><strong>THE INSIGHT</strong>: I read an interesting article in <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21649448-patent-records-reveal-way-inventions-are-made-has-changed-over" target="_blank">The Economist</a> that talked about why inventions are not very innovative anymore. There are many patents, but the actual inventions are not as dynamic. They said this is because inventions mainly exist by “recombining existing technologies” and chime with the idea that inventors were more adventurous in the past?</p>
<p><strong>HLP</strong>: The problem is that obviously only less than 5% of all patent applications refer to real innovations. I talked to a former patent examiner at the European Patent Office and he told me that it was a common saying among his colleagues that “they hadn’t seen an invention in five years”. A lot of patents, especially in the computer industries, are only there for strategic reasons, which means that companies want to use them as defensive or even offensive weapons in lawsuits. The number of patent applications is often used as an indicator for the inventiveness of a country and its level of innovation, but after my research for the film I doubt that this is a convincing parameter. Perhaps the real innovation is already happening somewhere else.</p>
<p><strong>THE INSIGHT</strong>: One area that was not discussed was the technology sector. The very public Apple vs. Samsung patent war, for example. These billion dollar companies have built up war chests to protect themselves from such infringements. However, Google has approached this slightly differently; recently they came out on a public spending spree for patents. This was done in order to avoid future trolls, which have caused havoc. Perhaps this is a way to go in the future?</p>
<p><strong>HLP</strong>: I find it a rather frightening and dystopian vision that Google wants to buy up patents at a large scale and I don’t think that this is a solution at all. Just imagine one company owning and controlling all the world’s important technologies! Why should we trust Google? They are not democratically elected and can simply change their terms and conditions at any time.</p>
<p>The patent troll problem needs to be solved on a political level instead. It is first of all a problem of U.S. laws and jurisdiction.</p>
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<div id="block-yui_3_17_2_3_1432578767336_14789" class="sqs-block html-block sqs-block-html"><div class="sqs-block-content"><p><strong>THE INSIGHT</strong>: We interviewed a data scientist, <a href="http://www.theinsight.co/viktor-mayer-schnberger" target="_blank">Viktor-Mayer Schonberg</a>, who talked about a new emergence of forensic data predictability that can already enable crime units to predict someone’s crime before it even happened. I see patents on genes in a similar murky world. Owning genes can have a chilling effect on society. Do you agree? How do you think we can control this?</p>
<p><strong>HLP</strong>: The problem of gene patents is not only that they make certain diagnostic medical products, like Myriad’s BRCA breast cancer genes test, unnecessarily expensive. In countries like the U.S. where the patent holder can also decide on and even prohibit research activities, many people fear that those patents may stifle medical innovation and progress instead of fostering it. And, again, I think this can only be controlled through wise political regulations. The public interest has to be taken into account.</p>
<p><strong>THE INSIGHT</strong>: The patent world is a complicated monster and it interacts with our everyday life. What would you like the general public to be aware of, having made this movie?</p>
<p><strong>HLP</strong>: The more things in our lives rely on technology – just think of highly processed foods, genetically modified seeds, medicines and even outdoor fabrics – the more things are patent protected, which means that one company owns the rights to the technology. I know that it is a very complex field and for an individual person it is hard to do anything about it. But, I think it is possible if people become aware of how things are connected and which ethical and social implications might arise – especially if you look at it from a global perspective.</p>
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<blockquote><p>“I find it a rather frightening and dystopian vision that Google wants to buy up patents at a large scale and I don’t think that this is a solution at all. Just imagine one company owning and controlling all the world’s important technologies! ”</p>
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<div id="block-yui_3_17_2_2_1432755954258_54960" class="sqs-block html-block sqs-block-html"><div class="sqs-block-content"><p><strong>THE INSIGHT</strong>: What kind of feedback did you get from this movie? Did it inspire people, help them, inform them?</p>
<p><strong>HLP</strong>: The film has been screened on public television in Germany and France and at a series of festivals mainly in North America. We always had very engaged debates after every screening. At the Mill Valley Film Festival, which is close to the Silicon Valley, many people who work in the field came over to the shows. Later this year I will screen the film at the European parliament in Brussels and I look forward to the discussion – I really hope there is still more to come to help nourish the debate.</p>
<p><strong id="yui_3_17_2_1_1432959601701_515"><a href="http://www.theinsight.co/hannah-leonie-prinzler" target="_blank">INSIGHT</a></strong></p>
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</div> Gov’t begins first step in pension confiscation & denying retirees their earned benefitstag:12160.info,2015-05-05:2649739:Topic:15559042015-05-05T05:22:08.963ZCentral Scrutinizerhttps://12160.info/profile/H0llyw00d
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<p><a href="http://govtslaves.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/uncle-sam.gif"><img alt="uncle-sam" class="wp-image-40852 alignleft" height="220" src="http://govtslaves.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/uncle-sam-580x363.gif" width="351"></img></a> (<a href="http://www.secretsofthefed.com/government-begins-first-step-in-pension-confiscation-and-denying-retirees-their-earned-benefits/" target="_blank">Kenneth Schortgen</a>) One of the best open secrets in working for a public entity during one’s <span class="IL_AD" id="IL_AD6">career</span> is the ability to double dip on …</p>
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<p><a href="http://govtslaves.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/uncle-sam.gif"><img class="wp-image-40852 alignleft" src="http://govtslaves.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/uncle-sam-580x363.gif" alt="uncle-sam" width="351" height="220"/></a>(<a href="http://www.secretsofthefed.com/government-begins-first-step-in-pension-confiscation-and-denying-retirees-their-earned-benefits/" target="_blank">Kenneth Schortgen</a>) One of the best open secrets in working for a public entity during one’s <span id="IL_AD6" class="IL_AD">career</span> is the ability to double dip on <span id="IL_AD4" class="IL_AD">retirement</span> and pensions plans. For example, if someone joins the military at age 18 and stays in for 20 years, they are guaranteed a<span id="IL_AD12" class="IL_AD">percentage</span> of the average of their highest three year<span id="IL_AD8" class="IL_AD">pay period</span>. Then, as the ‘retiree’ would only be 38 years old, if they were hired into a civil service position, or even as a U.S. Postal worker, they would be eligible for a second pension if they retired after another 20+ years with that organization.</p>
<p>But in the private sector it appears now that workers will not be given the same accommodation as a<a href="http://edworkforce.house.gov/uploadedfiles/bill_text_bipartisan_multiemployer_pension_reform.pdf" target="_blank">hidden rider</a> placed within the most recent budget bill by Congress will allow the government to take or confiscate up to 60% of a workers earned retirement if they fall under the parameters of a multi-employee union.</p>
<blockquote><p>A provision included in the $1.1 trillion spending bill that passed in the final days of the last Congress creates the possibility that certain current and future retirees<a href="http://www.pbgc.gov/about/factsheets/page/multiemployer-pension-reform-act-of-2014-faqs.html" target="_blank">could have their pension payments reduced</a> by 60% — a prospect that experts say has been virtually unheard of until now.</p>
<p>“I think that this kind of takes an important step back from what has always been just a bedrock principle that you can’t cut back on benefits that have already been earned,” said Gregg Dooge, an attorney at <a href="http://www.foley.com/" target="_blank">Foley & Lardner</a> in <span id="IL_AD9" class="IL_AD">Milwaukee</span> who has practiced pension law for 30 years.</p>
<p>The provision applies only to multiemployer union pension plans — those that cover more than one company’s workers — that face a high likelihood of running out of money within the next 20 years.</p>
<p>Multiemployer plans were developed as part of <span id="IL_AD11" class="IL_AD">collective bargaining</span> agreements and typically<span id="IL_AD5" class="IL_AD">apply</span> to union workers in professions such as trucking, food retailing, construction and mining, among others. There are about 1,400 such pension plans, covering about 10 million people. – <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/business/new-law-allows-reductions-in-certain-retiree-pensions-b99455953z1-295817401.html" target="_blank">JS Online</a></p>
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<p>With the Federal government’s budget deficit continuing to remain over a trillion per year, and the national debt well over $18 trillion, Congress is desperate to find more revenue to pay for mandates that take up more than half of the nation’s budget every year. In addition to this, tax revenues since the credit crisis of 2008 have not recovered since most jobs created over the past six years have been part time, and near <span id="IL_AD1" class="IL_AD">minimum</span> wage, with interest due on the nation’s debt climbing with each new appropriations bill.</p>
<p>A few years ago, the former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tried to push through a bill that would <a href="http://www.silverdoctors.com/obama-begins-push-to-confiscate-iras-401ks/" target="_blank">confiscate all retirement plans</a> under the guise of ‘protecting’ <span id="IL_AD7" class="IL_AD">the public</span> from the risks of<span id="IL_AD2" class="IL_AD">Wall Street</span> and economic recessions. But the real reason is the same one used by Congress when they looted the <span id="IL_AD3" class="IL_AD">Social Security</span> trust fund over the past 30 years… to spend your dedicated retirement for their own programs and crony largesse. And as we rush towards a new financial collapse, where liquidity problems are pushing governments to pass laws making it almost illegal to hold cash, to believe that the government doesn’t want all of your money is to fail to realize that they have done these forms of confiscations many times before in our past.</p>
<p><a href="http://govtslaves.info/govt-begins-first-step-in-pension-confiscation-denying-retirees-their-earned-benefits/">http://govtslaves.info/govt-begins-first-step-in-pension-confiscation-denying-retirees-their-earned-benefits/</a></p> Hundreds of bioterror lab mishaps cloaked in secrecytag:12160.info,2014-08-17:2649739:Topic:14960312014-08-17T21:39:18.257ZCentral Scrutinizerhttps://12160.info/profile/H0llyw00d
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wallpaper4me.com/images/wallpapers/biohazard-660419.jpeg" target="_blank"><img class="align-full" src="http://www.wallpaper4me.com/images/wallpapers/biohazard-660419.jpeg"></img></a></p>
<p>More than 1,100 laboratory incidents involving bacteria, viruses and toxins that pose significant or bioterror risks to people and agriculture were reported to federal regulators during 2008 through 2012, government reports obtained by USA TODAY show.</p>
<p>More than half these incidents were serious enough that lab workers received medical…</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wallpaper4me.com/images/wallpapers/biohazard-660419.jpeg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.wallpaper4me.com/images/wallpapers/biohazard-660419.jpeg" class="align-full"/></a></p>
<p>More than 1,100 laboratory incidents involving bacteria, viruses and toxins that pose significant or bioterror risks to people and agriculture were reported to federal regulators during 2008 through 2012, government reports obtained by USA TODAY show.</p>
<p>More than half these incidents were serious enough that lab workers received medical evaluations or treatment, according to the reports. In five incidents, investigations confirmed that laboratory workers had been infected or sickened; all recovered.</p>
<p>In two other incidents, animals were inadvertently infected with contagious diseases that would have posed significant threats to livestock industries if they had spread. One case involved the infection of two animals with hog cholera, a dangerous virus eradicated from the USA in 1978. In another incident, a cow in a disease-free herd next to a research facility studying the bacteria that cause brucellosis, became infected due to practices that violated federal regulations, resulting in regulators suspending the research and ordering a $425,000 fine, records show.</p>
<p>But the names of the labs that had mishaps or made mistakes, as well as most information about all of the incidents, must be kept secret because of federal bioterrorism laws, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates the labs and co-authored the annual lab incident reports with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.</p>
<p>The issue of lab safety and security has come under increased scrutiny by Congress in recent weeks after <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/topic/9ee9e5de-b702-4fbc-9e5d-1b595adcf938/biolabs/" title="http://www.usatoday.com/topic/9ee9e5de-b702-4fbc-9e5d-1b595adcf938/biolabs/">a series of high-profile lab blunders at prestigious government labs</a> involving anthrax, bird flu and smallpox virus. On Friday, a CDC investigation revealed how a rushed laboratory scientist had been using sloppy practices when a specimen of a mild bird flu virus was unwittingly contaminated with a deadly strain before being shipped to other labs.</p>
<p>Earlier this summer, other researchers at CDC potentially exposed dozens of agency staff to live anthrax because of mistakes; nobody was sickened. Meanwhile, at the National Institutes of Health, long-forgotten vials of deadly smallpox virus were discovered in a cold-storage room where they weren't supposed to be.</p>
<p>The new lab incident data indicate mishaps occur regularly at the more than 1,000 labs operated by 324 government, university and private organizations across the country that are registered with the Federal Select Agent Program. The program is jointly run by the USDA and the CDC, which are required by law to annually submit short reports with incident data to Congress.</p>
<p>The reports, released by CDC in response to a request from USA TODAY, contain few details beyond a count of incidents by categories, such as incidents involving bites or scratches from infected animals, needle sticks, failures of personal protection equipment, spills or specimen packages that temporarily went missing after they were shipped. No thefts were reported.</p>
<p>Data for incidents reported in 2013 is not yet finalized, CDC said. In 2012, lab regulators received 247 reports of potential releases of dangerous pathogens. They also received 247 reports in 2011. There were 275 reports in 2010; 243 in 2009; and 116 in 2008. The reports come from regulated select agent research labs as well as clinical or diagnostic labs that are exempted from registration with federal officials but still must report incidents if they identify a select agent.</p>
<p>"More than 200 incidents of loss or release of bioweapons agents from U.S. laboratories are reported each year. This works out to more than four per week," said Richard Ebright, a biosafety expert at Rutgers university in New Jersey, who testified before Congress last month at a hearing about CDC's lab mistakes.</p>
<p>The only thing unusual about the CDC's recent anthrax and bird flu lab incidents, Ebright said, is that the public found out about them. "The 2014 CDC anthrax event became known to the public only because the number of persons requiring medical evaluation was too high to conceal," he said.</p>
<p>CDC officials were unavailable for interviews and officials with the select agent program declined to provide additional information. The USDA said in a statement Friday that "all of the information is protected under the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002."</p>
<p>Such secrecy is a barrier to improving lab safety, said Gigi Kwik Gronvall of the UPMC Center for Health Security in Baltimore, an independent think tank that studies policy issues relating to biosecurity issues, epidemics and disasters.</p>
<p>"We need to move to something more like what they do in aviation, where you have no-fault reporting but the events are described so you get a better sense of what actually happened and how the system can be fixed," said Gronvall, an immunologist by training and an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.</p>
<p>Gronvall notes that even with redundant systems in high-security labs, there have been lab incidents resulting in the spread of disease to people and animals outside the labs.</p>
<p>She said a lab accident is considered by many scientists to be the most likely source of the re-emergence in 1977 of an H1N1 flu strain that had disappeared in 1957 because the genetic makeup of the strain hadn't changed as it should have over those decades. A 2009 article in the <i>New England Journal of Medicine</i> noted the 1977 strain was so similar to the one that disappeared that it suggests it had been "preserved" and that the re-emergence was "probably an accidental release from a laboratory source."</p>
<p>"People understand that mistakes will happen," Gronvall said. "But you want it to be captured, you want it to be learned from, you want there to be a record of how it was dealt with. That's something I think should happen with biosafety."</p>
<p>In 2012, CDC staff published an article in the journal<i> Applied Biosafety</i> on select agent theft, loss and releases from 2004 through 2010, documenting 727 reported incidents, 11 lab-acquired infections and one loss of a specimen in transit among more than 3,400 approved shipments.</p>
<p>The article noted that the number of reports received by CDC likely underestimates the true number of suspected losses and releases. Still, the data "indicate that the risk of exposure to [select agents] managed by US laboratories to the general population is low." The number of reports submitted rose annually during the period, from just 16 in 2004 to 269 reports in 2010, the article said. It's unclear why the numbers in the journal article differ slightly from those in the select agent reports to Congress reviewed by USA TODAY.</p>
<p>The newly released reports give limited information about the handful of incidents where there was occupational illness or an animal becoming unexpectedly infected.</p>
<p>• <strong>2012:</strong> Two workers in different select agent facilities showed signs of infection with the bacteria that causes Q fever, a select agent that primarily causes illness in livestock but can also sicken people with sudden or chronic symptoms including high fevers, headaches, nausea and vomiting. While most people recover, some will experience serious illness and complications, including pneumonia, hepatitis and an inflammation of heart tissue. The report says both of the lab workers returned to full work status, but their cases were not being counted as confirmed laboratory acquired infections because each may have been infected outside their labs. One also worked with vaccine strains of the bacteria that aren't counted as select agents; the other served as a large-animal vet outside of the lab work, the report says.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/17/reports-of-incidents-at-bioterror-select-agent-labs/14140483/" target="_blank">Rest of them w/Video HERE</a></p> Israeli sniper shoots Palestinian cameraman at Ofer protesttag:12160.info,2014-04-07:2649739:Topic:14450792014-04-07T03:33:57.742ZTarahttps://12160.info/profile/Tara
<p>BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- Video emerged on Sunday of the moment an Israeli sniper shot a Palestinian cameraman in the stomach while he was covering a protest at Ofer prison on Friday.</p>
<p>Israeli security forces shot and injured Mohammed Basman Yasin, a volunteer cameraman for the Israeli human rights organization B'tselem, while he was filming a protest in the West Bank city of Beitunia, according to Israeli website +972.</p>
<p>The video, which could not be independently verified, appears to…</p>
<p>BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- Video emerged on Sunday of the moment an Israeli sniper shot a Palestinian cameraman in the stomach while he was covering a protest at Ofer prison on Friday.</p>
<p>Israeli security forces shot and injured Mohammed Basman Yasin, a volunteer cameraman for the Israeli human rights organization B'tselem, while he was filming a protest in the West Bank city of Beitunia, according to Israeli website +972.</p>
<p>The video, which could not be independently verified, appears to show Palestinian protesters sitting on the road when Israel forces arrive and begin firing tear gas canisters at them.<iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/lGRJ_6Ch57o?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" height="315" width="560"></iframe>
</p>
<p>More Here: <a href="http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=687770">http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=687770</a></p> Regarding Barry Sealtag:12160.info,2014-02-13:2649739:Topic:14130532014-02-13T05:36:52.679ZRobert Sparnichthttps://12160.info/profile/RobertSparnicht
<p>Find out what happened to Philip Marshall in his association as Pilot for Barry. Marshall published the entire synopsis from JFK to 911. He was then eliminated. His publication: "The Big Bamboozle"</p>
<p>Check it out. Marshall, his 2 children and family dog were eliminated in what was called ---a suicide?</p>
<p>Find out what happened to Philip Marshall in his association as Pilot for Barry. Marshall published the entire synopsis from JFK to 911. He was then eliminated. His publication: "The Big Bamboozle"</p>
<p>Check it out. Marshall, his 2 children and family dog were eliminated in what was called ---a suicide?</p> Barry Seal, the Dallas get-away plane, and the JFK assassination -Part 2 of 2tag:12160.info,2013-12-30:2649739:Topic:13856712013-12-30T17:59:44.778ZCentral Scrutinizerhttps://12160.info/profile/H0llyw00d
<p><span style="color: #000000;">It’s July 1, 1972. The TV series Bewitched is airing its final episode, Attorney General John N. Mitchell is resigning as chairman of President Nixon's re-election committee, and Sammy Davis JR’s aptly-titled single “Candy Man” is moving smartly up the charts.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/72.gif"><img alt="72" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-5276" height="519" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/72.gif" width="588"></img></a></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">(This is the second of two parts.…</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">It’s July 1, 1972. The TV series Bewitched is airing its final episode, Attorney General John N. Mitchell is resigning as chairman of President Nixon's re-election committee, and Sammy Davis JR’s aptly-titled single “Candy Man” is moving smartly up the charts.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/72.gif"><img alt="72" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-5276" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/72.gif" width="588" height="519"/></a></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">(This is the second of two parts. <a href="http://12160.info/group/ifamericansonlyknew/forum/topics/barry-seal-the-cia-camp-in-lacombe-the-jfk-assassination?xg_source=activity" target="_blank">Read the first part here</a>.)</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">And its also the date of Barry Seal’s arrest in New Orleans for conspiracy to export enough C4 plastic explosive to blow the island of Cuba half-way toward the Florida Keys, an arrest which will eventually result in a move on Seal's part that seems to confirm that the e</span><span style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.6em;">xplosive rumor about him we've been trying to track down–t<span style="font-size: 16px;">hat </span></span><span style="color: #000000; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">he flew a get-away plane out of Dallas after the JFK assassination</span>–i</span><span style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.6em;">s true. Or, rather, is <em><strong>likely</strong></em> true, because we'll never know for certain.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em; color: #000000;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">His arrest for attempting to export 7 tons of platic explosive is</span>—al<span style="line-height: 1.6em;">though no one suspects it yet</span>—one of the many twists and turns of <span style="line-height: 1.6em;">the Watergate Scandal. And he knows it. </span></span><span style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.6em;">When Customs Agents slap the cuffs on Seal in New Orleans, he says, angrily, “All I need is a bunch of Cubans after me.”</span></p>
<h3><span style="color: #000000;">"All our secrets are the same."</span></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/seal_480.jpg"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="seal_480" class="alignright size-full wp-image-5270" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/seal_480.jpg" width="215" height="301"/></span></a><span style="color: #000000;">It was in the sun-drenched Albuquerque study of two of America's most prominent writers —one a Guggenheim Fellow, National Book Award winner, and former member of the National Security Council, the other a celebrated investigative reporter whose first book took on the entire power structure in Kentucky —that I first heard what I later came to think of as "The Question."</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Answering that question, to my satisfaction and hopefully yours, is where this story will end. In between are a few carefully chosen fragments, shards from the broken mirror that I have—that we <strong><em>all</em></strong> have—been attempting to piece back together for the past 50 years.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">To understand what follows, here are a few insights that seem to have particular relevance to this story from a few of Barry Seal’s contemporaries kind enough to share with me some of their accumulated wisdom.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">An active and still-living(and thus necessarily anonymous) participant in American “clandestine operations,” for example, who once told me something that upon reflection seems obvious on its face.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">He said, “All our scandals are the same scandal. All our secrets are the same.”</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/secrets1.jpg"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="secrets" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-5275" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/secrets1.jpg" width="277" height="240"/></span></a><span style="color: #000000;">What he meant, I believe, is that serious American scandals almost always arise from the fertile soil of this nation’s chief post-WWII money-making propositions: selling weapons and/or running drugs.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">These are often said to be the No. 1 and No. 2 industries in the world, in terms of foreign trade, and it matters not which is ranked first, and which second, because they are two sides of the same coin. Many people to whom you would like to sell weapons can only pay you back with an equivalent quantity of illicit drugs.</span></p>
<p></p>
<blockquote class="pullquote pqRight"><p>The three most over-rated things in this world,” he told me, “are home cooking, home loving…and the FBI.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">Then there's something a famous Southern lawman named Rex Armistead told me, which helps me keep from getting my hopes up too much </span><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.6em;">when there's an announcement that there will be a full FBI investigation of whatever the latest outrage happens to be: </span><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.6em;">"</span><span class="pullquote" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.6em;">The three most over-rated things in this world,” he told me, “are home cooking, home loving…and the FBI.</span><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.6em;">"</span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Finally there's what a retired US Customs Agent who had spent much of his career investigating Barry Seal said when he learned how shocked I'd been at the <span style="line-height: 1.6em;">solicitousness of so many Americans</span> <span style="font-size: 13px;">towards </span><span style="font-size: 13px;">Fidel Castro</span><span style="line-height: 1.6em;"> back in the 50’s, when he was just another bandito in the hills. These Americans had all shown their concern for Fidel by running weapons to him to defend his guerrilla band against the cruel Cuban tyrant Batista.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Their number included CIA guys, Mafia guys, and even a few characters from what they call the “Dixie Mob,' including Barry Seal, David Ferrie, and even Jack Ruby, who I was shocked to discover all knew each other!</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">“What did you expect?”asked my Customs informant with a bemused smile. "Of course they all know each other. There aren't that many ‘players’ out there."</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Most of what follows drives home one or another of these points.</span></p>
<h3><span style="color: #000000;">Welcome to Connected-land! </span></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/goon-platoon.gif"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="goon-platoon" class="alignright size-full wp-image-5273" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/goon-platoon.gif" width="432" height="193"/></span></a><span style="color: #000000;">Our story begins during the summer of 1972, a more innocent time where few suspected that the breaking Watergate scandal will contain links to narcotics trafficking and arms smuggling.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">During the CIA’s shut-down of what Watergate investigators will later call “The Mexican Connection,” <span style="font-size: 16px;">the arrest of Barry Seal will merely be “collateral damage” </span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">But it is what happened after <em><strong>Seal’</strong></em>s arrest <span style="line-height: 1.6em;">that today provides persuasive evidence that Barry Seal was involved in </span><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">the Kennedy assassination, and viewed it as his "ace in the hole" during his often-acrimonious dealings with his superiors. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">On July 3 The New York Times reports a DC-4 has been seized at the Shreveport Regional Airport, loaded with enough explosives to fuel a coup in a good-sized Latin American country. There’s almost seven tons of C-4 explosives, there’s 7,000 feet of primer cord, 2,600 electric blasting caps and 25 electrical detonators.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Authorities say the explosives are destined for Cuban exiles in Mexico, who plan to use them to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. <span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Federal officials say seven men in Texas and Louisiana have been arrested on charges of conspiring to smuggle munitions to Mexico. </span></span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/eagle-pass.gif"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="eagle-pass" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5277" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/eagle-pass-300x232.gif" width="300" height="232"/></span></a><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">They include </span><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Richmond Harper, a millionaire rancher and bank director from Eagle Pass, Texas, a former Inspector with the INS, a New York Gambino-connected Mobster named Murray Kessler, and pilot Barry Seal.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Kessler, a frequent house guest at the Harper ranch, has a record of six felony convictions on charges of interstate theft, transporting stolen property, bookmaking and conspiracy to possess heroin. </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">A surveillance report written after he landed at the San Antonio airport describes him as “50-ish and Jewish-looking, wearing a open-collar gray shirt with a gray sports suit, accompanied by a “bleached blond in white slacks and a red polka-dotted jacket.” </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">More important than the bleached blond wearing polka dots, to our story, at least, is that Murray Kessler according to former DEA agent Dick Gustafson, who knew him, is “an anti-Castro guy, which was like a mantra he carried around with him.”</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Stirring the pot a little thicker, Kessler was also a known associate of Guy Banister and David Ferrie in the 1960’s. </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">“He had a lot of familiarity with that group of ‘yahoos’ in New Orleans,” Gustafson says. “That’s how I figure he met Barry, who was involved with Guy Banister and Ferrie back then too.”</span></p>
<h3><span style="color: #000000;">The Shut-down of the Mexican Connection</span></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/mexlogo2.gif"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="mexlogo2" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-5278" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/mexlogo2-300x99.gif" width="300" height="99"/></span></a></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">It will come out at their trial that the <span style="line-height: 1.6em;">men were busted </span><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">by a US Customs undercover agent with CIA connections with whom Kennedy assassination aficionados are familiar named Cesario Diosdado, a participant in one of the stranger episodes occurring on November 22, 1963.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">In Miami, Cuban Alpha 66 head Antonio Veciana reported that several hours after the assassination Caesar Diosdado mysteriously showed up at his home unannounced.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">“You don’t know anything about Kennedy, do you?” Diosdado asked.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">When Veciana replied “no,” Diosdado seemed satisfied. Veciana felt he was being tested, so didn't tell Diosdado that he had seen Oswald in Dallas a month earlier, he later testified, because “he didn't want to get involved.”</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">JFK assassination investigator Gaeton Fonzi reported: "Veciana said as soon as Diosdado walked in the door he told him, ‘hey, don't worry about a thing, I don't even know why I'm doing this, they just told me to do it, interview some Cubans.’”</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">What’s been busted up, later court testimony reveals, is a weapons for heroin deal, masterminded by “rancher-banker” Richmond Harper, who is described as a “tall lean guy wearing a string tie and cowboy boots and a cowboy shirt with monogrammed initials “RCH.” </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">It’s a description which fits him, Seal widow Debbie agrees, having seen him when she flew in to the airport in Eagle Pass with her pilot husband, so the two men could confer while awaiting trial.</span></p>
<h3><span style="color: #000000;">Any friend of Zapata's a friend of mine</span></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/George-de-Mohrenschildt.jpg"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="George de Mohrenschildt" class="alignright size-full wp-image-5279" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/George-de-Mohrenschildt.jpg" width="247" height="336"/></span></a><span style="color: #000000;">Time to stir the pot a little thicker: It was through Richmond Harper's’ Eagle Pass Texas ranch that Oswald’s friend in Dallas, oilman and CIA asset George DeMohrenschilt had entered Mexico en route on “a walking tour” of Central America that led him to be in Guatemala for the launch of “The Bay of Pigs invasion.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">After DeMohrenschildt's sudden death by shotgun on the eve of his testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations—which his wife strenuously said was not a suicide—his personal address book was located, containing an entry reading: "Bush, George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 W. Ohio see also Zapata Petroleum Midland."</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Richmond Harper is also an associate of the man known as Carlos Marcello's front man, Herman Beebe. And, according to a statement Barry Seal issued later, he had "very deep ties right into the (Nixon) White House."</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Those ties were to the head of US Customs, Myles Ambrose, who was also a Special Consultant to the President on Narcotics, and who was there at the birth, in 1973, of Nixon’s demon spawn, the DEA.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Myles Ambrose, according to former Customs officials who were disgusted at having had to work under him, would visit Harper and go hunting with him on his ranch on the border. <span style="line-height: 1.6em;">He was a guest at what must have been the wedding of the year down in Eagle Pass, the nuptials of Richmond Harper’s daughter, an event</span><span style="line-height: 1.6em;"> her proud Daddy commemorated with <strong><em>the slaughtering of 600 steers. </em></strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">"We tried to warn him [Ambrose],” stated one Customs official at the time. “Tell him that this guy [Harper] is bad. He wouldn't listen."</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">When we finally reached Myles Ambrose for his version of events, and his recollections of Barry Seal, he was perhaps understandably defensive.</span></p>
<h3><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">“Frank is dead now. We can talk.”</span></span></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/mylers-a.gif"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="mylers-a" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-5280" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/mylers-a.gif" width="320" height="252"/></span></a><span style="color: #000000;">Ambrose said he had no recollection of the warning. It was only after his visits that he discovered that Harper had been the defendant in a civil suit involving the mislabeling of dog food–food not intended for humans—that was then shipped over the border from Mexico to the United States.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">At any rate, he had only ever visited the Harper ranch once, he said emphatically.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">He had been the guy, he told me, changing the subject, who had shepherded the establishment of the DEA through Congress. “I got to Tip O’Neill,” he told us. “And that kept the partisan stuff out.”</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">During my interview with him, I felt Ambrose’s displeasure at some of my questions, which, in fairness, may have sounded slightly more suspicious than someone</span> <span style="color: #000000; font-size: 13px;">is used to fielding </span><span style="color: #000000;">who has been a Special Consultant on Narcotics to President Nixon.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">But whatever the reason, Ambrose became a bit over-eager to share his thoughts on the involvement in the drug trade by folks on <strong><em>the other side</em></strong> of the aisle.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/391_1sloppyjoes.jpg"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="391_1sloppyjoes" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-5281" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/391_1sloppyjoes-300x236.jpg" width="300" height="236"/></span></a></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">“I was with Treasury back in the late Fifties, when Bobby Kennedy was running the Kefauver Committee Hearings on Organized Crime,” Ambrose said. “I know for a fact that there was a yellow sheet (investigative report) on a meeting in Havana where Meyer Lansky gave two kilos of heroin to Frank Sinatra to bring back to the States so he (Sinatra) would have a little ‘walking-around’ money.”</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">“But because Sinatra was helping Kennedy get elected, his brother removed all reference to this from the Committee’s report.”</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Ambrose left office shortly after his friendship with Harper was revealed. Years later, Nixon aide Chuck Colson told Senator Lowell Weicker two pieces of information on Myles Ambrose that should never go together. </span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">1. "Ambrose set up the CIA in the Drug Enforcement Administration.”</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">2. Ambrose had cordial relations with certain Mafia figures.”</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Even the DC-4 Barry Seal was piloting loaded with 7 tons of C4 plastique had some heavy connections. It was owned by a man, James Boy of Fort Lauderdale, with whom Seal will be arrested in Miami in 1983 as part of the DEA’s Operation Screamer.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">As a result of that arrest, Barry Seal will “get with the program” and move his smuggling activities up to Mena Arkansas. And the rest, of course, is history.</span></p>
<h3><span style="color: #000000;">“The trial of the C4 Seven”</span></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/2831.jpg"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="2831" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-5282" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/2831.jpg" width="400" height="193"/></span></a><span style="color: #000000;">One clue to Seal’s status is that, after having been caught illegally exporting 7 tons of C4 explosives, no one was in any hurry to bring him to trial.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">But when they did, an extraordinary document surfaced, which clearly shows that Barry Seal viewed his participation in the Kennedy assassination as a bargaining chip, a laminated "get out of jail" card to be <font size="3" face="Georgia, Bitstream Charter, serif"><span style="line-height: 25.59375px;">for the rest of his life. </span></font></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"> Both the prosecutor and the judge received an anonymous (though the envelope bearing the letter is clearly in Barry Seal’s handwriting) letter threatening that unless the charges were dismissed, the sender would blow the cover off matters pertaining to “national security.”</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The heading reads <em><strong>“CJ Simpson de Cuba.”</strong></em></span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 80px;"><span style="color: #000000;">“Due to personal initiative and desire to see justice done this letter is mailed to you and your associates,” the letter reads.</span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 80px;"><span style="color: #000000;">“The United States two-count indictment against seven men on charges of conspiracy to ship “implements of war” out of the United States, without having approval of the government, has no chance to succeed.”</span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 80px;"><span style="color: #000000;">“I worked for the <strong><em>CJ Simpson de Cuba</em></strong> Drilling Company, which had three rotary drilling rigs operating in Cuba. Whether you or any of your associates are aware of the number of “implements of war” shipped by that company out of the United States as components of drilling equipment, I have no idea. But I advise you to find out!</span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 80px;"><span style="color: #000000;">These shipments of “implements of war” by the CIA had no known open approval of the United States Government. Yet I am sure that your attitude towards it would be that as long as it is done by a federal agency, it is correct. If this is your assumption, then you are dead wrong.</span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 80px;"><span style="color: #000000;">I can name names of agents involved in these shipments. The whole sorry mess of the CIA putting Fidel Castro into a position to overthrow the government of Juan Batista has never been told to the public.”</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The letter, on its surface, is puzzling. While it might still have been embarrassing if the size of the assistance the CIA provided Fidel Castro became known, any resulting scandal would clearly have not risen to a level of seriousness where it might threaten to compromise current operations.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Vietnam and Cambodia were on the front burner in 72. Castro and Cuba was old news.</span></p>
<h3><span style="color: #000000;">"That Bay of Pigs Thing"</span></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/woodstein-quitter.jpeg"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="woodstein quitter" class="alignright size-full wp-image-5283" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/woodstein-quitter.jpeg" width="300" height="386"/></span></a><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">T<span style="font-family: georgia,serif;">he letter couldn’t be taken literally. But was it making some sort of oblique reference only understood by insiders? The way Nixon did while trying to get the FBI to call off the Watergate investigation?</span></span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: georgia,serif;">"Look, the problem is that this tracks back to the Bay of Pigs, </span><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; line-height: 1.6em;"> the whole problem is that this will open the whole— the whole Bay of Pigs thing," </span><span style="font-family: georgia, serif;">Nixon is caught saying, on the Watergate Tapes. </span></span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif;">"A</span><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; line-height: 1.6em;">nd the President just feels that ah, without going into the details–don't, don't lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is a comedy of errors, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again and, ah…they should call the FBI in and (unintelligible) don't go any further into this case period!”</span></span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: georgia,serif;">H.R. Haldeman later testified that Nixon's references to Howard Hunt and the Bay of Pigs was Nixon’s way of making an oblique allusion to the Kennedy assassination.</span></span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: georgia,serif;">Could the "political dynamite" the letter-writer hoped to be flinging in the judge’s face have something to do with the <strong><em>company</em></strong> involved, CJ Simpson de Cuba?</span></span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: georgia,serif;">The name CJ Simpson de Cuba, a little research reveals, occurs in the literature of the Kennedy assassination in the most amazing context imaginable… </span></span></span><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; color: #000000; line-height: 1.6em;">A report by a U.S. Secret Service agent in Chicago </span><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; color: #000000; line-height: 1.6em;">that a <em><strong>CJ Simpson de Cuba</strong></em> employee named <strong><em>Homer Echevarria</em></strong> knew about the Kennedy assassination…<em><strong>before it happened.</strong></em></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: georgia,serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">The House Select Committee on Assassinations Report cited the incident as particularly troubling. </span></span></span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: georgia,serif;">The informant "reported that he had knowledge of a group of Chicago Cubans, allegedly anti-Castro, who were bitterly opposed to President Kennedy.” <span style="line-height: 1.6em;">The informant</span></span></span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: georgia,serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">had been attempting to negotiate a sale of machine guns to Homer Echevarria. The day before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy Echevarria told the informant that 'we now have plenty of money…as soon as 'we' take care of Kennedy.'”</span></span></span></span></p>
<p style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: georgia,serif;">Homer Echevarria, the man making threats against the President, worked for the <em><strong>CJ Simpson Oil Drilling Company</strong></em> in Cuba, and then later in Dallas.</span></span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: georgia,serif;">It prompted an agent in charge of the Chicago field office of the Secret Service to write a memorandum about "a group in the Chicago area who may have a connection with the JFK assassination."</span></span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: georgia,serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Again, for emphasis: three days after the JFK assassination, a Secret Service Agent in Chicago reported that somone </span></span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: georgia,serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">and who worked for CJ Simpson de Cuba, the company Barry Seal is citing to blackmail his judge with "national security concerns" in his trial for exporting explosives</span></span></span></span><span style="color: #000000; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25.59375px;">—knew </span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: georgia,serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">President Kennedy was going to be assassinated before it happened. Moreover he was associated with </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: 13px; color: #000000;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">connected with the DRE and the 30th of November Movement</span></span></span></span><span style="color: #000000; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25.59375px;">—the two groups said to be training at the CIA's "rogue" camp for assassins in Lacombe, Louisiana.</span></p>
<h3><strong style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.2em; font-size: 13px;">Cuba, the guns, New Orleans, everything"</strong></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/lacombe2.gif"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="lacombe2" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5285" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/lacombe2-300x245.gif" width="300" height="245"/></span></a><span style="color: #000000; font-size: 13px;">New Orleans sits alongside not just the Mississippi, but a large freshwater lake, Lake Pontchartrain. For well over twenty years assassination researchers and government investigators have suspected that a shooter team for the Kennedy assassination came from the anti-Castro guerrilla training camp on the north shore of Lake Pontchatrain, in the tiny town of Lacombe.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000; font-size: 13px;">The two exile Cuban groups with which Echevarria was associated, the DRE and the 30th of November Movement, were the groups using what is often referred to as the CIA’s rogue, renegade, or black training camp in Lacombe.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">The HSCA found that the 30th of November group was backed financially by a Chicago-based organization run by Paulino Sierra, and that the DRE had financial support from organized crime, and that </span></span><span style="color: #000000; font-size: 13px;">Sierra's money came</span><span style="color: #000000; font-size: 13px;"> from "hoodlum elements, and that </span><span style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.6em;">Sierra was linked to the Lake Pontchartrain camp and the Mafia and the Castro assassination plots.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/lacombe.gif"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="lacombe" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-5284" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/lacombe-300x249.gif" width="300" height="249"/></span></a></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The camp referred to is the same one where New Orleans DA Jim Garrison suspected brothers Mike and Bill McLaney had been providing Cuban exiles with a renegade off the books training site and arms cache, courtsey the CIA.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"> Garrison said there had been two anti-Castro groups training north of Lake Pontchatrain, one "overt," the other "covert."</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The covert group, according to Garrison, was led by David Ferrie, who drilled five-man commando teams in guerrilla warfare practice and infiltration techniques on a site adjacent to the McLaney cottage. According to the New Orleans States-Item. "Immediately after the Lacombe raid, the so-called 'overt' Cuban group disappeared."</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">When we asked the engaging but slippery "CIA's man in '60's New Orleans" Gordon Novel if he had known the McLaney brothers, his answer was interesting. "I knew Mike McLaney by name, a CIA guy, supposedly. Dead now."</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">"But," he continued, "here's the problem of dealing with intelligence: its a beehive. Each cubicle is like this. McLaney over here and me over here, see? We're in separate cubicles, and our operations never overlapped. Just because he did this and I did that and we were both in New Orleans doesn't mean we ever came in contact."</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/mike-mclaney23.gif"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="mike-mclaney23" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-5288" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/mike-mclaney23.gif" width="600" height="431"/></span></a></p>
<h3><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>"Everybody know everybody in New Orleans"</strong></span></h3>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">While doing research in Louisiana in 2000, I identified and visited Mike McLaney’s Lacombe property. It's a spooky place, filled with ghosts, none of whom would agree to be interviewed on the record.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">So, for what follows, I’ve relied on what I consider the most reliable JFK researched to cover the subject:</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/the-pool.gif"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="the pool" class="alignright size-full wp-image-5329" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/the-pool.gif" width="300" height="225"/></span></a><span style="color: #000000;">In July of ‘63 a group of Cuban exiles from Miami arrived and joined the anti-Castro guerrilla training camp at Lacombe.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Not long after the Miami exiles arrived, Lee Oswald offered his services to the exiles. Whether Oswald is patsy or conspirator or emissary from the Spiders From Mars, he was there, in the company of men like Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and CIA agent David Atlee Philips.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">At some point, Mike McLaney sent the CIA a detailed plan for knocking out three Havana refinerie. But instead of getting his plan approved, he got an urgent phone call from Washington warning him “not to attempt such a thing under any circumstances.”</span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Carlos Marcello associate Sam Benton had more than two tons of dynamite beside McLaney's cottage. to deliver this "big bang" </span><span style="color: #000000; font-size: 13px;">Castro’s oil refineries </span><span style="color: #000000;">Benton was negotiating to obtain a B-24 aircraft.</span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="color: #000000;">T</span><span style="color: #000000;">wo p</span><span style="color: #000000;">lanes were </span><span style="color: #000000;">to take off from an airstrip near the Lacombe camp, then fly on to Havana .</span><span style="color: #000000;"> </span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.6em;">On the other hand, Royal Dutch Shell Oil Corporation retained a fondness for their seized refineries in Havana, as well as a reluctance to return at some future date to discover bomb craters where their refinery once stood. </span><span style="color: #000000; font-size: 13px;">The raid was set for August 1 1963. Prodded by Bobby Kennedy, on July 31st the FBI raided the house in Lacombe and the training camp nearby.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.6em;">Fervent anti-communism is all well and good, apparently; but business is business.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/mclaney-jfk1.gif"><span style="color: #000000;"><img alt="mclaney-jfk" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-5289" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/mclaney-jfk1.gif" width="300" height="290"/></span></a><span style="color: #000000;">The FBI’s Lacombe raid assumed a prominent role in Jim Garrison’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination. He believed that the exiles training there—for an assassination attempt on Castro—had been ‘spun off’ into the successful attempt on Kennedy.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">So just who were Mike and Bill McLaney? Mike was a casino owner in Havana, where one of his employees, Lewis McWillie, was Jack Ruby's best friend. When Fidel Castro took power, Mike McLaney was arrested for three months, then freed, and continued to operate under Fidel Castro in hopes of becoming gambling czar of Cuba, hopes nursed by having paid out $102,000 to Fidel Castro's Ministry of Gambling, Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">When the Casino Nacional was nationalized in 1960 he lost $7 million. McLaney's brother, Bill, owned the Carousel Club in Las Vegas. It is presumably "just a coincidence" that Jack Ruby's club in Dallas is also called the Carousel Club.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Life Magazine once printed a story linking McLaney with Meyer Lansky, and he responds by filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. When the magazine produced newspaper clippings that confirmed that no casino operated in Havana without the consent of Meyer Lansky, his suit was thrown out.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The Internal Revenue Service then rubbed a little salt in Mike's wound by filing income tax evasion charges him. He was convicted of evading $118,000 in taxes and sentenced to three months in Federal prison.</span></p>
<h3><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>A personal friend of J Edgar Hoover</strong></span></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/dixon2.gif"><img alt="dixon2" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-5290" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/dixon2-300x282.gif" width="300" height="282"/></a><span style="color: #000000;">Because of the Life brouhaha, the Miami Police began an investigation of McLaney. "In the course of the conversation Mr. McLaney named some of his close friends," their report said. "Those named included J. Edgar Hoover, John S. Knight, publisher of the Miami Herald and Rocky Pomerantz, Chief of the Miami Beach Police Department. He (McLaney) stated that he could use these people as references, along with the Chief of Police and Mayor of New Orleans."</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">We have the feeling he could have quit after mentioning Hoover, but you know how Mob guys like to boast.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.6em;">Garrison charged that David Ferrie, Jack Ruby, and Lee Oswald were all involved in training two paramilitary groups of Cuban exiles and American "neo-Nazis"</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The covert group, he said, was led by David Ferrie, who drilled five-man commando teams in guerrilla warfare practice.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">There are eyewitness accounts of Dave Ferrie, Lee Oswald, and numerous Cubans dressed in military fatigues and carrying automatic rifles involved in extensive military training maneuvers on the site.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Several people, including a CIA asset named Colonel William Bishop, shortly before his death in 1990, who told author Dick Russell that he’d seen Oswald and Ferrie in a have seen a training film shot at the site.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">So too, did HSCA lawyer and later Beverly Hills Mayor Robert Tenenbaum, who claims that after the House assassination investigation got hold of a copy of the training film shot at the Lacombe camp, it was stolen.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">“MIKE MCLANEY WAS a good friend of mine, a wonderful athlete, a national tennis champion, and a splendid golf hustler,” said venerable old New Orleans antiques dealer Dave Dixon, who “just happened” to have been Barry Seal’s CIA handler.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">But none of these attributes which Dixon ascribed to his friend made McLaney important enough to burglarize the US House of Representatives.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">“What was there about the McLaney's training camp on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain that made it important enough to risk burglarizing the US House of Representatives?”</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The answer is simple. What else?</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Finally, we return to where we began: in the sun-dappled study of Roger Morris and Sally Denton, whose question had sent me on my quest. </span><span style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.6em;">One question I wished I’d asked them was where they first heard the rumor.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.6em;">Later, </span><span style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.6em;">I learned from Sally Denton that her father, a prominent attorney in Las Vegas, had been Mike McLaney’s lawyer.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000; line-height: 1.6em;"><span style="color: #000000;"><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/2013/11/22/barry-seal-the-dallas-get-away-plane-the-jfk-assassination/#more-5265" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a></span></span></p> Barry Seal, the CIA camp in Lacombe, & the JFK Assassination -part 1 of 2tag:12160.info,2013-12-30:2649739:Topic:13855622013-12-30T17:54:19.548ZCentral Scrutinizerhttps://12160.info/profile/H0llyw00d
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">It was in the sun-drenched Albuquerque study of one of America's most prominent historians—a Guggenheim Fellow and a National Book Award winner—that I first heard what I later came to think of as "The Question."</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Barry-MexCity63-HiRez.jpg"><img alt="Barry-MexCity63-HiRez" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-5217" height="420" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Barry-MexCity63-HiRez.jpg" width="664"></img></a></p>
<p> </p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Enroute from Los Angeles to New Orleans, where I would spend the next two…</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">It was in the sun-drenched Albuquerque study of one of America's most prominent historians—a Guggenheim Fellow and a National Book Award winner—that I first heard what I later came to think of as "The Question."</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Barry-MexCity63-HiRez.jpg"><img alt="Barry-MexCity63-HiRez" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-5217" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Barry-MexCity63-HiRez.jpg" width="664" height="420"/></a></p>
<p> </p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Enroute from Los Angeles to New Orleans, where I would spend the next two years researching and writing a book about renowned CIA pilot-turned-infamous drug smuggler Barry Seal, I stopped to visit Dr. Roger Morris and Sally Denton, the writers who first brought serious national attention to the CIA operation in Mena, Arkansas led by Oliver North, and Barry Seal.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/14.gif"><img alt="14" class="alignright size-full wp-image-5219" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/14.gif" width="227" height="269"/></a></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">We were drinking cokes in the warm sun and exchanging tidbits of information each of us had gleaned about our common subject, when at one point Morris leaned forward.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">“What have you heard,” he asked, “about Barry Seal having flown a get-away plane out of Dallas after the Kennedy assassination?” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">I stared at him blankly. I replied that I didn’t know there had even<strong><em> been</em></strong> a get-away plane. And that was the end of it. The conversation quickly moved on. But the moment changed my life. In the two years of research which followed, I never forgot</span> <em style="line-height: 1.6em;">the question</em><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Months later, while collecting old news clippings in Barry’s hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I struck up a conversation about Seal with the morgue librarian at the Baton Rouge Advocate. She had a kind of smoky whiskey voice you generally don't associate with librarians.</span></p>
<h3><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">"Its another world, New Orleans"</span></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/baton-rouge-advocate2.jpg"><img alt="baton-rouge-advocate" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-5227" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/baton-rouge-advocate2.jpg" style="opacity: 0.9;" width="300" height="225"/></a></p>
<div><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">We shared </span><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">a few anecdotes about Seal. Then, unbidden, she told me, “My ex-husband, who was ‘connected,’ told me that Barry</span> <span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Seal flew a getaway plane out of Dallas after JFK was killed."</span></div>
<div> </div>
<div><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">"How long ago?" we demanded. "How long ago did he tell you? When did you hear about this?'</span></div>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">"Hell, she said, “a good 20 years. I've been remarried for ten."</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Later, after I heard a story about Barry Seal from John Odom, a friend and classmate of Seal’s in high school, I began to realize that the rumor might be something more than that. While it wasn’t common knowledge, in certain circles in Louisiana it is what is known as an “open secret.”</span></span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/slidell-airport.gif"><img alt="slidell-airport" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-5221" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/slidell-airport-300x258.gif" style="opacity: 0.9;" width="300" height="258"/></a></p>
<div><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">“One Friday evening, while we were in high school, I got a call from Barry,” Odom began, “asking if </span><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">I'd like to fly with him in the</span> <span style="line-height: 1.6em;">morning over to Lacombe, a little town on the north shore across Lake Pontchatrain from New Orleans."</span></div>
<div> </div>
<div><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">“We left about 5.30 A.M. and flew over to the little airport there. And when we got off the plane there was a guy on the tarmac dressed all in black: black military fatigues, black boots, a black beret. He was sitting in a director's chair, drilling a bunch of Civil Air Patrol cadets, all carrying the old M1 rifles, standing in formation in front of him.”</span></div>
<div> </div>
<div><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">“His name was David Ferrie. He was a captain in the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol. And he had fake eyebrows, real weird, with one eyebrow turned up at a 45-degree angle. I laughed when I saw him. And Barry didn’t like that, and told me to stay by the plane or he wouldn't let me fly back with him to Baton Rouge.”</span></div>
<h3>Big shout out to Oliver Stone</h3>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/david-ferrie2.gif"><img alt="david-ferrie2" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5228" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/david-ferrie2-300x271.gif" width="300" height="271"/></a></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Even if you’re not a JFK assassination researcher—and I wasn’t—you know who Ferrie was. Everyone’s seen Joe Pesci’s brilliant portrayal of Ferrie in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Many recall that Ferrie – just forty-eight hours after Kennedy died—was brought in for questioning on suspicion that he had been involved in the assassination.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Odom watched them confer, he said, and saw Ferrie point to the 50-or-so wooden crates staged next to the tarmac.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">On the way back to Baton Rouge, Barry Seal told him that he was working for Ferrie, who he said was "CIA.” (Ferrie's CIA link was confirmed by Victor Marchetti, former Deputy Assistant to Richard Helms, who testified that Helms disclosed, in executive discussions during the Garrison investigation, that Ferrie had in fact been employed by the CIA.)</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">“Seal said he making $400 a week flying "runs" of crates of weapons and ordinance for Ferrie,” said Odom. He asked me, How'd you like to make that kind of money?”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Odom said he told Barry, 'I'll think about it.' But they never discussed it again. Decades later, the incident remains puzzling to Odom. "Our dad made about $400 a month back then, and we weren't poor, but I was stunned and didn't know what to say.”</span></p>
<p>Translated into today's money, Barry Seal was making $2500 weekly…on the weekends.</p>
<h3>A piece of real history slipped through the cracks</h3>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/384px-MexicoAngelDeLaIndependencia.jpg" style="line-height: 1.6em;"><img alt="384px-MexicoAngelDeLaIndependencia" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5223" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/384px-MexicoAngelDeLaIndependencia-300x225.jpg" style="opacity: 0.9;" width="300" height="225"/></a></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Then a</span><span style="line-height: 1.6em;"> fortuitous happenstance brought me a photograph that spoke volumes about Barry Seal's career, and the people involved in </span><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">the JFK assassination.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Seal left it to his wife, Debbie, now his widow. And despite the 7-man "clean-up crew" from the State Department that came down from Washington to her home and combed through all of Barry's records in early 1995, it is still in her possession. The photo, which she considered a keepsake, remained untouched in her safe.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">The photo was in a cardboard frame of the kind used by nightclubs and tourist attractions, with the date it was taken, January 22,1963, stamped on the back. It was taken in the nightclub of the Aristos Hotel in Mexico City’s Zona Rosa.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">At the time the photo was taken, the CIA's covert action chief in Mexico City was David Atlee Phillips. Philips, AKA Maurice Bishop, reportedly met with Oswald in Dallas before the assassination.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/goss-seal.gif"><img alt="goss-seal" class="alignright size-full wp-image-5230" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/goss-seal.gif" width="275" height="296"/></a></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">The photo shows a group of ten men, wearing black suits and skinny ties, drinking around a table. They appear to be a mixed group of Cuban exiles, Italian wise guys, and square-jawed military intelligence types.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Identifying the men in the photo took months. And when I had, I realized that it is the only extant photograph of the members of the CIA’s super-secret assassination squad known as “Operation Forty."</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">A young (24-year old) Barry Seal is seated third from left. </span><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Seated to Seal’s right is former CIA chief Porter Goss. Front left, beside Goss, is the notorious Cuban "freedom fighter" Felix Rodriguez. Rodriguez, a vice cop under the corrupt Mob-run Batista regime in Cuba, later became an Iran Contra operative and a confidant of the first George Bush.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/felix-rodriguez2.gif"><img alt="felix-rodriguez2" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-5231" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/felix-rodriguez2.gif" width="280" height="289"/></a></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Felix Rodriguez has long been known to be one of the CIA's most vicious assassins. According to law enforcement authorities, he keeps Che Guevara's hands in a jar atop his dresser. </span></p>
<p>On the other side of the table, the only celebrant displaying any regard for tradecraft is covering his face with his sport coat. However, his swept-back “Big Wave in Hawaii” pompadour made him fairly easily identifiable as Frank Sturgis. Sturgis has often been mentioned in connection with the JFK assassination.</p>
<p>Sturgis will later become famous as one of the Watergate burglars.Beside him, f<span style="line-height: 1.6em;">ront right, is a man well-known among Kennedy assassination researchers. William Seymour was the New Orleans representative of the Double-Chek Corporation, a CIA front used to recruit pilots (like Seal). Researchers identify Seymour as the man said to have impersonated Lee Harvey Oswald, while Oswald was out of the country.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/sturgis-seymour2.gif"><img alt="sturgis-seymour2" class="alignright size-full wp-image-5232" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/sturgis-seymour2.gif" width="300" height="300"/></a></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">It is certainly a well-connected group. Just the fact that the man who will become the biggest drug smuggler in American history had been consorting back in 1963 with a man whose job was recruiting pilots for the CIA makes allegations of CIA involvement in the drug trade far more than just another conspiracy theory.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">So, if there had been a get-away plane flown out of Dallas after the Kennedy assassination—and assuming there had been an authentic investigation into the assassination, which there was not—Barry Seal would have been high on the list when authorities told the police to call in the “usual suspects.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">But that puts the cart somewhat in front of the horse. Is there evidence that there was a get-away plane? The answer is yes.</span></p>
<h3><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Three men in suits at Redbird Airport</span></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/RedbirdAirport.jpg"><img alt="RedbirdAirport" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5233" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/RedbirdAirport-300x194.jpg" width="300" height="194"/></a><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">At about 1:00 P.M. that same afternoon, half an hour after the president was shot, neighbors who lived along the road that runs by the Redbird Airport, about 10 miles southwest of downtown Dallas, began calling the police. A small private plane, they reported, was behaving very strangely. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">For an hour it had been revving its engines, not on the runway, as per usual, </span><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">but parked at the end of the airstrip on a grassy area next to the fence. The noise was so loud it prevented nearby residents, glued to their TVs for the news about the terrible event downtown, from hearing.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">The police, perhaps understandably, were too busy to check it out. The question became moot when shortly thereafter the plane took off. </span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/redbird.gif"><img alt="redbird" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-5234" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/redbird-300x225.gif" width="300" height="225"/></a></p>
<p>An FBI file of March 10, 1967, describes statements made by Louis Gaudin, the government's air traffic control specialist at Redbird airport, who recalled observing three men in business suits board a Comanche-type aircraft at about 2:00 P.M.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Thirty-seven years later, I tracked down Louis Gaudin in retirement in the tiny town of Long Branch, Texas. “I filed that report in ’67 for only one reason,” Gaudin told me. “Sometime in 1967 I received a visit from an Assistant District Attorney in (New Orleans District Attorney) Jim Garrison’s office.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">“He showed me pictures of four possible pilots involved in the incident that day. One was a weird-looking character with a funny-looking wig. Then, shortly thereafter I saw on the news that David Ferrie had committed suicide, said Gaudin.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">“That’s when I smelled a rat.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Redbird Airport (today Dallas Executive Airport) is a small airfield between Dallas and Fort Worth. But it wasn’t just any old airport.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">“The FAA had its general aviation headquarters there, said Gaudin. “Howard Hughes had a huge old WWII hanger there, with heavy security. People from Wackenhut all over the place. And there were the Porter planes from General Harry Byrd’s outfit.”</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/MDByrde3.gif"><img alt="MDByrde3" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5235" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/MDByrde3-300x241.gif" width="300" height="241"/></a><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">General D. Harry Byrd’s links to the Kennedy assassination begin with the fact that he owned the building, the Texas School Book Depository, from which Kennedy was supposedly gunned down.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Then, too, he founded an aircraft company that became one of the largest U.S. defense contractors during the Vietnam War, Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV), which also—and perhaps not coincidentally?—tested missiles at the Venice Airport in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">“What had happened was this,” he continued. “I was an air traffic controller working in the tower at Redbird that day. When I came on shift at 2 PM, we received a bulletin to report any suspicious activity immediately to an FAA Security number. And we kept calling that number all afternoon, but got nothing but a busy signal. And then, after we heard they had caught the ‘lone gunman,’ I guess they called it, we stopped calling, and let the matter drop.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">From his perch atop the control tower, Mr. Gaudin, between handling twenty or thirty flights into and out of the airport an hour, had noticed something suspicious about three well-dressed men in business suits standing, along with several suitcase, beside a Comanche painted green-and-white.</span></p>
<div><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/redbird3.gif"><img alt="redbird3" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-5236" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/redbird3-300x257.gif" style="opacity: 0.9;" width="300" height="257"/></a></div>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">So suspicious was he, Mr. Gaudin related, that when the plane took off on runway 17, he asked the pilot if he needed any</span> <span style="line-height: 1.6em;">assistance. The pilot said no. Gaudin asked which way the plane was heading. The pilot stated south.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Gaudin watched as the plane flew south for two miles, then made a hard left, and then flew north to Love Field.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">The pilot had lied.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Suspicions aroused, Gaudin went over to the control tower’s receiver and listened as the plane made an approach and landed at Love Field, eight miles north of Redbird.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">An hour later, the plane was back at Redbird. This time only two people were aboard. The third passenger—let’s call him the shooter–had been left at Love Field.</span></p>
<h3><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">James Garrison, American hero</span></h3>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/jim-garrison.gif"><img alt="jim-garrison" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5237" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/jim-garrison-300x234.gif" width="300" height="234"/></a>And that’s where the matter rested until Garrison’s investigator’s came calling. </p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Then, after Gaudin became alarmed at the death of a man whose picture he had just recently been shown, he called the FBI, and filed the report which, he said, became something of a burden to him for the rest of his life.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">“There was no Freedom of Information Act back then,” he says today. “That’s what’s created some problems for me.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">This would be just a ‘suspicious sighting’ except for something that happened later, which clearly indicated to Gaudin that he was a witness to something he had no business seeing.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">From the control tower, he says, he was too far away to be able to identify anyone who boarded the plane. But there was one person who could: Merrit Goble, who ran the fixed-wing operation, TexAir, at Redbird Field.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">“Merrit and I were friends,” Gaudin relates. “So one day, after filing the FBI report, I went down to see if the FBI had been by to visit him as well. They hadn’t, he told me. So I asked him if he had anything, any gas receipts, any record of the fueling of the plane in question. And Merit acted very strangely. He told me, in effect, that it was none of my business. He said, ‘I will only answer questions from a bonafide law enforcement authority.’”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">“I always thought that was strange: <em>‘I will only answer questions from a bonafide law enforcement authority.</em>’ Because like I said, we were friends.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Merrit Goble died last year, taking any secrets he possessed about the suspicious plane to his grave.</span></p>
<h3><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Means, Motive, Opportunity</span></h3>
<p> <a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/young-seal.gif"><img alt="young-seal" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-5241" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/young-seal-300x248.gif" width="300" height="248"/></a><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Was Barry Seal at the controls of the plane that took off from Redbird Airport on November 22 1963? We’ll never know for sure. But lacking an eyewitness willing to come forward and enough of a survivalist to live to tell his tale, we base a “yes” answer on his association with—and proximity to—the major players whose names get bandied about in connection with the assassination.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">The central thesis of most writers on the assassination is that the Kennedy assassination was the work of the Mafia, elements of the CIA, and right-wing Cuban exiles aligned with Guy Banister, Clay Shaw, and David Ferrie, all of whom were CIA-connected. Not to mention Lee Oswald, who had formed an alliance with the U.S. intelligence community as a young man in the Civil Air Patrol with David Ferrie.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Barry Seal knew them all.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">He was a known associate of the ‘usual suspects’: David Ferrie, Carlos Marcello, Guy Banister, and Grady Partin. He was a gunrunner to Cuba, and a veteran of the Bay of Pigs. And his participation in Operation 40, the CIA’s assassination squad, the blackest of black ops, as attested by the photo taken in Mexico in January 1963.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/guy-b1.gif"><img alt="guy-b" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5246" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/guy-b1-300x247.gif" width="300" height="247"/></a><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">About one longtime associate of Banister and Ferrie (Murray Kessler) who was busted with Barry in 1972, one DEA agent said, “He (Kessler) had a lot of familiarity with that group of ‘yahoos’ in New Orleans; that’s how I figure he met Barry, who was known to have been involved with Guy Banister and Ferrie back then too.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Moreover, Barry Seal was a spectacular pilot, one of the best alive.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">I believe Seal flew that ‘getaway’ plane out of Dallas; and that during his often-acrimonious dealings with his superiors, his participation in the JFK hit remained his ‘ace in the hole’ for the rest of his life.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">But where did the shooters</span><span style="line-height: 1.6em;"> come from? I’ll take that up tomorrow, in “The Camp in Lacombe.” As far as I know, I’m the only investigator in recent times who was able to locate—and visit—the site of the CIA’s secret camp for assassins in Lacombe, Louisiana.</span></p>
<h3><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">What do the 9/11 attack and the Kennedy assassination cover-ups have in common?</span></h3>
<p style="font-size: 13px;"><a href="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ConnectedLogo.gif"><img alt="ConnectedLogo" class="alignright size-full wp-image-5243" src="http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ConnectedLogo.gif" width="225" height="250"/></a></p>
<p style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Mis-direction. On 9/11, New York City was where most of the killing took place. It took maybe an hour. In Venice, Florida, where the key conspirators got together, they spent more than a year. </span><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Yet there’s been endless talk—leading absolutely nowhere—about thermite, about holograms, about Building 7. And its all hooey, or, to use the technical term, disinformation.</span></span></p>
<p style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Why I’m so sure is because I was the only investigative reporter at the biggest 9/11 crime scene—Venice—that wasn’t reduced to rubble. And I was continually made aware that I didn’t belong—and wasn’t wanted—there.</span></span></p>
<p style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">The Kennedy assassination set the pattern. Debating the minutiae of Dallas—the ‘magic bullet theory,’ the changing parade route, the standing down of military intelligence, and dozens of other unexplained anomalies—has proven only that a conspiracy had indeed taken place.</span></span></p>
<p style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">But it was never going to put anyone in jail. Because the conspiracy was elsewhere. In New Orleans, Chicago, Miami, on No Name Key, and. most especially, in Lacombe, Louisiana, where the CIA kept a secret camp which trained assassins.</span></span></p>
<p style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">Moreover the conspirators were pros. The Kennedy assassination was their calling card. Unlike the “big find” about the identity of the second shooter which one prominent author is currently using to flog his book</span>—who was told by a friend of a friend of a guy who had it on good authority that so-and-so, who’s now, regrettably, dead, was in on the hit— <span style="line-height: 1.6em;">t</span>hey didn’t disappear from history after November 23, 1963.</span></p>
<p style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;"> For the next several decades, the people who killed JFK </span><strong style="line-height: 1.6em;"><em>made</em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.6em;"> history. In Laos, and Cambodia, at the Watergate complex, and in the drug trafficking scandal that was mis-named Iran Contra.</span></span></p>
<p style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">They were people like Barry Seal. <br/></span></span></p> Map Shows The NSA's Massive Worldwide Malware Operationstag:12160.info,2013-11-25:2649739:Topic:13662362013-11-25T02:56:48.243ZCentral Scrutinizerhttps://12160.info/profile/H0llyw00d
<p>A new map details how many companies across the world have been infected by malware by the National Security Agency's team of hackers, and where the companies are located.</p>
<p>Dutch newspaper <a href="http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/11/23/nsa-infected-50000-computer-networks-with-malicious-software/" rel="nofollow">NRC Handelsblad reports the NSA uses malware to infect</a>, infiltrate and steal information from over 50,000 computer networks around the globe. This new, previously unreported…</p>
<p>A new map details how many companies across the world have been infected by malware by the National Security Agency's team of hackers, and where the companies are located.</p>
<p>Dutch newspaper <a href="http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/11/23/nsa-infected-50000-computer-networks-with-malicious-software/" rel="nofollow">NRC Handelsblad reports the NSA uses malware to infect</a>, infiltrate and steal information from over 50,000 computer networks around the globe. This new, previously unreported scope of the NSA's hacking operation comes from another PowerPoint slide showing a detailed map of every infection leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden.</p>
<p></p>
<div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image on-image"><img src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/5291191769bedda42870aa68-800-/nsa568.jpg" border="0" alt="NSA Map" width="800"/><p class="source"></p>
<p class="source"><span style="font-size: 13px;">The practice is called "Computer Network Exploitation," or CNE for short, and it's carried out by the NSA's Tailored Access Operations team. A yellow dot on the map signifies a CNE infection. The NSA plants malware within a network that can flipped on or off at any time. Once a network is infected, the malware gives the NSA unfiltered access to the network's information whenever it's most convenient. The </span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/29/the-nsa-has-its-own-team-of-elite-hackers/" rel="nofollow" style="font-size: 13px;">Washington Post previously profiled</a><span style="font-size: 13px;"> the team of "elite hackers" who make up the NSA's TAO division. </span></p>
</div>
</div>
<p>The practice is called "Computer Network Exploitation," or CNE for short, and it's carried out by the NSA's Tailored Access Operations team. A yellow dot on the map signifies a CNE infection. The NSA plants malware within a network that can flipped on or off at any time. Once a network is infected, the malware gives the NSA unfiltered access to the network's information whenever it's most convenient. The <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/29/the-nsa-has-its-own-team-of-elite-hackers/" rel="nofollow">Washington Post previously profiled</a> the team of "elite hackers" who make up the NSA's TAO division. </p>
<p>The British intelligence service liked this strategy too, <a href="http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/11/23/nsa-infected-50000-computer-networks-with-malicious-software/" rel="nofollow">NRC Handelsblad </a><a href="http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/11/23/nsa-infected-50000-computer-networks-with-malicious-software/" rel="nofollow">reports</a>, because they successfully duped a Belgium telecom company with a fake LinkedIn account. A strip at the bottom says the map is relative to relative to the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the "Five Eyes" nations that share intelligence. </p>
<p>The bulk of CNE operations take place in Europe, South American and Asia. Some <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57613550-38/nsa-slapped-malware-on-50000-networks-says-report/" rel="nofollow">are speculating CNE operations focus on</a> Internet service providers, telecom giants and other similar companies to better facilitate massive information collection. </p>
<p>Where the NSA's team of hackers fit into the organization's greater intelligence gathering structure is presently unclear. But another new document, a February 2012 memo <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/us/politics/nsa-report-outlined-goals-for-more-power.html?pagewanted=1&hp" rel="nofollow">leaked to The New York Times about the NSA's goals for the future</a>, shows exactly how extensive the NSA thought its intelligence gathering would become. They wanted everything:</p>
<p>Intent on unlocking the secrets of adversaries, the paper underscores the agency’s long-term goal of being able to collect virtually everything available in the digital world. To achieve that objective, the paper suggests that the N.S.A. plans to gain greater access, in a variety of ways, to the infrastructure of the world’s telecommunications networks.</p>
<p>Prior to Edward Snowden revealing the operation to the world and ruining the fun, that is. There's now far more public and international scrutiny directed towards the bulk intelligence gathering operation. </p>
<p><span><br/><br/>Read more: <a href="http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/11/map-shows-nsas-massive-worldwide-malware-operations/355453/#ixzz2lcdZehrR">http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/11/map-shows-nsas-massive-worldwide-malware-operations/355453/#ixzz2lcdZehrR</a></span></p> Urgent Appeal for Palestinetag:12160.info,2013-11-23:2649739:Topic:13643072013-11-23T01:54:19.209ZLisa Gulianihttps://12160.info/profile/LisaGuliani
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yv_u692h1I&feature=c4-overview&list=UUbxDRTuk3vNU4nE4OzybKbw" target="_blank">Urgent Appeal for Palestine</a></p>
<p></p>
<p>If you're not currently a friend on FB, you can find plenty of info on the current situation in Gaza and throughout Palestine online.</p>
<p>Also: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WedD30tvu4">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WedD30tvu4</a></p>
<p>I urge everyone to do whatever you can do, with whatever you have,…</p>
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yv_u692h1I&feature=c4-overview&list=UUbxDRTuk3vNU4nE4OzybKbw" target="_blank">Urgent Appeal for Palestine</a></p>
<p></p>
<p>If you're not currently a friend on FB, you can find plenty of info on the current situation in Gaza and throughout Palestine online.</p>
<p>Also: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WedD30tvu4">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WedD30tvu4</a></p>
<p>I urge everyone to do whatever you can do, with whatever you have, wherever you are.</p>
<p>Stay Human.</p>
<p></p> Children Navigate Sewage in the Streets of Al Sabra, Eastern Gaza Citytag:12160.info,2013-11-23:2649739:Topic:13643422013-11-23T01:49:39.148ZLisa Gulianihttps://12160.info/profile/LisaGuliani
<p>There is a serious, urgent humanitarian crisis in Gaza and throughout Palestine.</p>
<p>Please share this video widely. They need our help.</p>
<p>I urge you to speak out in your strongest voices and to use your social media pages and websites well, for the highest good.</p>
<p> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/VVedD30tvu4?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0"></iframe>
</p>
<p>Published 11/15/13</p>
<p>There is a serious, urgent humanitarian crisis in Gaza and throughout Palestine.</p>
<p>Please share this video widely. They need our help.</p>
<p>I urge you to speak out in your strongest voices and to use your social media pages and websites well, for the highest good.</p>
<p> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/VVedD30tvu4?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0"></iframe>
</p>
<p>Published 11/15/13</p>