Bilderberged again
Giles Radici’s Diaries 1980-2001 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004) isn’t terribly interesting but it does contain some snippets about Radici’s activities at the annual Anglo-German Konigswinter conference and one or two on his time at St Antony’s College (as a ‘parliamentary fellow’). There is also a section (pp. 336-7) on his attendance at the 1995 Bilderberg conference. Of this he writes: ‘I am sent by the Blair office as none of the front-line Labour spokesmen can go’. Oddly – or not – Bilderberg is not in the index.
Generalissimo
Somehow it was terribly cheering to learn from a posting by the National Security Archive (1) that General Pinochet
‘had used multiple aliases and false identification to maintain over 125 secret bank accounts at the Riggs National Bank and eight other financial institutions in the United States.’
Saviour of the nation? Defender of Christianity? Just another brutal, bent, South American dictator bought by the Americans.
Gonzo suicide?
So farewell Hunter S. Thompson. His Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas still makes me laugh out loud in places. However, shooting yourself while in the middle of a conversation with your wife is pretty gonzo, even for Dr Raoul Duke; and us paranoids thought, ‘I wonder if he was murdered?’ A little Googling shows that everyone – law officers, as well as family, fans and friends – was puzzled by the death. But who would think him worth killing? A piece in the Canadian daily Globe and Mail offered the following:
‘Hunter telephoned me on Feb. 19, the night before his death. He sounded scared. It wasn’t always easy to understand what he said, particularly over the phone, he mumbled, yet when there was something he really wanted you to understand, you did.
He’d been working on a story about the World Trade Center attacks and had stumbled across what he felt was hard evidence showing the towers had been brought down not by the airplanes that flew into them but by explosive charges set off in their foundations. Now he thought someone was out to stop him publishing it:
“They’re gonna make it look like suicide,” he said. “I know how these bastards think . .”‘ (2)
Syd’s tell
Although essentially a hagiography, Sydney Blumenthal’s 800 page memoir of life at the Clinton White House, The Clinton Wars (London: Viking, 2003), contains a very interesting account of the enormous efforts (and expense) by the Republicans and their corporate supporters to smear Bill Clinton. There is much talk of truth and honesty. How curious then that Blumenthal tells a spectacular fib about his own career, stating on p. 206 that his first book was the The Permanent Campaign (1980). Actually it was the 1976 Government by Gunplay, a series of essays about the assassinations in the 1960s (JFK, RFK, MLK), of which he was co-editor with Harvey Yazijian. (3) Are assassinations too weird for you these days, Syd?
When Clinton took office ‘Who shot JFK?’ was on his list of things to find out. The Associate Attorney General – whatever that is – in the first Clinton administration, Webster Hubell, an Arkansas friend of the Clintons, mentioned this in his memoir. Hubbell wrote a couple of memos to the FBI and forgot about it. He then lost the job when he was busted for padding his billing hours while a lawyer with the firm which had employed Hilary Clinton.
Freedom of information (not)
Who believed that the British state would give us access to its files without a considerable struggle? So the news that a ‘clearing house’ had been set up in Whitehall to look at potentially embarrassing FOI requests, was hardly a surprise.(4) But I did not imagine something as ingenious as the claim by the MOD that millions of their files have been contaminated by asbestos and are therefore inaccessible. (5) Who dares to say that our civil servants are lacking in initiative?
Same old Con
Undeterred by the disinformation given to him by MI6 about Gadaffi’s son which led to a successful libel action against The Sunday Telegraph,(6)and undeterred by all the nonsense he ran in the run-up the attack on Iraq, the aptly named Con Coughlin is at it again. In The Sunday Telegraph of 20 March he ran a piece, ‘Iran plans secret “nuclear university” to train scientists’, which was attributed to ‘reports received by Western intelligence’.
Crazy wavies, right?
Meanwhile, out there in the wonderful world of commercial science, the ability to do what mind control victims have been complaining of for nearly 20 years, is coming into view.
On 8 April CNN reported that a Sony scientist has a patent, first granted in 2000, on an ultrasound device which in the words of CNN’s headline writer, ‘aims to beam sights, sounds into brain’. Among the patent’s claims are:
‘The pulsed ultrasonic signal alters the neural timing in the cortex…….No invasive surgery is needed to assist a person, such as a blind person, to view live and/or recorded images or hear sounds.’ (7)
Some of the crazy wavies also claim that their minds are being read. In the last few months we have had stories in the mainstream media about brain scanners which can read your thoughts and what you are seeing. (8)
To understand the mind control stories just ask yourself this: if this is how far down the road commercial science has come, how much further ahead in this field are the military? And you still think ‘the wavies are crazy’?
The great ricin plot (not)
Another classic by the British security forces: a plot so feeble they couldn’t persuade a British jury to convict a bunch of foreigners with Arab-sounding names; a plot so feeble the police were reduced to calling it a conspiracy to cause…… panic! (9) The comic highlight for me was the TV pictures of police or army personnel entering the house in full Chemical and Biological Warfare kit to collect……some seeds.
Being Frank
In his account of being shot in Iraq, ‘The man who would not die’ in The Guardian 19 April 2005, BBC correspondent Frank Gardner said of the person who shot him: ‘He didn’t see me as a non-partisan reporter who’s simply trying to report what’s going on.’
Hate to tell you this, Frank, but as the BBC’s erstwhile Security Correspondent, and all that implies by way of confidential briefings by the British spooks, I’m not sure you would be my idea of a ‘non-partisan reporter’, either.
Papa!
Kevin Koogan e-mailed me about the new Pope, Ratzinger, quoting the New York Times to the effect that Ratzinger had been brought to the Vatican Council at the age of 35 by Cardinal Joseph Frings of Cologne. In Koogan’s book Dreamer of the Day (NY: Autonomedia, 1999), which was reviewed in Lobster 39, he shows on p. 403 that in the early post-war years Frings was a sponsor of groups called the Committee for Christian Aid to War Prisoners and Committee for Justice and Trade which were working on behalf of German war criminals.
KGB shot the Pope (not)
A pretty large frisson of excitement ran through sections of the Western media on 1 April (!) at news reports that East German intelligence (Stasi) files showed that, as one report had it, ‘the KGB ordered Bulgarian colleagues to carry out the killing, leaving the East German service known as the Stasi to co-ordinate the operation and cover up the traces afterwards’.
On the back of this all kinds of people cranked up their computers and began recycling 20 year old stories. Even that old disinformationist, Arnaud de Borchgrave, was given space in the Washington Times to rerun the bones of the ‘reds killed the Pope’ story – in the process citing the late Claire Sterling, the author, in several senses, of some of this.
All these stories were sourced back to a piece in the Italian paper Corriere della Serra. (10) Google’s Italian–to-English translation of the Corriere text showed that the original story did not claim that Stasi files showed the KGB told the Bulgarians to kill the Pope at all. As Google’s mechanical translator put it, the key section said:
‘the letters, in which the intelligence agencies of the DDR they ask aid and co-operation their Bulgarian colleagues in order to make useless the version of one participation of the Balkan Republic to the attack to the Papa.’
Which, in usable English reads as: letters from the Stasi asked for the help of their Bulgarian counterparts to help them defuse the attempts being made in the West to blame the shooting of the Pope on the Soviet bloc.
Support your local police
The Tetra microwave-based communications system is spreading across the world. A quick Google shows the system in Asia, Africa and Europe (it has been approved by the EU). Despite official endorsement, the reports of illness associated with Tetra continue to surface. In ‘Police blame health crisis on radio mast’, the Telegraph reported another group of British police officers suffering the ill-effects now associated with Tetra and other microwave systems – and being forbidden to talk about it. An anonymous source quoted by the Telegraph said:
‘They [the officers] are caught between going to work in a place that is making them ill and the huge financial and political pressures that demand Tetra must be a success at all costs.’ (11)
Implementing Tetra nation-wide will cost almost £3 billion.
Tetra was debated in the House of Commons in March 2005.(12) During the debate several MPs reported their constituents’ complains of ill-health generated by the Tetra masts.
Watergate: why Spencer Oliver’s phone was tapped
When the Nixon White House ‘plumbers’ broke into the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) they placed taps on two phones. One was Larry O’Brien’s. This was intelligible: O’Brien was a big Washington operator who knew a lot, including the then not public information that Howard Hughes had helped Nixon by bailing-out Nixon’s brother’s restaurant business.
The other was Spencer Oliver’s, a relatively junior employee of the Democratic Party. Why him? In his Secret Agenda (1984) Jim Hougan showed that Oliver’s phone was being used by DNC male employees to book hookers and hypothesised that the Republicans were after dirt. Robert Parry reports Oliver’s own theory.
In 1972 the Democratic Party looked likely to pick George McGovern as its Presidential candidate to fight Nixon. A section of the party’s professionals knew that Nixon would defeat McGovern and were trying to mount a ‘stop McGovern’ campaign. (If the Democrat pols didn’t want McGovern as candidate, the Nixon team did.) Oliver was working for the ‘stop McGovern’ campaign, from that phone in the DNC in Watergate, and thinks the Republicans wanted to follow the progress of the campaign.
Notes
[1] ‘The secret Pinochet portfolio: former dictator’s corruption scandal broadens’ at <http://www.nsarchive.org>
[2] Saturday, 26 February 2005, Page F9 <www.whatreallyhappened.com/archives/cat_assassination.html>
[3] Copies of which are still available at <www.abebooks.com>.
[4] Marie Woolf, ‘Secret spin unit was set up to protect the Government’, The Independent 25 March 2005
[5] ‘Access to secret files threatened by asbestos’, Daily Telegraph 25 October 2004
[6] The Guardian’s David Leigh’s account of this is at <www.bjr.org.uk/data/2000/no2_leigh.htm>
[7] <www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/fun.games/04/07/sony.brain.reut/index.html>
[8] See ‘Scans that read your mind fuel ethical worries’ The Observer, 20 March < http:// observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1441799,00.html> ; ‘Brain scan “sees hidden thoughts”‘ <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4472355.stm> and ‘Mind-reading machine knows what you see’ <www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7304′>.
[9] ‘This was a hugely serious plot because what it had the potential to do was to cause real panic, fear, disruption and possibly even death to the public’, Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch.
[10] Which is on their Website at <www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Cronache/2005/03_Marzo/30/stasi.shtml>
[11] The Sunday Telegraph 13 August 2004.
[12] <www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200405/cmhansrd/cm050301/halltext/50301h03.htm#50301h03_head0>