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'Saved'? Site Lets You Send E-mails Post-Rapture

Youvebeenleftbehind.com Lets Saved Christians Send Emails From Heaven

By ASHLEY PHILLIPS
June 10, 2008


A new Web site is offering a first-of-its-kind service: sending e-mails to nonbelieving friends and family who are "left behind" after you are whisked away by God in the rapture.

The site Youvebeenleftbehind.com offers users the ability to store e-mails and documents that will be sent to up to 63 e-mail addresses six days after the rapture has occurred. Users get up to 250 megabytes of storage space, 150 megabytes of it encrypted for sensitive information such as bank account numbers or eTrade passwords that can be accessed by those who remain on earth.

In evangelical Christian theology, the rapture is marked by a sudden visit from God, in which Christians will be whisked away to heaven while remaining nonbelievers will live on earth for seven years under the rule of the anti-Christ, until God returns with his followers to rule heaven and earth.

Billed as the last chance to "snatch them from the flames," Youvebeenleftbehind.com is the month-old brainchild of Mark Heard, a 49-year-old supermarket shelf-stocker who lives in Cape Cod, Mass.

"You've Been Left Behind gives you one last opportunity to reach your lost family and friends For Christ," the site reads. "Imagine being in the presence of the Lord and hearing all of heaven rejoice over the salvation of your loved ones. It is our prayer that this site makes it happen."

Heard says it's also a way to pass on financial information to loved ones who remain on earth before God's return.

"The idea started for me in 1999 when I was& trading equities online and trying to think, 'How I can send my password to my wife if the Rapture happened at this moment?'" he said.


A Way to Proselytize?
Jeff Vacarro, a 34-year-old computer programmer in San Diego who runs the Web site Godsurfer.com, which allows users to post and rank Christian-based Web content, signed up for the service when he saw it covered on another news site last week.

Although Vacarro hasn't uploaded any messages just yet, he says that he plans to construct e-mails that give the non-believers in his life a nudge along with Bible passages.

"I like the idea behind it," said Vacarro, "It would be one final, 'Hey guys, maybe you need to check this out further & I haven't figured out what I want to say yet."


Despite the promise of encryption, Vacarro said he wasn't planning to save personal financial information on the site.

"I'm not going to put any of my financial documents up, but sending out an e-mail who to those who don't believe & when this does happen, I thought, 'Why not?'" he said.

Security experts generally recommend only using data storage services that are well-known with a proven track record and that detail the type of security used on their sites.


When the Rapture Comes
Perhaps the trickiest detail for Heard was devising a way for the digital service to determine the spiritual fates of its clients. How will the Web site know when the rapture has come?

Heard, who wouldn't reveal how many people have signed up for the service, has set up his e-mail server with what he calls a "fail-safe" clause: if three of his five employees fail to log on to their work accounts after six days, the service will be triggered and the e-mails be sent out.

"We don't want these things to go out early," he said.


The Business of Christianity
Not all of this is being done out of the kindness of Heard's faithful heart; he does charge $40 a year for membership, a fee he hopes to lower as more people join.

Christian-themed products make up a multibillion dollar industry that includes books, movies, music, theme parks, video games and even beauty pageants, according to Peter A. Maresco, a business professor at Sacred Heart University and author of the upcoming book "The Business of Christianity: The Growing Market For Everything Christian."

"This Web site is yet another extension of the use of the Internet to reach a specific demographic  in this instance, Christians saving lost souls before and even after the rapture," Maresco said.

The best example of Christian entertainment's crossover into the secular mainstream may be the best-selling juggernaut "Left Behind" book series, a fictional account of the rapture. Since its inception the series has sold 63 million books and spawned several movies and a video game.

Maresco said the Youvebeenleftbehind site may be poised to capitalize on the huge financial success of the rapture-themed books, but the blurring of the line between profits and proselytizing has some observers concerned.

"The section used to attract subscribers left me cold. However, it does reflect the potential of a market that may reach in excess of $10 billion in the next few years," Maresco said. "If there is an opportunity to market a product or, in this case, a service to the Christian demographic, then someone will find it, develop it and ultimately market it,"

Michael Budde, Depaul University political science professor and author of the book "Christianity Incorporated: How Big Business is Buying the Church," is similarly skeptical.

"It's hard to know whether this is the church of P.T. Barnum and a sucker is born every minute or whether this is a rather curious take on what the church needs in this particular type of place," he said. "I can't see this turning into a particularly big presence because, for the millions of people this fits with, to send e-mails to the left behind  I'm not sure this is going to be worth $40 to them."


Will the Web Even Work?
Despite its infiltration into pop culture, the idea of the rapture as depicted in the "Left Behind" series is a fairly new development in Christianity, according to Randy Maddox, a theology professor at Duke divinity school.

"The understanding of the rapture as a time when Christians are taken out and [others] left behind is not a universally accepted Christian belief," Maddox said. "Indeed, the model that this Web site [promotes] is something we don't find in the Christian church until the end of the 19th Century. It's a small subset of evangelicals who have adopted this."

Similarly, the catastrophic narrative that the rapture invokes doesn't jibe with the idea of a fully-functioning Internet.

"In one sense, they're arguing it will be a time of great disaster, but in another sense he's saying, 'I promise my Web site will be working,'" Maddox said. "There are logical incongruities with the model, and there's basic theological incongruities."


'This Is Someone Who Wants $40'
Several things rang alarm bells for Amy Frykholm, author of the book "Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America," a scholarly look at the "Left Behind" series and a writer for "Christian Century."

While Heard's site claims to be "for Christians by Christians," it never identifies who is running it, a point which Frykholm said made her instantly suspicious.

"I was shocked that there was no place on the site where you could find out more about the Rapture. & You don't know who these people are," Frykholm said. "My first thought: 'This is someone who wants $40.'"

According to Frykholm, people who believe in the rapture, also known as dispensationlists, are almost always evangelizing, something that doesn't happen on the site.

"That makes me very, very suspicious. I just expected something more, some attempt to reach me as the unsaved," she said. "You justify taking people's money by spreading the kingdom of God. There's nothing there to justify taking your money. & I'd be stunned if people are signing up for this."

Tim LaHaye, one of the authors of the "Left Behind" series, was less skeptical. He and co-writer Jerry B. Jenkins have been pitched several ideas over the years about communicating with those left behind after the rapture, from videos to bumper stickers, but have so far not endorsed any of them.

LaHaye called the Web site "likely very sincere."

"It is not a bad idea to leave behind some type of message for your loved ones or neighbors, giving them the plan of salvation and an explanation for your immediate disappearance," LaHaye said in an e-mailed statement. He added that Christians should talk to family and friends about their beliefs now.

In explaining his hopes for the site, Heard stressed his own strongly-held beliefs, reciting Bible verses in one breath and discussing server security in the next.

Though he won't reveal number of people who have signed up for the service, Heard says that there's been a fair amount of interest from other Christians  particularly those preparing for what they believe is inevitable.

"Nobody knows the day or the hour of the rapture," he said. "It's really an any-minute situation."


Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

Bush's 'war crimes' & misdemeanors

09/06/2008
AlJazeera Magazine Online Edition

The evidence is now overwhelming that Bush knew of – and approved of – violations of the rules of war.

By Robert Parry

Facing a tough reelection fight in 2004, George W. Bush expressed outrage over leaked photos showing U.S. military police at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison abusing detainees, who were paraded naked before female guards, threatened by attack dogs, chained in “stress positions” and forced to wear ladies underpants on their heads.

President Bush assured the American people that he “shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated.” Other administration officials pinned the blame on a “few bad apples” and dismissed the prison guards’ claim that they were told to “soften up” the detainees for interrogation.

Now, a report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General reveals that months before those abuses at Abu Ghraib, nearly identical tactics were used against “war on terror” detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at CIA prisons – and that FBI complaints about the tactics went up the chain of command back to Washington.

FBI agents at Guantanamo even opened a file that they labeled “war crimes” to document the systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions and laws against torture that they witnessed – before being told by superiors to close the file.

According to the Inspector General’s report, the FBI protests reached the White House but went unheeded. Instead, the prisoner abuses spread to Iraq where the Abu Ghraib prison was “Gitmo-ized” with the same harsh and bizarre tactics applied to Iraqi detainees.

So, the new Inspector General’s report adds to the growing body of evidence that – in the months before Election 2004 – Bush only feigned shock about what was being done to detainees in American custody.

The evidence is now overwhelming that Bush knew of – and approved of – those violations of the rules of war and basic human decency, that the “war crimes” catalogued by the FBI agents could be traced to him.

In April 2008, ABC News reported, citing unnamed sources, that during the early days of the “war on terror,” senior Bush aides met in what was called the Principals Committee to calibrate the level of harsh techniques that would be used against detainees.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

“The high-level discussions about these ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed – down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic,” ABC News reported, adding:

“These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al-Qaeda suspects – whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC News.”

Asked about his subordinates setting these interrogation rules, Bush told ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz that “yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved." [ABC News, April 11, 2008]

Moral leader?
Yet, in 2004, by dismissing the grotesque scenes at Abu Ghraib as an aberration, Bush portrayed himself as a moral leader who was furious that some low-level American soldiers would misbehave in such a fashion.

After the photos became public, Army Sgt. Sam Provance was the only uniformed military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib to support the guards’ claim that the prisoner abuse was part of the “alternative interrogation techniques” that had made their way from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib.

Provance, however, was punished for his candor and pushed out of the U.S. military. The Bush administration then went ahead and pinned the blame on the MPs.

Eventually, 11 enlisted soldiers were convicted in courts martial. Cpl. Charles Graner Jr. received the harshest sentence – 10 years in prison – while Lynndie England, a 22-year-old single mother who was photographed holding an Iraqi on a leash, was sentenced to three years in prison.

Protected from the scandal’s fallout, Bush was rewarded with a second term in the White House. Later, he began to treat the Abu Ghraib case like some freak accident that the media had blown out of proportion.

At a press conference on May 25, 2006, Bush complained, “We’ve been paying for that for a long period of time.”

However, it’s now clear the President didn’t pay much of a personal price at all. The more complete record now available indicates that Bush was a knowledgeable participant in the sadistic treatment of detainees, not an innocent bystander.

Indeed, on Feb. 7, 2002, Bush signed the key memo that cleared the way for the abuses, asserting that the Geneva Conventions’ prohibitions against the degrading treatment of prisoners did not apply to “unlawful combatants,” including al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Many casual readers missed the import of Bush’s phrasing, which stressed that captives would be treated “humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.”

The operative phrase in the memo turned out to be “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity.” In the Bush administration’s view, that was a loophole you could drive a truck full of abusive tactics through.

Fresh evidence
The Inspector General’s report, released May 20, 2008, also provides fresh evidence that senior Bush aides signed off on the harsh treatment of detainees.

In spring 2002, when FBI agents objected to the treatment of badly wounded al-Qaeda captive Abu Zubaydah – what one agent called “borderline torture” – they were assured by CIA personnel “that the procedures being used on Zubaydah had been approved ‘at the highest levels,’” the Inspector General’s report said.

But one of the FBI agents, called “Thomas” in the report, still passed on his concerns to his superior, FBI Counterterrorism Assistant Director Pasquale D'Amuro, who soon pulled the FBI agents out of the interrogation.

D’Amuro, in turn, took the issue of Zubaydah’s interrogation to FBI Director Robert Mueller; Michael Chertoff, then Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; and other senior department officials, the report said.

During a meeting with his superiors in summer 2002, D’Amuro said he learned that the CIA had obtained a legal opinion from the Justice Department opening the door for the harsh interrogations.

That was an apparent reference to memos written by John Yoo of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, claiming that the President’s commander-in-chief authority gave Bush the right to ignore laws if he deemed that necessary to protect the nation.

“After his meeting at Chertoff's office, [D’Amuro] met with Director Mueller and recommended that the FBI not get involved in interviews in which aggressive interrogation techniques were being used,” the Inspector General’s report said.

“He stated that his exact words to Mueller were ‘we don't do that,’ and that someday the FBI would be called to testify and he wanted to be able to say that the FBI did not participate in this type of activity.

“D'Amuro said that the Director agreed with his recommendation that the FBI should not participate in interviews in which these techniques were used.”

D’Amuro said he objected to the harsh techniques because they were less effective in gleaning reliable information; complicated later prosecutions; violated moral standards; and “helped al-Qaeda in spreading negative views of the United States.”

Up the ladder
These FBI concerns made there way up the ladder to Bush’s National Security Council.

Mueller’s chief of staff Daniel Levin said he attended a meeting at the NSC at which CIA techniques were discussed and an attorney from the Office of Legal Counsel [OLC] defended their legality.

“Levin stated that in connection with this meeting, or immediately after it, FBI Director Mueller decided that FBI agents would not participate in interrogations involving techniques the FBI did not normally use in the United States, even though OLC had determined such techniques were legal,” the Inspector General’s report said.

FBI agents also crossed swords with Pentagon interrogators over similar abusive techniques instituted at Guantanamo, especially the harsh questioning of suspected 20th hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani between Nov. 23, 2002, and Jan. 15, 2003.

During this period, military interrogators tied al-Qahtani to a dog leash and made him perform dog tricks; repeatedly poured water over his head; put him in painful stress positions; questioned him for periods of 20 hours straight; stripped him naked in front of a woman; held him down while a female interrogator straddled him; called his mother and sister whores; accused him of homosexual tendencies; made him dance with a male interrogator; ordered him to pray to an idol shrine; and subjected him to extreme temperatures.

At one point in December 2002, al-Qahtani was taken to a hospital suffering from low blood pressure and low body core temperature, what one FBI agent termed hypothermia.

The FBI’s objections to al-Qahtani’s interrogation also were brought to the attention of senior officials in Washington, according to the Inspector General’s report.

David Nahmias, a counsel in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, told the IG that he was “fairly confident” that department officials raised the al-Qahtani issue at a meeting of the Principals Committee.

Nahmias also said he believed Attorney General Ashcroft spoke with someone at the NSC, mostly likely NSC adviser Rice, about the FBI concerns regarding al-Qahtani.

“When asked if anything ever happened as a result of these meetings, Nahmias said that DOJ officials were continually frustrated by their inability to get any changes or make progress with regard to the al-Qahtani matter,” the report said.

Ashcroft, who resigned in November 2004 shortly after Bush won a second term, declined to be interviewed by the Inspector General.

Lack of action
But the reason for a lack of action on the FBI complaints is now more obvious.

The FBI’s evidence of “war crimes” went up the chain of command, all the way to the White House, the NSC and the Principals Committee – precisely where the abusive policies had been developed in the first place.

Before senior FBI officials grasped this high-level support for the mistreatment of detainees, some FBI agents were instructed to compile the evidence for a “war crimes” file at Guantanamo.

“At some point in 2003, however,” the Inspector General’s report said, the FBI agents at Guantanamo “received instructions not to maintain a separate ‘war crimes’ file, … that investigating detainee allegations of abuse was not the FBI's mission.”

When the ugly reality of how the United States was treating detainees finally surfaced in spring 2004 with the Abu Ghraib photos, Bush and his top aides pretended that they were innocent parties as shocked as everyone else.

By laying the blame off on a “few bad apples,” Bush managed to get through the November 2004 election relatively unscathed.

And now that the truth is finally coming to the surface, it appears to be too late for him to be held accountable for “war crimes” and other abuses of his presidential powers.

Some members of the Democratic-controlled Congress have expressed outrage over the latest disclosures and want hearings.

But – if recent history suggests anything – it is that the Bush administration will brush aside congressional inquiries, and the Democrats, who long ago took impeachment off the table, will surrender once again.

-- 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 , 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. Or go to Amazon.com.

ConsortiumNews





-- Middle East Online

The Next Real Estate Crisis

Hey, I thought Big Ben got this shit under control.

By April, 2009, hundreds of thousands of option ARM mortgages will begin resetting, bringing on a fresh wave of foreclosures
by Prashant Gopal

The American homeowner must feel like one of those characters in an old cartoon who has just been hit by a falling piano. After dusting himself off and touching the large bump on his head, he probably doesn't expect another piano to be dangling overhead. But he'd be wrong.

But what's often funny in a cartoon is anything but in real life. With the subprime mortgage crisis already crippling the U.S. economy, some experts are warning that the next wave of foreclosures will begin accelerating in April, 2009. What that means is that hundreds of thousands of borrowers who took out so-called option adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) will begin to see their monthly payments skyrocket as they reset. About a million borrowers have option ARMs, but only a fraction have already fallen due.

That was the catch to option ARMs; borrowers were offered low initial payments that would recast higher after several years. Many home buyers thought they could resell their homes before their payments increased. But instead, many of them got trapped. According to Credit Suisse (CS), monthly option recasts are expected to accelerate starting in April, 2009, from $5 billion to a peak of about $10 billion in January, 2010. Some of these loans have already started to recast. About 13% of option ARMs that were issued in 2006 were delinquent by 60 days by the time they were 18 months old, Credit Suisse said.

California: Problem's Bellwether
Among the states expected to be worst-hit is already battered California. Today, outstanding option ARM loans in the U.S. total about $500 billion, about 60% of which were sold to California homeowners, according to Credit Suisse. Option ARMs were especially popular in the state, where they were heavily marketed during the boom by such companies as Countrywide Financial (CFC) in Calabasas, Calif.; Washington Mutual (WM) in Seattle; and Wachovia (WB) in Charlotte, N.C. Moreover, on top of their ARMs, many homeowners also refinanced their homes, driving themselves even deeper into a debt they thought they could escape by flipping their homes.

But California won't be alone. Homeowners are also frighteningly vulnerable in states such as Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, and others.

The Mortgage Bankers Assn. said on June 5 that the option ARM problem is growing. The group reported that the national rate of foreclosure starts for prime ARMs, including option ARMs, increased to 1.55% in the first quarter, up from 0.53% a year earlier. In California the foreclosure start rate in the first quarter was 2%, vs. 0.5% a year earlier. In Florida, the rate was 2.57%, compared with 0.5% in the first quarter of 2007. "California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada combined…represent 62% of all foreclosures started on prime ARM loans, and 84% of the increase in prime ARM foreclosures," the group said.

The option ARM loan defaults could accelerate next year even if subprime defaults subside, said Chandrajit Bhattacharya, vice-president and mortgage strategist at Credit Suisse Securities. He said California will see the bulk of the option ARM foreclosures and the rest will be spread out across the country.

Underwater and Gasping for Air
"Most of the public is thinking that the subprime thing is over, but this is another thing waiting," Bhattacharya said. "The problem for these borrowers is that once you go underwater, it's very hard to refinance, and if you cannot refinance there is very little option for you."

But it gets worse.

Option ARMs, which were originally designed for self-employed people with fluctuating incomes, gained popularity with other workers during the peak of the real estate boom in 2004, when rapidly rising home values would have otherwise kept many buyers out of the market.


The loans, which were generally given to borrowers with better-than-subprime credit, give homeowners the option of making a minimum monthly payment, which covers none of the principal and only a portion of the interest, the rest of which is added to the loan balance. With years of unpaid interest accumulating and house prices falling, some homeowners have seen their equity disappear and now owe even more than their initial loan balance.

The loans automatically recast after five years, but many will recast sooner as loan balances hit specific principal caps—typically between 110% and 125% of the initial loan amount. Many of these loans are expected to recast within the next two years, meaning that borrowers' monthly payments will swell to include both principal and interest.

Walking Away from a Collapse
Some borrowers say they signed up for the complicated loans without understanding the terms, or expected to be able to refinance or sell their homes before the loans recast. Instead, home prices fell and the credit crunch made refinancing impossible for many borrowers.

Some homeowners are simply walking away because with their equity vanishing, there's little incentive to stay.

William Purdy, a lawyer at Simmons & Purdy in Soquel, Calif., a firm that specializes in home refinance issues, said some borrowers with option ARMs are defaulting before the loans recast because they couldn't afford even marginal increases in the minimum payments.

"It's a ticking time bomb inside your house that you can't get rid of," Purdy said. "They can try to slow down the inevitable, but sooner or later their loan is going to cap. …This year is going to be a blood bath. Next year, we'll start out just about the same."

Crushed by the Slump
The option ARM was initially a blessing and then a curse for Deborah Shaw, a 52-year-old systems analyst for Santa Cruz County, Calif. In 2004 she bought a $575,000 two-bedroom house with her boyfriend with a 40-year fixed mortgage. But when she and her boyfriend split, Shaw could no longer make the payments. She refinanced into an option ARM, which allowed for a $1,600 minimum payment (she was paying $2,300 on the fixed loan).

Shaw planned to avoid a recast by selling the house in a couple of years, but the housing slump changed everything.

Shaw now thinks her loan has already recast, which means that her monthly payment would more than double. Shaw doesn't know for sure, because she stopped answering her lender's daily phone calls and, since April, stopped making payments entirely. She says foreclosure is her only option.

"I call the house my albatross," Shaw said. "I feel a sense of relief knowing I won't have that house to deal with anymore. I'm not looking forward to moving and selling everything. But I am looking forward to not having stress about something I can't afford."

New FHA Loan Guarantees
But options are available—even if refinancing isn't possible. Lenders have been working with borrowers to reduce loan amounts and interest rates and, in some cases, simply accept the deed in lieu of foreclosure.

The Mortgage Bankers Assn. says it appears that a growing number of homeowners are avoiding foreclosure by getting help from the Hope Now hotline (888 995-HOPE), a mortgage-counseling phone line backed by lenders and the federal government that gets 4,000 calls a day. Hotline counselors help borrowers negotiate with banks and offer advice on refinancing options. Even though foreclosure rates are rising in California and Florida, they've slowed elsewhere, the bankers association said.

Some callers to the hotline have complained about long wait times, but the group says it has beefed up its counseling staff and now gets to calls quickly.

Other option ARM borrowers could benefit from government plans now in the works. A bill approved by the House in May would allow the Federal Housing Administration to guarantee up to $300 billion in new loans to help homeowners facing foreclosure. Borrowers could get more affordable loans worth no more than 90% of the home's value, meaning that participating lenders would have to take a significant loss on the loan. The bill was sponsored by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.). Senate Banking Chairman Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) has a similar measure.

Foreclosure Is Not Inevitable
"The fact is that people didn't really understand the transaction at the outset and were counting on being able to refinance when the loan got recast," said Colleen Hernandez, president of Minneapolis nonprofit Homeownership Preservation Foundation, which owns and operates the hotline. "That combination means a lot of risk, a lot of danger in the situation. But it isn't inevitable that they foreclose, and foreclosure isn't the best option."

Moe Bedard, founder of LoanSafe.org in Corona, Calif., a free online forum that helps homeowners negotiate loan modifications, said the larger problem is that banks, many of which laid off scores of loan officers, are so swamped that many borrowers can't get the attention they need.

Many California homeowners, including some with $2 million homes, are simply making their minimum payment, waiting for the recast. Then they plan to walk away, even if it damages their credit, Bedard said.

"A lot of people are just walking," Bedard said. "It's just a business decision; they don't have a lot of skin in the game." But for many others it will be devastating.

The Voice of the White House for June 7th 2008

Washington , D.C., : “Not only is our beloved President sliding off the muddy cliff into the cesspit of public oblivion, he is dragging the far-right Republicans and the pro-Israeli neocons with him. Added to this mixed bag of fruits and nuts, we also have the evangelical Christians who are loud, vicious and entirely crazy.

McCain, who has the acumen of a jar of pond scum, chased the lunatic Christian nut, John Hagee, around, panting after his endorsement. McCain must be living back in the Coolidge administration because the so-called Christian Right has been repudiated by most Americans and their endless rantings about abortion and gays are falling on very deaf ears.

Now, we learn that the pathetic Hagee is claiming the fictional anti-Christ is going to be both Jewish and gay! It has always been a curiosity to me, and others, that born-again freakos loathe gays so much. Given the Haggard revelations, I strongly suspect that the loudest gay-bashers secretly lust after other men and are filled with self-hatred.

These pin heads are in love with the Book of Revelations which most historians know was written a hundred years after the early Christian era by the inmate of a Roman lunatic colony on the island of Patmos . They love this nonsense because you can read into it anything you want…and they do, regularly. Hagee has also said that Hitler was a Jew, which he wasn’t, and that God made Hitler go after the Jews to force them to repopulate the Holy Land !

Most of the Jews who fled to Palestine in 1946-1948 are not even ethnic Jews but are descended from Caspian Sea Turkish tribes and have about as much historical right there as Canadian geese.

If it isn’t the idiot Hagee bellowing about evil gays, it’s professional Jews screaming about 800 passenger gas vans and twenty millions barbecued. This is what comes of promulgating Political Correctness. No one dares to speak out against this sort of imbecilic propaganda just as one cannot poke fun at Mongoloids, dwarves or urine colored people. Don’t forget the old law of physics: Every action has a reaction. I’m waiting, eagerly, for it.”

Conversations with the Crow: Part 4

Editor’s note: When we ran the first conversation, there was the question of reader interest and acceptability. It is pleasant to report that our server was jammed with viewers and the only other tbrnews story that has had more viewers was our Forward Base Falcon story that had a half a million viewers in less that two days. We are now going to reprint all of the Crowley conversations, including a very interesting one on John McCain, in chronological sequence. It is also pleasant to note that two publishers and three reporters have all expressed concrete interest in the Crowley conversations.

On October 8th, 2000 , Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA's Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer's Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley 's widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley 's CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley , died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda , Md.

After Corson's death, Trento and a well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson's bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled 'Zipper.' This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley 's involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento 's house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA's actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA's horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA's activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious 'Regional Interrogation Centers' in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid "historians" and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley 's survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files our of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement , secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago , Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in military intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

One of Crowley ’s first major assignments within the agency was to assist in the recruitment and management of prominent World War II Nazis, especially those with advanced intelligence experience. One of the CIA’s major recruitment coups was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler’s Gestapo who had fled to Switzerland after the collapse of the Third Reich and worked as an anti-Communist expert for Masson of Swiss counterintelligence. Mueller was initially hired by Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA, who was running the Gehlen Organization out of Pullach in southern Germany . Crowley eventually came to despise Critchfield but the colonel was totally unaware of this, to his later dismay.

Crowley ’s real expertise within the agency was the Soviet KGB. One of his main jobs throughout his career was acting as the agency liaison with corporations like ITT, which the CIA often used as fronts for moving large amounts of cash off their books. He was deeply involved in the efforts by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile , which eventually got him into legal problems with regard to investigations of the U.S. government’s grand jury where he has perjured himself in an agency cover-up

After his retirement, Crowley began to search for someone who might be able to write a competent history of his career. His first choice fell on British author John Costello (author of Ten Days to Destiny, The Pacific War and other works) but, discovering that Costello was a very aggressive homosexual, he dropped him and tentatively turned to Joseph Trento who had assisted Crowley and William Corson in writing a book on the KGB. When Crowley discovered that Trento had an ambiguous and probably cooperative relationship with the CIA, he began to distrust him and continued his search for an author.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. . In 1996, Crowley , Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley ’s story but only after Crowley ’s death. Douglas , for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

In 1998, when Crowley was slated to go into the hospital for exploratory surgery, he had his son, Greg, ship two large foot lockers of documents to Douglas with the caveat that they were not to be opened until after Crowley ’s death. These documents, totaled an astonishing 15,000 pages of CIA classified files involving many covert operations, both foreign and domestic, during the Cold War.

After Crowley ’s death and Trento ’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley ’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley ’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas . No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.

All of this furor eventually came to the attention of Dr. Peter Janney, a Massachusetts clinical psychologist and son of Wistar Janney, another career senior CIA official, colleague of not only Bob Crowley but Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Jim Angleton and others. Janney was working on a book concerning the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official, and later the mistress of President John F. Kennedy. Douglas had authored a book, ‘Regicide’ which dealt with Crowley ’s part in the Kennedy assassination and he obviously had access to at least some of Crowley ’s papers. Janney was very well connected inside the CIA’s higher levels and when he discovered that Douglas had indeed known, and had often spoken with, Crowley and that after Crowley’s death, the FBI had descended on Crowley’s widow and son, warning them to never speak with Douglas about anything, he contacted Douglas and finally obtained from him a number of original documents, including the originals of the transcribed conversations with Robert Crowley.

In spite of the burn bags, the top secret safes and the vigilance of the CIA to keep its own secrets, the truth has an embarrassing and often very fatal habit of emerging, albeit decades later.

While CIA drug running , money-launderings and brutal assassinations are very often strongly rumored and suspected, it has so far not been possible to actually pin them down but it is more than possible that the publication of the transcribed and detailed Crowley-Douglas conversations will do a great deal towards accomplishing this.

These many transcribed conversations are relatively short because Crowley was a man who tired easily but they make excellent reading. There is an interesting admixture of shocking revelations on the part of the retired CIA official and often rampant anti-social (and very entertaining) activities on the part of Douglas but readers of this new and on-going series are gently reminded to always look for the truth in the jest!

Date: Wednesday, March 20, 1996
Commenced: 9;32 AM(CST)
Concluded: 10:08 AM (CST)

RTC: Hello, Gregory. Sorry I was out the last time you called but we were off on family business. My son’s family. By the way, I have some information for you that might interest you. You know, there are a number of people here who are not happy with you and they are certainly not pleased that I am talking with you. Not at all. This morning I had a call from some shit at Justice who wanted to warn me, being a friendly and caring person of course, that you were a very bad person and I would ruin my reputation by telling you anything. He had a similar talk with Corson yesterday. Bill called me last night about this and we both laughed about it. This is a sure sign that you must be right. Both of us know you were friends with Mueller and the thought of him loose in America is something the Company and now Justice does not want talked about. First off, they don’t know what name he used while he was here.

GD: Are you serious, Robert?

RTC: Oh yes, very. You see, the CIA and don’t forget the Army, used high-level Nazis after the Cold War broke out. We especially went after the Gestapo and SD people because they had the most to do with fighting the Communists, both in German in the ‘30s and then during the war.

GD: I knew Gehlen very well and met some of them. I agree. His top recruiter was old Willi Krichbaum who was a Colonel in the SS and a top Gestapo person. I talked many times with Willi who had been in the Freikorps after the first war and he was quite a fellow. He was Mueller’s top deputy in the Gestapo and in charge of the border guards at one time. And, don’t forget, Willi was head of the Wehrmacht’s Geheime Feldpolizei who had a terrible reputation with the troops. Hanging deserters at the end of the war. Yes, Gehlen told me the SS intelligence men were his best people.

RTC: You have a grasp of this from the time, don’t you. So, of course no one now wants to infuriate the rah-rah patriotic idiots and most especially the Jews by letting anyone know about this. You see, they brought Mueller and others over here and gave them new names and identities. The higher they had been, the more they concealed them. Now your friend Mueller’s name was known to Truman, Beetle Smith, Critchfield, Gehlen and about three others. Now that everyone is dead and you are tearing open old caskets, they are absolutely frantic to find out what name Mueller was here under and actually so they can run around the files and burn anything with that name on it. Then they can say, like the pious frauds they are, that Oh no, we never heard of that person. We searched our records, sir, and believe us, there was no such person anywhere. That’s what they want. Smith is dead, Truman is ditto, Critchfield will never talk because he ran Mueller and still has his pension to consider. I know the name but they have never brought the subject up to me. They think you’re a loose cannon, Gregory, with no loyalty to the system and they think I am getting daft in my old age and marginalize me.

GD: Think they’ll shoot me? A boating accident? Something like that?

RTC: When I was in harness, yes, they would. A bungled robbery or a rape like Kennedy’s lady friend but not now. Besides, they don’t know what you have on them and if you were crushed to death by an elephant falling out of a plane, who knows what might come out? I have to send you some documentation which you then have to let them know you have. But in a safe place, not in a local storage locker under your name or in your attic or garage. A gentle hint of joys to come. I have hinted at that and very strongly. The Justice oaf today got an earful from me and when I told him I would tell you about this, he got scared and hung up on me. Now, I can expect Tom Kimmel to call me and try to find out if I’ve told you or given you anything. You know, you got some rare documents that were very helpful to his case to clear the Admiral but now he’s a torn person. The family want desperately to accept these as genuine but are furious that you, a terrible person in their eyes, had them. No gratitude. I suppose if that awful Wolfe had found them and passed them along, he would be a great hero to the Kimmel family but you are one whose name is never to be mentioned. You know, Gregory, I find this very entertaining. And Kimmel is horrified that Bill and I like you and talk to you. Both of us have been warned, I by people from the Company I haven’t seen since I retired and Bill by the fringe wannabees like Trento and others. I think it’s time we nailed Critchfield, don’t you?

GD: I’m game, Robert. If he ran Mueller, he must be scared.

RTC: Will be scared shitless. In the old days, he’d have had you killed at once but those days are no more. You knew Gehlen and that will be my approach. You are quick enough with in house terms so that I can convince Jimmy that you were once part of his operation. You’ll have to play it by ear but you are about ten times smarter than him so you should have fun. I want you to convince him that you were really there and knew some his people. And most important, convince him you knew Mueller. Oddly enough, Jimmy never met Mueller because he operated him out of Switzerland through Willi and later, Mueller moved up the ladder to the point where Jimmy had no access to him. Let’s keep his bowels open, Gregory, what do you say?

GD: I have no problem. Should I tape him?

RTC: Why not get him on a speaker phone with both a tape recorder going and a reputable witness? That way, if something comes of this and they get to the witness, you have a backup.

GD: I have a retired colonel acquaintance who was with your people in ‘ Nam . He’d be perfect as a witness. Just let me know. Is Justice going to do something nasty to me?

RTC: God no. They just want to scare me off of you, that’s all. They’re all such pinheads, Gregory. They chatter like old whores at a tea party and I can remind you that gossip is king here. Everyone inside the Beltway runs around like the little self-important toads that they are, pretending to be really important. They see a Senator in a restaurant, wave at him and get waved at back. This impresses their client who does not realize that the Senator will always wave back on the assumption that the waver might be someone important he might have forgotten. And they tell you that the President, or the Secretary of this or that said this to them when no one knows them at the White House or anywhere else. This jerk from Justice is a small, malformed cog in a big and brainless machine. Typical. I had to deal with these punks for years and I have more respect for a black tart, believe me. At least they don’t try to hide the fact that they fuck for money.

GD: (Laughter)

RTC: It really isn’t funny. If the public was aware of the crooked, lying sacks of shit that run this country, they would be boiling the tar and preparing the chicken feathers.

GD: You know, speaking of Gehlen, he told me in ’51 that his famous ’48 report about the Russians being poised to invade Europe was made up at the Army’s specific request. Gehlen told me that far from moving hundreds of armored units into the east zone, the Russians had torn up all the railroad tracks after the war and shipped them back to Russia . And most of the armored divisions were only cadre.

RTC: But it did work, didn’t it? Big business got to gear up for a fictional coming war and the military got a huge boost.

GD: Ever heard of General Trudeau?

RTC: Oh yes, I knew him personally. What about him?

GD: He found out about Gehlen and bitched like hell about what he called a bunch of Nazis working for the CIA and inventing stories about fake invasion threats.

RTC: Now that’s something I didn’t know. You know they shipped him out of the European command and sent him to the Far East ? Yes, and I met him when I was in Hawaii . I’m surprised they didn’t do to him what they did to George Patton. A convenient truck ran into his car and shut him up.

GD: Why?

RTC: George found out that the top brass was stealing gold from the salt mine and many generals and colonels were getting very rich. And then the accident and with George dead, they just went on stealing.

GD: I can use that.

RTC: I can get you some paper on that out of my files. Patton was strange but one of our better generals. Lying thieves. Gold has a great attraction for people, I guess.

GD: A few years ago, one of your boys, Jimmy Atwood and I went down into Austria to dig up some Nazi gold. Atwood is a terrible asshole but very useful. I think he viewed me the same way. Anyway, we had a former SS officer and a Ukrainian camp guard along. What a wonderful adventure, Robert.

RTC: Were you successful? Treasure hunts rarely are.

GD: Oh, very. And we brought most of it back with us.

RTC: How ever did you get it through customs?

GD: Boat. Brought it in by boat. I’ll tell you about this some time. Did you ever hear about it?

RTC: No, I didn’t. Should I have?

GD: Probably a rogue operation. Two Limeys got knocked on the head and put over the side on the way to the Panama Canal but other than that, it was an uneventful trip.

RTC: Well, someday, I’ll discuss the Kennedy assassination and you can tell me about the gold hunt. Sounds fair?

GD: Oh yes, why not?

RTC: I remember the time we had to fly the KMT general out of Burma with an Air America transport full of gold. He was our boy out there but he had a hankering to make more money so he began to raise opium and used our weapons to kill of the locals. Thirteen million in gold and twelve trunks full of opium. Quite a problem getting it all into Switzerland and into a bank. But he performed and we kept our word. That fucking Colby was into drugs as well.

GD: William?

RTC: Yes, our beloved DCI. A nasty piece of work, Gregory. Was working in SEA doing the drug business when he was tapped for PHOENIX . And just kept on going when he got to Saigon . PHOENIX got to be a really nasty business and Bill set up torture centers all over our part of the country. Regional Intelligence Centers they called them. Well, Church got his hands on some of the goings on and guess what? Colby snitched on all his co-workers. I know for a fact from some of the old ones that they’re going to kill him for that. I remember he has some kind of a telephone device hidden in his glasses. Princeton man. You can always tell a Princeton man, Gregory, but you can’t tell him very much. Watch the papers pretty soon.

GD: How will they nail him? Run down in a crosswalk? A stampede of elephants flatten him in his garden?

RTC: You have an overheated imagination. I don’t know the how but I do know the why. Give it six months and the Dictator of Dent Place will be another stone in the cemetery.

GD: What about the one who killed himself by tying weights to his legs and shooting himself in the back of the head before jumping off his boat?

RTC: John Arthur Paisley. He used to be the deputy director of the Office of Strategic Research. Paisley . Tragic. Shouldn’t have sold out to the Russians. He was such a rotten mess when they found him that it took weeks to do an ID on him. There’ve been more.

GD: I have a packet coming in from overseas and the mail truck is at the end of the block. Let me ring off now, Robert and I can call you back later today.

RTC: Make it tomorrow. OK? Things to do.

(Concluded at 10:08 AM CST )

Middle East Pop Quiz

by Charley Reese

It's time for another pop quiz on America's favorite region of the world – the Middle East. Let's get started with the subject of nuclear weapons.


Which country in the Middle East actually possesses nuclear weapons?

Israel.

Which country in the Middle East refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?

Israel.

Which country in the Middle East refuses to allow international inspections of its nuclear facilities?

Israel.

Which countries in the Middle East have called for the region to be a nuclear-free zone?

The Arab countries and Iran.

Which country in the Middle East occupies land belonging to other people?

Israel, which occupies a piece of Lebanon, a larger piece of Syria, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

Which country in the Middle East has for 60 years refused to allow refugees to return to their homes and refused to consider compensation to them for their lost property?

Israel.

Which country has roads on which citizens who are Arab may not drive and housing developments where Arabs may not live?

Israel.

Which country in the region has violated more United Nations resolutions than any other?

Israel. The United States has on more than one occasion gone to war ostensibly to enforce U.N. Security Council resolutions, but when it comes to resolutions directed against Israel, the U.S. is like the amoral monkey that sees, hears and says nothing. That raises the question of who's the dog and who's the tail?

Which country in the region has in the past been led by men who at one time were terrorists with a price on their heads?

Israel. Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir once led the Stern Gang and ordered, among other things, the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat working for the United Nations. Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin led the Irgun, a terrorist gang that among other things blew up one wing of the King David Hotel, killing nearly 100 people.

Which country in the Middle East openly employs assassination against its political enemies?

Israel. There have been assassinations carried out by some of the Arab governments, but they usually don't own up to them. Israel has created a euphemism that the suck-up American press has readily adopted: "targeted killings." A British journalist told me once, "The Palestinians have a talent for picking bad leaders, and the Israelis have a talent for murdering their good ones."

What are the top five countries from which we import oil?

Here they are in order of volume: Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Nigeria and Venezuela. The next time you hear some blowhard politician ranting about how the Arabs control our oil imports, remind him or her of the facts. By far, a majority of oil imports come from non-Arab countries.

Which country in the region receives an annual gift of $3 billion or more from Congress?

Israel.

Which foreign-aid recipient is the only one allowed to receive its aid in a lump sum and which routinely invests part of it in U.S. Treasuries so that taxpayers pay them interest on the taxpayers' gift?

Israel.

Which country in the Middle East has the most powerful lobby in the U.S.?

Israel.

Which country in the Middle East are most American politicians, journalists and academics afraid to criticize?

Israel.

On behalf of which country has the U.S. vetoed the largest number of U.N. Security Council resolutions?

Israel.

What country do the people in the region consider the world's biggest hypocrite?

The United States.

Which countries in the Middle East have attacked U.S. ships in international waters?

Iraq and Israel. A lone Iraqi plane fired one missile at a U.S. ship by mistake. The Iraqi government quickly compensated the U.S. In 1967, Israeli airplanes and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, killing 34 Americans. The U.S. government declared it an accident even before the ship limped into port, and to this day Congress has never held a public hearing and allowed the survivors to tell their story. Their story, by the way, is that the attack was deliberate. Israel compensated the families of those who were killed, but resisted for years paying compensation for the ship.