For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government…. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.

-former President Harry Truman, 22nd December 1963, one month to the day after the JFK assassination, op-ed section of the Washington Post, early edition

On the anniversary of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Barack Obama’s wholly illegal drone programme -which has so far put 2400 people to death without trial- now may be the time to shine a little light on the restless dead.

It’s amazing how many corpses pile up defending entirely non-existent conspiracies, isn’t it?

This post is deliberately quite video heavy as assassinations are more of a continuous function of a control system than one-off, audacious hijacks. They require less threading than the money or the tech. Knives in the dark are better considered an immune response of both.

Once the videos have been absorbed we will present -rather than a connecting of the dots- a quantum analysis of the dot fields, which is the best that can be achieved without moving permanently into Choronzopolis.

But first, we need to humanise the drone situation. And the best person to do that is Jeremy Scahill, who is soon to join Glen Greenwald on his privately-funded venture into proper journalism. (Fingers crossed for them all.)

Drones

It upsets me that this video has only had about 800 views:

http://youtu.be/nQthIrMvmX0

In reference to his film, Dirty Wars, Scahill had this to say:

I called it Dirty Wars because there is no such thing as a clean war, and drone warfare is not clean, but also as a sort of allusion to how we’ve returned to the kind of 1980s way of waging war, where the U.S. was involved in all these dirty wars in Central and Latin America, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and beyond.

And we’re using—you know, we’re in a world right now where the U.S. is using proxies, that effectively are death squads, in Somalia to hunt down people that the U.S. has determined are enemies. We’re using mercenaries. President Obama continues to use mercenary forces in various wars, declared and undeclared, around the world. You also have the aiding of dictatorships and other, you know, right-wing governments around the world and propping them up. It’s very similar to what Reagan and company were doing in Central America.

More on that last bit coming up. Next, however, we move on to the most recent high-profile American scalp claimed, Michael Hastings.

Michael Hastings

You may recall the story from last year. A journalist who exposed the military use of psy ops on American soil and in Afghanistan on US Senators, a permanent thorn in Petraeus’s side, sends a mysterious email to his friends saying he is under surveillance and then dies in a drink driving accident despite being sober for five years.

The engine of his car, in defiance of all laws of physics, is flung behind the crashed vehicle. Mercedes Benz -understandably alarmed- is prevented from inspecting the vehicle or its black box.

Watch this extremely helpful round-up of the situation.

The final point that bears emphasising is that, against the family’s wishes, the coroner cremated him (!), removing any potential evidence of the drinking he’d supposedly been doing, despite being sober for five years, which they vigorously dispute.

http://youtu.be/5raJDwJv97E

Hastings’s murder happened within weeks of Snowden’s revelations which, to me, is an indication of a shadow government running scared. Prism is the smallest skeleton in their closet.

One final note. Think a modern car can’t be remotely hijacked? Then you’re an idiot. But here’s one happening for you.

Hastings’s tragedy puts us all in mind of another journalist who rubbed the shadow state up the wrong way and also died because of it. In the same state, in fact. He was pilloried by what passes for news media at the time, and was subsequently shown to be completely correct.

Gary Webb

We’ve met Gary before. He was the journalist who uncovered the CIA was running crack into American cities (principally the black areas) in order to fund the Contras. He was the journalist who ‘committed suicide’ with two gunshot wounds to the head. Here’s his story:

I bring it up again because it turns out the DEA is the largest drug dealer in America, supplying Chicago with 80% of its cocaine. Video below. Plus ça change, eh?

Connecting the two is this story of the Reagan administration and the CIA being complicit in the murder of a DEA agent back in the day. I leave the economics up to Catherine Austin Fitts, but her analysis and personal experience is that this vast shadow economy is how the secret space and UFO programmes receive much of their off-book funding. The motive has to be big enough for the CIA to think it’s okay to sell crack to American children, whatever your suspicions.

Dead presidents

Before we get to you-know-who, here are a couple of minutes of fascinating syncs to do with the assassination attempts on Reagan and Carter. Cued up for you because I love you:

Then, staying with Jim Marrs, here’s his anniversary presentation on JFK from last year, which is probably the quickest way to bring yourself up to date.

Staying with the Kennedy boys, here’s an update on Sirhan Sirhan’s appeal from last year. This one seems more open and shut than Oswald:

Inadvertantly [sic], the Report begins by actually supporting Petitioner’s claim of actual innocence. It states: “As Senator Kennedy stopped to shake hands with hotel employees, Petitioner walked toward him extending his arm. Instead of shaking Senator Kennedy’s hand, Petitioner shot him.”(CD 199 at p.1)

This recitation of the activity leading up to the shooting is a virtual admission of Petitioner’s innocence since Senator Kennedy was hit by three bullets, fired in an upward angle (indicating that the shooter may have been kneeling behind the Senator) from behind him, by a weapon pressed up against his back with the fatal shot fired about an inch behind his right ear. All shots left powder burns on the back of his jacket and on his skin behind his right ear. The Report explicitly acknowledges, along with the statements of twelve eye witnesses, that Petitioner was, at all times, in front of the Senator, where, as the Report confirms, the Petitioner could have shaken hands with him.

I’m avoiding MKULTRA in this post because it has been discussed in previous installments. But we’re certainly staying with spooks. Dead ones.

Dead spooks

Spooks die all the time in suspicious circumstances. Impossibly locked in gym bags in their bath, for instance. (The absolute goo in the official explanation can be seen from space.) On canoe trips after discovering heroin and sex abuse scandals, you name it.

In fact, there is a direct correlation between the number of spook deaths surrounding an incident and the level of inaccuracy of said incident as reported in the media. For instance, Tsarnaev’s friend, who was not holding a knife, was shot seven times by federal agents during a ‘casual chat’. That’s par for the course when an asset you are cultivating goes rogue. (Which remains my analysis of the bombings.)

But more interestingly is that the two arresting FBI agents died at sea in a ‘routine training accident’ 12 miles offshore. They fell out of a helicopter. Containing colleagues. If helicopter deaths of government and military personnel involved in highly dubious actions sounds familiar, it’s because it should. It happened to the Bin Laden ‘assassination’ (ha!) team, an incident not even their military families believe was an accident. Dead men and tales, eh?

Washington death lists

While the so-called Clinton kill count is largely a Republican rumour, Washington reporters keep death lists because important people die in weird ways all the time. Here’s Catherine Austin Fitts describing exactly that from her Washington experience. ( Cued to 8 minutes 58 seconds if YouTube is still fucking with me/you.)

But I want to zero in on one in particular. The story of a man who died in a plane crash ‘during the worst storm in twenty years’ even though it wasn’t even raining and cloud cover was patchy, and who somehow managed to get a bullet lodged in his brain during the crash.

These people did not want empty tributes. They just wanted an honest investigation. So did many of the family members of those who died, six of whom were in the US Air Force.

The Post has never even tried to provide an answer. As far as I know, I am the only media person to have requested the 22-volume US Air Force report.

It was in the report, for instance, that I learned about the Enron connection. No one at the Post wanted to know even about that.

Fifteen years after Brown’s death, some very basic questions remain unanswered. If the Post ever finds its soul, here are some questions its reporters might ask:

“We’ve been looking for her,” said the USAF of Zdenka Gast, the liaison between Enron and Croatia. Gast left Brown’s plane to fly on Enron’s private jet at the last moment. Why did no interview with her appear in the final USAF report?

Why did Hillary Clinton invite Gast to Alexis Herman’s intimate wedding reception at the White House some time after the plane crash?

Why did Hillary make an unscheduled visit to Tuzla in Bosnia, just nine days before Brown left Tuzla on his fatal trip?

Time Magazine claimed that the plane crashed while “one of the worst storms in a decade was raging.” In fact, it wasn’t even raining at the time, and the sun was peaking through the clouds. Who mislead Time and why?

The USAF called the crash “inexplicable.” Why was the White House so easily satisfied with that non-explanation?

Who detoured NATO rescuers for more than fours hours over the Adriatic when the plane crashed just a mile or so inland from the airport?

Why did the White House deny Brown an autopsy after an apparent bullet hole was found in the top of his head?

Who determined that three military pathologists and a forensic photographer should have their careers ruined for telling the truth about the head wound?

Why did the White House not inform Brown’s wife and two adult children of a possible gunshot wound to the head?

What happened to the head X-Rays that showed a “lead snowstorm?” Why did the Justice Department not pursue the Naval Criminal Investigative Service leak that they said had been purposely destroyed?

When the airport’s aviation systems manager showed up dead with a bullet hole in his chest days after the crash, why did the USAF accept the Croatian verdict of “suicide” without protest? [More.]

Around the world

Lest you think this is a solely American phenomenon. (Not that you would.)

One of the more far-reaching kingslayings of recent centuries was John Paul I. We’ve touched on this before. Below is an overview of a book you can now get secondhand for £0.01 but once sold millions.

I tried to cue it up again, because of the love, but this is one of those piece-of-shit-future-archon-google-bullshit that won’t allow me to even though the URL clearly ends with =1m16s… which should be your indication that that’s where the good bit starts. I tried to save you 1 minute 16 seconds of your life which hopefully balances out the time I stole while you read this sentence. If you’d studied harder in school, you’d have finished reading this by now. Just saying.

And here are some of the high points from the book. Sincerest apologies for the music, but if you owned the book, I wouldn’t need to do this.

http://youtu.be/02VUCLDb3lE

Here’s a full documentary, which is very… history channel… but there’s some good bits in it. Worth a watch for the interested.

http://youtu.be/HFewRC3oUX4

Echoes of this incident and control for the Institute for Religious Works continues to this day. (At the moment, it’s probably tied up with the German gold situation that no one else seems interested in but is extremely important.)

Let’s bullet point some of the other ones.

Benazir Bhutto.

All of Operation Gladio.

All of Latin America, or as we call it in meeting rooms in London when arbitrarily deciding media strategy, LatAm:

The latter, as Secretary of State under Eisenhower, worked with his brother (by now head of the CIA) to destroy Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, among others. The two of them pursued a Manichaean world view that was endemic to American ideology and government, which included the notion that threats to corporate interests were identical to support for communism.

As John Foster once explained it: “For us there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others.” It was not for nothing that President Johnson, much to his credit, privately complained that the CIA had been running “a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean,” the beneficiaries of which were American corporate interests. [More.]

Dead scientists

The classic case, is of course, Frank Olson’s murder by his employers, the CIA. But here’s another book you can get for £0.01: Open Verdict.

Most people seem to have forgotten the Marconi killings -when a veritable roleplaying club of British scientists died in bizarre ways and suspicious suicides- but it made into reputable international media at the time.

LONDON – In this trench-coated city, where real-life stories of spies and moles and double agents often rival the best fiction, the peculiar deaths of nine British defense scientists in the last 20 months have stirred suspicions that the cases might be connected-and that espionage might be involved.

Those who have studied the deaths-among them opposition politicians, a Cambridge University counterintelligence specialist and some investigative journalists-are loathe to draw any definitive conclusions, because the evidence, although intriguing, is scant.

But they do believe that the seemingly isolated cases bear enough connections and similarities to at least warrant a government investigation into whether some terrorist group or foreign government is involved.

The Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, however, insists that the deaths, most of them apparent suicides, are mere coincidences, at best attributable to the unusually high stresses associated with secret defense research.

Apparent suicides? Let’s have a look at some of them.

March 1982: Professor Keith Bowden, 46

Expertise: Computer programmer and scientist at Essex University engaged in work for Marconi, who was hailed as an expert on super computers and computer-controlled aircraft.

Circumstance of Death: Fatal car crash when his vehicle went out of control across a dual carriageway and plunged onto a disused railway line. Police maintained he had been drinking but family and friends all denied the allegation.

Coroner’s verdict: Accident.

April 1983: Lt. Colonel Anthony Godley, 49

Expertise: Head of the Work Study Unit at the Royal College of Military Science.

Circumstance of Death: Disappeared mysteriously in April 1983 without explanation. Presumed dead.

March 1985: Roger Hill, 49

Expertise: Radar designer and draughtsman with Marconi.

Circumstance of Death: Died by a shotgun blast at home.

Coroner’s verdict: Suicide.

November 19, 1985: Jonathan Walsh, 29

Expertise: Digital communications expert who had worked at GEC and at British Telecom’s secret research centre at Martlesham Heath, Suffolk.

Circumstance of Death: Died as a result of falling from a hotel room in Abidjan, West Africa, while working for British Telecom. He had expressed fears that his life was in danger.

Coroner’s verdict: Open.

August 5, 1986: Vimal Dajibhai, 24

Expertise: Computer software engineer with Marconi, responsible for testing computer control systems of Tigerfish and Stingray torpedoes at Marconi Underwater Systems at Croxley Green, Hertfordshire, and was also working on an SDI related simulation system.

Circumstance of Death: Dajibhai told his wife he would be working late, and then drove a hundred miles to Bristol (a city with which he had no known connection) and fell 260 feet (80 m) from the Clifton Suspension Bridge over the River Avon. The police report on the body mentioned a needle-sized puncture wound on the left buttock, but this was later dismissed as being a result of the fall. Dajibhai had been looking forward to starting a new job in the City of London and friends had confirmed that there was no reason for him to commit suicide. At the time of his death he was in the last week of his work with Marconi.

Coroner’s verdict: Open.

October 1986: Arshad Sharif, 26

Expertise: Reported to have been working on systems for the detection of submarines by satellite.

Circumstance of Death: Died as a result of placing a rope around his neck, tying the other end to a tree and then driving off in his car with the accelerator pedal jammed down. His unusual death was complicated by several issues: Sharif lived near Vimal Dajibhai (see above) in Stanmore, Middlesex, he committed suicide in Bristol and, inexplicably, had spent the last night of his life in a rooming house. He had paid for his accommodation in cash and was seen to have a bundle of high-denomination banknotes in his possession. While the police were told of the banknotes, no mention was made of them at the inquest and they were never found. In addition, most of the other guests at the rooming house worked at British Aerospace. Prior to working for Marconi, Sharif had also worked at British Aerospace on guided weapons technology.

Coroner’s verdict: Suicide.

January 1987: Richard Pugh, 37

Expertise: Ministry of Defence computer consultant and digital communications expert.

Circumstance of Death: Found dead in his flat in with his feet bound and a plastic bag over his head. Rope was tied around his body, coiling four times around his neck.

Coroner’s verdict: Accident.

January 8, 1987: Avtar Singh-Gida, 26

Expertise: Researcher at the Ministry of Defence Admiralty Research Establishment, conducting tests of submarine warfare equiment.

Circumstance of Disappearance: Disappeared mysteriously in January 1987 during his doctoral thesis on underwater signal processing at Loughborough University, just three weeks away from his project’s successful completion. Both mainland police and Interpol launched searches for him in several countries, without success. He eventually reappeared four months later. He had been traced to a red light district of Paris and confirmed that he did not know precisely how he had got there. Allegedly, he has retuned to his work and has said that he does not want to discuss his disappearance or the death of his colleague, Vimal Dajibhai (see above).

It’s worth noting that, at the time all these unrelated deaths were occurring, Marconi was believed to be working on the Star Wars programme. It’s about now that, under the auspices of son-of-a-nazi-collaborator/former CIA head/then President, Bush Snr, was slowing sunsetting the programme into the private sector.

Loose ends, then?

It’s also worth noting that his son’s warmongering also tends to kill scientists.

How to kill a princess

The first video is only ninety or so seconds. Watch it for the attempted take down of Keith Allen by some member of the British press with a very public school accent. The ‘journalist’ points out that Mohammed Al Fayed supplied the funding for the documentary but… that’s kinda the point. A private billionaire had to put his own hand in his pocket because a news organisation that exists solely by royal charter won’t investigate the death of a former member of the royal family.

Now here’s the full documentary. If this video vanishes, just search for ‘unlawful killing’. There are a few versions up there. I’d link to the BBC iPlayer version but it was never aired in the UK. Funny that.

http://youtu.be/qKyCuybAVUE

I feel weirdly compelled to point out that I deeply disliked Diana. Not to say she should have been murdered because she was a mother and that’s the end of the discussion. (Also, murder =bad.) But still… I struggle to mourn the death of a spoiled little rich girl who manipulated her way into history’s most dangerous family and then cried when the whole thing didn’t revolve around her. Game of Thrones. The clue is literally in the name. She played it. She didn’t win. This is not a Michael Hastings story.

But perhaps the most interesting angle in Allen’s documentary is that, two weeks after she died, she was due at a land mine summit where she had convinced Bill Clinton to come out against their manufacture… which would have been very bad business for the same military industrial complex that keeps real gun control permanently off the political agenda by contributing vast amounts in political donations and… you know… killing people.

He completely changed his tune at the summit.

Conclusion

Sometimes I worry that I give them impression I am anti-spy or anti-military. I’m not. As an amateur student of the Sun Tzu, I appreciate the strategic value of spying and consider it a legitimate function of the state.

In the same way, I’m technically not opposed to what we may call the Platonic idea of assassination, in the apocryphal Hassan I Sabbah sense of the term… if bumping off some inbred Duke or spoiled princeling prevents a war that kills thousands of commoners then it’s a good thing.

But none of these examples fall into the Platonic ideal. What we have here is an ungoverned supranational shadow structure who has mistaken its own self-interest for the interest of the population it once thought it protected.

This has been the position Glen Greenwald has always taken. I’m glad that the world has him. Rather than a background in nothing but American journalism, where you are taught how to be ‘unbiased’ by balancing both sides of an issue (which is impossible when one is a murderous/nazi-built shadow state with death rays… seriously think about it), what you see is a former lawyer -now thoroughly radicalised- making his case.

It is a thing of beauty to watch his excoriating take-downs of whatever Senator corporate meatpuppet dares to flash his or her head next to Greenwald’s on the garish, epileptic fever dream that passes for American cable news. He’s destroying opposing counsel’s witnesses one by one.

Tactics such as these are a necessary step before rolling out the A Material… recall that he has kept back the majority of the Snowden documents. Whilst I would be surprised if ‘an idiot’s guide to how we pulled off 9/11’ is among these files, he’s definitely got something very good. Releasing it all at once risks tipping his work from ‘pioneering journalist’ into ‘conspiracy theorist’ and that’s not how you win court cases. Spend a year shredding the moronic shill speak issuing from these government officials who fulfil the textbook definition of traitor, use a billionaire’s money to set up a wholly independent news organisation which you personally run… then you’re in a much better position to drop the A-material.

I wish him all the luck in the world. But I still wouldn’t get in a car with him.