The Voice of the White House

Washington , D.C. , June 7, 2008 :”  We seem to be involved with more bubbles than a burlesque house,. There was the so-called “dot-com” bubble of the 90’s that was the result of the manipulations of a number of American stock brokers who deliberately inflated the stock prices of electronics companies that had no real assets. Then we had the equally phony and rigged “housing” bubble which, we now can see, was the result of criminal connivance between small mortgage companies and huge international banking houses.  The dot-com swindle injured very few personally but the housing collapse has injured, directly or indirectly, millions. No one cares about this and the national economic manipulators have now moved into the oil, water and food markets with a wild rush.

Of course, the next bubble which consists of creeps like the hedge funds managers (pure Ponzi-schemes from the ground up) bankers and investors rushing to get their hands on what they, and many others, see as the greatest bubble of them all, the control of food, water and fuel, both domestically and overseas.

We know that increasingly, the prices of these elements have been steadily and sharply rising throughout the world and this has caused, and is causing, terrible social and economic havoc in  poorer countries such as Nicaragua and Guatemala in Central America, and Haiti in the Caribbean  and in India and neighboring Balgladesh.  And in Africa, there is near-disaster in both Ethiopia and Somalia with severe water and food shortages. African countries such as Liberia , Egypt, the Sudan, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Kenya and Eritrea . There have been food riots in Haiti and Egypt with threats of civil insurrections in India and throughout Southeast Asia. , to include the Philippines .

The upward-spiraling price of crude oil is not the result of a shortage of oil. It is estimated that the cost of a barrel of oil in the Middle East does not exceed 15 dollars. The costs of a barrel of oil extracted from the tar sands of Alberta , Canada , is of the order of $30

The price of crude oil is currently in excess of $130+ a barrel. This market price is largely the result of the speculative onslaught, completely controlled by the Anglo-American oil giants, including British Petroleum (BP), ExxonMobil, Chevron-Texaco, and  Royal Dutch Shell

All of this horrifying and financially devastating escalation  is, without question,  a process of deliberate and simultaneous market manipulation by the major Wall Street banks and financial houses,  in close cooperation and conjunction with the oil and natural gas dealers

The increasing cost of  gasoline pump  prices is leading to the collapse  of local level economies, increased industrial concentration and a massive centralization of economic power in the hands of a small number of global corporations. In turn, the rigged surges  in gasoline has a devastating effect on  urban transit system, schools and hospitals, is crippling the American trucking industry, intercontinental shipping, airline transportation, tourism, recreation and most public services.

According to William Engdahl;

"... At least 60% of the 128 per barrel price of crude oil comes from unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds, banks and financial groups using the London ICE Futures and New York NYMEX futures exchanges and uncontrolled inter-bank or Over-The-Counter trading to avoid scrutiny. US margin rules of the government's Commodity Futures Trading Commission allow speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the Nymex, by having to pay only 6% of the value of the contract. At today's price of $128 per barrel, that means a futures trader only has to put up about $8 for every barrel. He borrows the other $120. This extreme 'leverage' of 16 to 1 helps drive prices to wildly unrealistic levels and offset bank losses in sub-prime and other disasters at the expense of the overall populationthe price of grain staples has increased by 88% since March 2007. The price of wheat has increased by 181% over a three year period. The price of rice has increased by 50% over the last three months….”

In addition, there is a large and growing movement in the United States to pull away from off-shoring American industry and services.

Although I tend to view allegations of conspiracies with great caution, I have been reading through reams of official reports, market evaluations and intelligence data for my position. I go through this material on a daily, and sometimes more, basis, make notes with references and pass the reports up the line to my superiors. I see a good deal of material which is either too sensitive or too complex for the media.

After ten years of this, I can state with great sincerity that there are indeed business and governmental plots and schemes. We invaded Iraq because Israel wanted us to both establish bases there to assist them in the event of Arab attacks on them and to punish Saddam for daring to lob rockets at them during the first Gulf War. So far, at a bare minimum, over four thousand Americans have died to make Israel more secure. In my opinion, that’s exactly four thousand too many. It is interesting to note that almost all of the hedge fund and private equity people are Jewish and many of them bank in Israel where their money is safer than in Switzerland and, if things get too hot here, they can always go and be absolutely secure from extradition. And then we have the very obvious, but never mentioned, pre-911 stock manipulations by Israeli speculators. At the time, this was well-reported in the reputable segments of the American media but was almost immediately silenced and all mention of it expunged from the media’s various on-line sites.

It can all still be found on the microfilm records of the media units involved but not ever on the internet.

Why is that? I ask the question rhetorically and you answer it in private.

And finally, our very own K street lobbyists are beginning to wonder if Obama will indeed block the huge sums of what is basically bribe money flowing from American business interests through the hands of the K Street lobbyists into the pockets of American legislative and government officials

The American public? That great cash cow? Keep milking it until it runs dry and then go and live in your nice vacation house you bought in Aruba with your stolen money.”

NEW YORK  AP June 8.- Drivers are paying an average of $4 for a gallon of gasoline for the first time. AAA and the Oil Price Information Service say the national average price for a gallon of regular gas rose to $4.005 overnight from $3.988. But consumers in many parts of the country have already been paying well above that price for some time.

Gas is expected to keep climbing, putting greater pressure on consumers and businesses, because the price of oil is soaring in futures markets. Light, sweet crude shot up nearly $11 a barrel Friday and approached $140 for the first time.

Along with higher fuel costs, consumers are also contending with higher prices for food and other goods because of rising transportation costs

Conversations with the Crow: Part 5

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: Tuesday, April 2, 1996

Commenced: 10:17 AM (CST)

Concluded: 10:57 AM (CST)

GD: Am I interrupting anything there? It took awhile for you to pick up.

RTC: No, everything’s fine. I was going through my files seeing if I could find anything more about your friend Mueller but I came across something interesting on H&K instead.

GD: Heckler and Koch? The German arms company?

RTC: No, Hill and Knowlton. The PR people.

GD: Public relations.

RTC: Yes. One of my jobs with the company was to keep up our connections with major business and H&K was my baby. Actually, you might be interested in all of this. We were talking about Frank Wisner’s contacts with the media and Cord Mayer’s with the publishing business so I thought this might just fit right in.

We always wanted to emulate Colonel Hoover’s good PR. You know, the Hollywood and radio dramas about the wonderful G-Men. I think we established a far more effective system but then, of course I am prejudiced. Before we were finished, we had our fingers in every pot imaginable from the major media to book companies, television networks and so on.

GD: I knew Brownlow in Munich who ran Radio Liberty.

RTC: Station chief there. Yes, but that was for foreign consumption. My specialty was domestic. I guess you can call it propaganda if you like but we needed it to push our programs forward, ruin our enemies and help our friends. I think these were noble goals, Gregory, don’t you?

GD: Well, at least from your point of view.

RTC: We had to cover up failures as well. I think you can say that the Company pretty well controls the media in this country now. Take the AP for example. Every little jerkwater paper out in East Jesus, Texas , cannot have a reporter in Washington or Moscow so they rely almost entirely on the AP for anything outside their town. I mean if a cow waders out onto the highway and wrecks a truck or the local grange burns down, sure the have the local reporters but for what’s going on in Washington or elsewhere, it’s the AP. Look, you get on a plane in New York bound for, say, Chicago. You read the paper and then stuff it into the seat pocket and get off. In Chicago , you pick up the Tribune and read it. Same national and international news. Fly to ‘Frisco and the same thing. The AP is a wonderful asset, believe me. Let’s say you want to put a story about that a certain foreign potentate is about to get kicked out. Or better, you want him kicked out. So, we plant a story with the New York Times, the Washington Post or other big papers and then get AP to send our special message all over the damned country. Let’s say we start in the night before. By the six o’clock news the next day, all of America knows just what we want it to know and we do this so anyone reading an article can only come to the conclusions we want.

GD: This is not a surprise, Robert. I’ve been in the newspaper game for forty years now and I know most of the games.

RTC: Well, you can see why I developed H&K as a purely captive asset, can’t you.

GD: Of course.

RTC: And we used them to plant our own agents all over the world. It is a wonderful cover. We have some of the major columnists, of course, and many editors and more than a few publishers but putting our own agents in, say, France or Ottawa, is a great advantage, believe me. And H&K had the best, the very best, connections. Bobby Gray was Ike’s press secretary and was a good friend of Nixon and Reagan and had their ear.

We infiltrated our people into every level of the business, political and professional worlds and you never knew when one of your people might bring home the bacon. I can say with some pride that, let’s say, we wanted to get some legislation passed, it was a piece of cake. Sometimes we made bad calls like the time we pushed Fidel Castro into office only to have the bastard turn on us. I remember the howling the Alcoa people did when he nationalized their plants in Cuba . Or the United Fruit people demanding we get rid of Guzman in Guatemala because he was expropriating their banana plantations. The man we put in after we kicked Guzman out turned on us and we had to shoot him but in theory, it was a slick deal. Sam Cummings got Nazi weapons from the Poles and we shipped them over there on a freight line we owned and for a little while, Levi and Zentner were happy. It was a question of helping our friends. I’ll tell you about Sullivan and Cromwell, some time.

GD: Not Gilbert and Sullivan?

RTC: No the New York law firm. Dulles was with them. They helped everyone out. Very pro-Hitler once but then the Company was full of ex-Nazis, in fact our Gehlen Org was almost exclusively Nazi. Frenchy Grombach drew up a list of top Nazis wanted for war crimes after the war and Critchfield used it at his main recruiting guide. Of course if the Jews ever found this out, we would have to do some major damage control. Israel is friendly with us just as long as we keep the money and the guns coming. But then we have to kiss up to the Arabs as well because of the oil so the main thing here is to maintain a careful balance. But not only H&K but a number of other firms have been of inestimable help to us. They plans stories we want planted, they open offices in foreign countries of interest and let our men come in as employees and so on. The PR people can move mountains. Paster, who not only worked for H&K but also the Clintons, worked with Bill’s people to neutralize the Lewinski scandal which was really not political but religious in nature. The right wing Christians, who are as crazy as hit house owls, wanted Clinton ’s scalp so they could put one of their own pro-Jesus nuts in the White House. Ken Starr is as strange as they come and I am ashamed to admit he’s a lawyer from my home town. Stands in his yard and screams for Jesus to listen to him. The neighbors made such as fuss about these nocturnal shouting sessions, they called the police.

GD: Tell me, Robert, did Jesus ever answer?

RTC: I don’t think so but Ken was warned that if he kept his yowling up at night, or even in the daytime, it was off to St. Elizabeth’s funny farm in an ambulance.

GD: Don’t talk to me about the Jesus Freaks! My God, I’ve known my share and the best place for them is a desert island populated by hungry tigers.

RTC: I think there are things even a hungry tiger wouldn’t eat.

GD: But back to the press again. Did you control or did you influence?

RTC: Both. I can give you an example. Ben Bradlee was the managing editor of the Washington Post and was our man all the way. It’s a long, involved story and if you have the time, I’ll give you the background. I know we’ve talked about this before but it’s absolutely typical of what I was telling you. Do you have the time?

GD: Yes, as the old whore said, if you have the money.

RTC: Ben’s best friend when he was a child was Dick Helms. After Ben left Harvard during the war, he joined ONI and worked in their communications center. He dealt with a flood of secret codes messages from all over the world. He had married Jean Staltonstall, the Governor’s daughter and the old man was also a spook. Not generally known, however. War was over and Ben was sent to join the ACLU as a spy. Pretty soon Ben got an inside connection with Gene Meyer, who’s family ran the Post and he got a job there covering the police beat. Eugene ’s son in law, married Katherine and poor Gene was a blossoming nut and he eventually swallowed his gun and the wife took over the paper. Graham got Ben a job with the Foggy Bottom people…

GD: What?

RTC: State Department. Anyway, Ben was off to France where he worked in the embassy in Paris where he did propaganda work and started working very closely with us. Then he went to work for Newsweek. Ben is an ambitious type and he ditched the Staltonstall woman and married Tony Pinchot. Her sister, Mary, was married to Cord Meyer, our beloved Cyclops….

GD: And a friend and co-worker with party comrade Cranston …

RTC: The same one. And joined together in the Mockingbird program we have been talking about….

GD: The Mighty Wurlitzer of Wisner?

RTC: Same idea.

GD: Graham and Wisner killed themselves and Wisner spent a lot of time in a nut house, didn’t he?

RTC: Raving mad. They had to drag him screaming out of headquarters, trussed up in a strait jacket and foaming at the mouth. Not one of my fonder moments. As I recall it, Bradlee knew Jim Angleton in France . I’ll tell you about Jim one of these days. Ben was kicked out of France because the CIA was secretly supporting the FLN…supplying them inside information about French counter-terrorist groups and give them plastique and other nice things…just as they did later with the Quebec Libré people in Canada . The French png’ed him…

GD: What?

RTC: Persona non grata. Not wanted in the country.  Then he did his Newsweek work and got to know Kennedy and wrote some puff pieces for him and got on the inside track there. In the early ‘60s’ Helms told Bradlee that one of his relatives wanted to sell Newsweek and Bradlee brokered the deal with the Post people. We had a firm in with the Post and now with Newsweek, a powerful opinion molder and a high-circulation national magazine. Then there was the tow path murder. Cord’s ex-wife was one of Kennedy’s women and everyone felt she had too much influence with him, not to mention her hippifying him with LSD and marijuana. We can discuss the Kennedy business some other time but Mary was threatening to talk and you know about the rest. Good old Ben and his friend Jim went to Mary’s little converted garage studio which Ben just happened to own, and finally found her diary. They took it away and just as well they did. She had it all down in there, every bit of the drugs use, all kinds of bad things JFK told her as pillow talk and her inside knowledge of the hit. Not good.

GD: If you want to talk about the Kennedy business, Robert, I am perfectly willing to listen.

RTC: But I am not perfectly willing to talk at this point. We can get to it little by little, Gregory. Ben got to be vice president of the Post company and retired with honor and plenty of money.

GD: The diary?

RTC: Jim burned the original but made a copy. Makes interesting reading. It gives you different view of Camelot, believe me. What the American public doesn’t know, cannot hurt them, can it?

GD: No it can’t but if….do you still have your copy?

RTC: Now, now, Gregory. I don’t want a black bag job here. I’m too old to start shooting at mysterious burglars, or even being shot by them.

GD: This has been very interesting today, Robert.

RTC: An old man has little left sometimes but his memories.

GD: Do an autobiography, why not?

RTC” I don’t feel like committing suicide, Gregory, and I signed the paper keeping me from writing about any of this.

GD: But I haven’t.

RTC: No, you haven’t. Let’s call it a day for now, Gregory. I’m a little tired now. The Swiss have been working their microwave transmissions overtime.

GD: ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ Robert. I’ll be out of town for a few days so I’ll get back in touch next week.

RTC: Have a nice trip and thanks for the call.

(Concluded at 10:57 AM CST )

And the winner is ... the Israel lobby

June 3, 2008

by Pepe Escobar

Asia Times

WASHINGTON - They're all here - and they're all ready to party. The three United States presidential candidates - John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Madam House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most US senators and virtually half of the US Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney's wife, Lynne. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. And a host of Jewish and non-Jewish political and academic heavy-hitters among the 7,000 participants.

Such star power wattage, a Washington version of the Oscars, is the stock in trade of AIPAC - the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the crucial player in what is generally known as the Israel lobby and which holds its annual Policy Conference thisweek in Washington at which most of the heavyweights will deliver lectures.

Few books in recent years have been as explosive or controversial as The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, written by Stephen Walt from Harvard University and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago, published in 2007. In it, professors Walt and Mearsheimer argued the case of the Israeli lobby not as "a cabal or conspiracy that 'controls' US foreign policy", but as an extremely powerful interest group made up of Jews and non-Jews, a "loose coalition of individuals and organizations tirelessly working to move US foreign policy in Israel 's direction".

Walt and Mearsheimer also made the key point that "anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy stands a good chance of being labeled an anti-Semite". Anyone for that matter who "says that there is an Israeli lobby" also runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism.

All the candidates in the House say yeah

Republican presidential candidate McCain is opening this year's AIPAC jamboree; Clinton and Obama are closing it on Wednesday. Walt and Mearsheimer's verdict on the dangerous liaisons between presidential candidates and AIPAC remains unimpeachable: "None of the candidates is likely to criticize Israel in any significant way or suggest that the US ought to pursue a more evenhanded policy in the region. And those who do will probably fall by the wayside."

Take what Clinton said in February at an AIPAC meeting in New York : " Israel is a beacon of what's right in a neighborhood overshadowed by the wrongs of radicalism, extremism, despotism and terrorism." A year before, Clinton was in favor of sitting and talking to Iran 's leadership.

And take what Obama said in March at an AIPAC meeting in Chicago ; no reference at all to Palestinian "suffering", as he had done on the campaign trail in March 2007. Obama also made it clear he would do nothing to alter the US-Israeli relationship.

No wonder AIPAC is considered by most members of the US Congress as more powerful than the National Rifle Association or the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.

AIPAC has explicit Zionist roots. The founder, "Si" Kenen, was head of the American Zionist Council in 1951. The body was reorganized as a US lobby - the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs - in 1953-4, and then renamed AIPAC in 1959. Under Tom Dine, in the 1970s, it was turned into a mass organization with more than 150 employees and a budget of up to US$60 million today. Dine was later ousted because he was considered not hawkish enough.

The top leadership - mostly former AIPAC presidents - is always more hawkish on the Middle East than most Jewish Americans. AIPAC only dropped its opposition to a Palestinian state - without endorsing it - when Ehud Barak became Israeli prime minister in 1999.

AIPAC keeps a very close relationship with an array of influential think-tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, the Hudson Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Middle East Forum, the The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Sprinkled neo-cons in these think-tanks can be regarded as a microcosm of the larger Israel lobby - Jews and non-Jews (It's important to remember that Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and five other neo-cons drafted the infamous "A Clean Break" document to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 - the ultimate road map for hardcore regime change all over the Middle East.)

The house that AIPAC built

AIPAC in the US Congress is a rough beast indeed. Former president Bill Clinton defined it as "stunningly effective". Former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich called it "the most effective general-interest group across the entire planet". The New York Times as "the most important organization affecting America 's relationship with Israel ". Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, before his involvement in a corruption scandal, said. "Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in the whole world."

AIPAC maintains a virtual stranglehold over the US Congress. Critics of the Israel lobby other than Walt and Mearsheimer also contend that AIPAC essentially prevents any possibility of open debate on US policy towards Israel . Compare it with a 2004 report by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board, according to which "Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies".

AIPAC should not be crossed. It rewards those who support its agenda, and punishes those who don't. In the end, it's all about money - specifically campaign contributions. From 2000 to 2004, according to the Washington Post, AIPAC honchos contributed an average of $72,000 each to campaigns and political committees. For pro-AIPAC politicians, money simply pours from all over the US .

Every member of the US Congress receives AIPAC's bi-weekly newsletter, the Near East Report. Walt and Mearsheimer stress that Congressmen and their staff "usually turn to AIPAC when they need info; AIPAC is called upon to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes".

Hillary Clinton has learned long ago she should not cross AIPAC. Clinton used to support a Palestinian state in 1998. She even embraced Suha Arafat, Yasser's wife, in 1999. After much scolding, she suddenly became a vigorous defender of Israel , and years later wholeheartedly supported the 2006 Israeli war against Hezbollah in Lebanon . Clinton may have gotten the bulk of Jewish American donations for her 2008 presidential campaign.

Rice also learned about facts on the ground. She tried to restart the eternally moribund "peace process" when visiting the Middle East in March 2007. Before the trip, she got an AIPAC letter signed by no less than 79 US senators telling her not to talk to the new Palestinian unity government until it "recognized Israel , renounced terror and agreed to abide by Palestinian-Israeli agreements".

AIPAC and Iraq

It has become relatively fashionable for some members of the Israeli lobby to deny any involvement in the build-up towards the war on Iraq . But few remember what AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr told the New York Sun in January 2003: "Quietly lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq was one of AIPAC's successes over the past year."

And in a New Yorker profile of Steven Rosen, AIPAC's policy director during the run-up to the war on Iraqi, it was stated that "AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraqi war".

Compare it with a 2007 Gallup study based on 13 different polls, according to which 77% of American Jews were opposed to the Iraq war, compared to 52% of Americans.

Walt and Mearsheimer contend "the war was due in large part to the lobby's influence, and especially its neo-con wing. The lobby is not always representative of the larger community for which it often claims to speak."

AIPAC and Iran

Now it is Iran time. Walt and Mearsheimer contend "the lobby is fighting to prevent the US from reversing course and seeking a rapprochement with Tehran . They continue to promote an increasingly confrontational and counterproductive policy instead". Not much different from the embattled Olmert, who told Germany 's Focus magazine in April 2007 that "it would take 10 days ... and 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles" to set back Iran 's nuclear program.

A measure of Walt and Mearsheimer's power to rattle reputations is that the Zionist establishment had to bring out all its big guns to refute their argument, again and again.

Walt and Mearsheimer are no ideologues. They are realpolitik practitioners - very much at ease in the top circles of US foreign policy establishment. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of their book is that they argued four points that the establishment never mentions in public. Essentially these are:

·  The US has already won its major wars in the Middle East , against Arab secular nationalism and against communism, and does not need Israel quite as much.

·  Israel is now so much more powerful than all Arab nations combined that it can take care of itself.

·  The unconditional support for Israel , regardless of its outrageous deeds, does harm US interests, destabilizes pro-US regimes like Hosi Mubarak's Egypt and King Abdullah's Jordan , and plays into the hands of Salafi-jihadi radicals.

·  Fighting Israel 's wars on its behalf is the surefire way to lead to the collapse of US power in the Middle East .

Walt and Mearsheimer also seem not to accept that oil, and rivalry with Russia and China, have also played a crucial part in why the US went to war in Iraq and may attack Iran in the near future. Anyway only insiders as themselves - with unassailable establishment credentials - could have started, at the highest levels of public debate, a serious discussion of extreme pro-Zionism in the public and political life of the US.

Meanwhile, the power of the lobby seems unassailable. In March 2007, the US Congress was trying to attach a provision to a Pentagon spending bill that would have required President George W Bush to get congressional approval before attacking Iran . AIPAC was strongly against it - because it viewed the legislation as taking the military option "off the table". The provision was killed. Congressman Dennis Kucinich said this was due to AIPAC.

AIPAC made a lot of waves in 2002, when the theme of the annual meeting was " America and Israel standing against terror". Everyone bashed Arafat, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria at the same time - just as in PNAC's letter to Bush in April 2002 claiming that Israel was also fighting an "axis of evil" alongside the US.

During AIPAC's jamboree in 2004, Bush received 23 standing ovations defending his Iraq policy. Last year, the star was Cheney, making the case for the troop "surge" in Iraq . Pelosi was dutifully present.

But it was pastor John Hagee, whose endorsement McCain recently refused, who really made a killing - even though Hagee maintains that "anti-Semitism is the result of the Jews' rebellion against God".

On Iran , Hagee definitely set the tone: "It is 1938; Iran is Germany and [President Mahmud] Ahmadinejad is the new [Adolf] Hitler. We must stop Iran 's nuclear threat and stand boldly with Israel ." He received multiple standing ovations. McCain may be sure to get the same treatment this year - and he'll certainly have no trouble remaining on message.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

The Rabbi Timmerman’s Column

Stalin's Jews

June 5, 2008

by Joel Timmerman

We mustn't forget that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish

Here's a particularly forlorn historical date: Almost 90 years ago, between the 19th and 20th of December 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war, Lenin signed a decree calling for the establishment of The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, also known as Cheka.

Within a short period of time, Cheka became the largest and cruelest state security organization. Its organizational structure was changed every few years, as were its names: From Cheka to GPU, later to NKVD, and later to KGB.

We cannot know with certainty the number of deaths Cheka was responsible for in its various manifestations, but the number is surely at least 20 million, including victims of the forced collectivization, the hunger, large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death at Gulags.

Whole population strata were eliminated: Independent farmers, ethnic minorities, members of the bourgeoisie, senior officers, intellectuals, artists, labor movement activists, "opposition members" who were defined completely randomly, and countless members of the Communist party itself.

In his new, highly praised book "The War of the World," historian Niall Ferguson writes that no revolution in the history of mankind devoured its children with the same unrestrained appetite as did the Soviet revolution. In his book on the Stalinist purges, Tel Aviv University 's Dr. Igal Halfin writes that Stalinist violence was unique in that it was directed internally.

Lenin, Stalin, and their successors could not have carried out their deeds without wide-scale cooperation of disciplined "terror officials," cruel interrogators, snitches, executioners, guards, judges, perverts, and many bleeding hearts who were members of the progressive Western Left and were deceived by the Soviet regime of horror and even provided it with a kosher certificate.

All these things are well-known to some extent or another, even though the former Soviet Union 's archives have not yet been fully opened to the public. But who knows about this? Within Russia itself, very few people have been brought to justice for their crimes in the NKVD's and KGB's service. The Russian public discourse today completely ignores the question of "How could it have happened to us?" As opposed to Eastern European nations, the Russians did not settle the score with their Stalinist past.

And us, the Jews? An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name "Genrikh Yagoda," the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU's deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the "bloodthirsty dwarf."

Yezhov was not Jewish but was blessed with an active Jewish wife. In his Book "Stalin: Court of the Red Star", Jewish historian Sebag Montefiore writes that during the darkest period of terror, when the Communist killing machine worked in full force, Stalin was surrounded by beautiful, young Jewish women.

Stalin's close associates and loyalists included member of the Central Committee and Politburo Lazar Kaganovich. Montefiore characterizes him as the "first Stalinist" and adds that those starving to death in Ukraine , an unparalleled tragedy in the history of human kind aside from the Nazi horrors and Mao's terror in China , did not move Kaganovich.

Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity. We'll mention just one more: Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD's special department and the organization's chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist.

In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in the next purges. In a fascinating lecture at a Tel Aviv University convention this week, Dr. Halfin described the waves of soviet terror as a "carnival of mass murder," "fantasy of purges", and "essianism of evil." Turns out that Jews too, when they become captivated by messianic ideology, can become great murderers, among the greatest known by modern history.

The Jews active in official communist terror apparatuses (In the Soviet Union and abroad) and who at times led them, did not do this, obviously, as Jews, but rather, as Stalinists, communists, and "Soviet people." Therefore, we find it easy to ignore their origin and "play dumb": What do we have to do with them? But let's not forget them. My own view is different. I find it unacceptable that a person will be considered a member of the Jewish people when he does great things, but not considered part of our people when he does amazingly despicable things.

Even if we deny it, we cannot escape the Jewishness of "our hangmen," who served the Red Terror with loyalty and dedication from its establishment. After all, others will always remind us of their origin.

The Rabbi Joel Timmerman can be reached care of his Holocaust Survivor’s Association at 350 5^th Ave , New York , NY 10018

Comment: As an historical note, the so-called Wailing Wall in Jerusalem , as well as the pavement in  front of it, are not part of the foundation of the Temple of Solomon . They were built in 600 AD by the Arabs. If Our Beloved President kissed it, he probably got trench mouth whichwould have  put him out of business for weeks.  BH

Time to do something about oil

May 28, 2008

by Martin Hutchinson

Asia Times

The oil price rise of more than US$50 per barrel since the US Federal Reserve started cutting interest rates in September is beginning to get serious. Since the rise of oil import prices alone removes $170 billion from the US economy, more than 1% of gross domestic product, it is both inflationary and highly recession-producing, especially since it has been accompanied by similar rises in other commodity prices. Its full effects have not been seen yet but they're coming - don't worry! At some point we are probably going to have to do something about it. The question is: what?

In general, the populist clamor to "do something" about a sharp move in commodity prices makes no sense. The price mechanism acts as a shock absorber for supply and demand hiccups, so that if storms shut down the Gulf oil platforms or rapid growth in China causes its use of automobiles to soar, oil price rises can signal to other consumers to cut back consumption and to producers to enter into new exploration projects.

That's why the fuel subsidies in Third World countries are foolish. They encourage the consumption of a substance that is increasingly scarce and at times like the present impose an appalling burden on local taxpayers or the government's financing mechanisms (as in India , where government deficits threaten to derail that country's magnificent economic boom.)

While oil prices were rising from $20 to $80 per barrel in 2002-07, this rationale seemed unquestionable. The rise was gradual, and the price remained well within the parameters that the world economy had survived, albeit with some difficulty, in the early eighties. (Although the peak 1980 price of $40 per barrel was equivalent to about $105 in today's dollars, that peak was ephemeral; the major economic effect of expensive oil came from the roughly six years of oil prices hovering around $30, or $70-80 in today’s dollars, in 1980-85.)

However, the $50 rise since September has been sudden, has taken oil prices to a level never before experienced, and shows no sign of abating. Its principal short-term cause has been the excessive lowering of interest rates and relaxation of credit conditions in the United States and elsewhere, but there are a number of long-term factors which may make it difficult to reverse.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is said to be producing a study showing that future oil supplies will be more restricted than had been thought, topping out at about 100 million barrels per day rather than the 115 million that had been thought necessary to accommodate the world's growth to 2030. The IEA's new caution is probably inevitable, given the rise in prices and the considerable uncertainty in reserve and production estimates; it's mostly a matter of IEA geologists seeing the inexorable rise in prices and deciding to use more pessimistic assumptions about future trends.

In any case, since current production is only around 85 million barrels per day, the decline in estimated future production is not an immediate problem. However, its psychological effect on the market is considerable.

Whatever the views of the IEA, it should be clear that the recent rise in oil prices is not driven by fundamentals. Economists differ about the price elasticity of oil, but the lowest plausible estimates for short-term price elasticity are around 10%, with medium-term elasticity being much higher. Thus if oil legend T Boone Pickens is right that oil supplies are currently 85 million barrels per day and oil demand is 87 million, that is a supply shortfall of 2.4%, which at a 10% elasticity should produce a price increase of 24%, not 60%.

The principal influence behind the huge rise in oil prices has been speculation, whether by the international oil companies, by hedge funds deprived of easy pickings in the housing and equities markets, or by the oil suppliers themselves, drunk with the glory of their new-found wealth. Naturally, easy money provided by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, European counterpart Jacques Trichet and the rest of the gang since September has empowered the speculators. Indeed, while real interest rates remain below zero oil speculators would appear to be on to a one-way bet, provided they are rich enough to sustain their buying - and the combined resources of the world's hedge funds, oil companies and dubious energy-rich Third World dictators are very great indeed.

Hence if we do nothing, but continue to focus on housing, consumer inflation and the NBA playoffs, oil prices will continue rising. This will have only a modest short-term effect, but a highly damaging effect in the medium term, as the recession-producing tendency of high oil prices works its malign magic on the long-suffering world economy.

Further rises are additionally dangerous because they may not quickly be reversed. In a market of entirely rational trading robots, the 1980 oil price spike to $40 might have been just a spike, with prices reverting within weeks to the $15 or so that was then the equilibrium. In the world of fallible speculators and other humans, the psychology of a rise to $40 made the price "sticky" on the downside at around $30, so that it was November 1985 before prices collapsed to $10. Thus if the oil price soars to $200 next week, we are probably condemned to $150 oil until 2013 or so, after which the price will collapse to $25 for several decades, as new supplies and bizarre and expensive government-mandated conservation schemes overwhelm the market.

To avoid this dreadful fate, what should we do? There are a number of possibilities:

We could invade somewhere. Considered as an oil acquisition exercise, Operation Iraqi Freedom has been a smashing success, and only appalling Wilsonian wimpiness in the US government has prevented the United States from taking full advantage of it. Iraq's known oil reserves have been increased by about 100 billion barrels since the invasion, as competent US oil companies have been free to explore for new oil employing techniques more advanced than the 40-year-old dowsing sticks used by Saddam's oil operation. At today's oil price of $130, less a generous $20 for drilling and extraction, those additional reserves have a value of $11 trillion, or approximately 10 times the most alarmist estimate of the cost of the war to date.

The problem is that the US did not secure itself a proper royalty on the new oil finds (even 10% would have been worthwhile - $1.1 trillion over the next few decades.) Nor did it ensure, by setting up a privatized oil company and a trust fund for the Iraqi people diverting oil revenues from the Iraqi government, that the new oil finds would be exploited in an efficient manner and the supplies directed properly into the world oil market. Any future invasion of an oil-producing country should avoid these two mistakes and thus make itself self-financing.

The obvious place to invade is Venezuela (even if current estimates of Venezuelan and Saudi reserves are wrong and there is in reality more oil in Saudi Arabia that could be unlocked if ExxonMobil and the boys were given free rein, the Saudis are nominally our allies, so an invasion would be considered unsporting by world opinion.) Since the 1.8 trillion barrels of Venezuelan oil deposits consist largely of the Orinoco tar sands, a Venezuelan oil-related invasion would impose an additional requirement: to keep the environmentalists away in order that reserves could be exploited with maximum efficiency.

For those who feel that invasion-for-oil is altogether too Bismarckian in its implications, there are other alternatives. The most effective would be to use the interest-rate weapon, reversing the damage caused by the cuts since September and ideally going a little further, to fight the resulting consumer price inflation. A series of small interest rate rises would not be effective, because it would enable speculators to adjust. (The 0.25% rate rises in 2004-06, all 17 of them, we now know were completely ineffective in quelling housing speculation as they allowed the speculating frog to bask in the gradually warming interest rate water, rather than being forced by a sudden temperature rise to jump out of the saucepan.)

The most effective interest rate trajectory would probably be an immediate reversal of the post-September cuts, jumping the Federal Funds rate from 2% back to 5.25%. This would still be too low to be effective in fighting consumer price inflation, currently around 4% even on the suspect government figures. However it should shock commodity speculators sufficiently to cause a sharp drop in oil and commodity prices which might, if we were lucky, become self-reinforcing enough to push oil prices down to the $80 level, which is probably the lowest we can currently expect. Once the immediate effect of higher interest rates had worn off, further rate rises, probably to around an 8% Federal Funds rate, would be needed to wring out inflation, but those could be undertaken over the next 18-24 months in the normal manner.

It is quite certain that the interest rate weapon, if used with sufficient vigor, would quell oil prices, but it's not entirely clear whether a single rise to 5.25% would do it. However, draconian rate rises beyond 5.25% to quell oil price rises would be deeply unpopular and would cause further catastrophe in the US housing market. Since invasion is presumably off the table, the political classes may thus attempt to impose other remedies for high oil prices, all of which would be either counterproductive, disastrous or both. These might include some or all of the following:

·                     Price controls on oil companies. These would have the cathartic effect of eliminating the profits of Western oil companies, but would have little effect on the market, since the majority of oil supplies are today not controlled by Western oil companies.

·               ·  Subsidies. The effect on consumers of spiraling oil prices could be reduced by cutting petroleum taxes (as recently proposed by Senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton) or subsidizing gasoline prices directly. Such subsidies would increase rather than reduce consumption and would divert income from taxpayers (the ultimate providers of the subsidies) to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and other oil producers. Terrible and counterproductive idea.

·   ·  Rationing. Britain did this at the time of the Suez crisis in 1956, when overall rationing was still a recent memory. Its initial psychological effect would be considerable and it might well prove politically appealing to a populist, economically illiterate president after January 2009. The principal gainers from such a measure would be the Mafia, who would find a new business in stolen and forged ration coupons.

·         ·    Intensified corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards, ethanol mandates and public transportation subsidies. These would be highly politically attractive to the left, and are thus probably quite likely. Their effect would be far too long term to change short-term price movements. Apart from increasing costs in the economy, they would result in tens of thousands of additional fatalities a year, as the feeble mini-cars took to America 's roads.

·         Intensified drilling in Alaska and offshore US areas. The right-wing alternative to CAFE standards; equally ineffective in the short term but much more helpful long term. Would probably intensify the 2013 price collapse as the new sources came on stream.

·         ·Closing down the commodities exchanges. The speculators have already found the counter to this one; a new crude oil contract is opening for trading in Dubai . To close that down, we would need to revert to the invasion option.

·         In summary, a sharp rise in US and world interest rates is the best way to solve the problem of spiraling energy and commodity prices, which will probably not solve itself. If that doesn't work or is "politically impossible" it's time to prepare the 82nd Airborne for jungle warfare in the Orinoco Basin .

·         Martin Hutchinson is the author of Great Conservatives (Academica Press, 2005) - details can be found at www.greatconservatives.com.

Five tips to ensure the TSA doesn't steal your stuff

May 31, 2008

by Christopher Elliott

Tribune Media Services

Taking. Something. Always.

That's what TSA means to airline passengers like Edward Fleiss, a sales manager from Huntington , N.Y. When screeners inspected his wife's carry-on bag at New York 's John F. Kennedy Airport recently, he claims her designer eyeglasses were swiped.

"Great sleight of hand," he says. "We didn't even know they were gone until we got to Los Angeles ."

Letters to the Transportation Security Administration — that's what TSA actually stands for, in case you were wondering — were met with a form response. "Dear traveler, thank you, but no reimbursement on a $500 pair of glasses," he recalls.

Thieving TSA? You might be forgiven for thinking so.

Since it was created in 2001, the agency has fired about 200 employees accused of stealing. Although the TSA has taken steps to discourage these government workers from helping themselves to our personal effects — including background checks on new hires, video cameras in screening areas and rules forbidding backpacks or lunchboxes at checkpoints — more and more passengers like Fleiss are coming forward to say they've been ripped off by the very people who are supposed to protect them.

It doesn't help that hardly a week goes by without another story about alleged TSA pilferage making headlines. Here's one from a Miami TV station, where 1,500 items (www.nbc6.net/news/15617249/detail.html) have been reported stolen at the airport since 2003. Here's someone who had his engagement ring filched (www.gadling.com/2008/01/08/engagement-ring-allegedly-stolen-by-lax-airport-security/) by screeners in Los Angeles . Here's another one involving a 12-year-old's heartbreaking loss (http://cbs13.com/seenon/Call.Kurtis.Consumer.2.464401.html) of $265 in birthday money.

You don't need a travel columnist to tell you this agency has a problem. The evidence speaks for itself. But here's what you might not know. The stealing isn't as random as the TSA may want you to believe (www.tsa.gov/blog/2008/02/tsa-our-officers-public-and-theft.html). Fleiss visited an optometrist for a replacement pair of glasses, and learned that since the TSA was created seven years ago, he'd seen a "marked increase" in patients requesting receipts for insurance claims relating to security-related thefts. "He said there is a huge market for stolen designer eyewear frames in the New York area," he added. "You put it together."

One aviation insider I spoke with believes stealing is a systemic problem the federal agency is unable to control, particularly at problem airports like New York 's LaGuardia Airport and Philadelphia International Airport . Not all of the screening areas in U.S. airports are under surveillance, and the TSA's rules have a big loophole that shifts liability for stolen baggage claims to the airline when luggage is delayed, he told me. In other words, there's little incentive for the stealing to stop. "It's the 800-pound gorilla no one wants to discuss at TSA," he says.

I contacted the TSA to get its side of the story. Sari Koshetz, a TSA spokeswoman, sent me an e-mail to say the agency is concerned about theft. "TSA aggressively investigates all allegations of misconduct," she wrote. "When infractions are discovered, it moves swiftly to end the federal careers of offenders." She added that travelers with questions should visit the TSA's Web site for claim information (www.tsa.gov/travelers/customer/claims/index.shtm).

I've got a better idea. Why not make sure your valuables aren't taken in the first place? Here are five tips:

Don't try to beat the system

If you think you can avoid a TSA theft by steering clear of LaGuardia or Philadelphia , think again. Reader David Cumpston had a $50 bottle of cologne stolen from his bag in San Francisco . They lifted a box of Montecristo cigars out of P.J. Zornosa's bag in Florida . "Hope someone enjoyed them," he grumbles. And Jeanne Rose lost one shoe — a brand-new Merrick clog — in Atlanta . Why just one shoe? Who knows? Point is, you can't predict where a TSA thief might strike next.

TSA-approved locks are useless, so don't even bother

Anyone can access your luggage after you've checked it. Anyone. Don't believe me? Here's how to break into a bag without the benefit of a TSA master key (http://mosh.nokia.com/content/3EB82A6FB8ADF170E040050AEE040FBA). Besides, the TSA likes to confiscate the locks after they're done rummaging through your belongings, according to readers like Paula Craig. "Sometimes, I get the Dear Paula, we have been through your luggage letter — and sometimes not," she says. "It's maddening."

Don't pack anything valuable in your checked in luggage

That's not just a bad idea because a TSA agent or an airline baggage handler might take something; it's also a terrible idea because if an airline loses it, you probably won't be reimbursed for it. Joe Zinno, a retiree from Seattle , slipped his digital camera in his luggage, from which he believes a TSA officer removed it on a recent trip. He contacted the agency to make a claim, and after "a very long time" it responded with a form letter. "They said there would be no compensation," he recalls. Airlines don't cover electronics in checked luggage, either.

Better yet, leave all of your valuables at home

Packing your valuables in carry-on luggage is no guarantee the TSA — or the airline — won't be able to get to it. For example, you might have to gate-check your carry-on if there's no room in the overhead bin on the plane. Or, like Fleiss, an agent could pull a fast one at the passenger screening area. Cheryl Wahlheim, an information systems manager from Boulder , Colo. , had jewelry stolen out of her bag by what she suspects was a TSA employee. Making a claim proved impossible. "They sent me a form letter and basically I had to present them with a document containing pictures of all the stolen jewelry, receipts for all the jewelry and the current cost of the jewelry," she says. "Since most of the things were gifts given to me over the years, I had no receipts and no pictures."

If you can't live without it, carry it on your person

Items like wedding rings, cash and other valuables should be carried through the checkpoint, wherever possible. Mauranna Sherman of Lynchburg , Va. , wishes her husband had kept a close eye on his medication when he passed through the TSA screening area a few years ago. "When we reached our hotel several hours later, it wasn't in his bag," she says. "We had to call our house sitter, who used her own money to deliver it to our family in Texas the next day. What a hassle."

Bottom line: if you want to see your valuables again, don't let a TSA agent near them.

There's one final myth about TSA thefts that needs to be busted, and it involves the claims process. In speaking with airline passengers who claim the TSA took their property, I hear about the same frustrating conclusion almost every time. In the end, they were denied compensation.

Well, the end isn't really the end. You can appeal your case to my counterpart at the TSA (www.tsa.gov/join/benefits/careers_benefits_ombudsman.shtm). Its ombudsman can be reached at TSA.Ombudsman@dhs.gov.

Send your questions to chris@elliott.org.

Comment: The rampant stupidity and wholesale thievery of the TSA;, coupled with the increasing cost of jet fuel is rapidly causing the demise of domestic air travel. Also, man y foreign  tourists, outraged at being fingerprinted and often strip searched, are going elsewhere and taking their money with them. The TSA has fired many of its employees but these are only the really stupid ones that have gotten caught. For the reasons cited above, I haven’t traveled by air since 2003 and refuse to do so as long as the TSA continues in existence. BH

Schoolboy avoids prosecution for branding Scientology a 'cult'

May 23 2008

by Anil Dawar and agencies

guardian.co.uk,

A teenager who was facing legal action for calling the Church of Scientology a cult has today been told he will not be taken to court.

The Crown Prosecution Service ruled the word was neither "abusive or insulting" to the church and no further action would be taken against the boy.

The unnamed 16-year-old was handed a court summons by City of London police for refusing to put down a placard saying "Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult" during a peaceful protest outside the church's headquarters near St Paul's Cathedral earlier this month.

Police said they had "strongly advised" him to stop displaying the sign but he refused, citing a high court judgment from 1984 in which the organisation was described as a cult.

The summons was issued under the Public Order Act on the grounds that the sign incited religious hatred.

A file was passed to the CPS, which today told City of London police it would not be pursuing the boy through the courts.

A spokeswoman for the force said: "The CPS review of the case includes advice on what action or behaviour at a demonstration might be considered to be threatening, abusive or insulting.

"The force's policing of future demonstrations will reflect this advice."

A CPS spokesman said: "In consultation with the City of London police, we were asked whether the sign, which read 'Scientology is not a religion it is a dangerous cult', was abusive or insulting.

"Our advice is that it is not abusive or insulting and there is no offensiveness, as opposed to criticism, neither in the idea expressed nor in the mode of expression. No action will be taken against the individual."

The teenager's mother said the decision was "a victory for free speech".

"We're all incredibly proud of him. We advised him to take the placard down when we realised what was happening but he said 'No, it's my opinion and I have a right to express it'," she said.

Human rights activists were outraged when news of the police action against the teenager broke earlier this week.

A simultaneous demonstration on May 10 outside a Scientology office in London's West End featured protesters waving similar placards but the Metropolitan police did not confiscate them or issue any summonses.

Two years ago, the City of London police attracted criticism when it emerged more than 20 officers, ranging from constable to chief superintendent, had accepted gifts worth thousands of pounds from the Church of Scientology.

The City of London chief superintendent, Kevin Hurley, praised Scientology for "raising the spiritual wealth of society" during the opening of its headquarters in 2006.

Last year, a video praising Scientology emerged featuring Ken Stewart, another of the City of London's chief superintendents, although he is not a member of the group.

Scientology was founded by the science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard in 1952 and espouses the idea that humans are descended from an exiled race of aliens called Thetans.

The church continues to attract controversy over claims that it separates members from their families and indoctrinates followers.

Comment: L.Ron Hubbard was a third-rate science fiction writer but a first class con man. He founded Scientology, based on one of his stranger short stories; and attracted large numbers of strange members who had what it took to join: money. Hubbard ended up with it, and his cult, for that is just what it is, not a religion, became very popular in the United States. It was banned in Germany because it was viewed as a cult, not a religion, that was systematically conning money out of its acoylites.  BH

The Green Corner

This 1100 pound catfish was caught downstream from the nuclear plant at Bad Seepage, Ohio after it had upset a fishing boat and eaten three of its occupants. This area is also known for 500 pound frogs and sparrows with two foot wingspans. Campers are advised to avoid the area for at least ten miles downstream..