Month: July 2019

by William Skink

UPDATE BELOW

Douglas Valentine wrote the definitive account of the CIA’s Phoenix Program by gaining unprecedented access to the agency. He did this by going straight to William Colby, former director, and told him about the project. Valentine explains in the introduction how his approach to the book–looking at the organizational structure of the Phoenix program, and not focusing on the salacious aspects, like the death squads–earned him Colby’s approval. William Colby gave Valentine contacts within the agency and, more importantly, told those contacts it was ok to speak with Valentine.

To hear more, Whitney Webb over at Mintpress has a great interview with Valentine.

Valentine describes the success of the Phoenix program as the silver lining in the otherwise disastrous Vietnam conflict. Because of that success elements of the Phoenix program lived on. And came home.

The structure of the Department of Homeland Security, with its fusion center integration of local/state/federal authorities, is an extension, Valentine argues, of the structure and methods pioneered in the jungles of Vietnam.

This seems important for Americans to understand. More important than the spectacles we are bombarded with.

Sadly, it seems more important for the politically-minded in this country to remain emotionally invested in the red/blue fight, reinforcing our dysfunctional political duopoly.

There is so much to understand about how “intelligence” work has functioned since WWII, but to truly do so would require abandoning American Exceptionalism and de-identifying ourselves from the mythical hero-role baked into the apple pie of our national naiveté.

I don’t see that happening any time soon, even with the Epstein case exposing a disturbing web of criminality and corruption among the most powerful and wealthy members of our society.

UPDATE:

A Missoula Current article that just went up helps me make my point about the domestic application of Phoenix methods. The article is about ICE wanting to use Missoula County radio equipment. I found this part particularly interesting:

The last time U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement used county communications was when Hells Angels rallied in Missoula in 2008.

County Chief Operating Officer Chris Lounsbury said ICE was involved because some members of the motorcycle group came from outside the country. So ICE provided intelligence information to local law enforcement.

I hope the Commissioners don’t immediately roll over for the Feds.

by William Skink

A new book about Charles Manson and the killing he compelled his followers to carry out is now available and I can’t recommend it enough. Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties is the product of a 20 year obsession by its author, Tom O’Neill. Originally meant to be a fluffy article for Premier to mark the 30 year anniversary, O’Neill turned his assignment into a decades long search that, even now, with the book out, is still not fully resolved.

What O’Neill did uncover is hand-written notes from Vincent Bugliosi that undermines the entire premise of the prosecution’s helter-skelter theory explaining the motive of the Tate-LaBianca murders. And he dug into Charlie and the family’s time in San Francisco during the summer of love where a curious free clinic in the Haight provided a geographical space where CIA assets orbited the burgeoning hippie scene.

One CIA asset in particular, Louis Jolson West, connects all the way up the hierarchy to Sidney Gottlieb, a core player in the MK Ultra experiments the agency tried (and failed) to cover up. Gottlieb also pops up in the sad story of Frank Olson, a serviceman who served in the US Army Chemical Corps. Olson died when he supposedly jumped out a hotel window in New York days after being unwittingly dosed with LSD.

One characteristic of O’Neill’s narrative that makes his story compelling is the deep reluctance he experienced when the leads and documents pointed to intelligence connections. But they did, and do, and it’s up to us (if we care) to face up to what that means.

by William Skink

In yesterday’s post I highlighted the claim trumpeted by local media that 27 kids are now safe after being removed from a private facility in Lincoln County. Hopefully everything goes by the book, claims of abuse are substantiated, and facilities like these will be on notice that they can’t operate without any scrutiny from state authorities.

But state authorities also deserve scrutiny. Just a few days ago it was reported that some parents in Pennsylvania received a threatening email that their kids would be taken by the state and placed in foster care. Why? Because the parents hadn’t paid the school lunch bill. From the link:

Dozens of families in Pennsylvania received an alarming letter from their public school district this month informing parents that if their kid’s lunch debt was not settled, their child could be removed from their home and placed in foster care.

Wyoming Valley West School District, one of the poorest districts in the state as measured by per-pupil spending, is located in a former coal mining community in Northeastern Pennsylvania, known affectionately by locals as “The Valley.”

When officials there noticed that families owed the district around $22,000 in breakfast and lunch debt, they tried to get their money back.
…
That’s when district officials sent out the now-infamous letter to about 40 families deemed to be the worst offenders in having overdue cafeteria bills — those were children with meal debt of $10 or more.

“Your child has been sent to school every day without money and without a breakfast and/or lunch,” said the letter signed by Joseph Muth, director of federal programs for the Wyoming Valley West School District. “This is a failure to provide your child with proper nutrition and you can be sent to Dependency Court for neglecting your child’s right to food. If you are taken to Dependency court, the result may be your child being removed from your home and placed in foster care.”

Quite the contrast to Montana, where 12 kids who were being abused and neglected ended up dying because the state failed to remove them in time.

While state efforts to remove children can vary from state to state, some blame the Federal government under Bill Clinton for changing the dynamics of removal by adding cash incentives:

Under Bill Clinton’s Administration he signed a law which gave cash incentives to CPS for every child taken from their parents and placed up for adoption. Clinton’s law gives CPS $4,000 per child with an additional $2,000 added for special needs children that are taken from their parents and put up for adoption.

On November 19, 1997 President Bill Clinton signed the law – The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA, Public Law 105-89) after having been approved by the United States Congress in early November of 1997.

Back in 2008, Nancy Schaefer, a Georgia State Senator, tried to bring attention to the corrupt business of Child Protective Services. She became quite the advocate for families who claimed the financial incentives transformed state authorities into a cash-for-kids kidnapping racket.

A few years ago a report highlighted serious concerns about whether kids were truly being protected in this for-profit foster care system:

CHILDREN IN THE for-profit foster care system are dying at alarming rates, but the deaths are not being investigated, and autopsies are not even being attached to the now-closed case files, a two-year investigation has found.

The investigation, conducted and released in rare bipartisan fashion by the Senate Finance Committee, looked closely at one of the largest private providers of foster care services, the MENTOR Network.

The companies and agencies charged with keeping foster children safe often failed to provide the most basic protections or take steps to prevent tragedies, the investigation found.

This is the system Nancy Schaefer was trying to bring attention to. And what did she get for her efforts? She was killed in an alleged murder/suicide.

Creating financial incentives for removing kids was a big mistake. Or maybe it wasn’t a mistake at all. Anyone who has spent time looking into human trafficking knows corruption and abuse exists everywhere.

Kids have been commodified, and not just by a black market that generates billions of dollars trafficking them for sexual exploitation. Thanks to Bill Clinton, cash-for-kids became Federal policy in 1997. I’ll leave it to readers to speculate why.

by William Skink

A large operation to remove 27 children from a private facility in Lincoln County is garnering headlines. Lee Enterprise staff are using this to congratulate themselves (and others) for being the brave, essential journalists who helped make the removal of 27 children possible. They even credit their reporting with inspiring law makers to pass legislation shifting oversight, making this mass-removal possible.

They are not wrong to credit themselves. I’m sure it’s a morale booster amidst an otherwise demoralizing media environment that squeezes the remaining staff to maintain shareholder profit. But after watching the self-congratulation tour on social media, it feels like they’re laying it on a little thick.

There is a history of reports of abuse that go back well over a decade. I’m glad there is now some oversight over these private facilities, because there damn well needed to be, but it’s taken a very long time, leaving many kids to suffer. Not all of them made it out alive.

The media reports the kids are now safe. I hope they are. Not every kid has been so lucky to be removed before something bad happened in a facility or private home. Last year 12 kids died despite reports of abuse:

The Office of Child and Family Services ombudsman reviewed the deaths of 12 children last year whose cases had been reported to Child and Family Services within a year of their deaths.

Nine of the children were under age 3, including seven who were less than a year old.

One case is being prosecuted as deliberate homicide, and another as negligent homicide. Two others remain under investigation. Three were deemed accidental, including one involving co-sleeping with a parent who had a history of drug use.

Two deaths were due to medical complications for a child whose mother used illegal drugs while pregnant.

Two were ruled suicides and in another the cause was undetermined.

I remember past articles about these facilities, and I’m pretty sure the Indy had at least one piece addressing this issue.

Alas, I am not able to search for those articles because Lee Enterprises maintains its spiteful shuttering of the Indy’s online archives.

by William Skink

There are at least a dozen different posts on the Epstein scandal I’d like to write. The arrest earlier this month of Jeffrey Epstein has unleashed an avalanche of information about the alleged sexual abuse, the apparent immunity from accountability, and the powerful and influential people who exist within Epstein’s web of influence.

To understand Epstein one needs to take a closer look at some of the people he is connected to. This requires going back decades and taking into consideration power structures like organized crime, government intelligence agencies and darker elements, like the occult.

With regards to organized crime, Mint Press has a great article worth reading, titled Hidden In Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins Of The Epstein Case. In light of what is coming out with the Epstein case, information that was already known is taking on new shades of significance . Here is how the article (first part in an exclusive investigative series) contextualizes the tactic of using sexual indiscretions to gain blackmail influence:

Claims of Epstein’s links and his involvement in a sophisticated, well-funded sexual blackmail operation have, surprisingly, spurred few media outlets to examine the history of intelligence agencies both in the U.S. and abroad conducting similar sexual blackmail operations, many of which also involved underage prostitutes.

In the U.S. alone, the CIA operated numerous sexual blackmail operations throughout the country, employing prostitutes to target foreign diplomats in what the Washington Post once nicknamed the CIA’s “love traps.” If one goes even farther back into the U.S. historical record it becomes apparent that these tactics and their use against powerful political and influential figures significantly predate the CIA and even its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In fact, they were pioneered years earlier by none other than the American mafia.

In the course of this investigation, MintPress discovered that a handful of figures who were influential in American organized crime during and after Prohibition were directly engaged in sexual blackmail operations that they used for their own, often dark, purposes.

In Part I of this exclusive investigation, MintPress will examine how a mob-linked businessman with deep ties to notorious gangster Meyer Lansky developed close ties with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) while also running a sexual blackmail operation for decades, which later became a covert part of the anti-communist crusade of the 1950s led by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), himself known throughout Washington for having a habit of drunkenly groping underage teenaged girls.

The article goes on to explore Samuel Bronfman, a name that may sound familiar because of a different sexual exploitation racket known as NXIVM (Nexium), a “self-help” scam that evolved into the grooming of sex slaves. I will be eagerly awaiting the second part of this investigative series.

Looking at this history of organized crime and their use of influencing schemes, like blackmail, provides critical context for the criminal part of the Epstein scandal, and since that is where the most salacious details of the scandal are coming from, that will get much of the attention.

Another area of interest that merits some attention is Epstein’s philanthropic efforts. What was he doing with his money? Would you believe Epstein was interested in funding the creation of radical AI emotional software? From the link:

Epstein subscribes to a scientistic worldview, which sees not politics, economics, or religion as a driving force of history but, rather, evolution. He spoke fondly of E.O. Wilson’s famous evolutionary determinist theory of “sociobiology” in 2002 and founded the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics the following year. What is the cause of Epstein’s attraction to evolutionary thinking about human social development? In a word: money.

Epstein stated, “If we can figure out how termites come together, then we may be able to better understand the underlying principles of market behavior – and make big money.” For Epstein, markets are not the product of human creation but, instead, evolutionally hard-wired systems that can be understood in terms of biology. This is all, of course, malarkey, but demonstrates that financial capitalists like Epstein see science not as a way of expanding human knowledge for the good of all; rather, it is, at best, an outlet for bogus theorizing about the so-called natural laws of the economy and, at worst, an unabashed intellectual justification for the wealth of key market players like himself.

This brings us to Epstein’s generous funding of top AI research scientists, with whom he has enjoyed close personal relationships. In 2013, he was reported to fund “the first humanoids” and “first free thinking robots,” which are designed to move beyond robots as “clunky machines that relied on deterministic algorithmic pathways” toward emotional human-like creatures with “responsive facial expressions, synthesized rubber skin, called frubber and delicate features.”

These are reminders that scientific research and technological development are not separate from politics. Indeed, Epstein has not only served on the boards of numerous science institutes, but also on those of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. The Council on Foreign Relations was founded in 1921 to advance US foreign policy interests in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution. Later on, the Council’s study groups developed the Cold War doctrine of “containment” and laid the foundations for NATO.

The first version of this article discussed a specific project, “Little Sophia”, but for obvious reasons the company involved is trying to distance itself from Epstein, though I find the correction explaining the distinction quite illuminating:

Hanson Robotics, the company that owns Sophia and Little Sophia, reached out to the author clarifying that Hanson Robotics and OpenCog are separate organisations, and that Epstein’s money was only used to fund OpenCog’s “videogames development” and not the AI behind Little Sophia. We acknowledge that it is difficult to demonstrate exactly how Epstein’s funds were used internally; we have issued a correction in the text to that effect.

Hanson also claims that Hanson Robotics AI has no relationship to OpenCog, while conceding that Epstein’s long-time beneficiary Ben Goertzel served simultaneously both as CEO of the OpenCog foundation and as Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics from 2015-2018. However, Goertzel’s own news report from 2015 suggests that there was a connection between Hanson’s AI and OpenCog’s research. Two years after the announcement of Epstein’s funding for OpenCog and one year before the activation of Hanson’s Sophia, Goertzel wrote a news update on the OpenCog website entitled “OpenCog partners with Hanson Robotics to work toward human-like robots.” In June 2018, Goertzel provided specific examples of OpenCog’s role in Sophia’s robotic functioning. While this is in reference to Sophia, and not Little Sophia, Hanson describes the latter as the “little sister” of Sophia.

A Forbes article dated October 10, 2013 on Jeffrey Epstein as the “financial guru” behind “radical emotional software for the gaming industry” stated that OpenCog’s software “has already had an impact . . on the robot industry where companies such as Hanson Robotics, developed by David Hanson, are incorporating it to advance the way their human-like robots function and interact with people.” This article has now been taken down from the Forbes website, although it can be found on the Internet Archive.

It’s fascinating to watch all the rats abandon ship Epstein. But, as they scurry away to crisis PR firms for image rehabilitation, we need to keep the focus on the fact Epstein was able to operate the way he did, and got a sweetheart deal after his first bust, because something was protecting him.

Was that something an intelligence agency, foreign and/or domestic? Acosta seems to think so. What are the national security implications? As tensions with Iran keep ratcheting up, Trump seems to be slowly accepting the inevitability of war. Is Trump compromised?

And what is the political opposition to Trump doing? It’s all Russia and racism and identity politics. In my non-professional assessment they are fucking worthless when it comes to describing the actual threats we are facing, especially in the spheres of geopolitics and the global economy.

In June, troops began heading for a key military base in Saudi Arabia used to stage troops in previous Mideast conflicts:

ASPEN, Colo. — In June the U.S. military began moving equipment and hundreds of troops back to a military base in Saudi Arabia that the U.S. deserted more than 15 years ago, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the deployment.

Over the coming weeks the deployment to Prince Sultan Air Base, intended to counter the threat from Iran, will grow to include fighter jets and Patriot long-range missile defense systems, the officials said. The Patriots have already arrived at the base and should be operational in mid-July, while the aircraft are expected to arrive in August.

With more troops moving to this tinderbox amidst tankers being seized and drones being shot down, it won’t take much to escalate things into a shooting war.

On the global economic front, Deutsche Bank is slowly succumbing to the gravitational pull of its derivative black hole. With a global economic slowdown already emerging, this Lehman Brothers 2.0 could eventually trigger the bursting of the everything bubble.

These are the issues that most concern me.

I also find it concerning more people don’t share these worries because their bandwidth is consumed by the need to react to each and every successful Trump-trolling tweet.

No one will care about your virtue-signaling when the bombs start dropping and your currency becomes worthless. We are running out of time.