Tag Archives: fbi

Who Killed Senator Paul Wellstone?

Posted on by
6

American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone

by Four Arrows and Jim Fetzer

Vox Pop (2004)

Book Review

American Assassination summarizes the authors’ investigation into the freak airplane crash that killed Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone on October 25, 2002. Wellstone, an outspoken populist, was killed exactly 10 days before a midterm election in which the Bush/Cheney administration invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat him.

Wellstone was the sole senator to oppose the Use of Force Resolution authorizing George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq. In addition to advocating for an independent investigation into 9-11, many believed he was the only Democratic who could beat Bush in the 2004 election.

Numerous anomalies associated with the crash investigation point to an official cover-up:

  • The FBI, which had no legal jurisdiction, departed for the crash scene before the accident occurred – and subsequently lied about the time they arrived.
  • The National Transport Safety Board (NTSB) failed to hold a public hearing (which is routine in high profile cases). Their reported also omitted important eyewitness testimony regarding roaring/humming cellphone interference at the precise moment the plane lost control and a flash of fire, followed by an abrupt cessation of engine noise, just prior to the crash.
  • Wellstone’s and other crash victims’ lungs showed evidence of smoke inhalation (which means they were still in the air – and alive – when the plane caught fire). In other words, the crash didn’t cause the fire, as claimed by the NTSB.
  • The smoke from the burning fuselage was blue, suggesting a pre-crash electrical fire. If the crash had caused the fuel tanks to explode (as claimed by the NTSB), the smoke would have been black. Neither of the wings, where the fuel tanks were located, caught fire.

The book also includes an excellent summary by late assassination researcher Michael Ruppert of 47 instances of US politicians dying in plane crashes – with six fatal crashes occurring during election campaigns.

There is also an excellent scientific overview of the microwave – aka electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons – developed by the Pentagon for use in Iraq. Pulses from these weapons can destroy all electronics within a 1,000 foot range by short circuiting electrical connections. Electronic aircraft navigational equipment is exquisitely sensitive to electromagnetic interference – which is why air passengers are strictly forbidden to use cellphones or laptops during takeoff or landing. Numerous military crashes have been caused by aircraft getting too close to radio transmitters.

Unlike the NTSB, Fetzer and Four Arrows try to come up with an explanation for the crash that explains the simultaneous loss of aircraft control and loss of communication with the tower. Only two possible scenarios are consistent with this evidence – a small incendiary bomb or an EMP weapon that took out the plane’s electronics as it was landing. They find the latter more likely – anyone can purchase a basic EMP weapon on the Internet.

Informants: FBI-Style Entrapment and Terrorism Stings

Posted on by
5

Informants

Al Jazeera (2014)

Film Review

Informants is an Al Jazeera documentary about the FBI use of informants to entrap vulnerable African and immigrant men and convict them on phony terrorism charges.

Their investigation focuses on three specific informants in Miami, Los Angeles and Toledo. In one Miami sting operation, an informant paid poor African American men and Muslim immigrants to take photos of federal buildings and got them to recite a pledge swearing allegiance to Osama bin Laden. This, in turn, would be the principal evidence against them at trial. There was no evidence whatsoever that any of them planned or engaged in acts of violence – nor had contact with any terrorist groups other than the FBI.

One African American convicted in this operation received a seven year sentence and spent two years in solitary confinement.

In Toledo, the FBI paid a mentally unstable victim’s rent as well as funding a trip to Jordan to visit his relatives. The informant also paid him to procure some secondhand laptops to smuggle into Iraq from Jordan. The victim received a 20 year sentence for his role in smuggling laptops to Al Qaeda and making the statement “I wish I could kill some American soldiers” in an on-line chat room.

 

We Are Legion: The History of Anonymous

Posted on by
1

 

We Are Legion: The Story of the Hactivists

Brian Knappenberger (2012)

Film Review

We are Legion traces the early history of Anonymous, the vast leaderless international hactivist community, back to geeky pranksters from MIT’s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Model Railroad Club. After branching out to form the Cult of the Dead Cow, they would morph into 4Chan, a website where anonymous – mainly adolescent users – go out of their way to post the most repulsive and/or obscene images and text they could think of.

The fact that most 4Chan posts bear the screen name “Anonymous” would inspire a group of 4Channers to formally take that name in 2006-2007. Their first politically motivated prank was directed attack against Neo-Nazi talk show host Hal Turner. In addition to shutting down his website through a DoS* attack, they charged massive amounts of pizza and industrial supplies to be sent to his address. On learning he was an FBI informant (by hacking into his emails), the widely disseminated this information to his right wing supporters.

By January 2008 when they took on the Church of Scientology (after the Scientology lawyers threatened them for disseminated an unflattering video of Tom Cruise promoting Scientology), they had transitioned from pranksters into a virtual online army.

In addition to repeatedly DoS-ing the Scientology website and tying up their hotline, they staged their first street protest in February 2008 – with more than 10,000 Anonymous members picketing Scientology offices in every major city. It was these protests that first popularized the Guy Fawkes mask originating from the V for Vendetta graphic novel and film.

In 2010 they launched Operation Payback to disable Mastercard, Visa and PayPal websites, after Wikileaks published Bradley Manning’s damning emails and videos about US atrocities in Iraq and the four companies suspended Wikileaks online payment services.

In 2011 Anonymous members provided third party website, dial-up and encryption services and text-based Twitter feeds for activists in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab Spring countries.

It was around this time the FBI began investigating Anonymous – resulting in the arrest of the Anonymous 16 for taking down the PayPal website. Several of the arrestees are featured in the documentary as they prepare to go to trial. Owing the amorphous and leaderless nature of the network, the arrest of dozens of Anonymous activists  seems to have done little to curtail their activists.

*A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber attack where perpetrators seek to make a website  unavailable by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services. It’s typically accomplished by flooding the targeted website with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload its systems.

Barrett Brown: Standing Up for Journalistic Freedom

Posted on by
2

Field of Vision – Relatively Free

Alex Winter (2016)

Field of Vision is the first media interview journalist Barrett Brown gave (in November 2016) after spending four years in federal prison. He was originally arrested for publishing (on his website) publicly available material that had been hacked from private intelligence/security contractor Stratfor. When these charges were eventually dropped, he pled guilty to making threats against an FBI office, obstruction of justice and being an accessory to cyber threats.

While in federal prison, he spent six months in solitary confinement.

***

The link below is a Democracy Now clip from a May 2017 interview from Brown’s halfway house. It delves more deeply into ongoing federal harassment again him, owing to his role in publicizing illegal collusion between the FBI, Stratfor and other private security contractors. Among others, Brown published emails in about private corporations who received Department of Justice assistance in discrediting activists who tried to expose their various criminal activities.

One particular email revealed a request by Bank of America to discredit Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald, based on fears they were about to publish leaked documents about their illegal BoA activities.

During the interview, Brown reveals the FBI re-arrested him in April to prevent him from appearing in a PBS documentary. The FBI claims (erroneously) that he’s prohibited from speaking to the media as a condition of his probation. He was only released after a first amendment lawyer threatened to sue the Department of Justice for violating federal law.

Brown is thinking strongly of immigrating after he completes his probation.

Democracy Now: Jailed Reporter Barrett Brown

Anonymous – The Hacker Wars

Posted on by
5

Anonymous – The Hacker Wars

Vivien Lesnik Weisman (2014)

Film Review

The Hacker Wars is a riveting documentary about members of Anonymous – the leaderless international hacking community – who have made their identity public. It focuses on four individuals: Andrew (Weev) Auernheimer, Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond and a hacker turned FBI informant who went by the screen name SABU.

The first two men made their identify public as a form of civil disobedience – directed at government surveillance, secrecy and suppression of civil liberties. Hammond’s name became public after an FBI informant named SABU entrapped him into hacking into Stratfor, the infamous private intelligence/security contractor.

Weev was arrested in 2013 – not for hacking – but for downloading over 100,000 government email addresses from an unscecure AT&T website and sharing the security glitch with journalists. He served 13 months in jail before his conviction was overturned on appeal.

Barrett Brown, a non-hacker, was a journalist who reported on Anonymous activities. He was arrested for allegedly copying a publicly available Stratfor link to his Project PM website, a clear violation of his first amendment rights. He was sentenced to 63 months in Federal prison. He was released to a halfway house (on house arrest) in November 2016.

SABU was arrested in June 2011 and released after one day after agreeing to infiltrate Anonymous on behalf of the FBI. Eight days later (at the behest of the FBI), he formed the splinter group Antisec, which in September 2011 aggressively promoted Occupy Wall Street to other Anonymous members. In December 2011, he persuaded Jeremy Hammond to assist him with the infamous Stratfor Christmas Hack. This was the operation in which scores of ex-CIA and ex-military operatives who worked for Stratfor woke up on Christmas to discover they had donated $50,000 each to various charities.

Hammond pled guilty and was sentenced to ten years.

The FBI was an active member of Anonymous for nine months in all. SABU’s role as an informant came out at his trial in April 2012. Owing to his invaluable service to the FBI, he walked away a free man.

The Long US Government War Against Americans

Posted on by
9

The Cointelpro Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States

by Ward Churchill* and Jim Vander Wall

South End Press (1990)

Free PDF: Cointelpro Papers

Book Review

As the authors describe, the FBI Cointelpro program first came to light in letters and memos seized when antiwar activists broke into an FBI field office in 1971 looking for draft cards. Using these and other documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the authors make it clear that the FBI has infiltrated and sabotaged every major citizens group since 1945.

The Cointelpro papers should be required reading for high school graduation. It’s essential to realize that government wire tapping, stalking, covert break-ins and infiltration of community groups didn’t start in 2002 when these activities first became “legal” under the Patriot Act. In fact, it’s extremely well documented (by University of Wisconsin professor Alfred McCoy – see Spying on Americans: the Ugly History) that it first began during the US occupation of the Philippines in 1898-1901.

This book had great personal importance in my life. There are a number of parallels between Jean Seberg’s case (see below) and the FBI harassment I began experiencing in 1987 related to my work with two former Black Panthers.** Along with four other African American activists, they had occupied an abandoned Seattle school in 1985 to transform it into a community-controlled African American Heritage Building and Cultural Center.

The section of Cointelpro Papers I found most illuminating describes the death squad activity that occurred on the Pine Ridge Sioux reservations during the 1970s – fifty-plus murders were never even investigated, much less prosecuted. Most Americans assume forced disappearances and extrajudicial assassinations only occur in Third World countries (thanks to the excellent CIA training their military officers receive at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning Georgia). Learning of scores of documented instances on US soil is extremely troubling.

The book also reproduces chilling FBI memos related to the coordinated FBI/police attack and murder of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and the attempted murder of Los Angeles Black Panther leader Geronimo Pratt (who was subsequently imprisoned for 27 years on fictitious charges). The book goes on to recount to the brave refusal of Seattle mayor Wes Uhlman to consent to a similar FBI/police raid on the Black Panthers in Seattle (see The Mayor Who Said No to the Feds).

The saddest chapter describes the sadistic campaign of personal harassment Hoover undertook against actress Jean Seberg, a white actress who provided the Black Panthers with financial support. As a result of rumor campaigns and vicious gossip columns planted by the FBI, Seberg and her partner ultimately committed suicide.

*Ward Churchill is a well-known American Indian Movement (AIM) activist and former professor of ethnic studies at University of Colorado.

**Which I describe in my memoir The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee

George Seldes: Fighting the Corporate Takeover of the Press

Posted on by
Reply

Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press

Directed by Rick Goldsmith (1996)

Film Review

Tell the Truth and Run is a tribute to muckraking* journalist George Seldes, released shortly after his death at 104. It takes its title from a book Seldes published in 1952. It includes an extensive interview with Seldes at age 98, detailed biographical sketches and commentary by prominent activists, whistleblowers and media reformers (including Ralph Nader, Daniel Ellsberg and Ben Badikian, Victor Navksy and Jeff Cohen) who were influenced by his work.

Born in 1890, Seldes first became a reporter at 18, just as all major dailies were starting to rely on advertisers (instead of readers) for their funding base. As this occurred, investigative journalists seeking to expose government and corporate corruption began writing for the monthly magazines instead. Bankster JP Morgan and other industrial robber barons put an end to this by buying up all the monthly magazines.

Seldes quit his first job at the Pittsburgh Leader after the publisher spiked a story he wrote about the son of a department store magnate who raped a female staff member.

Following an eye opening stint in the US military press corps during World War I, Seldes became a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. He first ran into difficulty at that paper for exposing the violent and corrupt nature of Mussolini’s fascist regime – at a time when the US government and all the major newspapers were pro-Mussolini (owing to banker JP Morgan’s desire to refinance Italy’s World War I debt).

Seldes quit the Tribune in 1927 and published the first two of a series best selling books (You Can’t Print That and Can These Things Be?) based on all his material the Tribune refused to publish between 1918 and 1928.

Between 1940-1950 he put out the weekly newsletter In Fact: An Antidote to Falsehoods in the Daily Press. He would use the newsletter to expose the FBI role in spying on labor unions and  corporate media’s failure to report on 1940s research documenting health problems associated with smoking. He was also the first investigative journalist to expose the role of major Wall Street corporations in supporting Hitler’s rise to power.

* A term applied to American investigative reporters, novelists and critics of the Progressive Era (1890-1930)

 

The NFL Coverup: Pro-football and Permanent Brain Damage

Posted on by
5

Concussion

Directed by Peter Landesman (2015)

Film Review

Concussion is a fact-based film about a brilliant Nigerian pathologist named Dr Bennet Omalu, who is systematically demonized and harassed by the National Football League (NFL) after publishing a scientific paper establishing that repeated head trauma places professional footballers at high risk for a brain disorder called chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Prior to Omalu’s groundbreaking research, the literature was dominated by the NFL’s own spurious studies that supposedly “proved” that repeated head injuries occurring in pro-football – unlike those that occur in boxing – do not produce long term brain damage.

The harassment Omalu experienced included death threats, getting a brick thrown thrown through his window, gang stalking and pressure on his employer to terminate his position with the county coroner.

When his supervisor refused to fire him, the FBI launched an investigation against his boss resulting in bogus charges for using supplies and equipment for personal use.

 

Introducing 9-11 Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds

Posted on by
10

Kill the Messenger (Sibel Edmonds)

Directed by Jean Robert Viallet, Mathieu Verboud (2006)

Film Review

Kill the Messenger is a French documentary about FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and the organized criminal behavior she discovered inside the Bush State Department and Pentagon.

Edmonds, the daughter of a Turkish family, was raised in Iran and recruited by the FBI four days after 9-11 to translate telephone conversations they had intercepted from suspected terrorists. In addition to English, Edmonds speaks Turkish, Farsi and Azairi.

Several months after she began her job, a fellow translator named Melek Dickerson and her husband, an Air Force major named Douglas Dickerson, tried to recruit her to a Turkish interest group whose intercepts she was translating. Believing they were spies, she reported the incident to her superiors, as well as FBI director Frank Mellor. The FBI responded by firing her and threatening to charge her under the State Secrets Privilege Act if she spoke to anyone else (including a lawyer) about the incident.

Other than filing suit for unlawful dismissal and breech of freedom of speech (which went all the way to the Supreme Court, who refused to review it), Edmonds spoke to no one about it until a 9-11 families group encouraged her to reveal what she knew about the Dickersons to the 9-11 Commission Bush appointed in 2003. This would lead Major Dickerson and his wife to be transferred out of the country.

When the 9-11 Commission Report failed to address Edmond’s evidence, she collaborated with Vietnam whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg to found the National Security Whistleblowers Network. Approximately 100 whistleblowers joined who had been tracking Middle East jihadists for years and whose warnings about 9-11 were ignored by the Bush administration.

Although Edmonds herself never disclosed the name of the group that attempted to recruit her, several journalists have identified it as the American Turkish Council. As they all report, the ATC, which has all the main US arms manufacturers on its board, first started to be wiretapped by the FBI in 1997 because they were illegally smuggling embargoed US weapons systems to Turkey.

As Giraldi writes inThe American Conservative, the ATC worked closely with pro-Israel White House insiders Douglas Feith and Richard Perle to illegally smuggle nuclear triggers to Pakistan via South Africa.

As the filmmakers point out the same pro-Israel Bush advisors blew CIA agent Valerie Plame’s cover in 2003. Plame’s main assignment was investigating ATC involvement in illegal nuclear proliferation.

*Farsi is widely spoken in Iran and Afghanistan.
**Azeri is the official language of the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.

Bobby Seal on the 50th Anniversary of the Black Panthers

Posted on by
2

In this presentation Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seal talks about the joint role he and Huey Newton played in forming the organization in 1966.

Seal’s genius as a grassroots organizer is what comes across most clearly in this talk. His initial vision in starting the Panthers was to use the 1965 Voting Rights Act to achieve “power” for African Americans by electing more black representatives to local, state and federal government. He maintains that monitoring police brutality and other tactics (like the children’s breakfast program) were merely a strategy towards this end.

Seal, who was employed in an Oakland jobs program for African American youth, recruited Huey (who had just started law school) because of his knowledge of the law. As brilliantly portrayed in Marvin Peeples 1995 film Panther, Huey became notorious for quoting large sections of the US Constitution and California law to Oakland police.

Seal is somewhat critical of Peeple’s docudrama, largely because it omits important historical details. An example is the crowd reaction – of supreme importance to Seal as an organizer – to the first confrontation between the Panthers and the cops. Another is the Nixon tape (which Seal, impersonating Nixon’s voice, describes in detail) in which the former president orders FBI director J Edgar Hoover to destroy the Panthers.

Seal also has some fascinating comments at the end about the Koch brothers and catastrophic climate change.

The film has an extremely long introduction and Seal’s talk begins at 21:00.