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Almost four decades after Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers – another whistleblower has stepped forward and now is facing similar retaliation.
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
Power and Corruption in the Country’s Greatest Police Force
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”
NYPD Confidential – Leonard’s latest book
 On November 28, 1953, U.S. Army biochemist Dr. Frank Olson crashed through a hotel window in New York City and fell over 150 feet to the sidewalk below where he died.
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”?
Continue reading A Terrible Mistake
The Emperor is Butt Naked
by Michael Levine
To the Reader: This article was first published in 1997, four years prior to 9/11. Imagine what a difference it might have made if mainstream media had really played its “watchdog” role and forced Congress to demand the best from our first line of defense, instead of their looking the other way at the kind of ineptitude exposed here…and only here.
Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I think he’s from the CIA
At this moment the next big and terrible secret that our CIA and some of their shills in congress and the media are scrambling to keep under wraps is that for the past eight years, they have been protecting and covering up for yet another world class drug trafficker while he and his family amassed a colossal fortune by flooding American cities with drugs. Ex- President of Mexico, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, linked to a half billion dollars in suspected drug money is now in hiding,[1] only I’m betting that my own government sources are right when they say that he is in daily contact with his CIA handlers.
Continue reading Essay: The Emperor is Butt Naked
I Volunteer to Kidnap Ollie North
by Michael Levine – ©1992
We Americans have no idea how the image of our great country has suffered throughout the world as a result of our leader’s so-called war on drugs. I just returned from an international drug symposium under the auspices of the OGD ( ), where I spent a week listening to representatives—members of police agencies, college professors, bureaucrats, elected officials and journalists—of virtually every nation in the world affected by drug problems, all of whom seemed to have one point of view in common: that the U.S. war on drugs was both a failure and a fraud.
The fact that it is a failure is readily evident on the streets of our country where it is proven in blood every day. The indications that it is a fraud, however, are much more public knowledge around the world than they are right here, where our media has lost its courage to confront political power and continue to be the kind of watchdog over our Constitution that it started to be during the Watergate years.
Continue reading Essay: I Volunteer to Kidnap Ollie North
“Despite the new controversy over whether a global CIA “hit team” ever went operational, there has been public evidence for years that the Bush administration approved “rules of engagement” that permitted executions and targeted killings of suspected insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The above from Robert Parry’s piece Bush’s Hit Teams at consortiumnews.com.
Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Bob about this great investigative piece.
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.
 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
In the first segment, Mike and Mark discuss THIS New York Times article, but more importantly, the subject of informant handling, who does it, and who hires them.
In the second part, we speak with Celerino Castillo – Vietnam Vet and Ex-DEA agent – about Iran Contra, Death Squads, government complicity in drug smuggling, Oliver North and Cele’s recent arrest..
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
“In 1976, when George H.W. Bush was CIA director, the U.S. government tolerated right-wing terrorist cells inside the United States and mostly looked the other way when these killers topped even Palestinian terrorists in spilling blood, including a lethal car bombing in Washington, D.C., according to newly obtained internal government documents.”
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.’
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Some Prior Guests David Moorhouse
Ray McGovern
Dr. Rick Nuccio
Renee Boje
Daniel Ellsberg
Richard Stratton
Gerard Colby
Greg Palast
Dennis Dayle
Ralph McGeehee
Stan Goff
Mark Levine
Vincent Bugliosi
J.H. Hatfield
Siobhan Reynolds
Charles Bowden
Katherine Gun
Bob Parry
Sandy Gonzalez
Sibel Edmonds
Ellen Mariani
Peter Lance
Senator Bob Graham
Cele Castillo
Tosh Plumlee
Donald Bains
Will Northrop
Aukai Collin
John Loftus
Joyce Reilly Von Kliest
Kelly O' Meara
John P. Flannery
Bill Conroy
Sander Hicks
Paul Williams
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Bill Conroy has worked as a reporter or editor for the past eighteen years at newspapers in Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota and Texas.
