-Caveat Lector- The Octopus Conspiracy: Has The U.S. Been Spying On Your Bank Accounts? By Art Kunkin (Editor's Note: Following is an almost unbelievable and yet true story of evil forces in the U.S. government. In the article below, followed by linkages to many web sites where important parts of the story are documented, we have assembled an outline of a political-financial-murder conspiracy that includes a vast international spying operation by the U.S. on the banks and intelligence agencies of most of the other major governments of the world from 1983 to the present. The conspiracy also involves use of the protected legal status of an American Indian reservation in California to carry on illegal activities including chemical and biological weapons production, murders of journalists and attorneys investigating the situation, the development of a big brother computer program that can consolidate the financial records of everyone in the world into one database, and the attempted destruction by the U.S. Department of Justice of a private American computer company which developed this master program. The story involves persons whose names surfaced during the Irangate scandal, the unconstitutional activities of Oliver North and even the Kennedy assassination. The name "Octopus" has fittingly been given to this conspiracy by one of the murdered journalists. The story is so much like a fictional movie script that major journalists and the mass media, even knowing that there have already been court and congressional hearings about parts of the wrong-doings, have not been willing or capable of fitting the facts together. Nevertheless, there are growing rumors that political forces in the American intelligence community are preparing to publicize some parts of the Octopus conspiracy this Spring in order to influence the presidential elections of 1996 and destroy Clinton. However, partial revelations motivated by partisan political considerations will not educate the public to the fact that this is an Octopus which has the potential of strangling constitutional democracy. This is a story much bigger than Watergate or Irangate or Whitewater and it must be told in as full detail as possible. The World Wide Free Press was alerted to this story when we were sent the transcript of a December 7, 1995 radio interview of James Norman, formerly Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine (now with Media Bypass Magazine) and Jim Quinn of WRRK in Pittsburgh. However, we felt that this interview did not present this complex story in a clear step by step way that can be easily grasped by the general public. Therefore, we felt compelled to write our own account even though we know that what we have written is at best only a first draft that will have to be updated in the coming weeks and months as more facts become known to us. However, with our new ability to provide for the reader immediate Internet linkages to other source material, the limitations of our necessarily brief outline of this incredibly complex story are somewhat overcome. What follows has been assembled from a mass of documentation available on the Internet and stories that have appeared in New York's "Village Voice,"" In These Times,"" The Napa Valley Sentinel" and transcripts of over 30 radio interviews broadcast by courageous journalists on Pacifica radio. We emphasize that it is others who have done the basic research of this story and deserve the credit; we are latecomers who are only synthesizing and compiling and repeating the results of their research. We expect that people reading this story will not know what to do about it and will initially feel even more powerless than before. How can ordinary citizens influence a system of big government capable of allowing and participating in such secret crimes? It is obvious that just electing better people here and there will not stop a far flung conspiracy like this! However, we do believe that it is only by relentless exposure of the gruesome facts of such criminal activities that we will see a day when sufficient numbers of the American people will say that they have had enough and do everything necessary to institute the major changes and reforms needed. We have confidence that the American people will wake up. -------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------- Our story begins as a peculiar but seemingly straightforward business conflict between a computer company and a branch of the U.S. government. But hang in there; hidden in the financial details is the Octopus! In the late 70's and the early 80's, a small computer company named the Institute For Law and Social Research (later to be known as INSLAW) developed a computer program called PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information System). Originally financed by a government grant, this computer program has the ability to integrate many different databases produced by many different computer platforms and programs into one massive database . The U.S. Department of Justice, for example, saw PROMIS as being useful in law enforcement. By using PROMIS the names of criminals and their lawyers and the outcomes of their cases as contained in the local computer databases of all cities and counties in the United States can be integrated with the national FBI and CIA databases. This gives American law enforcement the ability to track national and even international criminal activity involving drug production and drug distribution and terrorist activity as never before. Other groups interested in PROMIS included the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Their need for PROMIS was to integrate many local and national bank databases throughout the world into a single efficient international financial database. PROMIS could do this but this is really part of the story as it unfolds later than the early 1980's. In 1982 Inslaw contracted with the Department of Justice (DOJ) to install a 1970's version of PROMIS in certain DOJ offices. However, by this time INSLAW had used private funds to develop PROMIS far beyond the achievements of the original computer program and was now a private company. DOJ had the legal right to freely use the first 1970's version of PROMIS, developed when INSLAW was still a non-profit company financed by the government, but DOJ now (1983) entered into a modified written contract with Inslaw to license for a fee the advanced 1980's proprietary version of PROMIS. In entering this contract DOJ had to agree to various restrictions wanted by Inslaw. For example, DOJ could only use PROMIS in the twenty largest U.S. Attorneys' offices; if DOJ wanted to install PROMIS in all of its offices, DOJ would have to pay an increased licensing fee. It was a normal contractual relation between a government agency and a private company! Several million dollars were initially involved in the DOJ contract but it was understood that PROMIS was so powerful and had so many national and international applications in government and business that it could forseeably earn Inslaw as much as three billion dollars a year. However, after getting physical possession of the advanced PROMIS program, DOJ surprisingly refused to pay Inslaw according to the terms of the contract. In a Pacifica Radio interview, Bill Hamilton, President of Inslaw and developer of the PROMIS software, had this to say: "As soon as they took delivery of the 1980's version, the Justice Department reneged on the contractual promise to pay us the license fees, and instead, started to refuse to pay us the bills for the services we were performing. They withheld payments for two million dollars worth of services and drove us into Chapter Eleven bankruptcy. As soon as we went into Chapter Eleven bankruptcy, the Justice Department launched a covert effort to convert Inslaw from Chapter Eleven bankruptcy to Chapter Seven bankruptcy, which means complete liquidation." Hamilton continued, " We sued the Department of Justice in Federal bankruptcy court, and after three weeks of trial, the court ruled that officials of the Justice Department 'stole' forty-four copies of the 1980's versions of PROMIS -- the proprietary version owned by Inslaw --'through trickery, fraud and deceit,' and then tried covertly to drive Inslaw out of business so that Inslaw could not seek legal redress in the courts." Eventually there were court rulings that the American government owed Inslaw some eight million dollars because of the DOJ violation of its contract. However, evidently to this day, Inslaw has collected nothing from the government even though the government continues to use the PROMIS program. There were even two Congressional hearings that sided with Inslaw, and another hearing is being proposed for 1996, but even this pressure has not helped Inslaw get its money and continue its business. All this, of course, is a matter of public record but has been reported mainly in computer industry magazines and the financial press. So why has the Department of Justice been so adamant in its refusal to pay Inslaw. Here is where we can have the Octopus Conspiracy enter the story. At one time during the lengthy and publicized legal process between DOJ and Inslaw, 1982 up to the present, a special government counsel, Nicholas Bua, was appointed to review the matter. Bua eventually issued a report in 1993 which defended the actions of the Department of Justice. Then a detailed rebuttal to this report was written by Elliot Richardson, the attorney for Inslaw. (Elliot Richardson is a former Attorney General of the United States. He was fired by President Richard Nixon from that position when Richardson refused Nixon's orders to fire the Special Counsel during the Watergate Hearings). Richardson's lengthy rebuttal is a remarkable document. (It has been posted on the Internet and at the end of this article we provide its Internet address so that you can read it for yourself. Copies have been distributed to every member of the present Congress and this has inspired several Congresspeople to call for still another hearing about Inslaw). Inslaw's rebuttal to Bua provides the reasons for the otherwise incomprehensible actions of the Department of Justice against Inslaw. (It is exciting reading but be forewarned that the relevant facts emerge only within the framework of a very long legal document constructed for specific legal purposes). Evidently, the Department of Justice and other U.S. government agencies (most likely the National Security Agency), in collaboration with Israeli Intelligence, and using several seemingly private computer companies set up by the Israeli's, have been illegally and secretly selling the expensive PROMIS software to such diverse organizations as the Royal Canadian Mounties in Canada, many banks all around the world and to as many as 88 foreign governments. The rebuttal gives a precise identification of the main Israeli Intelligence agent involved, a Rafi Eitan who was director of Lakam, a super-secret agency in the Israeli Ministry of Defense responsible for collecting scientific and intelligence information from other countries through espionage. This software theft, Inslaw asserts, not only was the basis for the creation of a secret multi-million dollar slush fund that has illegally benefited certain U.S. government insiders (including perhaps as many as 26 U.S. Congresspeople!) but was also motivated by the ability of the U.S. government to then spy on the foreign governments and foreign banks that used PROMIS. To summarize this core of the story, Inslaw has witnesses who have testified that the Wackenhut Corporation, a very large security company run by former military and intelligence officials, and a particular sub-division of the Justice Department located in Indio, California on the Cabazon Indian Reservation modified the PROMIS software with a secret back "trap door" that allows U.S. Intelligence to electronically and secretly eavesdrop on any bank or government using the software. Among the witnesses cited by Inslaw in its rebuttal is Michael Riconosciuto, the CIA computer expert who actually modified the PROMIS program with the "back door." (We give below the Internet addresses by which you can access interviews with Michael Riconosciuto done by Pacifica Radio journalists). In his testimony about the work he did at the Cabazon Indian reservation, Michael Riconosciuto revealed that he had also been involved in another secret government project on the reservation: the development of chemical and biological weapons in a project fronted by Park-O-Meter, a parking meter company. He claimed that these weapons were for the Contras, and were designed for the C-130 transport planes which were at the time carrying weapons and drugs in and out of Mena, Arkansas. He further stated that he had developed computer software to help launder drug money emanating from the Mena operation. In a signed affidavit submitted to a federal court proceeding, Riconsciuto stated "that the Wackenhut-Cabazon joint venture was intended to support the need of a number of foreign governments and forces, including forces and governments in Central America and the Middle East. The Contras in Nicaragua represented one of the most important priorities for the joint venture." The "Rebuttal To Bua" says the following about still another witness available to prove Inslaw's claims: "This individual claims to have knowledge, obtained contemporaneously with the actual event in June 1983, of a meeting at the World Bank headquarters in June 1983 concerning DOJ's conveyance of the 'proprietary VAX" version of Inslaw's PROMIS software. According to this individual (who also claims to have contemporaneous handwritten notes), the DOJ was represented at the meeting by D. Lowell Jensen, then Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division. Among others who this individual claims attended the meeting were Stanley Sporkin, then General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Acording to this individual, the initiative to implement PROMIS at the World Bank came from the Bank Operations Division of the CIA. (Footnote #1). Upon information and belief, the objective of the PROMIS implementation at the World Bank was to provide an early warning system to the U.S. intelligence community of signs of planned defaults on international loans. During the first few years of the Reagan Administration, a number of the so-called less developed countries actively considered defaulting on their international debts." And this is Footnote #1: "This kind of high technology penetration of the international banking system by U.S. intelligence is cited as one of the important accomplishments claimed by William Casey for his tenure as Director of Central Intelligence, in Bob Woodward's book,'VEIL: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987,' page 386. 'There was penetration of the international banking system, allowing a steady flow of data from the real, secret sets of books kept by many foreign banks that showed some hidden investing by the Soviet Union.' Now that we know about PROMIS and its "back door," we know exactly how this secret high technology penetration of international banks was done and we know why the Department of Justice stole the software from Inslaw in the first place. If DOJ had not stolen the software, Inslaw would have been licensing PROMIS directly to foreign banks and foreign governments and would then immediately have known about the existence of secret"back doors" and illegal spying if that was going on. According to Bill Hamilton, President of Inslaw, "Our software has been illegally sold to Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, France, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, South Korea and Japan. Supposedly, as many as eighty-eight countries were induced to purchase our software by people who had no right to sell it; who were, themselves, supported in their illegal efforts by the United States Government in the White House." In an interview with Pacifica Radio journalist Paul DeRienzo, Bill Hamilton also spoke about the strange death of Danny Casolaro, a journalist who was found dead in his motel room in West Virginia of 12 slashes in his wrists the day after he told friends on the phone that he had "solved" the Inslaw case. Paul DeRienzo: Where does Mr. Casolaro come in? He was doing his own research and he -- according to the newspaper accounts -- had developed a theory which he called "the Octopus." Are you aware of what Mr. Casolaro was working on at the time of his death? Bill Hamilton: "Yes, I spoke to Danny Casolaro on almost a daily basis for the year that he worked on this investigation....And what Danny had concluded was that a relatively small group of people with backgrounds in U.S. covert intelligence operations and with contacts high up in the political leadership of the United States government, were making a lot of money in a number of scandals: BCCI, Iran/Contra, October Surprise and Inslaw. And they would use the craft they had learned in foreign covert operations to help themselves to large profits through criminal activities; and that some of the proceeds from the illegal sales of our software were laundered through BCCI." Paul DeRienzo: "In West Virginia they're still saying it was a suicide, but many of his friends and family seem to think it was, in fact, murder. He wasn't in the mood, or the kind of person to take his own life..." A few other quotations of general interest from the Rebuttal To Bua: "One of Earl Brian's sales of PROMIS was to the military intelligence agency of the Government of Egypt, through what appears to be a CIA holding company." This is immediately followed by another, very suggestive paragraph: "There is one use of PROMIS by the United States Government that is considerably more sensitive than any that have been identified to the Hamiltons by this individual, and so sensitive that decisions on disclosure are restricted to the four statutory members of the National Security Council, i.e. the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense." There is some additional information available in the transcript mentioned above of a December 7, 1995 interview between Jim Norman, formerly Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine (now with Media Bypass Magazine) and Jim Quinn of WRRK in Pittsburgh. Norman says, "Let's start with the early 80's when Bill Casey came into office in the CIA under Ronald Reagan. That's when our government decided to embark on this amazing and extremely unbelievable successful effort to spy on the world's banks. We did it! We have been spying on world banking transactions for more than a dozen years.. The way we do it is by basically forcing foreign banks, wittingly or unwittingly, to buy bugged software and bugged computers that let our NSA (National Security Agency, the intelligence arm of the government) to basically surveill wire transfers all over the globe." Quinn: "Let me ask you this. How do you sucker the rest of the banking community around the globe into buying the software that you are selling?" Norman: "First of all you sell to front companies like this company Systematics in Arkansas, now called Alltel Information Services. They had another company called Boston Systematics, an affiliate based in Israel mainly...The tinkering of it was mainly putting back doors, just a few lines of code, that would allow somebody to dial into a computer without leaving any footprints, any audit trail that you were in there. Then you could go around and look around in files or you could collect information from a system without the user even knowing it..." Quinn: "Now this software, which was originally called PROMIS, was stolen by the Justice Department from a company called Inslaw...My question is -- why didn't Ed Meese just pay the damn bill and none of this would have ever come to light.... Norman: "Well, the trouble with it was that they bought it for use in the Justice Department but they were going to use it all over the place. If they were paying royalties on it, Inslaw would know just how extensive the use was of the software, and they didn't want people to know how extensively it was going to be used...What it has allowed us to do is basically riffle through other people's data files, abroad too, because the stuff was apparently being sold to foreign intelligence agencies, and it was also bugged...The whole computer world is much more porous and transparent than anybody wants you to know..." Norman then goes on to say that there are a group of computer hackers at the CIA ("this sort of renegade vigilante group of guys they call the Fifth Column") that has been monitoring (with PROMIS?) the international transfer of drug and terrorist monies in 3,000 foreign accounts! Norman believes that this group of hackers is planning to influence the 1996 elections against Clinton by releasing this Spring information it has about the Inslaw case and secret bank accounts of U.S. Senators and Representatives containing monies from the illegal sales of PROMIS. He even claims that this "Fifth Column" is presently terrorizing Washington by having taken 2.5 Billion Dollars ("B") from some of these accounts but no one has officially and openly complained about these thefts because of the original illegal source of these monies. However, these claims about the "Fifth Column" are not substantiated by any facts presently in our possession. (Above we have printed a small fraction of the information now available on the Internet about the Inslaw case and the Octopus Conspiracy. 141 items including the transcripts of 31 Pacifica Radio broadcasts, the Rebuttal To Bua, the Village Voice article on the death of Danny Casolaro, etc. can be found by opening the Lycos Search Engine and using "Inslaw" as the search term. The "Rebuttal to Bua" can also be obtained at: http://www.webcom.com/~pinknoiz/covert/inslaw.rebtuttal.html. In coming weeks, as we have more time, we will add other sources where information about Inslaw can be obtained). <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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