Thursday, December 28, 2006

Remembering Frank Olson, MKULTRA victim and "suicidee"



(Image: President Ford and Frank Olson's widow)


The recent news item about the activist lawyer "falling" to his death, along with the disgusting paeans to recently-deceased President Ford, brought to mind the story of Frank Olson. The Olson saga is a miniature primer of parapolitics, bringing together the nastiest of the dark players -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Colby, and of course GHW Bush and clan -- and the blackest of CIA projects, Paperclip, MKULTRA, and ARTICHOKE.

There's a lot of material about this online, but this site does a good job of condensing the story. See the links on the page for further material.

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Second Chance for Hosanna Church

A second chance for Louisiana church
New assembly taking over site of alleged abuse

By DEBRA LEMOINE
The (baton Rouge) Advocate

PONCHATOULA, LA. — A Ponchatoula church shut down amid criminal allegations that some of its members engaged in ritualistic abuse of children is being reborn as a home for a new congregation.

Christian Life Assembly of God in Hammond is renovating the former Hosanna Church building in Ponchatoula and moving its church there, said the Rev. Gary Wayne Yates of Christian Life.

Seven members of the former Hosanna Church were arrested and charged in the sexual abuse of three children in April and May 2004. All are awaiting trial, and the first trial is scheduled for August.

The General Council of the Assemblies of God petitioned the 21st Judicial District Court in Amite last year to take ownership of the former Hosanna Church, which began as an Assembly member church.

Once the governing body obtained rights to the church, its officials offered the facility to Christian Life in exchange for its Hammond property, Yates said. By unanimous vote of its congregation, Christian Life decided to move to Ponchatoula, Yates said.

To Yates and his 150-member congregation, the move into the facility shows another way that God can turn something bad into good, the pastor said.

"There's going to be a great thing here," Yates said.

Early in the investigation, authorities alleged that the abuse was part of a satanic ritual but later said investigators found no physical evidence of such rituals.

Yates said that his church received the building as it was after detectives combed it for evidence. The church members also have found no evidence of occult rituals.

Yates, too, does not believe occult activities took place at the church. To him, it is simply a building that will once again be used as a church.

Yates said he believes his sentiment is shared by the Ponchatoula and Hammond residents who have called offering support. So far, the air conditioning units and the paint have been donated, he said.

The construction labor and expertise are being provided by Mission America Placement Services, also known as MAPS, a home missions arm of the General Council of the Assemblies of God, Yates said. Earlier this month, a half-dozen MAPS volunteers from across the U.S. worked on the sanctuary's newly installed drywall.

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Anti-Rove lawyer suicided?

It doesn't get any fishier than this:

Lawyer falls to death at hotel
Seaside: Police suspect Paul Sanford committed suicide
By JULIA REYNOLDS
Herald Staff Writer

In what police describe as a "probable" suicide leap, a prominent Monterey Bay Area attorney fell at least nine floors to his death at the Embassy Suites Hotel Monterey Bay in Seaside the morning before Christmas.

Shortly before 9:30 a.m. Sunday, officers found the body of Aptos attorney Paul Sanford in the west end of the hotel lobby, where he had landed on a large ventilation grate.

Police Capt. Steve Cercone said horrified guests were eating breakfast in the atrium at the time, and a number of witnesses saw Sanford fall from somewhere between the 9th and 12th floors.

"I'm at a loss for words," said Sanford's friend and business associate, Monterey attorney Shawn Mills. "Paul really had his fingers in a lot of different pies. He was from the East Coast, and I used to call him our 'West Coast Kennedy.'"

In addition to running his criminal defense practice in Capitola, Sanford was active in community organizations and hosted several independent radio shows in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties.

For several years, he was programs supervisor at the Volunteer Center in Santa Cruz and a teacher at the Monterey College of Law, where Mills said Sanford was an alumnus who mentored many students.

Sanford recently purchased his mother's home in Pebble Beach, and Mills said his friend planned to retire there one day.

Sanford was also active in the national arena. He appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004 beside Elk Grove resident Michael Newdow when he argued unsuccessfully that the words "under God" should be stricken from the Pledge of Allegiance.

A passionate believer in "a dynamic Constitution," Sanford always carried a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his pocket, Mills said.

"He was a champion of the downtrodden, he represented homeless people in Santa Cruz, and fought for free speech," Mills said. "He did a run across America. You name it he's done it. This is a real shock and a loss to the community."

Mills said Sanford decided in recent years to add journalism to his many occupations.

Almost immediately, he caused a stir after he joined the White House Press Corps in 2005, making waves as the first reporter to ask then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan whether the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name might be considered an act of treason.

"There has been a lot of speculation concerning the meaning of the underlying statute and the grand jury investigation concerning Mr. Rove," Sanford asked. "The question is, have the legal counsel to the White House or White House staff reviewed the statute in sufficient specificity to determine whether a violation of that statute would, in effect, constitute treason?"

McClellan was apparently flustered by the question and replied that "those are matters for those overseeing the investigation to decide."

The White House incident sparked controversy after Beltway bloggers incorrectly described Sanford as a reporter for the Air America radio network. At the time, he was associated with Watsonville radio station KOMY, an Air America affiliate, and Sanford told reporters he never claimed to work for Air America.

Sanford eventually filed suit against station owner Michael Zwerling after Zwerling was reported as saying Sanford had not been authorized to represent the station as a reporter, a statement Sanford refuted.

Mills represented Sanford in that suit, which was scheduled to begin in Santa Cruz County Superior Court in February. Mills said he did not know if the case will continue after Sanford's sudden death.

Although the dispute with Zwerling caused Sanford a great deal of stress at the time, Mills said his friend was feeling fine about it and believed he would soon be vindicated in court.

Sanford and Mills also have hosted the "Paul and Shawn Show" on Saturdays at Seaside radio station KRXA, where they covered last fall's election and interviewed former Salinas mayor and now Assemblywoman Anna Caballero, Pacific Grove Mayor Dan Cort and others.

In 2002, Sanford inadvertently found himself at the center of a controversy in Santa Cruz County when his independent election fundraising was characterized in the Santa Cruz Sentinel as last-minute "developer" contributions on behalf of supervisor candidate Mark Primack. Primack lost to incumbent Mardi Wormhoudt by fewer than 600 votes.

Friends and associates expressed disbelief at the news of Sanford's death and that it was ruled a suicide, saying Sanford seemed happy and had made many plans for this week and in coming months. Mills said he and Sanford recently decided to open a shared law office to serve Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, something Sanford was looking forward to doing.

He and Sanford spoke on the phone "around four or five times a day," Mills said, and the two had just spoken on Thursday, "tweaking a marketing plan" for their new law practice before Mills went out of town for the Christmas holiday.

"I just don't know what happened since Thursday. There was nothing on the horizon there to know this was going to happen," Mills said. "We were going to get together this week."

Mills said he had spoken to Sanford's wife, Paula, and that she also was in shock. He said Sanford, a father of two, was a devoted family man.

"This is a horrible thing for his family. He would never have intentionally put his family through that trauma. Something's not right, it doesn't make sense."

Police said that before Sanford fell, hotel housekeepers saw him pacing the hallway of an upper floor. Cercone said Sanford's car was parked next to the hotel, and he was not checked in as a guest.

Police declined to state exactly why they ruled the case a suicide.

Mills said he and Sanford often met at Chili's restaurant next to Embassy Suites Hotel Monterey Bay because the KRXA studio was nearby.

Mills said Sanford should be remembered for his volunteer work in the local community. "People don't like to work for free, and Paul worked for ideology. He didn't like the attention a lot. The attention he's going to get now would upset him."

(Thanks to Jingofever and Greencrow of the Rigorous Intuition Forum for finding this story.)

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Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Buzzflash Interviews Palast on Katrina Aftermath

Greg Palast continues to uncover the deliberate, calculated ethnic cleansing of New Orleans.

"The White House knew [the levees broke] because the Army Corps of Engineers sent them photographs. Again, I want to emphasize that the White House had the photographs of the levees breaking, and didn't tell state and local officials who had stopped the evacuation because the hurricane missed New Orleans. Everyone thought they dodged a bullet, but the White House didn't tell anybody the levees broke and were drowning the city." -- Greg Palast


BuzzFlash: Greg your new DVD, "Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans" is absolutely shocking because all of the footage you shot was one year after Katrina hit New Orleans. After all the devastation, virtually nothing has happened to recover from Katrina, and the residents have been left to fend for themselves.

Greg Palast: It's unbelievably ugly. You will see in the film mile after mile of destroyed houses. The 9th Ward looks worse than Berlin after the war because there's hardly a building standing. And this was just filmed a couple months ago! This was filmed one year after the flood. In Indonesia, they have rebuilt after the tsunami. The only thing they are rebuilding here is a Disneyland on the Mississippi to recreate a new, white, conservative city.

And don't forget, keeping African-Americans from coming back into New Orleans is amazing political gerrymandering. This is going to be crucial to keeping Louisiana in the Republican column in 2008. That's really part of the story.

BuzzFlash:
Sometimes I'll see you on TV or read something by you and I'll think to myself, there goes Greg again, saying something crazy -- Greg's saying they want to destroy the public housing in New Orleans to build new condos and keep the African Americans out.

But let me read you this from the Washington Post from December 7th: "Public housing officials decided Thursday to proceed with the demolition of more than 4,500 government apartments here, brushing aside an outcry from residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina who said the move was intended to reduce the ability of poor black people to repopulate the city." (Read the Post article)


Well, you were right again.

Greg Palast: Understand -- I used to work for the Housing Authority of New Orleans. The most beautiful housing in New Orleans are the townhouses near the French Quarter. And as Malik Brahim, an African-American leader there, says, "They just don't want them poor black people back." That's a crucial part of the film. It's about keeping the working class black people out of the city.

They're talking about knocking down 4,000 public townhouses. These are dry, safe, good houses. That's why they're still there. They literally want to bulldoze these homes because they don't want those "black people back."

You'll see in the film a woman, Patricia Thomas. We help break into her home because they've boarded it up. Everything is dry. You could eat the dry cereal. They've shuttered up their houses with steel bars. Katrina didn't do this, she says, "Man did this." And "the man" is in the White House and in the Mayor's Mansion.

BuzzFlash: Why do you think the rebuilding effort and relief effort in New Orleans has just come to a complete halt?

Greg Palast: It's not stalled. This is the plan. This is another White House gimmick to hide their evil intent in the clothing of incompetence.

The same with Iraq -- oh, we screwed up? We didn't get all the cheap oil that Wolfowitz promised in his congressional testimony, when he said the price of oil would decline. Well, it's gone up. Golly gee, who funds the Bush Administration but the oil companies and Saudi Arabia? Who profits when the price of oil goes up? That's "Mission Accomplished."

Look to New Orleans. Golly gee, the black folks haven't come back. There are no labor unions anymore in New Orleans. There are no public schools. It's all vouchers. Worker wages have gone down. It's "Mission Accomplished." This is the plan. This is the program.

The idea that this is just a screw-up, or a delay, or a stall is wrong. This is the plan. You're seeing it in effect. They don't ever want those people back. You still have 73,000 POWs - prisoners of "W."

New Orleans residents are locked in these "aluminum Guantanamos," also known as FEMA trailers, as you'll see in the film. There are a thousand mobile homes next to the Mobil Oil refinery. These trailers are in the middle of nowhere, and there's no way those people can get any jobs. It's a cycle. Some businesses and homeowners would like to rebuild New Orleans, but they can't get workers, and those who would like to work live too far away to get any jobs.

Families are not even allowed to move their trailer to their own home property. It's a deliberate program of ethnic and class cleansing in the City of New Orleans.

BuzzFlash: One of your big scoops in "Big Easy to Big Empty" was you found a company, "Innovative Emergency Management," that gave large donations to the Republican party, to create an evacuation plan in case of a hurricane. No one seems to be able to find that plan.

Greg Palast: The most innovative thing about their emergency management is that they had no plans that anyone knew about.

When I went and talked to "Innovative Emergency Management," they called security. I just went in and said where's the plan? What makes you qualified to do an evacuation plan besides your relations to the Republican Party?

These people had zero qualification to do this planning. We were told that the main problem was that they had no plan for getting people out without cars. I mean, their whole plan was "jump in your car and drive like hell."

But what if you didn't have a car? We had one guy who didn't have his car with him, and he was abandoned for four days in the rising water, standing on the overpass. He told us how he closed the eyes of a grandfather who had died giving his last bottle of water to his kids. The guy died of dehydration.

That's a story that no one has reported. Forget Anderson Cooper and his tears. By the way, we can't find Anderson Cooper after the fact.

BuzzFlash: Have you been able to find "Innovative Emergency Management's" evacuation plan yet?

Greg Palast: Actually, I finally got the contract that said they were "supposed to create" an evacuation plan. FEMA had withheld the documents we requested for a year and a half. FEMA was keeping it secret and was telling us it's a national security document until we threatened to sue.

I worked on an evacuation plan in Long Island, New York, for a hurricane. And you know what the key part about an evacuation plan is? You have to have it. Cops have to have it. Emergency workers have got to have it. The bus drivers have got to have it.

The most important thing is that we found out from the experts at the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University that they had a detailed evacuation plan.

BuzzFlash: Do you think part of the reason is that they may have had an evacuation plan for a hurricane, but not necessarily for a breach of the levees or a major flood?

Greg Palast: That's part of the problem, because they had no plan in case of a breach. Number one, the LSU Hurricane Center told the White House before the flood -- and I want to reemphasize this -- before the flood -- that New Orleans would be under water on a class 3 hurricane, that the levees were deficient, and that they were 18 inches short. The White House completely ignored their warnings.

You have to understand that the LSU hurricane experts actually spoke directly to the White House about this and what they saw as an emergency situation.

You should also know that the White House knew for nearly a full day that the levees had in fact been breached, and were about to drown the people left in the city. The emergency crews and police stopped the evacuation because they thought the city had survived Hurricane Katrina because the storm missed New Orleans. The hurricane watch center didn't realize that the levees had started to crack.

The White House knew it because the Army Corps of Engineers sent them photographs. Again, I want to emphasize that the White House had the photographs of the levees breaking, and didn't tell state and local officials who had stopped the evacuation because the hurricane missed New Orleans. Everyone thought they dodged a bullet, but the White House didn't tell anybody the levees broke and were drowning the city.

BuzzFlash:
What explanation could anyone have for that kind of "criminal negligence," as a City Councilman says in the film.

Greg Palast:
It is criminal negligence. Remember, I was a racketeering investigator.

The levees are federal property. If the federal levees failed, then it becomes a federal evacuation issue, and Bush and his gang did not want to be responsible.

Even more important is that they are financially responsible for all the homes lost, because the levees were deficient.

The original story coming out of the White House was that the Mississippi River and the lake north of New Orleans simply overflowed, right? Just big waves crash over the city and later the levees broke. Uh-uh. The city flooded because the levees broke.

Ivor van Heerden of the Louisiana State University hurricane center said he flew over those levees and he counted 28 levee breaks.

He said the White House, when they knew that the city was about to drown, said that there was one break. And he found 28. As he said, "That's not an act of God. That's an act of negligence."

BuzzFlash: You have a lengthy interview with Amy Goodman as part of the bonus features of the DVD. At one point, you spoke about the wetlands and the marshes that protect New Orleans from storm surges and floods. You place at least part of the blame on the oil industry, which is continuing to drill off the coast.

Greg Palast: The oil industry laid pipelines and canal routes through the marshlands. People say, "How come these people live in a city that's below sea level?" Well, they weren't anywhere near the sea, is the answer, except that over this past century, the oil industry has drained and destroyed the marshes. Now the Gulf of Mexico has come real close to the city.

BuzzFlash: What needs to happen to turn the situation around, when you have so many people and families displaced and so much profiteering going on? How do you ever break the deadlock?

Greg Palast:
A couple things. One, people have to know what the hell's going on. That's why they should get the film, invite friends and family, and have a screening so people can get informed. If you don't know what's going on, you can't solve it. This is like the war in Iraq. Once people figured out what's going on, they started wanting to get our troops the hell out.

And second, we have to allow the people of New Orleans to rebuild their homes. We need to give the people back their homes, and give them the jobs to rebuild their homes. And that will take care of it.

In fact, I show an example of a group called "Common Ground" which is rebuilding homes with the residents with their own sweat equity and a few bucks for materials. And this week, they're being evicted.

You have a group which has already put 115 families into homes that they've built themselves, and now they're being evicted this week. And by the way, all the money -- the million dollars of material and the hundred thousands of hours of sweat equity -- are all being stolen away from them by developers who are saying "Oh, you didn't have the right to rebuild those houses, we own them." And they're literally stealing their houses. That's what's happening.

And that's all with the grand approval of the Bush Administration. It's all with the grand approval of the Mayor of New Orleans, who is doing nothing about the mass evictions of people who have rebuilt their homes, and now their properties are being seized by banks and land speculators.

BuzzFlash:
Greg, as always, thank you for speaking with us.

Greg Palast: Thank you.

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Thursday, December 14, 2006

The Darkest Corner of the Mind


From George Monbiot's article:

From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man’s mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds – physical or mental – produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man’s power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.

President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the “values of civilised nations”: terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation’s interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.


Torture doesn't always leave cuts and bruises -- and still the scars are deep, permanent, and life-destroying.

(Thanks to a reader for the Monbiot link)

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