10 STORIES
see link for full story
http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/08/05/is-t ... anization/
Is the FBI a Criminal Organization?
John Glaser, August 05, 2013
p062113ps-0265
Last week, in a piece I wrote for The Huffington Post on the hypocrisy in the Bradley Manning trial, I argued that “The law is for the powerful to defy with impunity, and for the weak to be punished with.” As evidence, I mentioned several high crimes committed by the Bush and Obama administration, crimes for which they will never be prosecuted.
And then in yesterday’s USA Today I saw this remarkable article reporting that government documents show that the FBI committed 5,658 crimes in 2011 alone. That amounts to 15 crimes a day, on average, that FBI agents explicitly authorized. And far from being part of a rogue, covert program kept hidden from a judge, this is standard operating procedure on which the Department of Justice provides oversight.
The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation’s top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.
The U.S. Justice Department ordered the FBI to begin tracking crimes by its informants more than a decade ago, after the agency admitted that its agents had allowed Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger to operate a brutal crime ring in exchange for information about the Mafia. The FBI submits that tally to top Justice Department officials each year, but has never before made it public.
Agents authorized 15 crimes a day, on average, including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies. FBI officials have said in the past that permitting their informants — who are often criminals themselves — to break the law is an indispensable, if sometimes distasteful, part of investigating criminal organizations.
Let that last sentence sink in for a moment. The government must break the law in order to catch and punish lawbreakers. Does that not offend even the most superficial understanding of the rule of law this country was supposedly founded upon?
According to the USA Today report, this number of 5,658 crimes in one year barely scratches the surface:
USA TODAY obtained a copy of the FBI’s 2011 report under the Freedom of Information Act. The report does not spell out what types of crimes its agents authorized, or how serious they were. It also did not include any information about crimes the bureau’s sources were known to have committed without the government’s permission.
Crimes authorized by the FBI almost certainly make up a tiny fraction of the total number of offenses committed by informants for local, state and federal agencies each year. The FBI was responsible for only about 10% of the criminal cases prosecuted in federal court in 2011, and federal prosecutions are, in turn, vastly outnumbered by criminal cases filed by state and local authorities, who often rely on their own networks of sources.
“The million-dollar question is: How much crime is the government tolerating from its informants?” said Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles who has studied such issues. “I’m sure that if we really knew that number, we would all be shocked.”
If you read Trevor Aaronson’s meticulously reported book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, you’ll get a glimpse into how the thuggery at the FBI works in the war on terror. Aaronson thoroughly documents all those “terror plots” that the FBI has “foiled.” By and large, the FBI uses untrustworthy delinquents as informants in order to entrap unsuspecting halfwits that never would have been able to carry out a terror attack without FBI encouragement and facilitation.
Far be it from me to prejudge, but Antiwar.com has been requesting FBI documents on this website through the Freedom of Information Act since 2011, to no avail. Thankfully, the ACLU is suing on our behalf. Requesting surveillance of this website and its founders, as the FBI did, and suspecting we may be an agent of a foreign power – all for exercising our First Amendment rights- seems like it fits perfectly within the Bureau’s modus operandi.
see link for full story
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/ ... _ever.html
August 05, 2013
The Best Mob Story Ever
By Jack Cashill
The best mob story ever told does not involve Al Capone or Bugsy Segal or John Gotti. It involves a mobster few American have ever heard of, Greg Scarpa by name, and his not quite as lethal son, Greg Scarpa Jr., "Junior" going forward.
One reason few people ever heard of Scarpa is that until his arrest in September 1992, he worked as a "Top Echelon Confidential Informant" under the protection of the FBI for the most of the thirty years prior. During that time, Scarpa murdered at least fifty people. Understandably, this is not a story not that the FBI wants told, but author Peter Lance has told it anyhow in his stunningly comprehensive new book, Deal With The Devil.
I have taken a particular interest in this story over the years because of the light it shines, improbably enough, on the destruction of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island in 1996, a subject about which I co-authored the 2003 book First Strike. More on this angle later.
The FBI protected Scarpa, a capo in the Colombo family, because he provided intelligence on New York's five notorious La Cosa Nostra (LCN) families. Some of the intelligence was accurate. All of it was self-serving. As needed, Scarpa provided other services as well. In 1964, the FBI, under enormous pressure to solve the "MissBurn" case, sent Scarpa to the small Mississippi town of Philadelphia. His job was to interrogate one of the locals who knew what happened to three civil rights workers who had gone missing. The fellow would not talk to the FBI. Armed with a straight razor, Scarpa proved much more persuasive. FBI agents soon found the bodies, as the man told Scarpa they would, buried under an earthen dam. Although this part of the saga did not make the movie, Mississippi Burning, Lance makes a compelling case for its legitimacy. Nor was this the only time the FBI sent Scarpa to Mississippi.
In return for his services, the FBI kept Scarpa out of prison. At the heart of Lance's book is the contention that the FBI, in the person of agent Lin DeVecchio, did much more, none of it justifiable. Lance argues that DeVecchio lost his moral balance and, at the very least, provided Scarpa with the kind of FBI intelligence that allowed Scarpa to target his enemies.
What has intrigued me most is the activity of New York City's FBI office in the summer of 1996, the year TWA 800 was destroyed. In April of that year, the office's assistant director, Jim Kallstrom, sent a memo to the head of the FBI, Louis Freeh, warning that the continued internal FBI investigation of DeVecchio would "have a serious negative impact on the government's prosecution of various LCN figures."
In July 1996, the case was still dragging on when Freeh assigned Kallstrom to head up the TWA Flight 800 investigation. For the first five weeks Kallstrom did a credible job before buckling under White House pressure on or about August 22. I have always wondered what combination of carrots and sticks the White House used to misdirect the investigation away from the obvious missile strike to a fully contrived mechanical failure.
Without making the connection directly, Lance suggests a possible carrot. In early September 1996, the Justice Department abruptly closed its thirty-one month long investigation and informed DeVecchio that a prosecution was "not warranted." By mid-September 1996, Kallstrom had ended all talk of a bomb or missile and pushed through the administration's "mechanical failure" narrative. Kallstrom would remain DeVecchio's most prominent champion even during his criminal trial on the same charges.
As an FBI informant, Junior picked up where Scarpa senior left off. Awaiting trial in 1996 in New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) on racketeering charges, Junior turned down a 17-year plea offer in the hope that he could finesse information out of a few of his fellow prisoners and trade it for a reduced sentence.
Incredibly, those prisoners included Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad, and Wali Khan Amin Shah Shah, all awaiting trial on what is known as the Bojinka plot, and Eyad Ismail, who was awaiting trial for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center along with Yousef. In January 1995, Yousef's Manila apartment had caught fire just weeks before he and his co-conspirators were to unleash Bojinka, the plot to blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific. He was apprehended a month later.
On March 7, 1996, Junior initiated a meeting with assistant U.S. Attorneys Valerie Caproni and Patrick Fitzgerald and his own attorney, Larry Silverman, to formalize the arrangement. For more than a year, Junior worked these guys for intelligence and passed it along to the FBI. The investigators who first unearthed the FBI documentation, the late Stephen Dresch and Angela Clemente, have rightly called Scarpa's information "the single most significant Al-Qaeda intelligence in U.S. History, prior to 9-11."
"Yousef wants to blow things up but he does not say why," Junior would tell his handlers. Yousef was fully capable of such mischief. In 1994, he had planted a bomb on a Philippine Airlines 747 as something of a test and killed the Japanese national who was sitting above it.
In May 1996, Junior reported that "during the trial [Yousef et al.] had a plan to blow a plane up to show they are serious." As July 17 approached, according to Junior, Yousef was warning friends not to fly on TWA or American Airlines on the morning of July 18. On the night of July 17, after the explosion, Yousef kept pressing to use Junior's cell phone, which he allegedly did not know was part of an FBI sting. Yousef called 9-11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed that night, saying, "What had to be done has been done, TWA 800" (last two words unintelligible).
A week after the blast, Junior reported, "Murad feels that they may get a mistrial from the publicity surrounding the TWA explosion." By this time, Yousef had already appealed for one and been turned down. It is altogether possible, indeed likely, that Yousef had nothing to do with the destruction of TWA Flight 800. An opportunist to the core, he was willing to take credit nonetheless. Given his track record, however, the authorities had to have taken him seriously.
On July 24, the FBI reported, "Scarpa advised that Yousef has been avoiding any conversation pertaining to the explosion." Within days of the TWA 800 crash, the same U.S. attorney who was managing the Scarpa sting, Valerie Caproni, illegally took the crash investigation away from the National Transportation Safety Board and gave it to the FBI.
For the next five weeks, the FBI led the media to believe a bomb had destroyed TWA Flight 800. This culminated in the August 23 New York Times headline, "Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of Flight 800." Given the intelligence Caproni had gotten from Scarpa, she would have had to suspect that Yousef's people were responsible for the presumed bombing.
And yet there is no evidence in the available FBI documents to suggest that any pressure was brought to bear on either Yousef or Junior to cough up information. There are several possible reasons why. The most obvious is that from day one the White House knew that a missile, not a bomb, had taken down the airplane. The leaking of "bomb" evidence was a conscious misdirection.
The less obvious reason is that Caproni and the FBI had come to see Junior as a liability. If they publicly gave him credit for his intelligence work, it would be hard to deny his corroboration of the charge that his father had a lethally corrupt relationship with DeVecchio.
Some seventy-five trials of New York-area mob figures hinged on DeVecchio's integrity. If that were impeached, there would be chaos in the courts. This is the story that Lance tells. Junior received no credit for his intelligence work. At the end of the day, the authorities called it a "hoax and scam," despite the fact that in February 1997 Junior passed along Yousef's comment that Islamic terrorists "will like hijacking airplanes so much that they will become addicted to them."
see link for full story
http://world.time.com/2013/08/05/exclus ... ful-death/
Exclusive: Father of Slain Chechen Plans to Sue FBI for Son’s Wrongful Death
Abdulbaki Todashev, whose 27-year-old son Ibragim was killed in May during an FBI interrogation, landed in the U.S. on Aug. 5 to seek answers from U.S. authorities to questions surrounding his son's death
Aug. 05, 2013
A grudge against the FBI is never an easy thing to act upon, especially for a man as foreign to the U.S. legal system as Abdulbaki Todashev, a municipal official from the Russian region of Chechnya. But on Monday, August 5, Todashev arrived in Tampa, Florida with a black briefcase of photographs – the evidence he plans to use in suing the FBI for the wrongful death of his son. The case would be a long shot, in part because Todashev speaks little English, cannot afford a lawyer and only has a U.S. tourist visa glued into his Russian passport. What he does have is the help of two U.S. rights organizations — including the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU — and the determination of a grieving father from a region where blood feuds run deep.
Todashev’s eldest son, Ibragim, was killed during an FBI interrogation in his home in Orlando, Florida, on May 22, two days before he was due to fly home to his native Chechnya. The FBI, along with several officers from the Orlando and Boston police forces, had arrived at his one-bedroom apartment that evening to interrogate him in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing. The suspected perpetrator of that bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose father also hails from Chechnya, had been a friend of the younger Todashev when they both lived in Massachusetts. The FBI was trying to learn more about their relationship, so the officers questioned him for several hours that night at a table in his living room. But soon after midnight, under circumstances that remain unexplained, Todashev was fatally shot.
The photographs in his father’s briefcase seem to raise more questions about the death than they answer. On a recent afternoon in Moscow, he laid them out across the table of a diner, starting with the family photos he had taken of his son with his 11 siblings in Chechnya. In one of the frames, Ibragim stands with several of his younger brothers at a boxing club in Grozny, the regional capital, where he began his training to become a mixed-martial arts fighter. In another, he grapples during a professional cage fight in Florida, surrounded by
see link for full story
http://www.knoxfocus.com/2013/08/a-tale ... ar-hoover/
A Tale of Tennessee and the FBI: Senator K. D. McKellar and J. Edgar Hoover
From the author’s personal collection.
Senator K. D. McKellar speaking during a Senate committee meeting.
By Ray Hill August 5 2013
Francis Biddle, was Attorney General of the United States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and noted Tennessee’s Senator Kenneth D. McKellar could be “obstinate” and “vindictive”, but was careful to note McKellar was “shrewd”. Biddle also added that McKellar “never forgot”. It was McKellar’s long memory that caused the Tennessean to bedevil the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover.
The Democrats came back to power in 1933 with the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt after twelve long years of Republican rule. McKellar’s office was inundated with requests from thousands of Tennesseans looking for work. Senator McKellar kept an eye out for his constituents with every Federal agency and McKellar contacted Hoover about the desire of a few Tennesseans who wished to become special agents for the FBI. The imperious Director ignored McKellar, causing the senator to go over his head and contact Hoover’s nominal boss, the Attorney General. When Hoover found out about McKellar complaining to the Attorney General, he retaliated by firing three FBI special agents in Tennessee not a week later.
Considering that Kenneth McKellar was the ranking member of the Senate’s powerful Appropriations Committee, Hoover’s act of vengeance was both arrogant and foolish. McKellar was also the Chairman of the Appropriation Committee’s Justice subcommittee, which oversaw Hoover’s own budget. McKellar had been in the Senate since 1917 and was one of the more senior Democrats in that body. Profoundly angered by Hoover’s insult, McKellar waited for the FBI Director to come to Congress, as he must, for funds.
The confrontation between Senator McKellar and J. Edgar Hoover has been well documented and has even been recognized in modern film. The Tennessean managed to mortally embarrass the ultra-sensitive Hoover so badly it chaffed the FBI Director for decades to come. Both Dillinger with Johnny Depp and the remarkable J. Edgar, a film by Clint Eastwood, have scenes with Senator McKellar clashing with Hoover. Oddly, both actors chosen to portray Senator McKellar have moustaches, an affectation McKellar never wore on his lip.
Congress had previously passed a slew of crime bills, but had not included enough money to cover the cost of implementation. J. Edgar Hoover came to Capitol Hill to ask for quite nearly twice his earlier budget appropriation. Waiting for him was Tennessee’s senior United States Senator.
Armed with an array of graphs, charts and statistics, Hoover doubtless felt himself well prepared for the questioning to come from the Senate Appropriations Committee members. Hoover proudly rattled off his statistics; bank robberies, which had been almost commonplace earlier, were significantly down. Kidnappings (the most famous of which was perhaps the abduction of the infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindberg) had been reduced. “Ma” Barker was dead, as were “Baby Face” Nelson and John Dillinger.
Senator McKellar began his questioning of Hoover after the Director finished his presentation outlining the FBI’s need for more money.
McKellar rather innocuously wondered if the FBI used any of its budget on advertising and the Director replied it did not. Senator McKellar noted the number of movies being released by Hollywood depicting the workings of the FBI, which he claimed widely advertised the agency and its methods. During the 1930s there were a plethora of movie studios and modern day readers will remember, television was years away from becoming a popular form of entertainment. At that time, the primary forms of entertainment for Americans was either the movies or radio. Fortunately for Hoover, Senator McKellar did not probe into the agency’s ties to some radio programs, as the producer of one such program proudly boasted the stories were lifted directly from the FBI’s own files. Hoover said the FBI objected to much of the material used by the Hollywood studios as it related to the agency and had duly registered its protests.
What Hoover did not mention to the subcommittee members was he was keenly aware of the power of modern media and how it affected the FBI’s reputation and effectiveness. Hoover had even entertained the notion of the FBI making its own movies for public consumption.
McKellar asked Hoover if the FBI employed any professional writers, which the Director denied. The two continued to verbally spar throughout the hearing and McKellar infuriated Director Hoover by pointing out the FBI had on more than one occasion claimed credit for arrests made by other law enforcement agencies. Senator McKellar told the red-faced Hoover, “It seems to me that your Department is just running wild, Mr. Hoover.” McKellar went on to say he considered Hoover’s request for more money “extravagant”.
The angry Hoover interjected, “Will you let me make a statement?”
Senator McKellar snapped, “I think that is the statement.”
One sympathetic senator tried to help Hoover during the course of the hearing. Missouri’s Harry Truman tried to steer the conversation away from McKellar’s pointed questioning. Ironically, Truman would later come to dislike J. Edgar Hoover intensely.
Comfortable with his well-prepared statistics, Hoover fielded Senator Truman’s questions easily. Positively relentless when provoked, McKellar was not done and was soon again on the attack. The Tennessean wanted to know, “How many people have been killed by your Department since you have been allowed to have guns?”
Hoover, describing the dead as “desperadoes”, replied that eight people had been killed since the FBI agents were allowed the use of firearms. Hoover also mentioned four FBI agents had been killed in the line of duty.
Senator McKellar snorted, “In other words the net effect of turning guns over to your department has been the killing of eight desperadoes and four G-men.”
Hoover tried to stress FBI agents were under the strictest of orders to make every effort to take any suspect alive. The FBI Director explained agents were only to use their weapons in self-defense or if absolutely necessary.
Senator McKellar dismissed Hoover’s statement, saying, “I doubt very much whether you ought to have a law that permits you to go around the country armed as an army would, and shoot down all the people you suspect of being criminals, or such that you suspect of having guns, and having your own men shot down.”
McKellar went on to tell the enraged and astonished FBI Director that it was not his fault the statutes enabling FBI agents to shoot down an unsuspecting populace were on the law books; rather it was the fault of the Congress who had enacted the laws. McKellar told Hoover even if a man was a murderer, the FBI agents did not have the right to kill him, causing the FBI Director to cry, “Even if he pulls a gun on you?”
Senator McKellar serenely replied that was a matter for the courts. Senator Truman wanted to know just how McKellar would catch them “If they commenced shooting at you?” The Tennessean was forced to reluctantly concede there might be instances where it was necessary for the FBI agents to use their weapons.
McKellar went on with his questioning, quietly asking Hoover what his qualifications were to serve as Director of the FBI. Hoover replied he had been employed by the Department of Justice for nineteen years and had been the FBI Director for twelve years. Senator McKellar retorted he meant had Hoover attended any sort of “crime school”? Hoover, starting to squirm, mentioned he had initiated just such a training program inside the FBI, causing Senator McKellar to scathingly say, “So whatever you know about it you learned there in the Department?”
Hoover replied that was true and described it as “first-hand” experience.
It was then that Senator McKellar asked the question that was to eat at Hoover until his death in 1972.
“Did you ever make an arrest?” McKellar wondered.
Hoover weakly replied he had.”
Senator McKellar refused to allow Hoover to wriggle off the hook, persisting by asking, “How many arrests have you made and who were they?”
J. Edgar Hoover answered the question by citing his investigations in a few cases, but Senator McKellar demanded, “Did you make the arrests?” Hoover said the arrests were made by officers who were “under my supervision”.
Senator McKellar thundered, “I am talking about the actual arrests.” Pressing his point, McKellar asked, “You never arrested them actually?”
Hoover lamely mentioned the FBI had not even had the authority to make arrests until two years before the 1936 hearing. Yet it did not erase the pubic perception that came from the hearing; the famed Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the top “G-Man” in the country had never even made a single arrest in his career.
It was a devastating admission for Hoover to make and one that made him appear at least vaguely cowardly. Years later, Hoover would confess McKellar’s forced admission had felt as if his manhood had been questioned. Following his confrontation with Senator McKellar, the outraged Director gave instructions to be notified the moment agents located the whereabouts of notorious bank robber and criminal Alvin Karpis.
When told that Karpis had been found in New Orleans, Hoover chartered a plane to fly him to the Big Easy where he personally arrested Karpis.
McKellar pressed the Senate to reduce the appropriation for the FBI, but the full Senate disagreed and gave Hoover the amount he had requested.
see link for full story
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/08/05/la ... ashington/
Lawless Washington
August 5, 2013
The FBI is the prime suspect in a new malware scheme.
Security researchers tonight are poring over a piece of malicious software that takes advantage of a Firefox security vulnerability to identify some users of the privacy-protecting Tor anonymity network.
The malware showed up Sunday morning on multiple websites hosted by the anonymous hosting company Freedom Hosting. That would normally be considered a blatantly criminal “drive-by” hack attack, but nobody’s calling in the FBI this time. The FBI is the prime suspect.
“It just sends identifying information to some IP in Reston, Virginia,” says reverse-engineer Vlad Tsyrklevich. “It’s pretty clear that it’s FBI or it’s some other law enforcement agency that’s U.S.-based.”
If Tsrklevich and other researchers are right, the code is likely the first sample captured in the wild of the FBI’s “computer and internet protocol address verifier,” or CIPAV, the law enforcement spyware first reported by WIRED in 2007.
The Drug Enforcement Agency has been using illegal wiretaps to build cases against drug dealers.
(Reuters) – A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
“It is one thing to create special rules for national security,” Gertner said. “Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”
see link for full story
CNN Finds Benghazi Terrorist Suspect; FBI Doesn’t
August 4, 2013
BenghaziSo let’s see if I have this right: A CNN reporter goes to a coffee shop at a well-known hotel in Benghazi and for two hours chit-chats with a man who some believe was the ringleader of the terrorist gang that murdered four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya — and almost a year after the attack the FBI either can’t figure out how to find this guy or has no interest in even trying to find him.
Really? A newsman with nothing more than a tape recorder and a pencil and paper interviews a prime suspect in the September 11, 2012 massacre, but the U.S. government hasn’t gotten around to it yet?
- See more at: http://www.bernardgoldberg.com/cnn-find ... 10SYb.dpuf
CNN Finds Benghazi Terrorist Suspect; FBI Doesn’t
Posted: August 4, 2013 in Featured, Political Opinion
Tags: Benghazi attack, CNN interviews terrorist in Benghazi, CNN Scoops FBI, GOP wants answer on Benghazi
124 834 9
BenghaziSo let’s see if I have this right: A CNN reporter goes to a coffee shop at a well-known hotel in Benghazi and for two hours chit-chats with a man who some believe was the ringleader of the terrorist gang that murdered four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya — and almost a year after the attack the FBI either can’t figure out how to find this guy or has no interest in even trying to find him.
Really? A newsman with nothing more than a tape recorder and a pencil and paper interviews a prime suspect in the September 11, 2012 massacre, but the U.S. government hasn’t gotten around to it yet?
- See more at: http://www.bernardgoldberg.com/cnn-find ... 10SYb.dpuf
see link for full story
http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs. ... /-1/NEWS11
Gonsalves: Cape man revisits Flight 800
August 04, 2013
July 17, 1996. TWA Flight 800 departed from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City.
Shortly after takeoff, the Paris-bound 747 exploded in the early night air as it ascended to 13,800 feet, crashing into the waters off Long Island. All 230 passengers and crew members aboard were killed.
IF YOU GO
What: A screening of the documentary "TWA Flight 800," made by Falmouth native Tom Stalcup. The film will be followed by a Q&A with Stalcup and a discussion about the filmmaker's petition asking the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to reopen the investigation.
When: 7:30 p.m. Aug. 15
Where: Falmouth High School
Admission: Free ($10 for reserved seats)
For more information: www.flight800doc.com.
Falmouth native Tom Stalcup, who now lives in Sandwich, was working on his doctorate in physics then. He didn't start to pay close attention to the tragedy until he happened to see the FBI press conference laying out the official story.
It was a CIA video shown during the press conference, Stalcup told me, that started him down the path that would eventually convince him the official explanation was contradicted by the government's own evidence — a disturbing story of an alleged cover-up Stalcup and other investigators tell in the recently released documentary "TWA Flight 800."
"This video came on during the press conference that said it was produced by the Central Intelligence Agency. That got my attention because I had never seen that before in my life. What's the CIA doing on TV talking directly to me?" Stalcup told me on Friday, hours before his documentary was shown at the Traverse City Film Festival in Michigan.
"It got weirder and weirder," he recalled. "The (video) narrator said, 'This was not a missile.' And I was like: Why are they telling us what it wasn't, rather than what it was?"
The official story, according to the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board, was that Flight 800 exploded because an electrical short circuit made its way into the center wing fuel tank and detonated the fuel vapors.
Though hundreds of eyewitnesses said they saw what looked like a missile taking off from the water and hitting the plane before it exploded, the CIA video emphasized how Flight 800 was NOT hit by a missile, relegating skeptics to tin-foil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists.
NTSB investigators said the flaming streak eyewitnesses described was most likely burning fuel leaking from the plane's wing tank.
Stalcup, who founded the Falmouth-based weather data transmitter company Upward Innovations Inc., began contacting eyewitnesses, all of whom said the CIA video was "a bunch of baloney."
"What kept me intrigued all these years is the disconnect between the official story and what the reality is and what the evidence shows," Stalcup explained.
Through Freedom of Information Act requests, Stalcup was able to get the radar data, internal investigative documents from the CIA, as well reams of other forensic evidence.
He coupled that with his knowledge of physics and the first-hand accounts of official investigators speaking out after they retired. Stalcup believes it all corroborates eyewitness accounts and clearly contradicts the official story.
The film has garnered national media attention, largely because it sparked a petition campaign in June requesting the NTSB reopen the investigation. And while some dismiss the film as paranoid propaganda, it's hard to ignore the investigators in the film who say the crash was caused by an "external detonation" just as 670 eyewitnesses initially reported.
Among the investigators in the film who call the official narrative into question are Hank Hughes, who served as a senior accident investigator with the NTSB and helped reconstruct the downed aircraft; Bob Young, a TWA investigator who was also involved with the official probe; and Jim Speer, an accident investigator for the Airline Pilots Association.
You don't have to be a physicist, Stalcup said, to know "there has never been an in-flight fuel-air explosion of any commercial aircraft ever," adamant that the voltage in airline fuel tanks are too low to ignite jet fuel.
The documentary doesn't offer a theory as to who or exactly what shot down Flight 800 (Was it alleged terrorism? An accidental strike from a U.S. military exercise?). Stalcup said they didn't delve into possible culprits because he considers it irresponsible to speculate, which is why he rejects the notion that he's peddling conspiracy theories.
"I'm a scientist. I'll go in front of any scientific body in the country and present the radar evidence. And they will agree. You can't have a low-velocity explosion create high-velocity debris. It's physically impossible," Stalcup said.
Most of us can't judge the science in this story. But Stalcup's documentary was convincing enough to get picked up by the EPIX TV network and distributed by Lions Gate Entertainment Corporation. Also, Stalcup said, "60 Minutes Australia" recently bought the rights to the film to show the movie Down Under.
Still, as CNN reported last month, Joe Lychner, whose wife and two daughters were killed on Flight 800, said he was skeptical of the missile theory.
"So far as I can tell, this is just a rehash of what's been out on the Internet," Lychner told CNN. But, he added, "If they do have new information and it's provable, it's a game changer. I will watch this thing with a very critical eye."
see link for full story
http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/05/reute ... americans/
Reuters: Secret DEA unit using intel to investigate Americans
08/05/2013
inShare2
2
inShare
2
Federal drug agents are being instructed to conceal the involvement of a secret Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) unit during the course of their investigations, a unit which helps law enforcement launch criminal investigations of Americans, Reuters reports.
The unit forwards tips acquired from the National Security Agency, “wiretaps by foreign governments, court-approved domestic wiretaps and a database called DICE to federal agents and local law enforcement officers,” Reuters reports.
Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, created in 1994, including the CIA, FBI, Internal Revenue Service, National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security.
Through a decades-old law enforcement technique called “parallel construction,” law enforcement officials pretend that their investigation began with something like a traffic stop, during which the agent discovered incriminating evidence by use of a tool like a drug dog.
The technique “may be legal” in order to establish probable cause for an investigation, defense lawyers and prosecutors told the publication, but it is kept secret in order to protect sources and methods.
“But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants,” wrote Reuters.
“DEA officials who oversee the unit say the information sent to law enforcement authorities was obtained through subpoena, court order and other legal means,” said Reuters.
Justice Department policy, revealed in documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, is that it does not need to seek a warrant when investigating the electronic communications of Americans.
”