The above is from Stephan Salisbury’s amazing article “Stage Managing the War on Terror“, which details just how bad the situation of informant handling has become… and how it puts us at risk.  Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Salisbury about this incredibly well-researched piece.

About the guest:

Stephan Salisbury is the senior cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he has been a reporter for three decades.

He has won numerous awards for his work and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize as part of an Inquirer investigative team looking into local election fraud.

He is author of the recently published Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland published by Nation Books.

Links:

Stage Managing the War on Terror – Stephan Salisbury’s brilliant article.

The 100 Years Episode – 4 Federal Agents talk about the state of Security and intelligence both in the U.S. and around the world.

Then…

We talked about the story last week – but this week, we got someone who is actually involved in the case. Mark interviews David Rocah, ACLU attorney for Anthony Graber – the motorcyclist who is being prosecuted for wiretapping after he posted a video of a law enforcement officer pulling him over on a highway exit ramp.

Here’s the video in question… the action begins at about the three-minute mark:

Our favorite reporter Bill Conroy joins us to discuss these and more…

About the Guest:

Bill Conroy has worked as a reporter or editor for the past eighteen years at newspapers in Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota and Texas.

His investigative reporting over the past five years has focused on corruption and discrimination within federal law enforcement agencies.

He is also a journalist for Narco News. His investigative pieces, particularly those on the House of Death, have made him our most-favored guest.

More info on related topics:

Bill Conroy’s article – U.S. federal agents nationwide bilked by brazen Ponzi scheme

Carlos Miller’s blog post about citizen videotaping

Congressional Resolution 298

Critical Mass NYPD Bicyclist Assault video referred to in the broadcast:

The film opens with the conviction of Ponzi King Bernie Madoff, whose acknowledged criminality drove a $65 billion dollar pyramid scheme. It argues that the wrong doing committed by a few individuals distracts from the real story, implicating the best-known institutions that financed and profited from fraudulent sub prime lending. This connection is now being investigated by the FBI as part of a probe into what it calls a “fraud epidemic.”

PLUNDER shows how these firms created special securities to repackage and resell these dubious loans after they were re-rated as Triple A. These firms then bet against many of these toxic assets with credit default swaps and other insurance scams. By leveraging these investments, they recklessly put trillions of dollars and the world economy at risk.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Danny Schechter about the film, media and about 20 other things…. a great, freewheeling conversation with the “Uber-investigative-journalist.”

More on the film, including how to get it on both DVD and iTunes – at the Plunder website.

About the guest:

Danny Schechter is a journalist, author, television producer and an independent filmmaker who also writes and speaks about economic and media issues.

He is the executive editor of MediaChannel.org, the world’s largest online media issues online network, and recipient of many awards including the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2001 Award for Excellence in Documentary Journalism.

His latest films are “Barack Obama, People’s President [2009], an examination of how Obama won and “IN DEBT WE TRUST: America Before The Bubble Bursts,” [2007] an investigation of the impact of credit and debt on American society.

In Debt We Trust was one of the first films or media coverage to expose subprime lending and warn of an economic crisis. He was a director on “Viva Madiba,” a feature-length biopic tribute to Nelson Mandela on his 90th Birthday. (2008).

He is the author of nine books.

Schechter is co-founder and executive producer of Globalvision, a New York-based television and film production company now in its 21st year. He founded and executive-produced the TV series “South Africa Now” and co-produced the series “Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television.”

Schechter has specialized in investigative reporting and producing programming about the interface between human rights, journalism, popular music and society. His career began as the “News Dissector” at Boston’s leading rock station, WBCN. Later, he moved into television as an on-camera reporter for WGBH (Channel 2) in Boston and then as a producer for WLVI (Channel 56) and WCVB (Channel 5).

Schechter then joined the start-up team of CNN and later became a producer for ABC News 20/20. He produced 50 segments for ABC News, winning two national Emmys and nominated for two others.

He has produced and directed many TV specials and documentary films. click here for a full listing. He has spoken at scores of universities – from Harvard to Hamline, from Minnesota to MIT, NYU to Georgia State, Santa Monica to the University of Hawaii, Princeton to Cornell.

A Cornell University graduate, he received his Master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and an honorary doctorate from Fitchburg College. He was a Neiman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard, where he also taught in 1969. After college, he was a full time civil rights worker and then communications director of the Northern Student Movement, and worked as a community organizer in a Saul Alinsky-style War on Poverty program. Then, moving from the streets to the suites, Schechter served as an assistant to the Mayor of Detroit in 1966 on a Ford Foundation grant.

Schechter has reported from 61 countries. He was an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and taught investigative reporting at the New School. Schechter’s writing has appeared in leading newspapers and magazines including the Newsday, Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, Media Studies Journal, Detroit Free Press, Village Voice, Z, Mediachannel.org, OpedNews.com, ZNET, Creative1, Global Research, Alternet and many others.

You can follow him on Twitter here.

Find him on Facebook here.

Closing music from the show:

“Man Walking” from Mark’s “New Eye” album.

Tonight – a rollicking conversation with Howard Bloom about war, intelligence, history and the future of energy.

About the guest:

Howard Bloom, a Visiting Scholar at New York University, is founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, executive editor of the New Paradigm book series, a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The International Society of Human Ethology, and the Academy of Political Science. He has been featured in every edition of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering since the publication’s inception.

Bloom has taken an unusual approach to the study of mass moods and cultural convolutions. He started out normally enough, building his first Boolean algebra machine at the age of twelve, becoming a dedicated microscopist that same year, codesigning a computer which won a Westinghouse Science Award before he left grade school, and being granted a private brainstorming session with the head of the Graduate Physics Department of The State University of New York, Buffalo, at the age of thirteen. By sixteen he was a lab assistant at the world’s largest cancer research center, the Roswell Park Memorial Research Cancer Institute, where he helped plumb the mysteries of the immune system. And before his freshman year of college he designed and executed research in Skinnerian programmed learning at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education.

Then came an act of academic heresy. After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from New York University, Bloom turned down four graduate fellowships and embarked on a 20-year-long urban anthropology expedition to penetrate what he calls “society’s myth-making machinery”–the inner sanctums of politics and the media. During his foray into “the dark underbelly of mass emotion” he edited a magazine which won two National Academy of Poets prizes, founded the leading avant-garde art studio on the East Coast, was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine, then gave up listening to Beethoven, Bartok, and Mozart to become editor of a rock magazine. Using correlational studies, focus groups, empirical surveys, ethnographic expeditions into suburban teen subcultures, and other scientific techniques, Bloom more than doubled the publication’s sales, and was credited by Rolling Stones’ Chet Flippo with having founded a new genre–the heavy metal magazine. Seeking still further ways to infiltrate modernity’s mass mind, Bloom formed a public relations firm in the music and film industry and won the confidence of those whose territory he’d invaded. The payoff in knowledge proved invaluable.

Bloom worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, John Cougar Mellencamp, Kiss, Queen, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Joan Jett, Diana Ross, Simon & Garfunkel, The Talking Heads, AC/DC, Billy Idol, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run D.M.C., Simply Red, and the heads of many a media conglomerate. He was adept at spotting new subcultures, entering them, and helping their members achieve their goals…a skill which gave him an inside role in the rise of rap, disco, and punk rock.

The pinnacles of fame provided surprising scientific revelations. “When you’re at the center of the sort of attention-storm which hits when you’re working with a superstar,” Bloom says, “it’s as if the laws of physics change. Hormones charge you up in ways you never imagined. Time perception alters. You resolve crisis in minutes, seeing solutions instantly which previously would have taken you weeks.

“More important is the impact of a communal ritual like a rock concert. The star onstage is taken over by a self he doesn’t know, one that seems to surge through him as if he were a length of empty pipe. The force of this strange passion welds the audience in an almost transcendent bond.” Bloom’s task was to first experience the exaltation, then to dissect it. “The model for this work,” he says, “came from William James, who attempted to feel the ecstatic experience of mystics, then to probe it scientifically, a process which led to his 1902 book The Varieties of the Religious Experience.”

Bloom’s forays into power and its manipulations were also intense. “In the music and film industry everyone knew that money and career advancement were on the line. But few realized how deeply what they did affected the lives of millions, and even fewer felt the responsibility that demands. It was an amazing privilege to work as an equal with the entertainment industry’s elite, many of whom I either had to woo or thwart to help my clients reach their audience with a message of genuine value. Some executives were master strategists but used their intelligence to increase their own stature, often at a brutal cost to others. Others were far more ethical. Yet even the best-intentioned employed boardroom and backroom tactics handed down from the politics of chimpanzees. Without knowing it, they used tricks of leadership we share with social animals from lizards and lobsters to baboons and mountain apes.”

The subculture of Washington politics was, to Bloom, the most disturbing of them all. Bloom founded Music in Action, a national anti-censorship organization. This brought him into head-on combat with Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President and eventual presidential candidate Al Gore. Says Bloom, “Tipper and the right wing religionists who used her for their ends were masters of perceptual manipulation. They perpetrated hoaxes of outrageous transparency, yet still managed to convince the press and public that their falsifications were true.”

Twenty pages in The Billboard Guide to Music Publicity are devoted to Bloom and the antidote he invented, “perceptual engineering,” which he defines as “a way of finding a valid truth which the herd refuses to see, then turning the herd around and making that truth self-evident. It’s what we do in much of science–seeing the ordinary from a new perspective, then revealing what makes it tick and in the process altering society’s views.”

Says British neuroscientist Dr. John Robert Skoyles of Howard Bloom’s science and of his photography, “Michelangelo walked around a piece of marble trying to sense the work within. Bloom hunts the banal of modern environment trying to sense the aesthetics hidden away in what we overlook.”

In 1981, Bloom organized the material he’d unearthed and began the formal research for a new theoretical structure that would first reveal itself in The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History. However he continued pursuing scientific truths in unconventional ways. In 1995 Bloom headed an insurgent academic circle called “The Group Selection Squad” whose efforts precipitated radical re-evaluations of neo-Darwinist dogma within the scientific community. In 1997, he founded a new discipline, paleopsychology, whose participants included physicists, psychologists, microbiologists, paleontologists, entomologists, neuroscientists, paleoneurologists, invertebrate zoologists, and systems theorists. Paleopsychology’s mandate is to “map out the evolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation from the first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang to the present.”

Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has written that with his unusual insights Bloom has “raced ahead of the timid scientific herd” often “vaulting over their heads” with a “grand vision” that “we do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand.” In The Lucifer Principle and his new book Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, Howard Bloom brings those understandings from dimness into the light.

More about Howard (there’s MORE???!?!?!?!) at his website.

Army Intelligence Specialist Bradley Manning is alleged to have turned over a large volume of classified material about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to Wikileaks.org, including the recently posted U.S. military video showing American helicopters gunning down two Reuters journalists and about 10 other Iraqi men in 2007. Two children were also injured.

The 22-year-old Manning was turned in by a convicted computer hacker named Adrian Lamo, who befriended Manning over the Internet and then betrayed him, supposedly out of concern that disclosure of the classified material might put U.S. military personnel in danger. Manning is now in U.S. military custody in Kuwait awaiting charges.

PLUS

A congressional report on Iran/Contra was written haphazardly and deceptively, including an apparently false claim that Reagan’s innocence was approved unanimously by a House task force.

A recent reexamination of the task force’s work also reveals that evidence implicating Reagan’s campaign in a pre-election deal to delay the release of 52 Americans then held hostage in Iran was kept from the U.S. public and even from members of the task force; that senior staff investigators shelved late-arriving evidence of Republican guilt; and that dissent within the task force was suppressed.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Robert Parry about these two important stories.

About the guest:

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com.

His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.

His investigative journalism website, consortiumnews.com, is an incredibly important resource.  Please visit the site, and support them any way you can.

The Consortium News stories we cover tonight:

Wikileak Case Echoes Pentagon Papers

The Tricky October Surprise Report

Related links:

http://collateralmurder.com/
The Wikileaks site about the leaked video

The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks
The great article by Glenn Greenwald at Salon, including an interview with Adrian Lamo

All border stories, plus an amusing piece from Slate.

This is a jam-packed show with Bill Conroy of Narco News, covering the above and more.

About the Guest:

Bill Conroy has worked as a reporter or editor for the past eighteen years at newspapers in Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota and Texas.

His investigative reporting over the past five years has focused on corruption and discrimination within federal law enforcement agencies.

He is also a journalist for Narco News. His investigative pieces, particularly those on the House of Death, have made him our most-favored guest.

Links to tonight’s stories:

U.S. Consulate worker in Juarez was targeted for assassination

HIDTA task force on border mired in corruption charges

Real threat to U.S. national security may be along northern border

U.S. Military has Special Ops “Boots on the Ground” in Mexico

OPR Review
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/userfiles/70/FOIA_4.pdf

And here’s a link to the ONDCP’s review of the larger New Mexico Region HIDTA program.
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/userfiles/70/FOIA_3.pdf

Stupid Drug Story of the Week
The Associated Press on the arrival of “deadly, ultra-pure heroin.”

And lastly – Here’s a link to all 5 hours of our talk with Tosh Plumlee.

Music from the show:

Mid-break:

Closing:

On the heels of a botched car bombing attempt in Times Square – Mike and Mark are joined by author and veteran reporter Leonard Levitt to talk about the relationship between the NYPD and Federal Inteligence agencies, and much much much more.

About the Guest:

From 1995 to 2005, Leonard Levitt wrote the column “One Police Plaza” for the newspaper Newsday about the New York City police department. Before joining Newsday, he worked as a reporter for the Associated Press and the Detroit News, as a correspondent for Time Magazine, and as the investigations editor of the New York Post. His work has appeared in Harper’s, Esquire and the New York Times magazine.

Levitt is the author of six books, the most recent of which is NYPD Confidential: Power and Corruption in the Country’s Greatest Police Force. He received the 2005 non-fiction Edgar Award for Conviction: Solving the Moxley Murder.

A graduate of Dartmouth College and the Columbia School of Journalism, Levitt served two years in the Peace Corps in Tanzania, East Africa, and has been the recipient of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the Humanities.

Related Links:

Leonard Levitt’s Blog Post – “Failure to Communicate”

The homes of many American citizens have been raided and searched on the basis of police claiming information from an informant that doesn’t exist.

You may be astounded to learn that, in the past 20 years, at least 40 innocent people have been killed by law enforcement offices taking part in such raids.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Dennis Fitzgerald, an expert on the subject of informant handling, on this profoundly disturbing story.

About the Guest:

Dennis G. Fitzgerald has been assisting the defense bar for more than a decade. He has 35 years experience in both international and domestic law enforcement and law enforcement training. He has served as a police supervisor with the City of Miami Police Department and as a Special Agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. He was the co-founder and director of the National Institute for Drug Enforcement Training and a visiting faculty member at the FBI’s International Law Enforcement Training Academy.

Fitzgerald is the author of Informant Law Deskbook (West Publishing, 1997), Informants and Undercover Investigations: A Practical Guide to Law, Policy, and Procedure (CRC Press, 2007), several criminal justice training manuals and related magazine articles, including Inside the Informant File.

Some excerpts from Fitzgerald’s résumé:

Provided counsel to CEE and NIS government and law enforcement officials on the development of initiatives and legislation to combat corruption, organized crime, money laundering and related white-collar crimes. Focused on undercover operations, the use of informants and electronic surveillance. Those countries included Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

Assisted Lithuania’s Ministry of Interior in the creation of its first Witness Security Program. The initiative has led to the signing of the Baltic States Witness Security Trilateral Agreement. The pact allows for the movement of threatened witnesses between Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.

Credited by international observers for being instrumental in the development of Lithuania’s first anti-corruption agency, the Special Investigation Service. His efforts continued with assistance to the State Security Service in the design of a national anti-corruption strategy for Lithuania.

EDUCATION:
Seattle University School of Law, J. D., 1988.
Florida International University, B. S., Criminal Justice, 1974.
U. S. Drug Enforcement’s National Training Academy, Commissioned as Special Agent, Criminal Investigator, 1974.
City of Miami Police Academy, Commissioned as Police Officer, 1969.

SPECIALIZED TRAINING:
Witness Protection Training, U.S. Marshals Service
International Money Laundering and Asset Forfeiture Training,
National Institute on Economic Crime
Bank Secrecy Act Compliance and Money Laundering and Asset Forfeiture Training, National Institute on Economic Crime
Financial Manipulation Analysis Training, ANACAPA Sciences,
Miami-Dade Police Training Institute
DEA/FBI Asset Removal Training, DEA National Training Center
I.R.S. Financial Investigation of Economic Crime
Financial Manipulation Analysis Training
Wiretap and Electronic Surveillance
Electronic Surveillance Training, National Institute on Economic Crime
Management of Drug Investigation Training
Conspiracy, RICO, and Continuing Criminal Enterprise Training
U.S. Department of Justice
Drug Diversion Investigation Training
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
U.S. Department of Justice and the American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative (DOJ/ABA/CEELI), Anti-Corruption Strategy Coordinator – Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
Headquartered – Kyiv, Ukraine (2000-2002)

U.S. Department of Justice and American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative (DOJ/ABA/CEELI), Criminal Law Liaison. Headquartered – Vilnius, Lithuania (1996-2000)

National Institute for Drug Enforcement Training, Director/Instructor (1989-2000)

U.S. Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration
Special Agent/Criminal Investigator. Planned and conducted both domestic and international investigations of persons and organizations suspected of engaging in the illegal manufacture, diversion, importation, or sale of narcotics or dangerous drugs and related money laundering offenses (1974-1986)

Intelligence Coordinator – The Vice-President’s Joint Task Group. Evaluated overall effectiveness of drug enforcement activities, both domestically and internationally. (1982-1983)

City of Miami Police Department
Police Officer (1969–1970)
Detective (1970–1972)
Sergeant (1972–1974)
Group Supervisor, assigned to Federal Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (1973–1974)

PUBLICATIONS:
Informants and Undercover Investigations: A Practical Guide to Law, Policy, and Procedure
CRC Press, New York, 2007

A Practical Guide to Witness Protection
© 2003 Dennis Fitzgerald

Informant Law Deskbook
West Publishing Company, New York, 1999

“Inside the Informant File,” The Champion magazine
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers

“Snitches, Narcs and Making Cases,” The Champion magazine
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers

“Informants: Handle With Care,” Narc Officer Magazine
International Narcotics Officers Association

Related Links:

Dennis Fitzgerald’s article on wrong-door raids. (pdf)

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with retired detective Jeannie Webb, the officer who courageously arrested ROBINSON (in spite of the feds) and subsequently paid with her career.

About the Guest:

Jeannie Webb was a Detective in the Crimes Against Children/Sex Crimes unit (they handled all adult assaults as well). She’s had a total of 24 years experience in Law Enforcement, 20 of those years with the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department.

She retired in 2004 and is now working part time as the Foster Care Coordinator for Rio Grande and Mineral Counties in Colorado.

The House of Death is the story of how an informant for Homeland Security, working “undercover” under the direct control of a Bush appointed United States Attorney, participated in a macabre house of horrors in which more than a dozen people were tortured to death. There have been a continuing series of articles at Narco News on the subject, reported by Bill Conroy, who has been a frequent guest.

In previous broadcasts, for the first time anywhere, Bill Conroy brought us the voice of the informant himself. Now, after an extended court battle, that informant has won the right to stay in the U.S. – as extradition to Mexico would certainly result in his death.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Bill Conroy about the House of Death and this informant – and also about how another online organization has taken to plagiarizing Bill’s work on the subject. See below for details.

Lastly – we discuss the latest in the Richard Horn case.

About the Guest:

Bill Conroy has worked as a reporter or editor for the past eighteen years at newspapers in Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota and Texas. His investigative reporting over the past five years has focused on corruption and discrimination within federal law enforcement agencies. He is also a journalist for Narco News. His investigative pieces, particularly those on the House of Death, have made him our most-favored guest.

More info on related topics:
Read Bill Conroy’s Investigative pieces on the House of Death

Bill Conroy’s article on the court decision for the HOD informant

Bill Conroy’s article about the HOD and plagiarism.

read the Examiner article for yourself – and feel free to leave a comment.

Bill’s article about the Richard Horn case.

After repeatedly fingering the “wrong guy”, the final FBI investigation of an incident that terrified an already-terrified nation leaves more questions than it answers.

It was, by many accounts, the most extensive investigation in the history of the FBI – but there are many, including members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, who aren’t satisfied with the final result.

“…the 96 page FBI report is predicated on the assumption that the anthrax letters attack was carried out by a ‘lone nut.’ The FBI report fails to entertain the possibility that the letters attack could have involved more than one actor. The FBI admits that about 400 people may have had access to Ivins’ RMR-1029 anthrax preparation, but asserts all were “ruled out” as lone perpetrators. FBI never tried to rule any out as part of a conspiracy…”

This from Dr. Meryl Nass – an expert in the subject.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Dr. Nass about the case.

About the guest:

Dr. Meryl Nass has a CV as long as your arm.

Professional chronology:
BS Biology 1974, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Lab Technician 1974-1976, Immunology Department. John Curtin School of Medical Research, Canberra, Australia
MD Degree 1980; attended New Jersey Medical School 1976-78, attended University of Mississippi Medical School, 1978-80
Birth of two children, 1980 and 1981, with part-time work as medical consultant for Social Security Disability, 1980-1982
Internal Medicine Residency 1982-5, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, Mississippi
Emergency Room Physician 1985-1999, Parkview Hospital, Brunswick ME (2 years), Wing Hospital, Palmer MA (10 years), Farren Hospital, Turners Falls MA (1 year) , Franklin Medical Center, Greenfield MA (1 year)
Instructor, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Department of Internal Medicine, 1989-1993
Internal Medicine Physician 1993, Kaiser Permanente, Amherst Massachusetts; 1999-2002 solo practitioner, Freeport, Maine
Removal of spinal cord meningioma 2002, necessitating closure of my solo practice
Internist and Hospitalist 2003-present, Mount Desert Island Hospital, Bar Harbor, Maine

Anthrax highlights:

• Evaluated government-sponsored anthrax research in relation to military policy and Biological Weapons Convention norms, 1989-1991.
• Used anthrax as a model for discussion of how to prevent biological warfare, 1991-1992.
• Reviewed anthrax vaccines and other therapies to create a model for effective biological warfare prophylaxis, 1997-1999.
• Produced numerous reports, academic and popular articles, and spoke widely throughout the US to educate military servicemembers, Congress and the public about anthrax, the science underlying biological warfare prophylaxis and the range of available methods for responding to a bioterrorism threat. Produced testimonies at the requests of the House Subcommittee on National Security, the House Armed Services Committee, and the House Committee on Government Reform. Assisted Congressional staff in hearing preparations. Spoke before two Institute of Medicine committees: on Gulf War Illness exposures, and safety and efficacy of the anthrax vaccine. Critiqued the March 2002 Institute of Medicine Report on anthrax vaccine safety and efficacy. 1998-2005.
• Developed a range of recommendations for dealing with the anthrax domestic terrorism crisis as it unfolded, published on my website, and adopted by other authors, 2001.
• Quoted in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, USA Today, The Lancet, New Scientist and scores of other newspapers and journals, regarding anthrax attacks, anthrax vaccine, and preventing and responding to bioterrorism, 1990-present.
• Interviewed on all major US TV networks and scores of radio/TV programs in the US, Japan, France, Germany, Spain, Canada and Australia, 1998-present.
• Investigated the cause of chronic symptoms in survivors of inhalation anthrax; this problem was discussed on page A1 of the NY Times September 16, 2002.

Links:

Dr. Nass’ blog

Dr. Nass’ CV

Federal Bureau of Invention: CASE CLOSED (and Ivins did it) – the article that brought the good Dr. to our attention.

Howard Bloom returns…

“The first decade of the twenty-first century gave the Western World one skull-cracking slap after another. The Great Crash of 2008, the downing of New York’s World Trade Center, the implosion of major corporations like General Motors, Chrysler, Merrill Lynch, and Citibank, and the growth of China to superpower status–these were wakeup punches. They handed you and me–CEOs, researchers, artists, students, and thinkers–what may be our greatest opportunity and our greatest responsibility since the Great Depression and the Nazis threatened to topple the Western way of life in the 1930s.

Our civilization is under attack. But many of us don’t want to defend it. Why? There’s a void in our sense of meaning. We’ve been told that the “the Western system” is one in which the rich stoke artificial needs to suck money, blood, and spirit from the rest of us. We’ve been told 9 that the barons of industry work overtime to turn us from sensitive humans into consumers–mindless buyers listlessly watching TV while growing obese on the artificial flavors, chemical preservatives, and the cheap sugars of junk food. And some of that is true.

But the problem does not lie in the turbines of the Western way of life–it does not lie in industrialism, capitalism, pluralism, free speech, and democracy. The problem lies in the lens through which we see. Emotional flows have powered our past and will drive our future, too. But we’ve never had the perceptual lens to bring them into view. Capitalism works. It works for reasons that don’t appear in the analyses of Marx or in the statistics of economists. It works clumsily, awkwardly, sometimes brilliantly, and sometimes savagely. The Genius of the Beast: A Radical re-Vision of Capitalism attempts to show you how and why.”

The above is an excerpt from Howard Bloom’s latest book The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism Putting Soul In the Machine. Tonight, Howard returns to the show to speak with Mike and Mark about this amazing book.

About the guest:

Howard Bloom, a Visiting Scholar at New York University, is founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, executive editor of the New Paradigm book series, a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The International Society of Human Ethology, and the Academy of Political Science. He has been featured in every edition of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering since the publication’s inception.

Bloom has taken an unusual approach to the study of mass moods and cultural convolutions. He started out normally enough, building his first Boolean algebra machine at the age of twelve, becoming a dedicated microscopist that same year, codesigning a computer which won a Westinghouse Science Award before he left grade school, and being granted a private brainstorming session with the head of the Graduate Physics Department of The State University of New York, Buffalo, at the age of thirteen. By sixteen he was a lab assistant at the world’s largest cancer research center, the Roswell Park Memorial Research Cancer Institute, where he helped plumb the mysteries of the immune system. And before his freshman year of college he designed and executed research in Skinnerian programmed learning at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education.

Then came an act of academic heresy. After graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from New York University, Bloom turned down four graduate fellowships and embarked on a 20-year-long urban anthropology expedition to penetrate what he calls “society’s myth-making machinery”–the inner sanctums of politics and the media. During his foray into “the dark underbelly of mass emotion” he edited a magazine which won two National Academy of Poets prizes, founded the leading avant-garde art studio on the East Coast, was featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine, then gave up listening to Beethoven, Bartok, and Mozart to become editor of a rock magazine. Using correlational studies, focus groups, empirical surveys, ethnographic expeditions into suburban teen subcultures, and other scientific techniques, Bloom more than doubled the publication’s sales, and was credited by Rolling Stones’ Chet Flippo with having founded a new genre–the heavy metal magazine. Seeking still further ways to infiltrate modernity’s mass mind, Bloom formed a public relations firm in the music and film industry and won the confidence of those whose territory he’d invaded. The payoff in knowledge proved invaluable.

Bloom worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, John Cougar Mellencamp, Kiss, Queen, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Joan Jett, Diana Ross, Simon & Garfunkel, The Talking Heads, AC/DC, Billy Idol, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run D.M.C., Simply Red, and the heads of many a media conglomerate. He was adept at spotting new subcultures, entering them, and helping their members achieve their goals…a skill which gave him an inside role in the rise of rap, disco, and punk rock.

The pinnacles of fame provided surprising scientific revelations. “When you’re at the center of the sort of attention-storm which hits when you’re working with a superstar,” Bloom says, “it’s as if the laws of physics change. Hormones charge you up in ways you never imagined. Time perception alters. You resolve crisis in minutes, seeing solutions instantly which previously would have taken you weeks.

“More important is the impact of a communal ritual like a rock concert. The star onstage is taken over by a self he doesn’t know, one that seems to surge through him as if he were a length of empty pipe. The force of this strange passion welds the audience in an almost transcendent bond.” Bloom’s task was to first experience the exaltation, then to dissect it. “The model for this work,” he says, “came from William James, who attempted to feel the ecstatic experience of mystics, then to probe it scientifically, a process which led to his 1902 book The Varieties of the Religious Experience.”

Bloom’s forays into power and its manipulations were also intense. “In the music and film industry everyone knew that money and career advancement were on the line. But few realized how deeply what they did affected the lives of millions, and even fewer felt the responsibility that demands. It was an amazing privilege to work as an equal with the entertainment industry’s elite, many of whom I either had to woo or thwart to help my clients reach their audience with a message of genuine value. Some executives were master strategists but used their intelligence to increase their own stature, often at a brutal cost to others. Others were far more ethical. Yet even the best-intentioned employed boardroom and backroom tactics handed down from the politics of chimpanzees. Without knowing it, they used tricks of leadership we share with social animals from lizards and lobsters to baboons and mountain apes.”

The subculture of Washington politics was, to Bloom, the most disturbing of them all. Bloom founded Music in Action, a national anti-censorship organization. This brought him into head-on combat with Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President and eventual presidential candidate Al Gore. Says Bloom, “Tipper and the right wing religionists who used her for their ends were masters of perceptual manipulation. They perpetrated hoaxes of outrageous transparency, yet still managed to convince the press and public that their falsifications were true.”

Twenty pages in The Billboard Guide to Music Publicity are devoted to Bloom and the antidote he invented, “perceptual engineering,” which he defines as “a way of finding a valid truth which the herd refuses to see, then turning the herd around and making that truth self-evident. It’s what we do in much of science–seeing the ordinary from a new perspective, then revealing what makes it tick and in the process altering society’s views.”

Says British neuroscientist Dr. John Robert Skoyles of Howard Bloom’s science and of his photography, “Michelangelo walked around a piece of marble trying to sense the work within. Bloom hunts the banal of modern environment trying to sense the aesthetics hidden away in what we overlook.”

In 1981, Bloom organized the material he’d unearthed and began the formal research for a new theoretical structure that would first reveal itself in The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History. However he continued pursuing scientific truths in unconventional ways. In 1995 Bloom headed an insurgent academic circle called “The Group Selection Squad” whose efforts precipitated radical re-evaluations of neo-Darwinist dogma within the scientific community. In 1997, he founded a new discipline, paleopsychology, whose participants included physicists, psychologists, microbiologists, paleontologists, entomologists, neuroscientists, paleoneurologists, invertebrate zoologists, and systems theorists. Paleopsychology’s mandate is to “map out the evolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation from the first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang to the present.”

Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has written that with his unusual insights Bloom has “raced ahead of the timid scientific herd” often “vaulting over their heads” with a “grand vision” that “we do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand.” In The Lucifer Principle and his new book Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, Howard Bloom brings those understandings from dimness into the light.

More about Howard (there’s MORE???!?!?!?!)  at his website.

The New York City Police Department, U.S. Army, and CIA, for whom he also secretly worked, reported Olson’s death as a suicide. In 1975, a Presidential-appointed commission inadvertently released information publicly that revealed that, days before his death, the CIA had surreptitiously dosed Olson with LSD. The CIA admitted that it had given the drug to Olson, but refused to reveal any details of the so-called “experiment”, or about what Olson’s work for the CIA involved. The American media briefly examined the perplexing mysteries surrounding Olson’s “suicide”, but soon lost interest. Twenty-years later, further investigation into Olson’s death revealed that there was ample reason to believe that he had been murdered. The Olson case grew even more mysterious and strange after the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office convened a grand jury inquiry into the odd death. Critical witnesses died strangely only days and weeks before they were to be questioned by prosecutors; government officials refused to speak and those that did suddenly developed severe memory problems; crucial documents were destroyed and lost; and investigators were intimidated and threatened.

Who killed Frank Olson and why? Why did the U.S. government actively work for over 50 years to conceal and cover up the facts surrounding Olson’s death? What were the bizarre connections between Olson’s death and Lee Harvey Oswald, foreign drug traffickers, and deadly government-sponsored assassins and undercover agents? What was the horrible experiment conducted by the U.S. government that cost Olson his life? What was Frank Olson’s self-admitted “terrible mistake”?

Today, following over ten years of investigation, the shocking truth about Olson’s work and murder is revealed by H.P. Albarelli Jr. in his remarkable and stunning book, A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with H.P. Albarelli Jr. about this amazing book.

About the guest:

H.P. Albarelli Jr. is a writer and investigative reporter who lives in the Tampa Bay area of Florida . He has written numerous feature articles about the 9/11 anthrax attacks; the history of biological warfare; the mysterious death of Dr. Frank Olson; the Cuban revolution; and social and political affairs. Some of these articles can be found on the World Net Daily, Pravda, Cubanet, Counterpunch, and Crime Magazine websites.

Albarelli has also written feature articles for Tampa ‘s alternative newspaper, The Weekly Planet . His work has been acknowledged and cited in American History magazine, and in books by many distinguished authors, including: The Biology of Doom by Ed Regis (Henry Holt and Co., 2001); Alston Chase’s classic, Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist (W.W. Norton, 2003); and The Eighty Greatest Conspiracies of All Time by Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen (Citadel Press, 2004). An accomplished scriptwriter and playwright, Albarelli’s LIFE GOES ON , written with his brother, Dean Albarelli, was published by Witness, a literary journal; in 1995 he produced and directed a regional production of Academy Award winner’s Steve Tesich’s play, On the Open Road . (Brilliantly scored by composer Sam Geppi.)

Albarelli’s six-year investigation into the controversial death of Army biochemist Dr. Frank Olson was the focal point of an hour long television documentary, Mind Control Murder , produced by London’s award-winning Principal Films (David Presswell, director) for A&E’s Investigative Reports, and by independent film producer, Scott Calonico, for the short film LSD a Go-Go shown at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Albarelli is a graduate of Antioch Law School and has traveled extensively throughout Europe, South Africa , and Asia. He is a noted expert on the history of the CIA’s behavior modification and assassination programs of the 1950s. Books to be published by Albarelli in the near future include: THE HEAP , a novel; A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments ; and STORMY MONDAY , a fictional account of infamous narcotics agent George Hunter White’s activities in the 1950s.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with T.J. English about this devastating article.

About the guest:

Thomas Joseph “T.J.” English comes from a large Irish Catholic family of ten brothers and sisters. Early in his writing career, English worked as a freelance journalist in New York City during the day and drove a taxi at night. He often refers to cab driving as a metaphor for what he does as a writer – cruising the streets, interviewing strangers, exploring the unknown, reporting on what he sees and hears from his sojourns in and around the underworld.

In 1990, English published his first book, The Westies, an account of the last of the Irish Mob in the infamous Manhattan neighborhood known as “Hell’s Kitchen.” The book was the result of a series of reports English wrote for a weekly Irish American newspaper based in New York…
His second book, Born to Kill (1995), was an unprecedented inside account of a violent Vietnamese gang based in New York’s Chinatown, that operated up and down the East Coast. In 2005, English published Paddy Whacked, a sweeping history of the Irish American gangster in New York, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, and other U.S. cities. Most recently, English published Havana Nocturne (2008), an investigative account of U.S. mobster infiltration of Havana, Cuba, in the years before the Revolution swept Fidel Castro into power.

As a journalist, English has written for many magazines and newspapers including: Esquire, Playboy, Irish America, The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times…

In the mid-1990s, he wrote a three-part series for Playboy entitled “The New Mob” that explored the changing face of organized crime in America. His work as a writer has taken him to Cuba, Jamaica, Hong Kong, Mexico, Ireland, and all around the U.S… Most of his articles are on the subject of crime and criminal justice, though English writes on a wide variety of subjects including music, politics, and movies. He has published full-length interviews with Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, actor Bill Murray, director Martin Scorsese, and comedy legend George Carlin, to name a few.

In addition, English is a screenwriter and has penned episodes for the television crime dramas “NYPD Blue” and “Homicide,” for which he was awarded the prestigious Humanitas Prize.

He lives in New York City.

You can find out more about him at his website.

During the political storm that erupted in early 2006 over the Bush administration’s plans to turn over port security to a United Arab Emirates-based company, the president was quoted on Fox News saying the following on March 12 of that year:

“People don’t need to worry about security. This deal wouldn’t go forward if we were concerned about the security for the United States of America.”

Apparently, if we are willing to heed the story of a former West Wing lead mailroom assistant, Laura C. Jones, the president’s gaff underscores another truth: that his staff isn’t concerned about White House security either. ”

(From the Bill Conroy Narconews Article)

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Ms. Jones, and her counsel Mike McCray of the No Fear Coalition about this amazing story.

More info on related topics:
Read Bill Conroy’s article on the Laura Jones story

A sensational, epic true story of a modern Mafia dynasty, by an author with incredible inside access to both the Mob and the FBI.

The Scarpas were a Mafia dynasty led by Greg Scarpa Sr., a man addicted to murder. His son, Gregory Jr., a promising athlete, worshipped his ruthless father, and was slowly drawn into his dark world. What only father and son knew was that for thirty years Scarpa Sr. was an FBI informant. For decades, his connection to the FBI granted him a virtual license to kill. But when facing arrest in the late 1980′s, Scarpa asked his son to leave his wife and children, and take the rap for his father.

After years in prison, in 1995, Gregory Jr, imprisoned alongside Ramzi Yousef, architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, agreed to extract information from Yousef in exchange for leniency, furnishing the FBI with detailed intelligence on what would result in 9/11. Incredibly, Greg’s desperate warnings were unheeded, and he was sentenced to forty-years-to-life at the notorious ADMAX. There he would supply the FBI with intelligence on Oklahoma City bomber and fellow prisoner, Terry Nichols. Again his contribution was ignored, and Gregory Jr. remains at ADMAX, where he believes he will one day be murdered.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with author Sandra Harmon about this amazing story.

About the guest:

Sandra Harmon, author of “MAFIA SON, the Scarpa Mob Family, The FBI, And A Story of Betrayal”, has had an extraordinary career as a best-selling author, journalist, television writer, producer and film maker. .

She wrote and produced the television movie, “Fast Friends” for NBC, which was based on her own experiences as a writer on “The Dick Cavett Show”. The film starred Dick Shawn as a popular talk show host who goes berserk on stage and is replaced by a young, unknown comedian, played by David Letterman. At the time, Letterman was himself an unknown comedian until Sandra discovered him and cast him in her film.

Sandra also produced the highly acclaimed “Promises to Keep” a CBS television movie starring Claire Bloom and Robert Mitchum, Mitchum’s real son, Chris Mitchum and his grandson, Bentley Mitchum. “Promises To Keep” tells the story of a family in crisis who finally come together when the grandfather makes amends, and in a case of reality imitating art, the shooting of the movie brought together the Mitchum family, who had been estranged for many years.

Sandra’s popular first novel, the critically acclaimed, “A Girl Like Me”, was published by Dutton Books in hardcover and Bantam Books in paperback. Norman Mailer wrote, “So let us welcome Sandra Harmon to the novelists. She begins with two splendid qualities. She is beautiful, and so we may depend on her to have much original material, and she is honest – the eye from which she writes is the eye to which it happened.”

Sandra is also the co-author of the internationally known, runaway best-seller, “Elvis and Me” – (the story of Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley – written with Priscilla Presley ) – which sold nearly one million copies in hard cover and three million in paperback and was, according to The Wall Street Journal, the tenth largest seller of the l980′s, occupying the #l spot on the New York Times Best seller listfor more than fifty weeks in both hard and soft cover.

Adapted for television by ABC,TV, “Elvis and Me” was then turned into one of the network’s highest-rated four hour miniseries of all times, putting the paperback of “Elvis and Me” back on the best-seller list.

Sandra next wrote the best-seller, “Getting To I Do”, in which she taught women everywhere, how to find the “right man”, begin a healthy sexual relationship, and get engaged, by the end of the first year.

This was followed by the sequel; “Staying Married and Loving It!” which teaches couples how to maintain a loving, erotic, successful long term relationship.

Links:

Mafia Son Website

Sandra Harmon’s Website

As we’ve previously talked about on the show, after 9/11 the NYPD stopped relying on Federal agencies for intelligence, and started gathering their own.

Well, Christopher Dickey has written an amazing book on the topic. Here, from the publisher’s website:

The NYPD is the best and most ambitious antiterror operation in the world. Its seat-of-the-pants intelligence is the gold standard for all others.

Christopher Dickey, who has reported on international terrorism for more than twenty-five years, takes readers into the secret command center of the New York City Police Department’s counterterrorism division, then onto the streets with cops ready for the toughest urban combat the twenty-first century can throw at them. But behind the tactical shows of force staged by the police, there lies a much more ambitious and controversial strategy: to go anywhere and use almost any means to keep the city from becoming, once again, Ground Zero. This is the story of the coming war in America’s cities and New York’s shadow war, waged around the globe to stop it before it begins.

Drawing on unparalleled access to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and other top officials, Dickey explores the most ambitious intelligence operation ever organized by a metropolitan police department. Headed by David Cohen, who ran the CIA’s operations inside the United States in the 1980s and its global spying in the 1990s, the NYPD’s counterterrorism division had uptotheminute details of new attacks set in motion to target Manhattan in 2002 and 2003.

New York’s finest are now seen by other police chiefs in the United States as the gold standard for counterterrorism operations and a model for even the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Yet as New Yorkers have come to feel safer, they’ve also grown worried about the NYPD’s methods: sending its undercover agents to spy on Americans in other cities, rounding up hundreds of protesters preemptively before the 2004 Republican convention, and using confidential informants who may be more adept at plotting terror than the people they finger.

Securing the City is a superb investigative reporter’s stunning look inside the real world of cops who are ready to take on the world and at the ambiguous price we pay for the safety they provide.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Chris Dickey about this great book, and the story behind it.

About the guest:

Award-winning author Christopher Dickey is the Paris Bureau Chief and Middle East Regional Editor for Newsweek Magazine. Previously he worked for The Washington Post as Cairo Bureau Chief and Central America Bureau Chief. Chris’s Shadowland column, about counter-terrorism, espionage and the Middle East, appears weekly on Newsweek Online. For links to recent columns and articles, visit the Shadowland archive. Chris’s nonfiction books include “Securing the City,” to be published in February 2009, as well as “With the Contras,” “Expats,” and “Summer of Deliverance.” He has also written two acclaimed thrillers: “Innocent Blood” and “The Sleeper.”

Links:

Christopher Dickey’s Blog

Christopher Dickey’s Website

Founded on March 16, 2002, LEAP is made up of current and former members of the law enforcement and criminal justice communities who are speaking out about the failures of our existing drug policies. Those policies have failed, and continue to fail, to effectively address the problems of drug abuse, especially the problems of juvenile drug use, the problems of addiction, and the problems of crime caused by the existence of a criminal black market in drugs.

Although those who speak publicly for LEAP are people from the law enforcement and criminal justice communities, a large number of their supporting members do not have such experience.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak to Terry Nelson – law enforfcement veteran and Leap spokesperson – about LEAP’s efforts, and the failed war on drugs.

About the Guest:

Terry Nelson’s law-enforcement career spanned three decades. It included service in the US Border Patrol, the US Customs Service, and the Department of Homeland Security, taking him beyond US borders into Mexico, Central America, and South America. In various capacities he acquired first-hand knowledge of the “War on Drugs,” being directly involved in counter-narcotics missions. He labored with distinction, even receiving special Congressional recognition for his work. “But,” he says, “as the ‘War on Drugs’ went on and on I never saw any visible progress – and only limited discussion about the lack of progress. Something was wrong with this picture.”

Terry came to understand drug prohibition was doing more harm than good and that the United States needed a major policy change.” For many years he had thought a lot about decriminalizing drugs but had not wanted to go so far as to legalize them. But the obvious lack of progress toward winning the war and the continued congratulatory backslapping unrelated to even incremental successes have made him conclude that enough is enough. Perpetuating the “War on Drugs” myth is dangerous to the well-being of the planet and lethal to future generations. Terry has decided the only solution is a policy of legalized regulation of all drugs. That decision led to his joining LEAP – the first group he has ever joined! “We must remove the criminal element from the drug trade, because it is destroying our society and crippling governments to the south of us. We must change the rules to win the real war.”

Terry retired in 2005 as a GS-14 Air/Marine Group Supervisor. He is a veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard, having served as a communications specialist in Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. He served 9 years in the U.S. Border Patrol including a stint as Instructor and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, 3 years in marine operations in the Florida Keys, 1 year a Customs Inspector at DFW Airport, 7 years as an Air Interdiction Officer/Criminal Investigator, 2 years as Staff Officer to Director of Foreign Operations and 5 years on the staff of Field Director (SSB East) Surveillance Support Branch East. During this period SSBE team participated in the seizure of over 230,000 pounds of Cocaine and received the United States Interdiction Committee award for interdictions. “But to what avail – today drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier for our children to get than at the beginning of the war.”

Links:

The LEAP website

“To get the most out of life, we should know as much as we can about the universe and the rules by which it operates. The more we invest the mind with diverse knowledge, the more strategies we have for living in the world well. Cultivating and exercising curiosity provides us with the means for conceiving our relationship with and our place in the world.

Everyday Survival is a book of changes. A book that will take you into the bowels of the earth and to the depths of the oceans in search of the origins of life and to the edge of the universe to discover where it all began. Everyday Survival demonstrates how our origins as humans shape our behavior today and it delves into the natural human systems that can often trip us up.”

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Laurence Gonzales about this fascinating book, the world we inhabit, and how we inhabit it.

About the guest:

Laurence Gonzales won the 2001 and 2002 National Magazine Awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors for National Geographic Adventure Magazine. Since 1970, his essays have appeared in such periodicals as Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Smithsonian Air and Space, Chicago Magazine, San Francisco Magazine, and many others.

He has published a dozen books, including two award–winning collections of essays, three novels, and the book–length essay, One Zero Charlie published by Simon & Schuster.

His latest book, Everyday Survival, published by W.W. Norton & Company, is available at book sellers now.

His previous book, Deep Survival, is now out in paperback.

Laurence Gonzales’s first book was the novel Jambeaux (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), which Rolling Stone called “the best rock-and-roll novel since Harlan Ellison’s Spider’s Kiss, which is to say it’s the best in almost twenty years.” His second and third novels, The Last Deal (1981) and El Vago (1983), were published by Atheneum.

By then he had turned his attention to writing nonfiction, and his book of essays, The Still Point, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1989. It won the Carl Sandburg Literary Arts Award. One of the essays was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. In an unsolicited comment, Kurt Vonnegut responded to The Still Point by praising, “the excellence of Laurence Gonzales’s writing and the depth of his reporting.” The book-length essay, One Zero Charlie (Simon and Schuster, 1992) won the 1993 Chicago Book of the Year Award and remains a classic of aviation literature. One of the essays in his next book, The Hero’s Apprentice (University of Arkansas Press, 1994), was also a finalist for the National Magazine Award.

His 2003 book, Deep Survival (W.W. Norton) has become a bestseller and is available in six languages. His latest book, Everyday Survival, was just published by W.W. Norton.

Laurence Gonzales has also written plays, screenplays, poetry, and a book of short stories titled Artificial Horizon (University of Missouri, 1986). He has been Managing Editor of the journal Tri-Quarterly, Contributing Editor for Paris Review, Articles Editor for Playboy, Artist in Residence at the University of Missouri, Contributing Editor for Men’s Journal, Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University, and is now Contributing Editor for National Geographic Adventure Magazine, where he writes a monthly column.

He has lectured before diverse groups ranging from the Santa Fe Institute to Legg Mason Capital Management and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Links:

Laurence Gonzales website

Everyday Survival website

Bugliosi sets forth the legal architecture and incontrovertible evidence that President Bush took this nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses—a war that has not only caused the deaths of American soldiers but also over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, and children; cost the United States over one trillion dollars thus far with no end in sight; and alienated many American allies in the Western world.

Tonight, on the Expert Witness Radio Show, Mike and Mark speak with Vincent Bugliosi about the eventual prosecution of George W. Bush, and how he intends to actually carry it out. More so than any other show we’ve ever done – you don’t want to miss this one…. especially because in this case, there’s something you can DO about it.

About the guest:

Vincent Bugliosi received his law degree in 1964. In his career at the L.A. County District Attorney’s office, he successfully prosecuted 105 out of 106 felony jury trials, including 21 murder convictions without a single loss. His most famous trial, the Charles Manson case, became the basis of his classic, Helter Skelter, the biggest selling true-crime book in publishing history. Two of Bugliosi’s other books—And the Sea Will Tell and Outrage—also reached #1 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. No other American true-crime writer has ever had more than one book that achieved this ranking.

His latest book, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, has been heralded as “epic” and “a book for the ages.” Bugliosi has uncommonly attained success in two separate and distinct fields, as an author and a lawyer. His excellence as a trial lawyer is best captured in the judgment of his peers. “Bugliosi is as good a prosecutor as there ever was,” Alan Dershowitz says. F. Lee Bailey calls Bugliosi “the quintessential prosecutor.” “There is only one Vince Bugliosi. He’s the best,” says Robert Tanenbaum, for years the top homicide prosecutor in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Most telling is the comment by Gerry Spence, who squared off against Bugliosi in a twenty-one-hour televised, scriptless “docu-trial” of Lee Harvey Oswald, in which the original key witnesses to the Kennedy assassination testified and were cross-examined. After the Dallas jury returned a guilty verdict in Bugliosi’s favor, Spence said, “No other lawyer in America could have done what Vince did in this case.” Bugliosi lives with his wife, Gail, in Los Angeles.

Then, a fascinating story about UFO’s.

About the guest:

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’

Links:

Consortium News

Edgar Mitchell Radio Interview

The Disclosure Project Video

Tonight, we speak with Retired Army Colonel Ann Wright about this simply disgusting story. From her April story on CommonDreams:

“The Department of Defense statistics are alarming — one in three women who join the US military will be sexually assaulted or raped by men in the military… But, now, even more alarming, are deaths of women soldiers in Iraq, and in the United States, following rape. The military has characterized each of the deaths of women who were first sexually assaulted as deaths from “non-combat related injuries,” and then added “suicide.” Yet, the families of the women whom the military has declared to have committed suicide, strongly dispute the findings and are calling for further investigations into the deaths of their daughters. Specific US Army units and certain US military bases in Iraq have an inordinate number of women soldiers who have died of “non-combat related injuries, with several identified as “suicides.”

If there were EVER a story that cried out for your outrage, this is it. See below for what YOU can do.

About the Guest:

Ann Wright grew up in Bentonville, Arkansas, and attended the University of Arkansas, where she received a master’s and a law degree. She also has a master’s degree in national security affairs from the U.S. Naval War College. After college, she spent thirteen years in the U.S. Army and sixteen additional years in the Army Reserves, retiring as a Colonel. She is airborne-qualified.

In 1987, Col.Wright joined the Foreign Service and served as U.S. Deputy Ambassador in Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan, and Mongolia. She received the State Department’s Award for Heroism for her actions during the evacuation of 2,500 people from the civil war in Sierra Leone, the largest evacuation since Saigon. She was on the first State Department team to go to Afghanistan and helped reopen the Embassy there in December 2001. Her other overseas assignments include Somalia, Kyrgyzstan, Grenada, Micronesia, and Nicaragua.

On March 19, 2003, the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Ann Wright cabled a letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell, stating that without the authorization of the UN Security Council, the invasion and occupation of a Muslim, Arab, oil-rich country would be a disaster. Since then, she has been writing and speaking out for peace. She fasted for a month, picketed at Guantánamo, served as a juror in impeachment hearings, and has been arrested numerous times for peaceful, nonviolent protest of Bush’s policies, particularly the war on Iraq. She lives in Honolulu.

She is also the co-author, along with Susan Dixon, of DISSENT: Voices of Conscience – Government insiders speak out against the war in Iraq

Find out about it at http://www.voicesofconscience.com

Links

Ann Wright’s latest report – Sexual Assault in the Military: A DoD Cover-Up? – Just released Friday

What YOU can DO

The following Congresspeople have indicated their willingness to pursue hearings into these horrific incidents, and the system that allows them to happen. Please contact them, and let them know how strongly you feel about the issue:

Diane Watson

Elijah E. Cummings

Donald M. Payne

Lacy Clay

Susan Davis

Tonight, we speak with Elliot D. Cohen about his startling book, why people aren’t seeing what’s going on, and how the country is being damaged by it.

About the Guest:

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. is an ethicist, media critic, and political analyst. He is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Applied Philosophy, ethics editor for Free Inquiry magazine, and the author or editor of many books in journalism, professional ethics, and philosophical counseling, including News Incorporated: Corporate Media Ownership and Its Threat to Democracy, Journalistic Ethics (with Deni Elliot), Philosophical Issues in Journalism, The New Rational Therapy: Thinking Your Way to Serenity, Success, and Profound Happiness, and What Would Aristotle Do? Self-Control through the Power of Reason. Dr Cohen has been a guest on such national venues as Ring of Fire, Majority Report, the Mike Malloy Show, and the Thom Hartmann Show, among others. He was the first prize recipient of the 2007 Project Censored Award for his investigative reporting on the corporate takeover of the Internet.

Find him at ElliotDCohen.com

Links

The FRONTLINE documentary Mark referenced in this episode.

We’ve all heard of Eisenhower’s famous warning about the military industrial complex (video below). Tonight, Mike and Mark speak wtih Robert Scheer about his devastating book on the subject of militarization, and its’ effect on society.

About the Guest:

Robert Scheer has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed to the lust in his heart and he went on to do many interviews for the Los Angeles Times with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and many other prominent political and cultural figures.

Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the Los Angeles Times, where he was named a contributing editor. That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now based at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Scheer can be heard on the political radio program “Left, Right and Center” on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, Calif. He has written seven books, including “Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power”; “With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War” and “America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals;” with his son Christopher and Lakshmi Chaudhry, “The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq.” Most recently, he wrote “Playing President: “My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I and Clinton–and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush.”

Scheer was raised in the Bronx, where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a Maxwell fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer is a contributing editor for The Nation as well as a Nation Fellow. He has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Links:

truthdig.com

Eisenhower on the Military Industrial
Complex:

“It may become one of the great historical mysteries, leaving future scholars to scratch their heads over how someone with as few qualifications as Geroge W. Bush came to lead the world’s most powerful nation at the start of the 21st century.”

“Historians may ponder why so many Americans thought that an enterprise as vast and complicated as the US government could be guided by a person who had failed at nearly every job he ever had. Why did so many voters believe that a little-travelled incurious and inarticulate man of privilege could lead the planet’s only superpower in a world of daunting challenges, shifting dangers and sharpening competition….”

These are the first two paragraphs of a book that should be read by everyone who votes. It answers the questions it poses….

This interview is in three segments.  In part three, we also take a look at competing agencies taking credit for solving the Oklahoma City bombing.

About the guest:

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’

Links:

Consortium News

I volunteer to kidnap Ollie North by Michael Levine

Who’s apologizing to Gary Webb? by Michael Levine

So begins the Consortium News special report by Robert Parry which prompted tonight’s interview. Parry is legendary for both his breaking of the Iran-Contra scandal and his groundbreaking investigative journalism.

Tonight, we have a freewheeling conversation with Bob Parry about everything from the special report above, to the state of media, Gary Webb and much much more.

About the guest:

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’



Mr. Levinson’s wife Christine, his son and sister-in-law visited Iran in December in an effort to gather information about his disappearance and press the Iranian government on his case. While the Iranian authorities guaranteed the security of the family during their journey, they provided few details from their investigation.

Tonight, we talk with Christine Levinson about the disappearance of Bob Levinson, and his family’s efforts to bring him home safely.

Then, we talk with Bill Conroy of Narco News about the latest in the House of Death and CIA plane stories.

Links:

www.helpboblevinson.com

Bill Conroy’s latest Narco News article

“Since last March, when I wrote a story about the apparent suicide of Col. Ted Westhusing in Iraq, I had believed there was nothing else to write about his tragic death.

But in December, I talked to a source in the Department of Defense who met Westhusing in Iraq about three months before his death. The source, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, was investigating claims of wrongdoing against military contractors working in Iraq. After a short introduction, I asked him what he thought had happened to Westhusing. ‘I think he was killed. I honestly do. I think he was murdered,’ the source told me. ‘Maybe DOD didn’t have enough evidence to call it murder, so they called it suicide.’ ”

Tonight, we interview author Robert Bryce about this sad tale.

About the guest:
Robert Bryce’s articles have appeared in dozens of publications including the Atlantic Monthly, Slate, New York Times, Washington Post, American Conservative, The Nation, Washington Spectator and The Guardian. His first book, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, received rave reviews and was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2002 by Publishers Weekly. His second book, Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate, was published 2004.

Bryce spent 12 years writing for the Austin Chronicle. His third book, Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence,” will be published in March by PublicAffairs. He lives in Austin.

Links:

I am Sullied-No More – Robert Bryce’s first article about Col. Westhusing

A Death Reconsidered – Bryce’s most recent Westhusing article

Robert Bryce’s Website

The FOIA Documents Robert Bryce refers to in the episode

A Gulfstream II jet that crash landed in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula in late September bearing a load of nearly four tons of cocaine. This particular Gulfstream II (tail number N987SA), was used between 2003 and 2005 by the CIA for at least three trips between the U.S. east coast and Guantanamo Bay — home to the infamous “terrorist” prison camp — according to a number of press reports.

Tonight, we talk with Bill Conroy from Narco News, and Sandalio Gonzalez, veteran DEA agent, about this amazing story.

Top, the signature of Gregory D. Smith on Aero Group Jets’ 1998 annual report filing; and below, “Greg Smith” on the Gulfstream II’s September 16, 2007 bill of sale.

Links:

Bill Conroy’s Narco News article

In September 1975, Dominic Amorosa personally led the federal prosecution of Frank Lucas – a hardcore heroin kingpin – and 18 co-defendants.

Imagine his surprise when the film American Gangster was released, and it not only portrayed Lucas as some kind of antihero – but it showed the arrest of Lucas as being accomplished by New Jersey law enforcement authorities, when, in fact, it was it was DEA, together with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which apprehended, prosecuted and tried Frank Lucas and his suppliers.

Further – American Gangster goes on to portray a vicious and brutal search, indicates that the officers involved were associated with New York City’s Special Investigations Unit (which was admittedly corrupt, but had long since been disbanded), that Frank Lucas smuggled in heroin in the coffins of dead Vietnam G.I.s, and, finally, states that 3/4 of New York DEA agents were prosecuted for corruption as a result of Lucas’ testimony – none of which never happened.

These are but a few of the outright fabrications in American Gangster. And Dominic Amorosa is but one of the folks who are not content to sit back and watch it happen.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with yet another front-line guest, to get the REAL story about the Frank Lucas investigation and prosecution – and defend some honest law enforcement folks in the process.

About the Guest:

From 1972 through 1974, Dominic Amorosa was an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of New Jersey where he prosecuted numerous criminal cases.

From 1974 through September 1981, Mr. Amorosa was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York where for several years he was assigned to the Fraud Unit. He later became Chief of the Narcotics Unit from 1979 to 1980 and Chief of the Organized Crime Unit from 1980 to 1981.

From September 1981 to the present, Mr. Amorosa has been in private practice specializing in complex litigation cases.

He also represents Gregory Korniloff, a former New York City DEA Agent.  Mr. Korniloff was the case agent for DEA on Lucas’ federal case and personally participated in the search of Lucas’ house conducted in January 1975 pursuant to a valid federal search warrant, and the arrest of Lucas on that same day.  During this search $585,000.00 in currency was seized, which was later physically introduced into evidence during Lucas’ federal criminal trial in the Southern District of New York in September 1975.

Links:

Dominic Amorosa’s Website

Dominic Amorosa’s letter to NBC/Universal – HTML – PDF

About the Guest:

CELERINO “CELE” CASTILLO III, is a 20-year veteran of both state and federal law enforcement with 12-year service in the U. S. Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration. Mr. Castillo is a highly decorated DEA agent for his undercover operations in Central and South America. For several years, he was also placed in major cities like San Francisco and New York City for deep cover operations. He is an author of “Powderburns” Cocaine, Contras And The Drug War, and is an acclaimed public speaker and educator.

COURT QUALIFIED EXPERT WITNESS: For 20 years Mr. Castillo has qualified as an “expert witness” in criminal and civil trials, both for and against various state and federal law enforcement agencies, in the following subjects: Undercover tactics, entrapment, informant handling practices and procedures, all subjects related to drugs trafficking, money laundering, and international narcotics investigations, police profiling, research on federal documentation for the defense. (Bates)

MR. CASTILLO has written several internationally known articles against federal law enforcement corruption: “Written Statement of Celerino Castillo III, for The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence” 1998. He was mentioned in several articles on Informant Handling for The National Law Journal. ABC’s Primetime Live, Dateline NBC, Discovery Channel and other numerous news magazines have done exclusive interviews on Mr. Castillo pertaining to “Outrageous Conduct” by the U.S. Government.

Links:

Cele Castillo’s Website – powderburns.org

Judge Evan Wallach article – “Waterboarding Used to Be a Crime”

NPR Nance interview on Waterboarding

Mike’s essay – “I volunteer to kidnap Ollie North”

About the Guest:

Author and filmmaker, Robert Young Pelton is known for overcoming extraordinary obstacles in his search for the truth. He has made a career of bypassing the media, border guards and the military in his goal of getting to the heart of the story. In his travels to and through the world’s most dangerous places, Pelton has shared risks with his hosts and often has become the sole surviving witness to history-shaping events. His recent journeys have taken him inside the siege of Grozny in Chechnya, the battle of Qala-I-Jangi in Afghanistan, the rebel campaign to take Monrovia in Liberia, inside the hunt for Bin Laden in the Tribal Areas with the CIA, with insurgents during the war in Iraq and running RPG Alley every day for four weeks with Blackwater in Baghdad.

Pelton is also known for penetrating many of the world’s most dangerous terrorist, rebel and paramilitary organizations. His goal as a neutral observer and accurate chronicler of events has earned him access on all sides of many wars including being the only journalist in combat operations with US Special Forces in Afghanistan and other covert and private military groups.

His travels have not been without penalty. He has been kidnapped by right wing death squads in Colombia, survived a plane crash in Indonesia, a head on motorcycle accident in Peru and gracefully endured numerous detainments and attacks.

His access has allowed Pelton to return with stunning interviews, surprising stories and unforgettable footage for his articles, documentaries and books. The world met just one the many characters Pelton has met when they watched his world exclusive interview of the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh.

In addition to his work for National Geographic Adventure, Pelton has worked for Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, ABC News, CBS 60 Minutes, CNN and other major media networks. His unusual perspective, insight and humor have made him a popular guest on news networks and entertainment shows that range from Oprah to NPR.

As an author, Pelton is best known for his classic underground guide to surviving danger; Robert Young Pelton’s The World’s Most Dangerous Places (Harper Collins), now in its fifth edition. His other books include Come Back Alive (Random House), an intense autobiography, The Adventurist (Broadway Books) and his latest: Three Worlds Gone Mad (Lyons Press) a book about three wars and the people Pelton met fighting them.

Links:

Robert Young Pelton’s Website – comebackalive.com

Judge Evan Wallach article – “Waterboarding Used to Be a Crime”

Nearly forty years later Tsung Tsai — now an old master himself — persuaded his American neighbor, maverick poet George Crane, to travel with him back to his birthplace at the edge of the Gobi Desert.

They are unlikely companions. Crane seeks freedom, adventure, sensation. Tsung Tsai is determined to find his master’s grave and plant the seeds of a spiritual renewal in China. As their search culminates in a torturous climb to a remote mountain cave, it becomes clear that this seemingly quixotic quest may cost both men’s lives.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with George about this amazing life adventure.

About the guest:

George Crane is the author of the internationally acclaimed Bones of the Master, and the followup Beyond the House of the False Lama. He is an occasional poet and translator of Chinese poems. With Tsung Tsai, Crane translated A Thousand Pieces of Snow. His writings has been published in eleven languages. He lives mostly on the road.

In a work of history that will make headlines, New York Times reporter Philip Shenon investigates the investigation of 9/11 and tells the inside story of the most significant federal commission since the Warren Commission.

From the Commission’s inception, Shenon covered its workings on a daily basis, developing sources at all levels of the investigation. Now, more than five years later, he has returned to those sources and uncovered important information which casts a new light on what the Commission discovered – and failed to discover.

If a great reporter had been present throughout the workings of The Warren Commission, we might have a better understanding of the events surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy. Philip Shenon’s book on the 9/11 Commission serves as both an essential historical record and a fascinating inside account of how our government works at the highest and most secret levels.

About the guest:

Philip Shenon is an investigative reporter with The New York Times, where he has worked since 1981. He was the lead reporter on the investigation of the September 11 commission and has held several of the most important assignments of the Washington Bureau, including chief Defense Department correspondent, diplomatic correspondent, Congressional correspondent and Justice Department Correspondent. He was one of two Times reporters embedded with American grounds troops during the invasion of Iraq and worked in pre-war Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran for Times foreign staff. This is his first book.

More information is available at thecommissionbook.com.

When I first wrote DEEP COVER, I was called by government insiders “DEA’s Daniel Ellsberg.”

At the time I was upset and confused, mainly due to the negative image in which mainstream media had cast this heroic man.

I now wear that title as a badge of honor, in spite of knowing that whatever it is that I did pales next to the risks this man ran to adhere to his oath to protect the people of this nation and their constitution. The number of young American and Vietnamese lives he saved by hastening the end of that “war” is incalculable.

So, it was with great pleasure and gratitude that I was afforded the experience of recording a heart-to-heart conversation with this man, and presenting it to our listening audience – at a time in our history that his words are needed more than ever.

Michael Levine

About the guest:

Daniel Ellsberg is a former American military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national uproar in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military’s account of activities during the Vietnam War, to The New York Times.

Ellsberg, the son of Jewish parents with a passion for Christian Science, grew up in Detroit and attended Cranbrook Kingswood School, then attended Harvard University, graduating with a Ph.D. in Economics in 1959 in which he described a paradox in decision theory now known as the Ellsberg paradox. He served as a company commander in the Marine Corps for two years, and then became an analyst at the RAND Corporation. A committed Cold Warrior, he served in the Pentagon in 1964 under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He then served for two years in Vietnam as a civilian in the State Department, and became convinced that the Vietnam War was unwinnable. He further believed that nearly everyone in the Defense and State Departments felt, as he did, that the United States had no realistic chance of achieving victory in Vietnam, but that political considerations prevented them from saying so publicly. McNamara and others continued to state in press interviews that victory was “just around the corner.” As the war continued to escalate, Ellsberg became deeply disillusioned.

As a Vietnam expert, Ellsberg was invited to contribute to the assemblage of classified papers regarding the execution of the Vietnam War. These documents later became collectively known as the Pentagon Papers. They revealed the knowledge, early on, that the war would not likely be won and that continuing the war would lead to many times more casualties than was admitted publicly. Further, the papers showed a deep cynicism towards the public and a disregard for the loss of life and injury suffered by soldiers and civilians.

Ellsberg knew that releasing these papers would most likely result in a conviction and sentence of many years in prison. Throughout 1970, Ellsberg covertly attempted to convince a few sympathetic Senators (among them J. William Fulbright) to release the Pentagon Papers on the Senate floor, because a Senator cannot be prosecuted for anything he says on record before the Senate.

When these efforts failed, Ellsberg, with the assistance of Anthony Russo, copied them and finally leaked the Pentagon Papers to Neil Sheehan at The New York Times. On June 12, 1971, the Times began publishing the first installment of the 7,000 page document. For 15 days, the Times was prevented from publishing its articles on the orders of the Nixon administration. However, the Supreme Court soon ordered publication to resume freely. Although the Times did not reveal Ellsberg as their source, he knew that the FBI would soon determine that he was the source of the leak. Ellsberg went underground, living secretly among like-minded people. He was not caught by the FBI, even though they were under enormous pressure from the Nixon Administration to find him.

The Nixon administration also began a campaign to discredit Ellsberg. Nixon’s plumbers broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in an attempt to find damaging information. When they failed to find Ellsberg’s file, they made plans to break into the psychiatrist’s home.

The release of these papers was politically embarrassing, not only to the incumbent Nixon Administration, but also to the previous Johnson and Kennedy Administrations. John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General, almost immediately issued a telegram to the Times ordering that it halt publication. The Times refused, and the government brought suit against it.

Although the Times eventually won the trial before the Supreme Court, an appellate court ordered that the Times temporarily halt further publication. This was not the first successful attempt by the federal government to restrain the publication of a newspaper as Lincoln illustrated during the Civil War. Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to other newspapers in rapid succession, making it clear to the government that they would have to obtain injunctions against every newspaper in the country to stop the story. The right of the press to publish the papers was upheld in New York Times Co. v. U.S..

On June 28, Ellsberg publicly surrendered to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, Massachusetts. He was taken into custody believing he would spend the rest of his life in prison; he was charged with theft, conspiracy, and espionage.

In one of Nixon’s actions against Ellsberg, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, members of the White House Special Investigation Unit (also called the “White House Plumbers”) broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in September 1971, hoping to find information they could use to discredit him. The revelation of the break-in became part of the Watergate scandal. Due to the gross governmental misconduct, all charges against Ellsberg were eventually dropped. White House counsel Charles Colson was later prosecuted and pled no contest for obstruction of justice in the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office.

Daniel Ellsberg has continued as a political activist, giving lecture tours and speaking out about current events. Recently he garnered criticism from the George W. Bush administration for praising Katharine Gun and calling on others to leak any papers that reveal deception regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Daniel Ellsberg also testified in 2004 at the conscientious objector hearing of Camilo Mejia at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

The Pentagon Papers is a 2003 movie documenting Ellsberg’s life starting with his work for Rand Corp and ending with the day on which the judge declared his espionage trial a mistrial.

In 2004, Ellsberg signed the 9/11 Truth Statement along with 99 other prominent Americans and 40 family members of victims killed in the attacks of September 11th. Oddly enough, both Dan Ellsberg AND Michael Levine are signatories to that statement. The statement is a public appeal for a new inquiry into the attacks of September 11th, with an explicit call to examine evidence that suggests high-level government officials purposely allowed the attacks to occur.

Ellsberg was arrested, in November 2005, for violating a county ordinance for trespassing while protesting against George W. Bush’s conduct of the Iraq War.

In September 2006, Ellsberg wrote in Harper’s Magazine that he hoped someone would leak information about a U.S. invasion of Iran before the invasion happened, to stop the war. He reiterated this in a September 21, 2006 interview on The Colbert Report.

Ellsberg is the recipient of the Inaugural Ron Ridenhour Courage Award; a prize established by The Nation Institute and The Fertel Foundation. On September 28, 2006 he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award.

Dr. Ellsberg’s website – www.ellsberg.net

Alpert was taken by a carful of gun-toting thugs looking to use his ATM card, but when they learned his bank balance, the plan changed. They took him, blindfolded by his own scarf, to a Brooklyn apartment, with the idea of going to a bank the next day and withdrawing most of it. But the later it got, the more the plan changed again…and again…as his captors alternately held guns to his head, threatened his family, engaged him in discussions of gangsta philosophy, sought his legal advice and, once they learned it was his birthday, offered him sexual favors from their girlfriends as a “birthday present”. All the while, Alpert, still blindfolded, talked with them, played on their attitudes and fears, tried to figure out where their mood swings would take them next, and memorized every detail he could in the event he ever managed to get out of there alive….

Mike and Mark interview Stan about this amazing story, and the way it changed his life is something you don’t want to miss.

About the guest:

Stanley N. Alpert served for 13 years with the United States Department of Justice, as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. As Chief of Environmental Litigation, Mr. Alpert investigated, prosecuted, and supervised many complex environmental civil and criminal cases and he litigated many trials and appeals.

Mr. Alpert worked on hazardous waste, asbestos, land use and other environmental issues, under many environmental statutes, including CERCLA, RCRA, NEPA, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Ocean Dumping Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

Stan Alpert has received numerous awards and commendations for his work as a prosecutor, including the Henry L. Stimson Medal awarded for Outstanding Performance as an Assistant U.S. Attorney by the Association of the Bar for the City of New York. He also twice received the Justice Department’s prestigious Director’s Award for Superior Performance. Mr. Alpert received his B.S. in Economics from Binghamton University (SUNY) and his J.D. from University of Pennsylvania.

Prior to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Stan was law clerk to the Honorable Edward B. Davis, United States District Judge for the Southern District of Florida in Miami. He also worked at the New York law firm of Kaye Scholer, LLP, where he was a commercial litigator on environmental, real estate, contract, trademark, and other matters.

After leaving the government, Mr. Alpert was Head of the Environmental Toxic Tort Unit at the New York law firm of Weitz & Luxenberg, focusing his practice on environmental and toxic tort matters, such as MTBE litigation against the oil industry, and actions for injury to people or damages to property from a host of environmental contaminants. He was Plaintiffs’ Liaison Counsel to MDL 1358 in the Southern District of New York, coordinating well over a hundred law suits against the oil industry for MTBE contamination of people’s drinking water. He is Co-Chair of the Toxic Torts Committee, Environmental Law Section, New York State Bar Association.

Mr. Alpert has recently opened The Alpert Firm in New York City, with focused practice in environmental and toxic tort cases for harm caused by pollution as well as commercial, real estate, and government false claims litigation.

Stan’s website is at http://www.stanleyalpert.com.

In the years leading to the 9/11 attacks, no single agent of al Qaeda was more successful in compromising the U.S. intelligence community than Ali Mohamed. A former Egyptian army captain, Mohamed succeeded in infiltrating the CIA in Europe, the Green Berets at Fort Bragg, and the FBI in California—even as he helped to orchestrate the al Qaeda campaign of terror that culminated in 9/11. As investigative reporter Peter Lance demonstrates in this gripping narrative, senior U.S. law enforcement officials—including the now-celebrated U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who personally interviewed Mohamed long before he was brought to ground—were powerless to stop him. In the annals of espionage, few men have moved between the hunters and the hunted with as much audacity as Ali Mohamed. For almost two decades, the former Egyptian army commando succeeded in living a double life. Brazenly slipping past watch lists, he moved in and out of the U.S. with impunity, marrying an American woman, becoming a naturalized citizen, and posing as an FBI informant—all while acting as chief of security for Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Known to his fellow terrorists as Ali Amiriki, or “Ali the American,” Mohamed gained access to the most sensitive intelligence in the U.S. counterterrorism arsenal while brokering terror summits, planning bombing missions, and training jihadis in bomb building, assassination, the creation of sleeper cells, and other acts of espionage.Building on the investigation he first chronicled in his previous books, 1000 Years for Revenge and Cover Up, Lance uses Mohamed to trace the untold story of al Qaeda’s rise in the 1980s and 1990s. Incredibly, Mohamed, who remains in custodial witness protection today, has never been sentenced for his crimes. He exists under a veil of secrecy—a living witness to how the U.S. intelligence community was outflanked for years by the terror network. From his first appearance on the FBI’s radar in 1989—training Islamic extremists on Long Island—to his presence in the database of Operation Able Danger eighteen months before 9/11, this devious triple agent was the one terrorist they had to sweep under the rug. Filled with news-making revelations, Triple Cross exposes the incompetence and duplicity of the FBI and Justice Department before 9/11 . . . and raises serious questions about how many more secrets the Feds may still be hiding.

Tonight, Mike and Mark talk with Peter Lance, author of Triple Cross, about this incredible story.

Click HERE to download the Triple Cross Timeline in PDF format. (1.66 mb)

Peter Lance is a five-time Emmy-winning investigative reporter now working as a screenwriter and novelist. With a Masters Degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law, Lance spent the first 15 years of his career as a print reporter and network correspondent.

He began his career as a reporter for his hometown paper, The Newport, R.I. Daily News. There he won the coveted Sevellon Brown Award from the A.P. Managing Editors Association. Lance next moved to WNET, the PBS flagship in New York, where he won his first New York area Emmy and the Ohio State Award as a producer- reporter for Channel 13′s news magazine THE 51ST STATE.

Later, while working as a writer and producer for WABC-TV Lance won his second Emmy along with the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism prize for WILLOWBROOK: THE PEOPLE VS. THE STATE OF NEW YORK, an exposé on a notorious institution for the mentally retarded. He also was award The National Community Service Emmy for that same documentary.

While getting his law degree, Lance worked as a Trial Preparation Assistant in the office of the District Attorney for New York County. Moving to ABC News as a field producer in 1978, Lance won his fourth Emmy in 1980 for his investigation of an arson-for-profit ring in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago: “Arson and Profit.”

In 1981 Lance became Investigative Correspondent for ABC News. For his very first investigative piece on 20/20 Lance won his fifth Emmy for “Unnecessary Surgery,” an exposé of unnecessary surgery in an Arkansas hospital. He won two more Emmy nominations in 1982 for 20/20 investigative pieces on Formaldehyde “The Danger Within” and toxic waste: “Deadly Chemicals, Deadly Oil;” a piece that also won the National Headliner Award.

Over the next five years he covered hundreds of stories worldwide for ABC NEWS 20/20, NIGHTLINE, and WORLD NEWS TONIGHT.

He was a member of the first American crew into Indochina after the end of the Vietnam War. He chased rebel insurgents through the Plaine Des Jarres in Laos and members of the Gambino Family through the toxic wastelands of New Jersey. He tracked knife-happy surgeons in the Deep South and nuclear terrorists through the twisted streets of Antwerp. Then, in 1987, he took a break from non-fiction.
Lance came to L.A. and began working as a writer and story editor for Michael Mann on two of his acclaimed NBC series: CRIME STORY and MIAMI VICE.

In 1989 Lance became the co-executive producer and “show runner” on the fourth season of WISEGUY for CBS and in 1993 he co-created MISSING PERSONS, for ABC. In recent years, he has served as a writer and consulting producer on such series as JAG (NBC) and THE SENTINEL (UPN).
In 1997 Lance’s first novel FIRST DEGREE BURN became a national best seller, ranking No. 24 on The Ingram A-List The Top 50 Requested Titles in Mystery- Detective Fiction. The film-noir mystery features FDNY Fire Marshal Eddie Burke.

Later Lance adapted VEIL: THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA, Bob Woodward’s best-seller on William Casey for HBO. For Showtime he wrote TERROR.NET, the story of Bradley Smith, the courageous Diplomatic Security agent responsible for helping to apprehend the world’s most notorious terrorists.
In the year 2000 Lance returned to investigative reporting with his best-selling non-fiction investigative biography: THE STINGRAY: Lethal Tactics of The Sole Survivor.

Following the 9/11 attacks Lance began investigating the origins of the FBI’s original probe of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Ahmed Yousef. After visiting Yousef’s former bomb factory in the Philippines, he came away with 100′s of pages of classified documents proving that Yousef had set the 9/11 plot into motion as early as 1994.

Lance then went back and examined the FBI’s original efforts to stop Yousef in 1992 as he built the first WTC device. The result is his acclaimed investigative book from Harper Collins 1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE.

Lance followed that book with COVER UP in 2004. In it he established evidence that federal officials entered into an “ends/means” decision in 1996 that buried a treasure trove of al Qaeda-related intelligence in order to preserve a series of Mafia-related cases in the Eastern District of New York (Brooklyn).

Lance presented probative evidence in the book that a senior Organized Crime Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s New York Office (NYO) may have been in a corrupt relationship with a Colombo Family killer. It was the FBI’s desire to prevent this potential scandal from tanking the mob cases, that led, Lance determined, to the al Qaeda evidence suppression.

A year after COVER UP’s publication the Brooklyn D.A. commenced a grant jury investigation inspired, in part, by Lance’s revelations about the Supervisory Special Agent: R. Lindley DeVecchio. On March 30th, 2006 DeVecchio was indicted on four counts of second degree murder stemming from that D.A.’s investigation.

In TRIPLE CROSS, the final book in Lance’s 9/11 investigative trilogy, he provides stunning evidence that senior FBI and Justice Dept. officials may have obstructed justice in their failure to monitor Ali A Mohamed, Osama bin Laden’s principal spy inside the United States.

In 1999, Terry Everett, R-Alabama, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations told a congressional panel that “there is without question a good-old-boy network within the VA” that tolerates “favoritism, cronyism, harassment, and reprisal.” He indicated that retaliation against VA whistleblowers was common and goes unpunished.

Although the Department of Veterans Affairs has and continues to provide many important quality services to veteran patients, layers of administration have condoned and engaged in covert activities that place our veterans at risk. This nation cannot afford to dishonor it’s veterans by condoning criminal activity among Department of Veterans Affairs administrators.

Because of the breadth of this problem, Dr. Fudin has engaged other Veterans Affairs whistleblowers by forming a national Veterans Affairs Whistleblower Coalition (VAWBC). The coalition consists of Veterans Affairs employees (past or present) who agree to actively lobby Congress to end government retaliation against those who expose veteran patient harm and/or abuse and/or major ethical flaws. Currently, there is a false sense of security that such protection does exisit through the services of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC). Unfortunately, the OSC is overwhelmed with such cases and is unable to completely investigate and follow-up with every filed complaint.

About the guest:
Dr. Jeffrey Fudin graduated from Albany College of Pharmacy (ACP) with his Bachelor’s degree and his Doctor of Pharmacy degree in 1981 and 1998. He completed an American Cancer Society Fellowship in Oncology/Hematology at SUNY Upstate Medical Center. He is a board-certified Diplomate to the American Academy of Pain Management, and a member of several other professional organizations.

Aside from his expertise in pain management, Dr. Fudin has been nationally recognized as a federal whistleblower, activities for which he has received extensive national attention.

Dr. Fudin challenged the Department of Veterans Affairs in federal court for retaliation specific to his whistleblowing activities after he disclosed research violations beginning as early as 1993. For his role in defending the rights of Veterans, he and fellow whistleblower Tony Mariano were appointed Co-Grand Marshals for the May 26, 2003, Albany Memorial Day Parade by the City of Albany Joint Veterans Committee. Dr. Fudin expressed his thanks for Mr. Mariano “for his bravery in supporting me and standing up for the ethical foundation of our profession, but more importantly, no person could every repay him for his honesty and integrity that ultimately ended his federal career for standing up to the Stratton VA Administration for the sake of veterans. In my opinion, he is a true hero.”
Some veterans wore T-shirts emblazoned with whistles and, on a rainy May day, blew whistles as Dr. Fudin and a pharmacist colleague led the parade. Three weeks later, on June 16, 2003, a New York State Assembly Resolution was adopted “honoring Dr. Jeffrey Fudin for his bravery and commitment to patient care.”

His website is at www.vawhistleblower.com

The House of Death is the story of how an informant for Homeland Security, working “undercover” under the direct control of a Bush appointed United States Attorney, operated a macabre house of horrors in which more than a dozen people were tortured to death with the informant taking part. There have been a continuing series of articles at Narco News on the subject, reported by Bill Conroy, who has been a frequent guest.

Our guests are Sibel Edmonds, a courageous whistleblower who subsequently became the Director of the National Security Whistleblower’s Coalition, and William Weaver who acts as Senior Advisor to the same organization.

About the guests:
Sibel Edmonds worked as a language specialist for the FBI’s Washington Field Office. During her work with the bureau, she discovered and reported serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence that had national security implications. After she reported these acts to FBI management, she was retaliated against by the FBI and ultimately fired in March 2002. Since that time, court proceedings on her issues have been blocked by the assertion of “State Secret Privilege” by Attorney General Ashcroft; the Congress of the United States has been gagged and prevented from any discussion of her case through retroactive re-classification by the Department of Justice. Ms. Edmonds is fluent in Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani; and has a MA in Public Policy and International Commerce from George Mason University, and a BA in Criminal Justice and Psychology from George Washington University. PEN American Center awarded Ms. Edmonds the 2006 PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award for her “commitment to preserving the free flow of information in the United States in a time of growing international isolation and increasing government secrecy”.

Bill Weaver served in U.S. Army signals intelligence for eight years in Berlin and Augsburg, Germany in the late 1970s and 1980s. He subsequently received his law degree and Ph.D. in politics from the University of Virginia, where he was on the editorial board of the Virginia Law Review. He is presently an Associate Professor and Associate Director of Faculty for the Institute for Policy and Economic Development and an Associate in the Center for Law and Border Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. He specializes in executive branch secrecy policy, governmental abuse, and law and bureaucracy. His articles have appeared in American Political Science Review, Political Science Quarterly, Virginia Law Review, Journal of Business Ethics, Organization and other journals. He has co-authored several books on law and political theory.

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
NSWBC Files a FOIA lawsuit Against
DEA & DOJ in House of Death Case

Excerpted from a new Narco News Article by Bill Conroy:

The litigation, which (Bill) Weaver says is “part of an effort by the NSWBC” to expose the truth in the House of Death, was filed under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It alleges that Washington bureaucrats are stonewalling the release of public records that promise to further illuminate the government’s role in facilitating the House of Death bloodshed.

Among the documents Weaver is seeking from the government (that the DOJ and DEA have so far refused to release) are an internal report involving more than 40 interviews conducted jointly by a team of DEA and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigators as well as a tape recording made of the first murder at the House of Death.

The murder toll at the house in Ciudad Juarez reached at least a dozen over a five-month period ending in mid-January 2004. A U.S. government informant who had penetrated a Juarez cell of the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes narco-trafficking organization, arranged, and in some cases participated in, the torture and murder sessions while he was under the supervision of ICE agents and a U.S. prosecutor in El Paso, Texas.

DOJ attorneys currently have deportation proceedings pending against that informant, Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, which if successful, would return him to Mexico and into the hands of the narco-traffickers he betrayed — setting up the informant to become yet another murder victim of the House of Death.

Weaver, in conjunction with Narco News, filed the initial Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with DEA in October 2005 seeking the release of public-record material related to the House of Death case. However, to date, Weaver claims in the lawsuit that the agency has “wrongfully withheld the requested records.”

Click here to download a PDF copy of the lawsuit

Related links:
Read Bill Conroy’s Investigative pieces on the House of Death

Can you believe that mainstream media is not interested in a story in which:

–an informant for Homeland Security, working “undercover” under the direct control of a Bush appointed United States Attorney, operates a macabre house of horrors in which more than a dozen people are tortured to death with the informant taking part?

–the reign of terror only ends when the murder of a DEA agent and his family is narrowly averted?

–a top DEA official starts an investigation that quickly determines that the the house of death is being operated and funded by officials of the US government?

–the DEA official is forced off the job for trying to push the investigation into the roll the Bush appointed prosecutor played in all this?

–the suspect prosecutor is PROMOTED to a high level Department of Justice position?

–the files are “vanishing?”

–memories of suspects are clouding over?

Well, whether or not mainstream media pays any attention, your EXPERT WITNESS is not letting the story disappear from New York Airwaves…

Our guests are Bill Conroy, a courageous investigative journalist who has stuck with this story from the beginning, and Sandalio Gonzalez, an equally courageous DEA agent who broke the story.

Previous shows on related topics:
Read Bill Conroy’s Investigative pieces on the House of Death

How close are we really to Nuclear Terror?

What does specific hard intelligence tell us are the probabilities of nuclear terror…soon?

What are Osama’s stated plans?

Why hasn’t it happened yet?

Are we less prepared then we were on September 10, 2001?

What role does media ineptitude and/or lack of expertise in covering our intelligence agencies play in our lack of preparedness?

What role does the publication of phony war-on-terror “victory” stories claimed by FBI and CIA, by mainstream, play in keeping us dozing, while the dark clouds of nuclear terror draw closer?

The war on terror has become a household subject since the attacks on September 11, 2001. In reality, the jihad against America did not happen overnight. It has been coming for quite some time. Paul Williams’ The Dunces of Doomsday documents ten blunders that resulted in an invigorated radical Islam, terrorism worldwide, and the coming “American Hiroshima.”

PAUL L. WILLIAMS, Ph.D., is a journalist and the author of The Al Qaeda Connection: International Terrorism, Organized Crime, and the Coming Apocalypse; The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia; and Osama’s Revenge: The Next 9/11–What the Media and the Government Haven’t Told You. He has served as a consultant for the FBI, as editor and publisher of the Metro in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and as an adjunct professor of humanities at the University of Scranton.

Books by the author:

Osama’s Revenge: The Next 9/11, What the Media and the Government Haven’t Told You

The Al Qaeda Connection: International Terrorism, Organized Crime, and the Coming Apocalpse

Dunces of Doomsday: 16 Blunders That Gave Rise to Radical Islam

Psyched Out: How Psychiatry Sells Mental Illness and Pushes Pills That Kill is an in-depth investigation into the fraud of psychiatric diagnosing and the dangerous, potentially life-threatening adverse reactions connected to the prescription mind-altering drugs used as “treatment.”

It is not a book that the psychiatric community or the pharmaceutical industry will appreciate because it exposes the lack of science to support even one psychiatric mental disorder being an objective, confirmable abnormality of the brain, and it further provides the People with the whole truth about the alleged mind-altering “treatments” that are reported to target specific alleged mental abnormalities, which the pharmaceutical companies openly admit they do not understand how the drugs work in the human brain in the treatment of the stated alleged mental illnesses.

The well-known, yet completely theoretical, “chemical imbalance” is debunked by some of the nation’s leading experts. Never in the history of the world has science discovered what the correct brain chemical levels are for any living person, making it impossible to know if these naturally occurring chemicals are out of balance. And, in fact, a test that measures a person’s brain chemicals does not even exist.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Award-winning investigative reporter Kelly O’Meara’s coverage of the adverse effects of psychiatric mind-altering drugs is virtually unmatched by any other journalist in the United States. During her six-year tenure (1998-2004) at The Washington Times’ Insight magazine, O’Meara wrote a series of articles (more than two dozen) examining the prescription drug industry and the connection between prescription psychiatric drugs and the increasing number of school shootings. She focused heavily on the lack of science behind the psychiatric diagnoses for which the drugs are prescribed, and the adverse reactions linked to antidepressants. Her articles resulted in record sales of the issues in which they appeared, as well as press coverage and interview requests that continue to this day. Among the national and international press that have featured her articles or asked her to appear are Fox News, the O’Reilly Factor, CBS News, BBC, ABC’s 20/20 and Hannity and Colmes.
For her work, The National Foundation for Women Legislators named O’Meara Investigative Reporter of the Year in 2001 and the following year, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights gave her their International Human Rights Award.

Other major investigative reports that O’Meara filed while at Insight include a 12-part series entitled How the Money Works, that probed Federal agency financial reporting. Her examinations of annual updates of department and agency audits focusing on missing money showed that trillions go unaccounted for at agencies such as the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In another series, U.S. Money Laundering, O’Meara looked at Enron, the Bank of New York and an estimated $500 billion of annual money laundering in the U.S. financial system. She also explored the relationship between Washington and capital markets.

In her series, Local Government Corruption, O’Meara investigated corruption in county governments and the judiciary, specifically the County of Los Angeles court system. She was the first reporter to break the story of the Los Angeles judges’ slush fund account and trigger an independent audit of that account, which has since been transferred to the county. She received the 1999 Friend of the Child Award from the California Protective Parents Association for her articles on the Los Angeles family courts.

Prior to working as an investigative journalist, O’Meara spent sixteen years on Capitol Hill. In 1996, as Administrative Assistant for Congressman Michael P. Forbes (R., NY), she was the lead investigator for the 1996 TWA 800 air disaster off the coast of Long Island, New York. As a caseworker for Congressman Raymond J. McGrath (R., NY), whom she served from 1981 to 1992, she conducted a three-year investigation into the 1987 controversial death of a Marine Corporal, who was serving in San Salvador at the time. O’Meara also served on the staff of Congressman David A. Levy (R. NY) and Congressman Kika de la Garza (D. TX). She holds a B.S. in Political Science from the University of Maryland.

Related Sites:
psychedout.net – Kelly O’ Meara’s website

Mike and Mark spend this episode going over a whole bunch of news items – links below.

Links:

FBI Agent slams bosses at Moussaoui Trial
The FBI agent who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 testified Monday he spent almost four weeks trying to warn U.S. officials about the radical Islamic student pilot but “criminal negligence” by superiors in Washington thwarted a chance to stop the 9/11 attacks.

Top Wall Street Firms Blast Chertoff on NY aid cuts
Wall Street sent Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff a stern letter yesterday, raising “grave concern” about the department’s decision to cut New York’s security funding by 40%.

Documents shed light on CIA’s use of ex-nazis
The Central Intelligence Agency took no action after learning the pseudonym and whereabouts of the fugitive Holocaust overseer Adolf Eichmann in 1958, according to CIA documents that shed new light on the spy agency’s use of former Nazis as informers after World War II.

Lionel Bruno Jordan was murdered on January 20, 1995, in an El Paso parking lot, but he keeps coming back as the key to a multibillion-dollar drug industry, two corrupt governments — one called the United States and the other Mexico — and a self-styled War on Drugs that is a fraud. Beneath all the policy statements and bluster of politicians is a real world of lies, pain, and big money.

Down by the River is the true narrative of how a murder led one American family into this world and how it all but destroyed them. It is the story of how one Mexican drug leader outfought and outthought the U.S. government, of how major financial institutions were fattened on the drug industry, and how the governments of the U.S. and Mexico buried everything that happened. All this happens down by the river, where the public fictions finally end and the facts read like fiction. This is a remarkable American story about drugs, money, murder, and family.

Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with author Charles Bowden about this tragic, neverending story.

About the guest:

Charles Bowden is an American non-fiction author, journalist, and essayist based in Tucson, Arizona. He is a former writer for the Tucson Citizen and often writes about the American Southwest. He is a contributing editor of GQ and Mother Jones magazine, and writes for other periodicals including Harper’s Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and Aperture. He is the winner of the 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Now Marc and his team focus their investigative efforts on THE PROTOCOLS OF ZION. A fictional propaganda creation presenting a Zionist conspiracy to take over the world, as a “Historical” document.

The POZ was created by the Russian Czarist secret service in the early 1900′s, in order to garner public support for the then ongoing murderous “pogroms” (rapes and murders) of Eastern European Jewery.
Astoundingly, to some, the “Protocols of Zion” is still a worldwide best seller, even available at Walmart’s. Marc Levin and crew have spent the last year investigating the effects of “the lie that won’t die” on all of us. The film “The Protocols of Zion” can be seen on Cinemax, and Cinemax on Demand.

A still from “Protocols of Zion”, where Marc Levin visits NaziMart™.

Links:

Visit Marc Levin’s website

Read Marc Levin’s Blog

Works by the guest:

Protocols of Zion

Katharine Gun, called “the blonde who dropped the bombshell on Tony Blair” by the British press, was jailed under the Official Secrets act when she outed a top secret USA/UK plan to coerce the United Nations vote in favor of invading Iraq by bugging the communications of individual members of the United Nations Security Council .

Then the charges were mysteriously dropped.

Hear the incredible inside story yourself from the woman who now proudly calls herself a Whistleblower.

Ray McGovern’s career as a CIA analyst spanned 27 years—from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush.

Ray’s responsibilities at the CIA included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief under presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. During the mid-eighties, Ray was one of the senior analysts conducting early morning briefings of the PDB one-on-one with the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. At his retirement ceremony Ray received the Intelligence Commendation Medal.

In January 2003, after it had become clear that intelligence analysis was being corrupted by political pressure to “justify” an unprovoked attack on Iraq, Ray helped create VIPS – Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. VIPS now includes over 50 former professionals from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Army Intelligence, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other US and Allied intelligence agencies.

In addition to co-authoring most of VIPS memoranda, Ray has published a number of articles and op-eds. These have appeared in newspapers around the country and in Europe. Many of Ray’s more recent articles have been published in the Miami Herald, as well as posted on TomPaine.com, Truthout.com, Commondreams.org, Counterpunch.org, Antiwar.com and other websites.

Ray received a B.A., summa cum laude, from Fordham College and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Designated a “Distinguished Military Graduate,” he was commissioned in the US Army and served two years as an infantry/intelligence officer. He holds an M.A. in Russian Studies from Fordham University, a certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown, and is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing ministry of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He writes and speaks for the arm of Tell the Word called “Speaking Truth to Power.” The scripture passage chiseled into the marble entrance to CIA headquarters says “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” There is now a huge gap between that ideal and current reality in the US intelligence community. “Speaking Truth to Power” is an attempt to call attention to that gap in the hope that, despite formidable obstacles, it can be filled.

Articles by Ray McGovern

Men Intoxicated with Power and Courtiers Who Serve Them – Truthout.org

Will the whistles blow before we attack Iran? – AlterNet

Referenced in this episode:

Joe Webber – Transcript – MSNBC

This is the last of those five hours.

Unfortunately, the audio is very low quality – it was pulled from an 8k realAudio stream dating back from 1999.

At some point in the near future, we’ll pull the original audio and update these files.  But in the meantime, here it is.

And as Mike says in this broadcast – this is one of the most important broadcasts we’ve ever done.

This is the fourth of those five hours.

Unfortunately, the audio is very low quality – it was pulled from an 8k realAudio stream dating back from 1999.

At some point in the near future, we’ll pull the original audio and update these files.  But in the meantime, here it is.

And as Mike says in this broadcast – this is one of the most important broadcasts we’ve ever done.

This is the 3rd of those five hours.

Unfortunately, the audio is very low quality – it was pulled from an 8k realAudio stream dating back from 1999.

At some point in the near future, we’ll pull the original audio and update these files.  But in the meantime, here it is.

And as Mike says in this broadcast – this is one of the most important broadcasts we’ve ever done.

This is the second of those five hours.

Unfortunately, the audio is very low quality – it was pulled from an 8k realAudio stream dating back from 1999.

At some point in the near future, we’ll pull the original audio and update these files.  But in the meantime, here it is.

And as Mike says in this broadcast – this is one of the most important broadcasts we’ve ever done.

This is the first of those five hours.

Unfortunately, the audio is very low quality – it was pulled from an 8k realAudio stream dating back from 1999.

At some point in the near future, we’ll pull the original audio and update these files.  But in the meantime, here it is.

And as Mike says in this broadcast – this is one of the most important broadcasts we’ve ever done.

While the fidelity of the actual recording leaves much to be desired, the conversation is striking to say the least.  It predicts much of what has since come to pass.

It is, in many respects, one of the most important broadcasts in the history of the show.

The three participants:

Dennis Dayle – DEA
He began his federal career working for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in Chicago, a forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he continued to distinguish himself. From the mid-1970s to 1980s, Dayle led investigations into international drug smuggling for the DEA, heading up Centac, which were chronicled in 1986 in a best-selling book, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace, by James Mills.

Ralph McGehee – CIA
a 25 year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency enlightened us with this following paragraph from his 1983 book “Deadly Deceits,” which edifies a familiar pattern of deception that we have witnessed but we never understood. He stated the following about the CIA:

“The CIA is not an intelligence agency. In fact, it acts largely as an anti-intelligence agency, producing only that information wanted by policymakers to support their plans and suppressing information that does not support those plans. As the covert action arm of the president, the CIA uses disinformation, much of it aimed at the U.S. public, to mold opinion. It employs the gamut of disinformation techniques from forging documents to planting and discovering “communist” weapons caches. But the major weapon in its arsenal of disinformation is the “intelligence” it feeds to policymakers.

Instead of gathering genuine intelligence that could serve as the basis for reasonable policies, the CIA often ends up distorting reality, creating out of the whole cloth “intelligence” to justify policies that have already been decided upon. Policymakers leak this “intelligence” to the media to deceive us all and gain our support.”

Wesley Swearingen – FBI

Former FBI Special Agent from 1951 to 1977, M. Wesley Swearingen wrote “FBI Secrets”. This important work traces his FBI career in “domestic counter-intelligence” from the time he signed on after World War II to his retirement and beyond.

Swearingen began his career doing “black bag jobs” on Communists in Chicago. In Kentucky and New York City, he spent years doing serious criminal investigations, which had been his goal in joining the FBI. But J. Edgar Hoover fixated on the threat posed by such groups as the Black Panthers and the Weathermen – Swearingen is more explicit than most on the FBI’s unconstitutional role in an important pattern of political corruption and illegal repression of U.S. Civil Rights in the 1960s, under his one-time mentor, Hoover.

He is interviewed in the documentary films All Power to the People! and The U.S. vs. John Lennon.

The episode runs 2.5 hours, and it’s worth every minute.