Date: May 6, 2006 7:13:41 PM PDT
Subject: "Mystery" Behind Goss' Resignation
May 6, 2006 -- Although the White House has spun Goss' departure as expected following some sort of "transition," it was clear that what WMR has been reporting for some time -- that Goss and his closest advisers, all GOP political operatives and hacks -- had been implicated in the contractor scandals surrounding Goss' Executive Director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo and ADCS head Brent Wilkes. The scandal involved poker parties at the Watergate Hotel and Westin Grand that reportedly featured prostitutes of both sexes, limousines, and situations in which CIA officials could be subject to potential blackmail. Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte became so concerned about the CIA scandal, he told Goss that it was time for him to go. it is now expected that other members of the Goss team -- including Foggo, chief of staff Patrick Murray, Michael Kostiw (who left the CIA under a cloud in the early 1980s after being arrested for shoplifting a package of bacon from a McLean, Virginia supermarket), Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, and others who Goss brought with him from Capitol Hill -- will be shown the door.
Although many current and recently retired CIA officials expressed relief that Goss resigned, his replacement, Negroponte's deputy and former NSA Director General Michael Hayden, is also problematic. Although Hayden and Negroponte get along very well -- a primary reason Hayden was selected -- Hayden's role in permitting warrantless wiretaps by the NSA of the international and domestic communications of U.S. persons, caused him problems with long serving employees of the signals intelligence agency. Hayden's mismanagement of NSA's modernization efforts have cost the American taxpayers perhaps billions of dollars. Hayden presided over an NSA that saw the first whistleblowers coming forward to report illegal activities, intelligence cover-ups, intelligence fabrications, and serious misconduct by senior NSA officials. There will be a lot of sharing of notes between NSA and CIA personnel on Hayden and his stint as CIA Director may prove as stormy as that faced by Goss. Hayden was also a good foot soldier for neo-con policy makers in the Pentagon. Hayden's arrival at Langley gives Donald Rumsfeld a trusted foothold inside the agency he has sought to bring under the control of his parallel Pentagon intelligence operation run by Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone and General William "Jerry" Boykin.
May 6, 2006 -- General Hayden's nomination to be the next CIA Director came as another scandal involving the intelligence agency emerged in addition to the "Hookergate" scandal centered on the Watergate and another Washington hotel. Under Goss, the CIA's venture capital arm, IN-Q-TEL, which provides CIA money to promising high-tech start-up firms, became the subject of a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation for possible massive misappropriation of taxpayer money and private money involving IN-Q-TEL, NASA's venture capital branch -- Red Planet Capital -- The US Special Operations Command's venture capital firm On Point, and the infamous Carlyle Group -- the war profiteering company in which George H. W. Bush, the Bin Laden family, and former Secretary of State James Baker have held major financial interests.
Suspicions about IN-Q-TEL were raised in late April when its 35-year-old CEO, Amit Yoran, abruptly resigned to "spend more time with his family." Yoran, an Israeli-American, had been on the job for just four months after he succeeded IN-Q-TEL's first CEO, Gilman Louie, a well-known Silicon Valley investor and technical guru. Before taking over IN-Q-TEL, Yoran was the director of the National Cyber Security Division at the Department of Homeland Security. Under Yoran, IN-Q-TEL's operating budget increased exponentially and the firm began negotiating with various high-tech firms to develop deep data mining programs and spy technology. Yoran's rumored successor was said to be Mark Frantz, who Yoran brought from The Carlyle Group to be IN-Q-TEL's managing general partner and board of trustees member. Frantz worked for George H. W. Bush and held a senior position with Alex Brown, later merged with Deutsche Bank, the firm where the CIA's former Executive Director, A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard served as Chairman. IN-Q-TEL's board of trustees chairman is Lee A. Ault III of Delray Beach, Florida, who also serves on the board of Office Depot.
Individuals familiar with IN-Q-TEL report that the company is suspected of steering CIA funds to start-up firms with close ties to the GOP as well as "pump and dump" penny stock firms tied to three foreign nations -- Israel, Dubai, and Malaysia. The emerging IN-Q-TEL scandal is mirrored by the financial scandal involving favoritism in CIA contracts to Brent Wilkes' ADCS and its subsidiaries.
Deputy DNI Gen. Michael Hayden, who presided over dubious multi-billion dollar contracts -- including Groundbreaker and Trailblazer -- as NSA director, has a great deal of experience in covering up cost overruns, contractor fraud, and contract favoritism. Beyond the need to have a good foot soldier at the helm of the CIA, the Bush administration is clearly hoping that Hayden, using his special form of intimidation through the use of psychiatric and security personnel to threaten whistleblowers, can tamp down the emerging financial "Watergate" emerging at the CIA.
May 3, 2006 -- George W. Bush's War Stamp Tax. According to US Postal Service insiders, the Bush administration, which has prided itself on tax cuts, has imposed a stealth war tax on the American people. In January, the Postal Rate Commission approved a raise in first class postage two cents to 39 cents. The commission has now indicated it wants to raise the price of a first class stamp by three cents to 42 cents next year. The reason for the Bush stamp tax is that when the Bush administration took power in 2001, the Postal Service Fund, a special account established within the Treasury Department, had a substantial surplus. However, in order to pay for its Iraq war adventure, the Bush administration raided the Postal Service Fund and created a deficit. The two successive rate increases have been necessary in order to replenish the fund, according to Postal Service sources. In addition to the Postal Service Fund, the misappropriation of money for the war has also adversely affected the Postal Employees' Compensation Fund, the solvency for which is guaranteed by the Postal Service Fund.
The Postal Rate Commission is a gaggle of GOP hacks. The two-term chairman is Mississippian George Omas, a former House of Representatives employee and a member of the National Republican Club of Capitol Hill. The Vice Chairman is Dawn Tisdale, a former postmaster of Smithville, Texas. Another commissioner is Tony Hammond, the 1998 director of campaign operations for the Republican National Committee and an assistant to then RNC chair Haley Barbour. Danny Covington, a one-time GOP House candidate whose term expired in October 2005, and Omas areboth Ole Miss graduates and represent a GOP clique beholden to Barbour and Senator Trent Lott.
May 3, 2006 -- GOP sex scandal has roots in Iran-Contra. According to sources close to the investigation of GOP businessmen Mitchell Wade and Brent Wilkes in the Duke Cunningham bribery scandal involving GOP members of Congress and sex escorts, poker parties, hotel suites, and limousines, many of the behind-the-scenes principals in the affair were involved in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. There is a focus on the activities of Porter Goss's CIA Executive Director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who was reportedly assigned to John Negroponte's death squad and Contra support operations in Honduras in the 1980s. Foggo is a good friend of Wilkes from their days as students in San Diego.
Foggo's past job was in chief of logistics, including contract administration, for the CIA's main European and Middle East support base in Frankfurt, Germany. Informed sources believe that Foggo was a key individual in approving contracts for many of the CIA rendition airline companies responsible for transporting "Al Qaeda" suspects from and to the Middle East via Frankfurt and other airports. The owners of these airline companies include many Iran-Contra veterans who were responsible for flying arms and drugs for the CIA in the 1980s.
May 3, 2006 -- More on WMR hacking. WMR has learned that one of the primary "intelligence support" contractors for the US Army's 5th Signal Command in Germany, which was identified as a source for unusual activity relating to our server, is ManTech International, which performs various intelligence related functions for the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. It is headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia.
Yesterday, WMR was warned by a reliable European source that there was unusual access activity detected regarding our web site. Fifteen minutes later, our server, which also supports other web sites, temporarily went down. But we have the identity of the source of the unusual access activity: the US Army's 5th Signal Command in Mannheim, Germany. Two component activities of the 5th Signal Command -- the 2nd and 7th Signal Brigades -- appear to be involved in information warfare operations and influence operations. Note to 5th Signal Command operators: by hacking into U.S. computers protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, you are in potential violation of Federal law (the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Section 1030, US Code, Fraud and related activity in connection with computers). If your Commanding Officer, Brig. Gen. Dennis Via, authorizes such illegal hacking, he is in violation of the law and it is your duty, pursuant to Army and DoD regulations, not to obey such illegal orders and report them to the Army Inspector General -- 1-(800) 752-9747, 1-(703) 601-1060 or DSN: 329-1060.
April 29, 2006 -- FBI agents lied about what they wanted from Jack Anderson's papers. The FBI agents who, in December, approached Olivia Anderson, the widow of deceased investigative reporter Jack Anderson and more recently, in March, author and researcher Mark Feldstein, who is writing a book about Jack Anderson, were interested in far more than the names of sources in the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) espionage case. That explanation by the FBI did not hold any water since Jack Anderson had not been active in pursuing that particular story -- he had suffered from Parkinson's Disease since 1986. According to individuals close to the FBI fishing expedition, the actual documents the FBI wanted to seize were files Anderson collected in the 1960s that linked George H. W. Bush's activities in Texas in 1963 to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22 of that year. Bush was a friend of George DeMohrenschildt, Lee Harvey Oswald's Belarusian-born contact officer. DeMohrenschildt befriended Oswald and arranged for him to settle in Dallas after leaving the Soviet Union. DeMohrenshildt "committed suicide" shortly before he was due to testify before the 1978 House Assassinations Committee. The elder Bush's name, address, and phone number in Midland, Texas was found in DeMohrenshildt's address book under the heading "Poppy."
In addition, the FBI wanted to remove from future public circulation Anderson documents that point to George H. W. Bush conspiring with the government of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran to keep U.S. hostages imprisoned in Iran until after the 1980 presidential election and avoid an "October Surprise" for Carter. The agreement between the Iranians and Bush (who was working with William Casey) sank the chances for Jimmy Carter's re-election and George H. W. Bush's entry into the White House as Vice President. The hostages were released at the very time Ronald Reagan took the oath of office in 1981. That operation would lay the ground for future Bush-Tehran collusion in the Iran-Contra scandal. Another set of files involve the links between the Bush family and that of Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin John W. Hinckley. Had Hinckley succeeded in killing Reagan, the Bush political agenda would have commenced in earnest in 1981 rather than 1989.
The Bush family has been known to use retired FBI agents as their political heavies and clean up men in the past -- most notably to erase the Bush links to Dallas. George W. Bush's departing Press Secretary Scott McClellan has a close relative who continued to muddy the waters about the JFK assassination. McClellan's father, Barr McClellan, wrote a book claiming it was Lyndon Johnson, not George H. W. Bush, who conspired to kill the president.
April 29, 2006 -- The cresting wave of major scandals in Washington. At week's end, there is every indication that the Bush White House is bracing for additional scandals. A sex scandal involving the rented suites at the Watergate Hotel (the GOP just can't stay away from that place), female and male prostitutes and male GOP members of Congress and top CIA officials, including Director Porter Goss, and GOP-connected contractors is simmering but is expected to blow wide open in the next few weeks. Goss's warnings about ex-CIA officers speaking to the media have more to do with curtailing information about the growing sex and bribery scandal than in tracking down leaks about pre-Iraq war intelligence. Also, George W. Bush's top assistant Karl Rove appears to be facing at least two criminal charges that could be brought by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the next few weeks. The former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Lester Crawford is the subject of a federal grand jury for financial improprieties involving pharmaceutical companies and making false statements to Congress. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, along with GOP Chairman Ken Mehlman, have been implicated in a GOP phone jamming criminal case in New Hampshire. The lack of federal response to Katrina and dissatisfaction with Barbour is causing Mississippi - once a solidly "red" state -- to turn pale blue and that means Trent Lott's re-election chances may not be as secure as Republican pollsters seem to believe. Bush's recent staff changes were largely made in anticipation of a summer of widening scandals. WMR's GOP scandal scorecard has been updated to show the current scandals.
April 28, 2006 -- The Bush administration has further enraged the U.S. Intelligence Community by instructing its GOP shill, CIA Director Porter Goss, to warn ex-members of the CIA that they could forfeit their pensions and jeopardize consulting contracts if they talk to the media or write books or articles without permission. This warning is similar to the warning, first reported by WMR, issued by the Pentagon to retired flag rank officers who speak out against the Bush administration. Those working for defense contractors were warned that their contracts could be jeopardized by criticism of the administration. Ex-CIA employees were also warned that their consulting contracts with the CIA could be at risk if they spoke to the media. Several ex-U.S. intelligence officers who have criticized the Bush administration have reportedly received threat letters warning them about their confidentiality agreements. This editor, an NSA employee in the mid-1980s and a Top Secret and TS/SBI-cleared Naval officer for 10 years, has been contacted by a number of former colleagues, some not heard from in 25 years, who have intimated at recent inquiries from government investigators asking about my past work, responsibilities, and other details.
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Porter Goss's bird flu-infected eagle squawks: ex-spooks warned not to talk or else
Nevertheless, WMR will continue to be a secure avenue for current and former members of the US Intelligence Community, military, Foreign Service, and other government agencies to report on the illegal and abusive activities of the Bush regime. Using the Intelligence Community's very own tradecraft, WMR goes to extraordinary lengths to anonymize and protect its sources. And intimidation does not play well here either.
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From George Orwell's 1984: "All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move toward rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is."
