Democrat Barack Obama leads Republican John McCain 49%-44% among "likely" voters, the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows. A month ago, McCain had a 48%-47% advantage.
Obama's advantage narrows slightly among registered voters, to 47%-44%.
Meanwhile, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton leads McCain 48%-44% among likely voters and 49%-43% among registered voters. A month ago, she trailed McCain 49%-46% among likely voters.
"A lot of people are asking, 'What does Hillary want?'" Clinton told supporters at a rally in New York. "I want what I have always fought for: I want the nearly 18 million people who voted for me to be respected and heard."
Clinton told the crowd she would consult in the coming days with advisers about the fate of her moribund candidacy. But her remarks came hours after she told congressional colleagues she would be open to joining Obama as his running mate.
Many of her top supporters spoke openly of Clinton's potential vice presidential prospects. Lanny Davis, a former White House special counsel under President Clinton, said he told the former first lady Tuesday that he was initiating a petition to press Obama to select her for the second spot on the ticket. He said Clinton did not encourage or discourage the step.
"If he doesn't have her, I think he can still win. With her on the ticket, he can't be beat," Davis said.
Clinton's national finance chairman, Hassan Nemazee, said he was also pushing an Obama-Clinton ticket, claiming that together they would be able to raise $200 million to $250 million for the general election.
Advisers indicated earlier Tuesday that the former first lady would publicly acknowledge in her speech that Obama had crossed the delegate threshold. But she changed her mind and refused to do so even after television networks and The Associated Press declared the Illinois senator had sealed the nomination.
Her advisers said they considered the delegate numbers to be unreliable, even as the AP estimated Obama had several more than the 2,118 needed to nominate. Earlier, Clinton acknowledged on a conference call with New York lawmakers that the delegate math was not there for her to overtake Obama, according to several participants on the call.
She said none of that publicly Tuesday but vowed the Democratic Party would unite in its effort to defeat Republican John McCain in November.
Clinton won South Dakota's primary Tuesday, while Obama won Montana's. The two contests rounded out a historic five-month primary battle that pitted the first major black candidate against the first serious woman contender.
The South Dakota victory, which was unexpected, gave Clinton an excuse to buy more time to consider options, her advisers said.
On the conference call with New York colleagues, Clinton, a New York senator, said she would be willing to become Obama's running mate if it would help Democrats win the White House.
Clinton's remarks came in response to a question from Democratic Rep. Nydia Velazquez, who said she believed the best way for Obama to win key voting blocs, including Hispanics, would be for him to choose Clinton as his running mate.
"I am open to it," Clinton replied, if it would help the party's prospects in November. Her direct quote was described by two lawmakers who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for Clinton.
"I deserve some time to get this right," she said, even as the other lawmakers forcefully argued for her to press Obama to choose her as his running mate.
Joseph Crowley, a Queens Democrat who participated in the call, said her answer "left open the possibility that she would do anything that she can to contribute toward a Democratic victory in November. There was no hedging on that. Whatever she can do to contribute, she was willing to do."
Another person on the call, Rep. Jose Serrano of New York City, said her answer was "just what I was hoping to hear. ... Of course she was interested in being president, but she's just as interested in making sure Democrats get elected in November."
Rep. Charles Rangel, a devoted booster of Clinton who helped pave the way for her successful Senate campaign, said he spoke to her Tuesday and got much the same answer.
"She's run a great campaign and even though she'll be a great senator, she has a lot of followers that obviously Obama doesn't have, and clearly the numbers are against her and so I think they bring all parts of the Democratic Party together and then some," Rangel said.
Aides to the Illinois senator said he and Clinton had not spoken about the prospects of her joining the ticket.
Most of Clinton's campaign staff will be let go and will be paid through June 15, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to divulge her plans.
Universal health care, Clinton's signature issue as first lady in the 1990s, was a point of dispute between Obama and the New York senator during their nomination fight.
Clinton reiterated her commitment to that issue in her remarks Tuesday.
"It is a fight I will continue until every single American has health insurance. No exceptions and no excuses," she said.
Other names have been floated as possible running mates for Obama, including former rivals New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, and governors including Janet Napolitano of Arizona, Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and Tim Kaine of Virginia. Also mentioned are foreign policy experts including former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd and Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, and other senators such as Missouri's Claire McCaskill and Virginia's Jim Webb.
Obama could also look outside the party to people such as anti-war Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska or independent New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Or he could look to one of his prominent supporters such as former Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota or try to bring on a Clinton supporter, such as Indiana's Sen. Evan Bayh or retired Gen. Wesley Clark.
(CNN) -- The titanic struggle for the Democratic candidacy neared its end Tuesday with final voting expected to push Hillary Clinton aside and usher in Barack Obama as the first ever black U.S. presidential nomination for a major political party.
After months of primaries and caucuses, the Democratic party still does not have a nominee.
Clinton's campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe told CNN Clinton will not concede at a New York rally being held after voting closes Tuesday night in the last two primary states.
That was a reaction to an Associated Press story quoting two senior Clinton campaign officials as saying she will concede Tuesday night or early Wednesday that Obama has done enough to secure the Democratic nomination, while stopping short of formally suspending or ending her race.
But Clinton told New York lawmakers she is willing to be the vice presidential nominee on Obama's presidential ticket, those lawmakers told CNN. CNN first reported Monday that Clinton was signalling the Obama campaign of her interest.
CNN confirmed that another big name Democrat, former President Jimmy Carter will endorse Obama.
Democrats in South Dakota and Montana cast the final votes Tuesday in a long and bitter campaign that has cost the candidates dearly in dollars and left the party struggling to unite to challenge Republican John McCain and succeed George W. Bush at the White House.
Obama needs the support of about 40 more Democratic delegates to make the 2,118 needed to capture the nomination at the party's August convention but he is likely to depend on superdelegates -- party officials free to back any candidate -- to tip the balance.
The Illinois senator, who has sought to dispel fears of inexperience by campaigning on a message of change, has emerged as favorite in recent weeks despite a dogged campaign by Clinton who as former first lady claims to have more political experience.
Although campaigns for both parties said there had been no formal discussion, sources close to Clinton said she was poised to acknowledge her inevitable defeat by Tuesday signaling her willingness to accept an offer of becoming Obama's running mate if asked.
"In her speech tomorrow night she will convey the message that first and foremost she is committed to Democrats winning in November and will do whatever she's asked to do," a close friend of the New York senator said.
Her husband, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, also told voters in South Dakota on Monday that "this may be the last day I'm ever involved in a campaign of this kind."Obama insiders are said to be split over whether a joint ticket with Clinton will be a good idea, with some doubting she can deliver, despite claims the pairing would help "ram down the animosity" between supporters of the two that many fear could cost the Democrats the election.
Democratic Party insiders are also discussing how to patch up Clinton's relationship with the black community and how to bring African American Clinton supporters into the Obama fold, several top Clinton supporters said.
Feuding between the two camps reached fever pitch at the height of the campaign, after Clinton and Obama saw off main rival John Edwards then traded blows on sideline issues including Obama's links to a controversial preacher and Clinton's claims to have dodged bullets in Bosnia.
At least one superdelegate -- the highest-ranking African American in Congress Jim Clyburn -- announced his endorsement Obama on Tuesday, saying Obama had "energized" constituents.
But despite forecasts of defeat, Clinton -- dubbed the "comeback kid" for earlier popularity resurgences -- campaigned into the night on Monday, clinging to the outside prospect of an upset in the final two U.S. states to make their selections in the six month primary voting season.
Clinton told voters in South Dakota Monday: "We're going to make our case to all the delegates as to who would be the best president, number one -- because that's the most important question -- and number two, who would be the stronger candidate against John McCain; and I believe on both of those questions I am the person who should get the support to get the nomination for our party."
CNN senior political correspondent Candy Crowley reported that "only a handful of people at the inner core of the Clinton campaign knows what she's thinking about doing when Tuesday's dust settles."
"Those who have been with her since nearly the beginning are saying she will not push this into the convention.
"As one close Clinton supporter put it, she's acutely aware of her place in the party. She will not ruin the party."
In the summer of 2005, John McCain's chief strategist Charlie Black, working for his firm Black, Kelly, Scruggs & Healey, was paid $60,000 to lobby the U.S. government on behalf of the Chinese oil conglomerate CNOOC. At the time, CNOOC was mounting an aggressive bid to buy Unocal, a California-based oil giant, and Black was tasked with churning up congressional support. But the bid ultimately fell through, in part because of objections over the China oil industry's ties to Iran, a country in which it had already invested tens of millions of dollars.
"This transaction poses a clear threat to the energy and national security of the United States," wrote Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican. "U.S. national energy security depends on sufficient energy supplies to support U.S. and global economic growth. But those supplies are threatened by China's aggressive tactics to lock up energy supplies around the world that are largely dedicated for their own use."
Flash-forward nearly three years and Black's old client -- which later scored a $16 billion deal with the Iranian government -- could now create major headaches for his current boss. On Monday, McCain, in a speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, called for a broad and aggressive international campaign to divest from Iran.
"We should privatize the sanctions against Iran by launching a worldwide divestment campaign," he said. "As more people, businesses, pension funds, and financial institutions across the world divest from companies doing business with Iran, the radical elite who run that country will become even more unpopular than they are already."
But, as demonstrated by the CNOOC anecdote, if choking off Tehran's economic lifeblood is McCain's goal, he could have personally started down that road years ago -- with his own advisers.
Indeed, in addition to Black, McCain employs several other campaign aides and fundraisers who have served in lobbying capacities in which they advocated on behalf of foreign clients with investments and interests in Iran.
As Talking Points Memo reported, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis and his firm, Davis Manafort, "helped Akhmetov's conglomerate, System Capital Management Holdings, to develop a 'corporate communications strategy' between the beginning of 2005 through the end of summer 2005... The company's subsidiary, Metinvest, a steel company, has one of its 11 offices in Tehran. And another subsidiary, Khartsyzsk Pipe Plant, sells large pipes to Iran." A McCain aide said Davis did not work on that account and was unaware of the company's ties to Iran.
A bit further removed, one of McCain's fundraisers, Peter Madigan, and Black's wife Judy, both lobby on behalf of the United Arab Emirates, a country that AIPAC itself says is a major hub for shipment of illegal goods into Iran. Another McCain adviser, Carly Fiorina, formerly headed Hewlett Packard, which Forbes Magazine reported, kept offices in Dubai in efforts of facilitating trade with Tehran.
But it's not just economic ties that bind, however tangentially, McCain's campaign and the Iranian government. There are political connections as well. One of the controversial figures represented by Black and his firm was Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi dissident who pushed for the invasion of Iraq with key Pentagon and administration officials before the war and has since, reportedly, passed U.S. information on Iraq to Iran.
As the New York Times reported in 2004, "Chalabi... disclosed to an Iranian official that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran's intelligence service, betraying one of Washington's most valuable sources of information about Iran, according to United States intelligence officials."
Black and Davis, it should be noted, have cut their lobbying ties in accordance with the McCain campaign's new conflict of interest policy. And McCain's call for divestment from Iran not only reflects a long held belief by the Senator but also comes despite these associations.
That aside, the distance between Obama and McCain on the topic of levying economic sanctions on Iran is not as wide as the Arizona Republican presents. While Obama did oppose (though not by vote) and McCain supported an amendment offered by Sens. Kyl and Lieberman that would have, among other things, designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, he did so, his campaign says, out of concern that the language was overtly inflammatory. In 2007, moreover, Obama sponsored an Iran divestment bill that he claimed "would educate investors and pressure foreign companies to reconsider doing business with Iran by requiring the U.S. government to publish - every six months - a list of companies that invest more than $20 million in Iran's energy sector."
It was Alabama Republican Richard Shelby who held up the measure in the Senate in what was described by the Israel paper Haarezt, as "a favor" for the Bush administration. Today, it is still on hold.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Barack Obama effectively clinched the Democratic presidential nomination Tuesday, based on an Associated Press tally of convention delegates, becoming the first black candidate ever to lead his party into a fall campaign for the White House. Campaigning on an insistent call for change, Obama outlasted former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in a historic race that sparked record turnout in primary after primary, yet exposed deep racial divisions within the party. The AP tally was based on public commitments from delegates as well as more than a dozen private commitments. It also included a minimum number of delegates Obama was guaranteed even if he lost the final two primaries in South Dakota and Montana later in the day. The 46-year-old first-term senator will face Sen. John McCain of Arizona in the fall campaign to become the 44th president. Clinton was ready to concede that her rival had amassed the delegates needed to triumph, according to officials in her campaign. These officials said the New York senator did not intend to suspend or end her candidacy in a speech Tuesday night in New York. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to divulge her plans. Obama's triumph was fashioned on prodigious fundraising, meticulous organizing and his theme of change aimed at an electorate opposed to the Iraq war and worried about the economy—all harnessed to his own innate gifts as a campaigner. Clinton campaigned for months as the candidate of experience, a former first lady and second-term senator ready, she said, to take over on Day One. But after a year on the trail, Obama won the kickoff Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, and the freshman senator became something of an overnight political phenomenon. "We came together as Democrats, as Republicans and independents, to stand up and say we are one nation, we are one people and our time for change has come," he said that night in Des Moines. A video produced by Will I. Am and built around Obama's "Yes, we can" rallying cry quickly went viral. It drew its one millionth hit within a few days of being posted. As the strongest female presidential candidate in history, Clinton drew large, enthusiastic audiences. Yet Obama's were bigger still. One audience, in Dallas, famously cheered when he blew his nose on stage; a crowd of 75,000 turned out in Portland, Ore., the weekend before the state's May 20 primary. The former first lady countered Obama's Iowa victory with an upset five days later in New Hampshire that set the stage for a campaign marathon as competitive as any in the last generation. "Over the last week I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice," she told supporters who had saved her candidacy from an early demise. In defeat, Obama's aides concluded they had committed a cardinal sin of New Hampshire politics, forsaking small, intimate events in favor of speeches to large audiences inviting them to ratify Iowa's choice. It was not a mistake they made again—which helped explain Obama's later outings to bowling alleys, backyard basketball hoops and American Legion halls in the heartland. Clinton conceded nothing, memorably knocking back a shot of Crown Royal whiskey at a bar in Indiana, recalling that her grandfather had taught her to use a shotgun, and driving in a pickup to a gas station in South Bend, Ind., to emphasize her support for a summertime suspension of the federal gasoline tax. As other rivals quickly fell away in winter, the strongest black candidate in history and the strongest female White House contender traded victories on Super Tuesday, the Feb. 5 series of primaries and caucuses across 21 states and American Samoa that once seemed likely to settle the nomination. But Clinton had a problem that Obama exploited, and he scored a coup she could not answer. Pressed for cash, the former first lady ran noncompetitive campaigns in several Super Tuesday caucus states, allowing her rival to run up his delegate totals. At the same time, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., endorsed the young senator in terms that summoned memories of his slain brothers, yet sought to turn the page on the Clinton era. Kennedy said in a reference to former President Clinton: "There was another time, when another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to cross a new frontier. He faced criticism from the preceding Democratic president, who was widely respected in the party." Merely by surviving Super Tuesday, Obama exceeded expectations. But he did more than survive, emerging with a lead in delegates that he never relinquished, and proceeded to run off a string of 11 straight victories. Clinton saved her candidacy once more with primary victories in Ohio and Texas on March 4, beginning a stretch in which she won primaries in six of the final nine states on the calendar. It was a strong run, providing glimpses of what might have been for the one-time front-runner. But by then Obama was well on his way to victory, Clinton and her allies stressed the popular vote instead of delegates. Yet he seemed to emerge from each loss with residual strength. Obama's bigger-than-expected victory in North Carolina on May 6 offset his narrow defeat in Indiana the same day. Four days later, he overtook Clinton's lead among superdelegates, the party leaders she had hoped would award her the nomination on the basis of a strong showing in swing states. Obama lost West Virginia by a whopping 67 percent to 26 percent on May 13. Yet he won an endorsement the following day from former presidential rival and one-time North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. Clinton administered another drubbing in Kentucky a week later. This time, Obama countered with a victory in Oregon, and turned up that night in Iowa to say he had won a majority of all the delegates available in 56 primaries and caucuses on the calendar. There were moments of anger, notably in a finger-wagging debate in South Carolina on Jan. 21. Obama told the former first lady he was helping unemployed workers on the streets of Chicago when "you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board at Wal-Mart." Moments later, Clinton said that she was fighting against misguided Republican policies "when you were practicing law and representing your contributor ... in his slum landlord business in inner city Chicago." And Bill Clinton was a constant presence and an occasional irritant for Obama. The former president angered several black politicians when he seemed to diminish Obama's South Carolina triumph by noting that Jesse Jackson had also won the state. Obama's frustration showed at the Jan. 21 debate, when he accused the former president in absentia of uttering a series of distortions. "I'm here. He's not," the former first lady snapped. "Well, I can't tell who I'm running against sometimes," Obama countered. There were relatively few policy differences. Clinton accused Obama of backing a health care plan that would leave millions out, and the two clashed repeatedly over trade. Yet race, religion, region and gender became political fault lines as the two campaigned from coast to coast. Along the way, Obama showed an ability to weather the inevitable controversies, most notably one caused by the incendiary rhetoric of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. At first, Obama said he could not break with his longtime spiritual adviser. Then, when Wright spoke out anew, Obama reversed course and denounced him strongly. Clinton struggled with self-inflicted wounds. Most prominently, she claimed to have come under sniper fire as first lady more than a decade earlier while paying a visit to Bosnia. Instead, videotapes showed her receiving a gift of flowers from a young girl who greeted her plane.
***UPDATE*** Akers reports that Cheney has now apologized for his West Virginia incest joke:
Vice President Dick Cheney has apologized through his spokeswoman for making an offhand joke during a speech at the National Press Club Monday stereotyping West Virginia as a state prone to incest.
Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride tells us, "The Vice President's offhand comment was not meant to hurt anyone. On reflection, he concluded that it was an inappropriate attempt at humor that he should not have made. The Vice President apologizes to the people of West Virginia for the inappropriate remark."
Mary Ann Akers of the Washington Post asks if West Virginia was just handed to the Democrats when Dick Cheney made an incest joke at West Virginians' expense:
Cheney was at the Press Club to congratulate this year's winners of the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency. During a question-and-answer session toward the end of the luncheon, someone asked the vice president about his wife Lynne Cheney's revelation on MSNBC last year that "Dick and Barack Obama are eighth cousins."
The questioner jokingly asked the vice president if he and Obama were going to have a family reunion, to which Cheney replied he would "have no objections" though he said he doubted Obama would want one - "certainly not before November."Then came the offensive punch line. Cheney explained that during the course of researching his family lineage for Lynne's memoir "Blue Skies, No Fences" last year, he learned there were Cheneys on both his father's and his mother's side of the family. There was a Richard Cheney on his mother's side, the vice president said.
"So I had Cheneys on both sides of the family and we don't even live in West Virginia," Cheney quipped.
Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia was not amused:
"That a man who has ascended to the seat of Vice President of the United States would openly display such contempt and astounding ignorance toward his own countrymen is an insult to all Americans. Now that he or the Administration he represents no longer needs their vote, Mr. Cheney apparently feels that he is now free to mock and belittle the people of West Virginia. With his trademark arrogance, the Vice President even added 'You can say those things when you're not running for re-election.'"
"This pitiful comment is not entirely surprising when you consider the source. Vice President Cheney's words reflect the attitude of an administration and a party that says what they must to get elected and then turns their backs on those they promised to represent."
Click below to listen to audio of Bill Clinton on a ropeline discussing "The Comeback Id," Todd Purdum's controversial Vanity Fair article.
MILBANK, S.D. -- Former President Bill Clinton today unleashed a salty stream of epithets to describe former New York Times reporter and current Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum, calling him "sleazy," "dishonest," "slimy" and a "scumbag."
The former president made the comment at a local campaign event after I asked him if Purdum's much-commented upon Vanity Fair story was weighing on his mind.
Tightly gripping this reporter's hand and refusing to let go, Clinton heatedly denounced the writer, who is currently married to former Clinton White House Press Secretary, Dee Dee Myers.
"[He's] sleazy," he said referring to Purdum. "He's a really dishonest reporter. And one of our guys talked to him . . . And I haven't read [the article]. But he told me there's five or six just blatant lies in there. But he's a real slimy guy," the former president said.
When I reminded him that Purdum was married to his former press spokesperson Myers, Clinton was undeterred.
"That's all right-- he's still a scumbag," Clinton said. " Let me tell ya-- he's one of the guys -- he's one of the guys that propagated all those lies about Whitewater to Kenneth Starr. He's just a dishonest guy-- can't help it."
Purdum's piece, featured in this month's edition of Vanity Fair, included former advisers criticizing former President Clinton for bringing negative attention to Hillary Clinton's candidacy and for surrounding himself with friends who might discredit her campaign.
The former president's tirade continued:
"The editor of Esquire-- he sent us an email yesterday and said it was the single sleaziest piece of journalism he'd seen in decades. He said it made him want to go take a shower and he was embarrassed to be a journalist when he read it."
"You know he didn't use a single name, cite a single source in all those things he said. It's just slimy. It's part of the national media's attempt to nail Hillary for Obama. It's just the most biased press coverage in history. It's another way of helping Obama. They had all these people standing up in this church cheering, calling Hillary a white racist, and he didn't do anything about it. The first day he said 'Ah, ah, ah well.' Because that's what they do-- he gets other people to slime her. So then they saw the movie they thought this is a great ad for John McCain-- maybe I better quit the church. It's all politics. It's all about the bias of the media for Obama. Don't think anything about it."
"But I'm telling ya, all it's doing is driving her supporters further and further away-- because they know exactly what it is-- this has been the most rigged press coverage in modern history-- and the guy ought to be ashamed of himself. But he has no shame. It isn't the first dishonest piece he's written about me or her."
"Anytime you read a story that slimes a public figure with anonymous quotes, it oughta make the bells go off in your head. Because anytime somebody uses those things-- he wrote the story in his head in advance, and he just goes around and tries to find some coward to say whatever they want to say, hoping to get some benefit out of it. It didn't bother me. It shouldn't bother you."
"Thank you, Mr. President," I said attempting to end the conversation.
But Clinton continued. "He can't help it," he said. "He still hasn't apologized to me for Whitewater."
Update: President Clinton's spokesman Jay Carson issued a statement in response to this article: "President Clinton was understandably upset about an outrageously unfair article, but the language today was inappropriate and he wishes he had not used it."
Update: Esquire spokesperson sent the following statement. "David Granger did not send an e-mail to Bill Clinton about the Vanity Fair article. One of the editors on staff sent a personal note about the piece to Doug Band, who was written about in the article. That was a private e-mail, and Band has since apologized to Esquire that it became public."Unless otherwise specified the document described here:
To sponsor further analysis and reportage of this document by professional journalists or anti-corruption investigators or fund a whistleblowing encouragement award for this country or industry, send Sunshine Press a targeted donation.
The document, dated May 15, 2008, and disowned by the McCain campaign team, presents a memorandum by 'S. Schmidt', likely Steven Schmidt, McCain's senior campaign advisor. It outlines a strategy designed to increase rivalry between followers of the Democratic Party candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Several specific techniques are described including organizing Clinton "meet-ups" (http://hrclinton.meetup.com/).
The memo appears to have been sent to a wider McCain campaign team group which focussed on internet based campaigning.
According to the memo, conflict between Clinton and Obama has created the possibility, on the event of an Obama nomination, to 'depress the turnout of key Democratic demographics in November'.
To reach voters consisting mainly of 'white, female voters over the age of 40', a strategy has been worked out, based on newly tested 'lines of attack through independent pro-Clinton communities on the Internet', 'local "meet-ups"', and similar means.
The document identifies three messages believed to 'resonate well' with the demographic and which it hopes will weaken Obama's growth following Clinton's loss of the nomination.
The memo calls for a 'greater commitment on the part of McCain’s fundraisers and our various media partners' to help in the alienation effort, as an example 'Clinton's campaign narrative about the unfair treatment that some networks, specifically MSNBC, have given her camp'.
On May 27 (prior to publication) Wikileaks gave the McCain campaign team a copy of document. After some delay spokesman Jeff Sadosky claimed that the document was not authentic but would not go into further detail.
An interesting possible linguistic clue as to the source of this document is the phrase "planning to unroll a new campaign". It is far more common to use the phrase "planning to roll out a new campaign". Searching Google for the phrase "planning to unroll" turns up a single page with 14 results. A search for the more normal "planning to roll out" phrasing turns up more than 100,000 hits. Additionally, a search for the phrase "planning to roll our" (a result of a typo) returns eight results, more than half as many hits as for the "unroll" search returns. Where is this phrasing from? What does it indicate as to the source of the document? Is there any evidence that Steven Schmidt uses this phrasing?
No:
Yes:
If the document is fabricated, then the people and methods behind the frame-up are of substantial interest. If the document is legitimate then it reveals wilful duplicity on the behalf of McCain.
Regardless, two far more interesting questions arise--to what extent is McCain following the strategy, if not the method, depicted--depressing the turnout of Clinton women, by enhancing their sense of victimhood and to what extent is Clinton turning a blind eye to assistance from such unusual quarters?Barack Obama has not received better media coverage than Hillary Clinton, according to a new study by the research team at Pew/Harvard, the gold standard in nonpartisan media analysis. After reviewing coverage from January to March, when the majority of states voted, researchers determined that Obama simply did not fare better than Clinton. In fact, reporters "began to turn against Obama [even] before questions surfaced about his pastor Jeremiah Wright," the study found. And Clinton's "Saturday Night Live" gambit - when she chided the moderators of a February debate, "maybe we should ask Barack if he's comfortable and needs another pillow" - apparently worked:
Shortly after Clinton criticized the media for being soft on Obama during a debate, the narrative about him began to turn more skeptical--and indeed became more negative than the coverage of Clinton herself.
In March, The Times reported that Clinton Campaign "practically browbeat" reporters with the SNL skit as evidence that Obama was treated "more gently." The article cited data suggesting the tactic swiftly shifted the "tone" of campaign coverage against Obama. But it's not only reporters worrying that the press is too rough on Clinton.
More voters think the media has been "too hard" on Clinton than on Obama or McCain, according to a Gallup poll released last week:
It's also an article of faith among Clinton supporters -- 56 percent say the media has been too hard on her, while only 29 percent of Obama supporters carry that grievance for their candidate. How did so many voters and reporters end up thinking the Clinton coverage was harsher than it actually was, according to the cumulative data? Here are three related reasons:
1) Media-bashing works. The Clinton Campaign has loudly complained about the media, and it obviously worked.
2) The loser dynamic. Clinton has been steadily losing the race since Super Tuesday, so the loser dynamic has been percolating. Supporters of losing candidates often blame the media, and reporters start second guessing their work as the post-mortem assignments roll in. The Gallup poll, however, only compares public opinion of Clinton's coverage to the presumptive nominees; comparing winners and losers is like apples and oranges. Add in Huckabee or Edwards -- or Ron Paul! -- and complaints about the media would likely spike. Or if Obama were losing, his supporters would be doing more media griping.
3) Offensive Clinton-bashing. The overall data does not capture the intensity of individual incidents of nasty Clinton-bashing. So while the cumulative coverage of Obama and Clinton was clearly similar, a small number of offensive media incidents can still damage a candidate and outrage voters, whether they support her or not. When CNN host Glenn Beck labeled Clinton a "stereotypical b----," for example, or the Washington Post ran an entire article about the senator's "cleavage," (under the absurd headline "Hillary Clinton's Tentative Dip Into New Neckline Territory"), many people saw her being mistreated and rightly denounced it. The empirical question, for voters and reporters, is how many outrageous incidents are required to conclude that the entire "media" was unfair to her.
If you combine this new data with the infamous incidents of Clinton-bashing, the conventional wisdom about campaign media coverage collapses. Obama did not receive special treatment; Clinton was not generally covered too harshly; but some high-impact, inappropriate media coverage did hurt Clinton and understandably outrage voters. In the end, the candidates still drew better media coverage than actual public policy, which drew only seven percent of all campaign stories.
Ari Melber is the Net movement correspondent for The Nation, where this post first appeared. Check out the Net Movement Politics Facebook Group.
Have you heard the news? Hillary Clinton is leading the popular vote--at least according to Hillary Clinton.
Yesterday, the former first lady crushed, creamed and/or clobbered rival Barack Obama 68 percent to 32 percent in Puerto Rico's penultimate primary. But knowing all too well that her net gain of 19 pledged delegates wasn't nearly enough to close the 180-delegate gap separating her from the Democratic near-nominee, Clinton instead focused her attention on the popular vote--technically irrelevant, impossible to measure accurately, but enough, she hopes, to sway the all-powerful superdelegates to break her way. Actually, "focused her attention" might be too gentle a phrase; "sunk her teeth in and wouldn't let go" was more like it. For Sunday's San Juan victory speech, Clinton's speechwriters found six (count 'em, six) different ways to claim a popular-vote victory. "More people have voted for us than for any candidate in the history of presidential primaries," she said. "We are winning the popular vote," she continued. "So, when the voting concludes on Tuesday... I will lead the popular vote," she added. "We are winning the popular vote," she repeated. And finally, "the majority of voters know who is ready on Day One to serve as our president"--in case you missed the point. Meanwhile, as Clinton regurgitated the lines du jour in interviews with the New York Times ("“In recent primary history, we have never nominated someone who has not won the popular vote”) and the Washington Post ("More people have woken up and gone to the polls and voted for me," etc.), her campaign released a new ad, posted above, called "17 Million" (apparently, "We Are Winning the Popular Vote" was too gauche). "Seventeen million Americans have voted for Hillary Clinton," says the narrator as adoring Clintonites--blacks, whites, toddlers--clap and cheer. "[That's] more than for any primary candidate in history."
The only problem? That's not quite, you know, true. As we wrote on Friday, Clinton, who has been saying for months that she would cross the finish line with the most votes, was banking on massive turnout in Puerto Rico to put her over the top. She had good reason to expect the best: local elections regularly attract 80 percent of the island's 2.4 million voters. But Sunday's primary was not a local election. In the end, only 384,578 Puerto Ricans cast ballots, meaning that Clinton's monster margin translated to an actual gain of only 141,662 votes. That's simply not enough to overcome Obama in any fair national vote tabulation--and by fair, we mean "any tabulation that awards Obama more than zero votes in Michigan," where his name wasn't on the ballot. If we include Florida (where Clinton won by 294,772 after neither she nor Obama campaigned) and the caucus states of Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington (where votes weren't counted and must, therefore, be estimated), Obama leads by 134,746; if we disenfranchise those caucus states--which represent a net Obama gain of about 110,000 votes--he's still ahead by 24,524. What's more, if we give Clinton her 330,000 Michigan votes and award Obama all 237,000 of the uncommitteds--a flawed but roughly equitable proposal, seeing as experts project that the Illinois senator would've won a standard Great Lakes State primary by 80,000--he emerges with a lead of 44,605. Even with only 82 percent of these uncommitteds in his column, Obama wins the overall popular vote. And he's expected to expand that edge by tens of thousands of votes on Tuesday with projected victories in South Dakota and Montana. To be fair, Team Clinton is not lying when they say their candidate has won "seventeen million" votes--or "more than any primary candidate in history." They're just defining the truth very, very technically. If we stack all the ballots cast for the candidate named "Hillary Clinton" (17,916,763, including the caucus estimates) alongside all the ballots cast for the candidate named "Barack Obama" (17,723,200), the New York senator leads by 193,563. But again, that tally includes Michigan, where "Barack Obama" technically received zero votes. In other words, to believe that Clinton is "winning the popular vote," you must accept the exact results of a flawed election in which voters could choose only one of the two competitive candidates--and which Clinton herself said was "not going to count for anything." That strikes me as somewhat undemocratic. More importantly, it seems to be striking the superdelegates--a.k.a., the only voters who matter at this point--the same way. Clinton's vote tally is impressive. But on Tuesday, Obama will reach the end of regulation a mere 20-30 delegates away from clinching the nomination; Clinton will come in a whopping 200 behind. Which means that if Obama's unquestionable lead in the delegate count--i.e., the metric by which the Democratic nominee is chosen--sways 10 percent of the 200 or so remaining superdelegates before the other 90 percent buy Clinton's highly questionable popular-vote claim, it's game over for HRC. Obama isn't just a lock; he's, like, a giant tungsten carbide safe designed to withstand an apocalyptic nuclear holocaust. Will Clinton continue after Tuesday? The signals are mixed. When the DNC decided on Saturday to award Obama 59 delegates in Michigan (as opposed to zero), top aide Harold Ickes "reserve[ed] the right to challenge [the] decision before the Credentials Committee"; such an appeal would lead, inevitably, to the Democrats' August convention in Denver (FYI: Clinton would lose). In San Juan the next day, Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe told the Politico that "every option is on the table," responding "No, it's not" when asked if securing 2,118 delegates (a post-Florigan majority) would mark the end of the marathon race and hinting that the campaign might be targeting some superdelegates committed to Obama. And as her plane left Puerto Rico, the candidate echoed McAuliffe's line on superdels, reminding reporters that "one thing about superdelegates is they can change their minds" up until the convention--a valid (if politically dicey) reason to stay in the race even after Obama has clinched the nomination. That said, there are equally compelling signs that the end is nigh. For starters, high-profile supporters like Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack and Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz are suggesting that the contest is winding down. "It does appear to be pretty clear that Senator Obama is going to be the nominee," Vilsack told the AP today. "After Tuesday’s contests, she needs to acknowledge that he’s going to be the nominee and quickly get behind him.” Meanwhile, Clinton plans to retreat to her mansion in Chappaqua, N.Y. this evening to confer with her husband and advisers about what's next--and tomorrow her staff (many of whom have been informed that their campaign roles are ending) will converge on Clinton's political home, New York City, for an election night event. As a group of her fellow New Yorkers once said, "Twenty, twenty, twenty-four hours to go..." UPDATE, 1:09 p.m.: Two more Tuesday clues: 1) Via Ben Smith, "Clinton's event in New York appears to be something a bit bigger than a minor election night in two small states she's likely to lose might suggest. The venue she's booked, at Baruch College, is quite large. And Clinton's finance director, Jonathan Mantz, sent an email out to top donors inviting them to the event, of which I've obtained a copy." 2) Via Marc Ambinder, "Clinton Campaign staffers and former campaign staffers are being urged by the Clinton campaign's finance department to turn in their outstanding expense receipts by the end of the week. That's a sign, to them, that the campaign wants to get its affairs in order soon. If Clinton were staying in the race, there'd be no real reason to collect these receipts now; she'd still be raising and spending money from the same primary campaign account." Just FYI. *Changed from "Close--But No Cigar" to avoid the inappropriate (and unintentional, I swear) reference. Apologies to all for my stupid choice of words.
Original here
My old friend, Larry Johnson, knows about manipulating elections from his training with the Central Intelligence Agency. He doesn't want Obama to win the nomination for whatever reason, and he's in full propaganda mode to do everything he can to frighten the superdelegates. He claims to have a shocking tape of Michelle Obama ranting in some anti-white diatribe. He promises to produce this tape tomorrow at 9am.
From what I understand, it is a tape of Michelle Obama criticizing the Bush administration.
How you'd write it:
Why did Bush cut folks off medicaid?
Why did Bush let New Orleans drown?
Why did Bush do nothing about Jena?
Why did Bush put us in Iraq for no reason?
How you'd say it:
Why'd he cut folks off medicaid?
Why'd he let New Orleans drown?
Why'd he do nothing about Jena?
Why'd he put us in Iraq for no reason?
How Larry Johnson wants you to hear it:
Whitie cut folks off medicaid?
Whitie let New Orleans drown?
Whitie do nothing about Jena?
Whitie put us in Iraq for no reason?
I'm going to be honest with you. Both SusanHu and Larry Johnson have been friends of mine. They have both done a lot for me and I am grateful and indebted to them. Any issues I've had with their activities in this election I have kept private. I haven't visited their site in four months because I found it too personally painful to read what they were writing and I did not want to be tempted to respond. I thought I owed them that. But loyalty can only go so far. If they publish this allegation tomorrow, I will no longer speak with them. And I say that with great sorrow.
This election has ruined a lot of friendships. I have tried hard not to let it ruin mine. But smears of this type are unforgivable. I have been forebearing. Perhaps, in retrospect, I have been too forebearing. That's all I say. This is too painful to me.
In the past two election cycles, it's been the same story: the West and Northeast go Democrat, the Midwest and South go Republican, leaving Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio to decide the election.
This year, things are shaping up differently, and that may be good news for Barack Obama. The reason has a lot to do with the Democratic victories in the 2006 midterm elections.
Current polling data suggests that if the election were held today, Obama would eke out a razor-thin, 6-electoral vote victory over John McCain in the general election. However, McCain is either trailing or holding only marginal leads in a number of states that went red in 2004. If the direction these states have voted since then is any kind of indicator, Obama is poised to add these states to his bank as insurance in what will be a comfortable win over McCain in November.
Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, and New Mexico all went to George W. Bush. It's not often that you hear of "up-ticket" candidates benefiting from popular candidates for lower offices. But this time around, recent and potential Democratic victories in these states have the Obama campaign looking to cash in. Let's take a look at how the election is progressing in each of these:
For the first time since the 90's, Iowa is on the brink of voting Democrat. Though it's always enjoyed a mixed ideological preference, the Hawkeye State seems to have made up its mind this time around. Pollsters have been asking Iowans whether they prefer Obama or McCain since December of 2006. Not once has McCain emerged in front. The most recent survey data, conducted by SurveyUSA, gives Obama a nine-point edge. That's hot on the heels of a Rasmussen poll that had the Illinois Senator up by eight.
Virginia is one of those states onto which McCain is clinging for dear life as Obama continues to surge in popularity. With a solid chunk of 13 electoral votes, he'll put up a firefight not to lose it. But in the past several years, a wave of blue has swept over the northernmost of the Dixie states. After edging out a historic victory of his own, Democrat Mark Warner became one of the most popular governors in recent memory, performing well enough to get his successor, Democrat Tim Kaine, elected right after. In 2006, Jim Webb unseated Republican George Allen, the popular Senator who had been considering a presidential bid. And now, with Warner the runaway favorite to succeed the other retiring GOP Senator, Virginia may be ready to complete it's Democratic crossover. The lead has been ping-ponging back and forth between the two candidates- SurveyUSA put Obama up 7. Rasmussen put McCain up 3.
The Rocky Mountain State is an almost assured flipper for Obama, having gone for Bush in '04. With the recent election of Democratic Governor Bill Ritter, and the strong candidacy of Democrat Mark Udall for Colorado's open Senate seat, 2008 may be a great year for Obama in Colorado. Rasmussen has released a flurry of polls there showing Obama with a lead of anywhere from 3 to 8 points.
Obama woke up a new demographic in North Carolina with a massive victory in the primary there. But if his luck and popularity hold among not only African American voters, but rural white ones as well, he could snatch one that John McCain is counting on right now. Public Policy Polling puts Obama within three points of the Arizona Senator there.
Like Virginia and North Carolina, Missouri is in the McCain column...for now. A once strong lead for the GOP nominee has been shrinking consistently. SurveyUSA now puts Obama just three points behind McCain. And considering the extreme unpopularity of Missouri's Republican Governor, Matt Blunt (son of GOP Rep. Roy Blunt), coupled with the recent upset election of Senator Claire McCaskill, a lot of Missourians may head to the polls and vote blue across the board. That could have a strong aggregate effect, shifting the state into Obama's pocket.
The way it's looking right now, Obama is headed to victory in New Mexico, where he's been endorsed by Governor Bill Richardson. Democratic Rep. Tom Udall (the cousin of Colorado's Democratic Senatorial Candidate) is the favorite to become New Mexico's second Democratic Senator. And with the shakeup of offices, Democrats may be picking up a few House seats there as well. When it all comes down to it, it's a Democratic year for New Mexico. Obama leads McCain by 9 points, according to the latest numbers from Rasmussen.
Go figure: Obama didn't even win the primary here, but he's favored in Ohio. The RCP Average puts Obama ahead by just under two points, a margin that's way too close for McCain's comfort, especially considering that the state went Republican in both 2000 and 2004.
Hillary Clinton has summoned top donors and backers to attend her New York speech tomorrow night in an unusual move that is being widely interpreted to mean she plans to soon suspend her campaign and endorse Barack Obama - not tomorrow night but within a day or two.
Obama and Clinton spoke Sunday night and agreed that their staffs should begin negotiations over post-primary activities, according to reliable sources. In addition to seeking Obama's help in raising money to pay off some $20 million-plus in debts, Clinton is known to want Obama to assist black officials who endorsed her and who are now taking constituent heat, including, in some cases, primary challenges from pro-Obama politicians.
"This has never happened before," one donor said, referring to the personalized request by email to attend the event in New York Tuesday night.
Obama is expected to claim enough delegates to put him over the top that night at a separate event in St. Paul.
In an afternoon conference call today with about two dozen top fundraisers, Clinton strategist Harold Ickes spoke in very conciliatory terms about Obama, in contrast to his tougher rhetoric in public and on television, according to sources. He told the participants that Clinton wants to "significantly" help Obama, but he did not go so far as saying that she will announce withdrawal -- that is the prerogative of the candidate.
Ickes told the group to "take a deep breath" and let Clinton proceed in her own fashion.
Earlier in the day it was reported that Clinton staffers were being urged by the campaign's finance department "to turn in their outstanding expense receipts by the end of the week," another sign that the run at the White House was nearing an end. In addition, Politico wrote that members of Clinton's advance staff had received calls and emails Sunday night, summoning them to New York City and telling them their roles on the campaign are ending.
by Mark Silva
Hillary Clinton's campaign is denying a report that the senator from New York is ready to concede the presidential nomination to Barack Obama tonight.
Clinton will concede that Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, has the delegates needed to secure the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential nomination, two campaign officials are telling the Associated Press anonymously.
The Clinton campaign, publicly, is denying the report.
"The former first lady will stop short of formally suspending or ending her race in her speech in New York City'' tonight, the AP's Beth Fouhy reports. "She will pledge to continue to speak out on issues like health care. But for all intents and purposes, two senior officials said, the campaign is over.''
Most campaign staff will be let go and will be paid through June 15, according to the officials who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
The Clinton campaign is disputing the report about her intentions.
Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton campaign chairman, interviewed on CNN today, called the report "100 percent incorrect.''
But he did say publicly on NBC's Today show this morning that once Obama has the number of delegates needed for the nomination Clinton will indeed congratulate him and "call him the nominee.''
So perhaps the operative term here is tonight -- or manana?
In an interview on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, Vice President Cheney told ABC’s Martha Raddatz that he doesn’t care about the American public’s views on the war:
RADDATZ: Two-third of Americans say it’s [the Iraq war’s] not worth fighting.
CHENEY: So?
RADDATZ So? You don’t care what the American people think?
CHENEY: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.
Cheney was roundly criticized for his remarks. Even Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly said Cheney was being a “wise guy” and “dismissed the folks” with his comments. A poll released a couple of weeks later found that 81 percent of the American public believed that when making an “important decision,” government leaders “should pay attention to public opinion polls.”
During his speech at the National Press Club today, the moderator gave Cheney a chance to apologize. “Do you wish that you had answered that question differently?” she asked. “Does it matter if the public disagrees sharply with the wisdom of the war?” Cheney instead made up an excuse about his initial comments, claiming that Martha had never asked him a direct question:
MODERATOR: Do you wish you had answered that question differently? Does it matter if the public disagrees sharply with the wisdom of the war?
CHENEY: No, when I said, “So?” the point was, “What’s the question, Martha?” She made the statement; she didn’t ask question.
Watch it:
It’s doubtful that Cheney meant, “What’s the question, Martha?” As the original exchange highlights, when Raddatz did ask a direct question — “You don’t care what the American people think?” — Cheney flatly replied, “No.” He clearly doesn’t care what the American public thinks, no matter how it’s asked.
Transcript:
REPORTER: In an interview earlier this year about the troop surge, Martha Raddatz pointed out that recent polls show about two-thirds of Americans say the fight in Iraq is not worth it. Your answer was, “So?,” which you then amplified this way: “You cannot be blown off course by polls.” Do you wish you had answered that question differently? Does it matter if the public disagrees sharply with the wisdom of the war?
CHENEY: No, when I said “So?” the point was, “What’s the question, Martha?” She made the statement; she didn’t ask a question. I think the point is valid and it’s very important to remind people, and I try to reference that in my remarks today, that presidents have to make decisions that are oftentimes impossible. If they’re making the tough calls or if they’re addressing the difficult issues, they’re going to sooner or later be unpopular.
If your goal and objective is to be loved some 75 or 80 or 90 percent of the time, you’re in the wrong line of work. Presidents get paid to make those tough calls and tough decisions. I have worked for some like George Bush and Gerry Ford who did exactly that and the point made I made was talking with Martha is that you simply cannot be in position where you respond weekly or monthly or daily in the fluctuations in the polls in terms of what kind of policy you’re going to set.
You don’t want a president who’s going to govern that way. And you get to go vote every four years on who gets to be president. You have to got out to earn their right to be president and make those decisions. I suppose that’s one of the reasons why we have limited terms and go through that process every four years.
A former high-ranking member of the CIA, now retired, who was a career employee, contacted us this week. Due to our reporting on Halliburton and their corruption we were given 46 pages of testimony on how Halliburton, the CIA, the Pentagon and Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have been stealing billions of dollars. What we were presented will shortly be presented to Congressman Waxman's Oversight and Reform Committee in the House. These pages of step-by-step criminal procedure are only part of a larger body of evidence being presented to Congress. What is presented is astounding in the scope of the crime and the billions of dollars being stolen by these criminals.
The text is raw copy never seen by the public previously. This is a long read, but it shows the depth of the official corruption within our government.
It is our desire that as many Americans as possible read this report. It is devastating.
The writer worked under Porter Goss until August 2004. V.P. Cheney forced Tenet out of the Agency and later this writer. The writer says Tenet was framed by Goss and Cheney.
We have not edited any of the text. It would be presumptions of us to do so.
The writer was assigned the rank of a Two-Star General when lent to the Pentagon by the CIA.
Introduction By Sue Arrigo
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=137&contentid=5153
I collected intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan for the CIA until Aug. 2004 when I was outed by Cheney for refusing to make propaganda that Iran was developing nuclear weapons. My official title within the CIA was Special Operations Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence. Since I set up the Remote Viewing Defense protocols for the Pentagon, I was given a title of Remote Viewing Advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a rank of a 2-star general in the US military. That rank was largely a bogus ploy by the Pentagon to get more of my time from the CIA and force me to attend a Joint Chiefs of Staff Meeting once a month. I did so from Oct. 2003 to July 2004.
On orders of my boss, DCI George Tenet, on Aug. 2001 I collected a moving van full of Pentagon documents showing Defense Contractor kickbacks to Pentagon officials. I removed them from the Pentagon and they were driven to the CIA. It took me about 10 days of time to get the Pentagon people to turn those documents over to me en masse. The ethical intelligence methods I used to do so are beyond the scope of this text. Alas, the CIA's intention turned out not to be to expose and correct the corruption, but to cover it up---as judged by later events.
Clearly I did not have time to read all of those documents in one week. My job was not to evaluate those documents and address the corruption, it was to run a "counter-intelligence" type of op to collect them. However, I did become aware of the depth of corruption during the course of the week and did read some of them. It is amazing what ended up in print because people in the Pentagon felt so immune from prosecution, esp. under Bush in the White House.
The main reason for collecting those documents, I believe in retrospect, was to allow CIA analysts to evaluate how to take business away from other US Defense Contractors and give it to Halliburton and Carlyle-related contractors. The mood at the CIA and Pentagon was "war is coming" because the Bush Family stands to make billions from it--so get ready. I did come across reports later which confirmed that the documents had been used in that fashion. That is, they were used to blackmail Pentagon officials into 'working on' the Halliburton-Carlyle team, or to judge how much to bribe them to switch to that team. So, on later reflection, I am afraid that my actions led to worse, not less, corruption. Certainly that corruption was not in the interests of the US public nor our country's national security interests.
I want to mention a conversation that I had with DCI Tenet after giving him these documents. The moving van full of them had just arrived at the CIA's headquarters in Langley. Tenet laughed and said to me "You have just given me the keys to the Kingdom". I guess that I was a bit dense, as I did not grasp immediately what he meant. So, I asked him "How?" He said to me in front of McLaughlin the Deputy Executive Director (both of whom I knew rather too well at the time) "Those documents will make me rich." Horrified that he might sell them on the black market for cash I replied "How dare you sell them to the Russians!" McLaughlin laughed and said "All she thinks of is Russian counter-intelligence." Tenet made a joke of it too and the discussion turned to the serious matter before us having to do with another country. But I believe that some of the documents that I brought back from the Pentagon did get sold to the Russians later to make a buck. I had been sent to collect 3 types of documents at the Pentagon and here I am only writing about one category of them.
As to the corruption that I came across at the Pentagon in Aug. 2001, I want to say a few words before going on to corruption in the Iraq and Afghan wars. Some of the details may have slipped my mind. I have a good audio memory, but precise dates, names and places are not my forte. But the events themselves I usually render the gist of correctly.
Case 1: The Ordering of Unneeded New Models of Fighter Planes
This case has to do with a particular kickback scheme that I read three Pentagon documents on. It involved an Air Force general on the JCS and a Defense Contractor, Boeing. He was due to discuss the Air Force's needs for new fighter planes at an upcoming JCS meeting. I went to talk to him after reading the three documents and asked him to recuse himself from giving that presentation. He refused. I then went to the Head of the JCS, General Shelton, and asked him to appoint someone else to give that presentation. It should be remembered that I had no mandate to address the corruption that I came across. I did not initially bring forward the documents when I made the request, but when he refused then I did show him the documents to make my point. He still refused to make the change.
I later discovered when back at the CIA that the Air Force General had gone ahead and made that presentation. From within the CIA I verified that he did receive the payment from Boeing that one of the documents had set forth in black and white. I reported that at the time to the Pentagon criminal investigation unit. It was rather like reporting it to the fox guarding the chicken coop. I then reported it to my boss Tenet after the Pentagon's investigation unit did not act on it to my satisfaction. That is, I found out that they had done precisely nothing with my complaint. But nothing happened as a result of my reporting it to Tenet either.
I then reported it to the GAO on a form designed rather for other problems it seemed to me--but that was the form that they insisted was the correct one. A man from the GAO did come out to the CIA and take down my complaint in person. He seemed to be sincere and thorough. I did read the report that he later wrote after he went out to the Pentagon to investigate. That report confirmed what I had said and gave an estimated amount for the amount lost to the US taxpayer through bidding that was rigged.
It did not however address the larger issue of whether those new generation planes were needed. The old planes were much, much cheaper and worked fine for their purposes. The new planes were untested and the new features seemed unnecessary to me--it was not as if we were going to be fighting the Russians and what we had was good enough to fight them anyway. Several Air Force Generals I called up on the phone to get their opinion agreed with me.
Later, I ended up on the JCS meetings myself in Oct. 2003. There was that same high ranking Air Force General still there in the JCS. He knew that I had tried to get him in trouble and he tried to get back at me in a great variety of ways. At one point he circulated the rumor that I was a lesbian--I had to laugh at that one. When I confronted him teasingly about it, he did not deny it. Had I actually been a lesbian his malicious rumor might have caused me grief. Later, he tried to pin a corruption scheme on me that I had nothing to do with but my boss at the CIA had not prevented, investigated, or stopped it.
While I was at a JSC meeting in early 2004, that same Air Force General had the gall to try to force through another unneeded plane contract for Boeing. I stood up at the meeting and said that the previous new plane had still not been delivered as it did not meet the specifications of the order and here he was trying to force the US military to buy another upgrade. Then I went on about the fact that even the first new plane was not needed. Only one general, another Air Force General, backed me up and said that a new plane did not need to be re-designed. But at the end of the discussion the vote was only the 2 of us against the new order and it went through. That made me angry as soldiers on the ground were dying from not having water in the desert and from not having adequate safety gear. The US did not need fighter planes; there was no air war going on and none in sight. The new planes were very expensive to buy and there was no reason to justify that expense. The only motivation for ordering those new planes instead of more of the ones that were already shown to work was to make big Research and Development bucks for the company and the kickbacks for the military officers. That issue never got satisfactorily addressed. It is a crime to make the companies and the brass rich at the expense of the deaths of the soldiers and civilians on the ground.
I then went to the trouble of finding out how much each Pentagon official got paid in kickbacks on that new order. It averaged $22,000 for each vote at that Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting according to their bank accounts. These were not their regular US accounts, these were the Swiss bank accounts that the CIA set up for them especially to get the kickbacks into! The highest amount went to the Air Force General who gave the presentation. Only myself and that dissenting Air Force General did not get that kickback---that is how corrupt the JCS members were in the Spring of 2004. I then went further to look at whether those men were witting to their getting kickbacks---even though I considered the vote for the unneeded planes proof of that. But I looked at whether they would notice if that payment from Boeing was missing from their account and object to it. I did that by circulating at the next JCS meeting a notice that Boeing may have defaulted on some of its payments. It did not give specifics. All but 3 of the members of the JCS, per the phone records I had access to at the CIA, called that Swiss bank to verify that they had indeed gotten that Boeing payment! The other 3 might have gotten the information from others who called that the payments had gone through. At the next meeting, one of the members said to me "Well, of course it looked like to you that Boeing didn't make the payments, because you did not get one. I told Boeing that you had not done your share of the work". Two men standing near him agreed that that was why I had not gotten the payment. One of them added "If you want to join in, there is a good deal coming up with company X." This was at the start of a JCS meeting and most of the members were at the table already. It was not like he took me aside and whispered this in my ear. The fact was that the JCS was so corrupt that they did not have to even try to hide it from other members.
End of Case 1
Case 2: Halliburton Delivers Half Full Cartons to the Swing Shift
Roughly 7 of the Pentagon documents that I had collected over the 10 days dealt with this same scam. I had set aside some to read back at the CIA. It was not until I read the 4th one on this topic that I started to have a clear idea of what the full scam entailed. That was true of much of the van load of documents; an individual document was often not very incriminating. It appeared that the duty roster at the Pentagon was being rigged to ensure that only corrupt personnel would be on duty at certain times. That way not everyone in the receiving dept. had to be bribed or coerced. It was only the swing shift with its fewer numbers of personnel who were on the take. The scam ensured that other personnel never got assigned that shift in the Receiving Dept.
When I figured that out I immediately tried to get on that shift in the Receiving Dept. under an alias to see what would happen. It was not hard for me within the CIA to make up the alias and a military background and get it assigned to the Receiving Dept.. I then put in a sick notice to say that that alias had a daytime physician's appointment and would be reporting for its first duty at the Pentagon on the swing shift. Immediately upon getting that communication at the Receiving Dept., its duty officer sent off emails to 3 other people in the Pentagon asking them what to do.
One of those people was in Rumsfeld's office. That person emailed back and told the duty officer to give the incoming man the day off and start him on the day shift the next day. The duty officer did not write back to that man. He complained in other email to one of the other 2 he had contacted that he needed the body to move boxes. One of them asked him if there was a position that he could be put in to ensure that he did not "wise up". The duty officer did not reply promptly. He waited several hours between reading that message while sending out many other messages before he replied. Then he said that the man had already arrived, which was not true, and that he would give him the least chance to 'correct his understanding'. That official took it as a fait accompli and apparently took no further steps. That man I was later able to show was taking bribes from Halliburton as I will discuss below. He worked in the Pentagon at a job that had nothing directly to do with the Receiving Dept. The third man he had emailed was his supervisor in the Receiving Dept., the regular daytime head of it. That man was driving home when the first message was sent to him. He did not read it until the next day by which time the problem of the uncorrupted man showing up had evaporated. The next message I sent was just after the swing shift started. It regretted to inform them that the incoming man had been hospitalized until further notice.
At that point I was still reading the documents and drawing my own conclusions from them by reading between the lines. I thus initiated the next test of my understanding during that same swing shift. In this case, I sent an email to that same duty officer pretending to be a Halliburton employee. Since I had read his usual traffic in emails, I knew what he expected from Halliburton's shipping people. My email informed him that the shipment was delayed and gave a specific order number. I used a number from an order that I had reason to believe was crooked. The packing weight on it seemed too low for the goods that were listed on the invoice. I did not say how long the delay would be for sure but I hinted that it might not arrive until the morning. That triggered not 3 emails by the duty officer but 6! I was quite surprised by that. The goods were not perishable, they were military. It should not have mattered that they would arrive on the next day shift---except if they were missing part of the order! Again, one of the emails was to Rumsfeld's office and got an immediate reply. That surprised me as it was after hours about 9 pm. This was not a military emergency--this was a delayed carton. The reply from Rumsfeld's office was that he should send a courier out to intercept the delayed carton or wait himself until it arrived and sign it in and deal with it himself, even if he had to wait until morning. The duty officer apparently had done the overtime many times before and was tired of it. In one of the six emails he sent he complained bitterly that the work was taking over his life and he was getting no sleep. I want to talk about other emails first before saying more about that one.
One of the 6 emails was again to the Halliburton bribed Pentagon official. He replied from his home. He advised that the duty officer call Halliburton and see if the carton had actually left its shipping office yet and ask them to send it a day later. He suggested that the Halliburton people in the shipping office sometimes said a shipment was delayed in shipping when in fact it was delayed in their office. The duty officer did not reply to that email. He complained, in the previously mentioned email about lack of sleep, that the people were always giving him the same meaningless advice. His email to the day time Head of the Receiving asking him if he could just set aside the carton until the next swing shift did not get a reply. The next three emails were to other receivers asking them if they could come in and work that night shift or the next day shift instead of coming in on the next swing shift. There were no immediate replies to those even though they had his tales of woe and lack of sleep in them. The carton did arrive, not unduly late, and that resolved that problem that night. But I had a lot of evidence.
By morning I had one additional piece of evidence; my boss Tenet asked me to stop looking into corruption at the Pentagon's Receiving Dept.. I had not told him that I was looking at that. That meant someone else had advised him that I was and had asked it to stop. I then set out to figure out who that was and why. It did not take me long to figure it out. I sent an email to a co-worker laying out what I had found and that I had been called off looking into why the military was having trouble getting supplies to the troops on time. I had never been given that assignment, but I had been called off investigating this receiving problem and by then I knew that the two problems were related from the documents. The word Halliburton was in my email. Shortly after I sent that email a CIA official knocked on my office door. That was unusual as there was bold black lettering on the door that no one should knock without the permission of the DCI. That notice was put up by Tenet because he was tired of people taking up my time. He wanted it all to himself and his chores. The man then barged in without waiting for a reply from me and stated loudly that I had been called off looking into supply problems at the Pentagon, not supply problems to the troops. Since the person I had emailed was in the next office, presumably it was for their ears that he was speaking so loudly. He then shut the door and walked off, again without waiting for a reply from me. That man was indeed someone I recognized.
At the CIA we jokingly called him "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA". Like his counterpart at the Pentagon he handled all of the delivery problems for Halliburton products arriving at the CIA. He was paid by a federal salary, just like that Pentagon man. But after looking into their backgrounds I could find no evidence that either had been hired by the CIA or the military through their personnel depts. Neither had done military training or trained at "the Farm" as a spy. The more I looked into that, which I had not been called off of, the more curious it became.
Finally one day months later I knocked on the "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA" 's office door. I was surprised when it opened to find not the office of a single man but a whole section of offices. I had worked at the CIA for over 30 years and thought I knew it inside and out. But a new section had been added onto the other side of that door. Over 40 people worked in it and they were all working for Halliburton while being paid by the US taxpayer as if they were CIA. I checked that carefully. The CIA's human resources dept. had no files on them. It had never interviewed them for the job. IT HAD NEVER VETTED THEM! The CIA had a back door in its security created to let Halliburton put anyone they wanted into the hallways of the CIA. It was an outrageous violation of US National Security. And this was after 911 and the terrorism scare.
I immediately reported it to Tenet and he said, "Yes, I know."
I checked with the Head of CIA building security and he admitted that he knew too. I asked him what he was going to do about it. He said "Keep my mouth shut so I can stay alive and I suggest you do the same." That sounded like a threat to me, even though indirectly worded. I asked him who would kill me if I talked about it. He hemmed and hawed a bit. I asked him if he would try to kill me if I talked about it. He said no but others would. I went fishing and asked, "Do you think Halliburton will kill me for it?" He didn't say. Then I asked "Will the CIA?" He said, "Not likely, you are inside the CIA." Then I asked "CACI?" At that he agreed that they would likely try in defense of their sister enterprise Halliburton. I asked him if CACI had their own back door into the CIA that I should be afraid of them while I was inside the CIA. He acknowledged that they did.
Now back to my knocking on the Halliburton company offices at the CIA. A security guard immediately asked me for my Halliburton ID. When I did not have one, he asked me if I had an appointment to see someone. I mentioned the name of the man who knocked on my door and that man came out to greet me. He invited me into his office. The furniture in it was better than the DCI had upstairs though this was on the ground floor. We chit chatted a few minutes and then I got down to business. I asked him if Halliburton intended to short the troops on their supplies on purpose or was incompetent. By then I had the evidence in my office that Halliburton was shipping only half of the invoice contents in many of its cartons. That was true in the war zones as well. It had set up the same corrupt system of swing shift receivers on at least 3 continents. They received the cartons and signed that the goods were all received properly. Then the shortages later were chalked up to thefts or war damage, etc. He looked at me awhile before he replied. Then he said, "I know nothing about it". I then laid copies of some of the documents that I had on his desk that proved that Halliburton was doing that. He said he would look into it and called security to usher me out of the office.
Later that day, (it was after Christmas in 2001) I reported to Tenet that I had found evidence that Halliburton was short shipping to the Pentagon and war zones. He at first said, "That is nothing new." And then realizing that he had just admitted knowing about it without correcting it said, "Have a report about it on my desk before Christmas." He had been saying that probably for weeks and now under the stress of my asking him about this corruption, automatically repeated that comment. Christmas had passed about 3 days before at the very least. When he caught his mistake a moment later, he said "I just can't get rid of that problem." I then asked him what he had tried to do about it. He did not reply. Instead he sent me to speak to another man he said that he had put to work on the problem.
Yes, you guessed it--he sent me to speak to "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA". I had just come from his office that morning and I said so. Tenet played ignorant of the fact that the man worked for Halliburton. I reminded Tenet that I had been asked to show my Halliburton ID to even get to his office. He offered to call down there to make sure I could get in when I went. I told him that it was his responsibility to correct Halliburton's short shipping and its invasion of the CIA, not Halliburton's. He said that he couldn't because his "hands were tied behind his back" by the White House. I made a mock walk around to the other side of him to look for his hands tied behind him and said "That is not what I see." He said "There is nothing I can do about it." I picked up his phone and handed it to him and said, "You can start by calling Congress, the FBI, and the New York Times. They would believe you, if you did so." He declined to make those calls. I told him that the head of the CIA should be a man of courage. But he never did make the calls.
I went to my office and started making calls. First I faxed the documents I had over to the GAO. I needed to have copies of them outside of my office before it got raided. They were not national security secrets, they were Halliburton short shipping papers. One of them was even a memo on Halliburton stationery discussing the short shipping policy and how well it was working to make profits for the company. It appeared that each time they got a call complaining that an order was short or missing that they considered it another new order. I say that because the documents I had showed that they created a new order number that did not refer back to the order number of the missing goods or mention that any goods had been missing. In that way they never lost by having to make good for the part of an order that was missing. When I called the GAO to make sure that they received the documents they checked them carefully to make sure that they were all legible. There were over 100 pages of documents and it took them awhile. After they finished they agreed to look for the GAO investigator who had come out to speak to me before. But before they could get him on the phone to me, there was a knock at my door and in barged "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA". He yanked my phone out of the wall. Then he had his security guards ransack my office and take every shred of paper out of it. Then he had me bodily hauled off to a prison cell inside the Halliburton offices at the CIA. It was in the basement. There I was intimidated and my life was threatened. I wondered if it would be ended. It occurred to me that the CIA head of building security might not know that Halliburton had its own torturers and assassins. I decided to cooperate. I promised not to investigate Halliburton for the rest of the year. I figured I could keep my promise for the about 2 days left in the year. The date was probably Friday, Dec. 28, 2001, now that I look at a calendar. Somehow they accepted my promise and let me go.
I immediately went up to Tenet's office and complained and showed him the bruises that they had given me. He said, "There, there, everything will be all right in the morning." That was not true. Halliburton was still stealing the US taxpayer's dollars in the morning and the troops were still doing without. But at that time I was too tired to fight any more that day. I decided to put myself in a place that I could keep my promise and asked leave to fly back to my home in California. Tenet agreed and I managed to get out of the building without further incident.
I believe that the GAO still has the documents that I sent them buried in its files. They started an investigation into it and then it was "interrupted". But I believe that they are willing to go forward with the investigation now, if asked to. I believe that you're asking them to do that would be enough to accomplish that. The GAO has done a lot of good work. You could write a letter to its Head and ask them to restart that investigation.
End of Case 2
Case 3: The White House Conspiracy to Cook the Books: Halliburton, Carlyle and the CIA
When I returned to the CIA in the New Year in 2002, I had to put my office back in order. As I did that I thought about what I had done wrong and decided to try not to end up with a stripped office the next time. So, I decided to tackle the problem from a different angle, one I hoped would be tamer. Thus, I went down to the "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA"'s office and profusely apologized to him. Then I did something that I knew Tenet would not like, I offered to give him some of my time. Tenet had not protected me from his apparent 'boss' judging by his behavior and the man's office furniture. So, I figured that I needed to kowtow to him appropriately on the surface. My offer would also get me inside of his office with a Halliburton security clearance. He accepted my offer of 10 hours a week of my time. Then I went and told Tenet. He was furious with me but he did not oppose it in any meaningful way. I did not get the title of Special Operations Advisor to the DCI by letting red tape and meaningless 'No's' stand in my way. It was a title I had been given just prior to the 1991 Iraq War and I had a lot of experience in getting past No.
My work for Halliburton ran only until late May 2002, about 4 and a half months. In that time I learned a very great deal about Halliburton and how it works. Thus, I find that it is unlikely that I can write it all down in less than a full length book and do it justice. But I still want to give some of the overview and highlights of what I learned.
First off, it was not true that Cheney stopped running Halliburton. That is a complete myth. He called in orders to the man I worked for almost every day and sometimes twice or more times a day. He remained the functional head of it in all but name. No one at Halliburton had the power to override his orders.
Second, it is not true that he divested himself of the profits of the company. He merely hid how they got to him through a series of shell companies. Some call that "creative accounting" at the CIA. One of my jobs became to liaison between the Halliburton "creative accounting dept." and the CIA's "creative accounting dept." They had incompatible computer software. As I had overseen a software development change in the CIA's creative accounting computer, I was in the position to oversee the software development to make Halliburton's software compatible with it. I have a Master's Degree in Mathematics and advanced training in software to the extent of having written a compiler by myself. So, I am a person of many talents and have had many uses of them within the CIA.
In this context I want to mention that in 1983 the CIA sent me to investigate the NYPD Internal Affairs computer. The NY Police Dept. was alleging that they were unable to print out data that a regulator wanted to examine because the KGB had hacked into their computer. I was able to show that the KGB had not done that. The problem was that some people in the NYPD were corrupt and wanted to hide the data that would prove that. If you watch the movie based on a true story, Serpico, you will see that the NYPD was heavily on the take in at least certain years of its existence. That is just to say that I had some espionage grade experience in looking for corruption in computer files and software.
I only mention it in passing to assure you that no one at the CIA thought that it was inappropriate for me to be overseeing software development for the CIA or Halliburton's creative accounting computers. I thus had the opportunity to write software programs to answer some of the questions that I had. It was safer for me to investigate that way than by sending emails. Anyone can read and understand your emails with an unencryption program. Not anyone can understand your computer programs especially when you write them in a computer language extension that you create specifically for the task. When the consequences can be severe, it is worth some extra effort. I was able to run that software on both Halliburton's and the CIA's creative accounting computers. On the surface of events, I had offered to improve security of Halliburton's financial data and was doing so. But while one is doing so, one has to test the security of the data. And that means that one comes to understand how that security was set up and why it was set up that way. That depends on what a company needs to hide. And that depends on what they know they are doing illegally and who they think might be trying to uncover it.
Some schemes to hide that corruption are extremely clever. The CIA's library has a wealth of How-to books on the subject. And new methods are always being devised. The Halliburton and CIA software was incompatible because their software developers had used different ways of hiding the corruption that were incompatible. It was as if an axe murderer hid the axe under the woodpile to say he had not done it and his brother gave an alibi for him saying that he had been out chopping wood at the time. In this case, Halliburton's methods exposed the CIA's wrongdoing and Carlyle Industries at the same time. That was because Bushes had used the CIA's creative accounting theft methods. Bizarrely, the CIA's accounting methods caused no problem for Halliburton. It was because I was able to help the CIA by overseeing the making the two systems of cover-up compatible that Tenet was unable to object to losing my time. So, I became an expert in how the CIA and Halliburton decided to jointly cover-up their financial illegalities.
Defense contractors since before the Civil War have been padding their bills, delivering shoddy goods, under delivering, etc. The methods to cover it up are basically to say A=B when they do not equal each other in quantity, quality, longevity of usage, or cost. The ways of preventing others from uncovering that A and B are not equal is to use corrupt experts or others who 'certify' that A=B without letting the taxpayer see for themselves. The cure is transparency and letting everyone look at A and B and make the judgment. Computers are good ways to fool most people because most people are not willing to spend the time to "look inside of them". Computers can be made to print out one set of books for the regulators, another set for the Defense Contractors, another for the Pentagon, another for the taxpayer, ad infinitum. Really they are like black box voting. You tell them what you want them to say and they can print it out for you. But most criminals are not smart enough to know how to do it seamlessly. They are not technical and patient enough, so they have to rely on other people to do it. That means that their illegality is never 'secret'. The Clint Curtis testimony at Congressman Conyer's hearing in 2004 on hacking the vote showed that fatal flaw in the criminal's planning. Clint Curtis showed that it was possible to write self-destructing code to hack the vote; but it also showed that his having been asked to write it was not kept secret. Thus there are many, many people who wrote the software to cover-up the CIA's and Halliburton's dirty secrets. It takes a lot of people to write software. The CIA's creative accounting dept. had over a hundred of them, not all working at Langley. Some of them worked at Swiss banking concerns like the Bank of International Settlements in Basel. Some of them had worked at BCCI, Bank of Credit and Commerce International, http://www.apfn.org/APFN/BCCI.htm The CIA has been trying to hide its financial crimes since its inception.
The reason that I am pointing out that there are a lot of people in the know about Halliburton's corruption is that I think that that makes a difference in how this case is handled. This is not a murder case were the only person at the scene of the crime still living is the murderer. Of the 40 people working at the Halliburton offices at the CIA, about 8 of them were software programmers for their creative accounting computer on site. Halliburton's head offices employed many more of them. I was involved in conference calls with them in which 60 programmers were in the audience listening to the latest CIA plan of how to cover up the illegalities in the Halliburton computer. It was generally agreed that Halliburton did not have the expertise in cover-ups that the CIA had. Thus making the two systems compatible meant that Halliburton had to do 90% of the changing towards the CIA model of doing it. The CIA had to do the other 10% roughly. It was not quite that simple because there were many other third parties involved in the change including Swiss banks, other govts. and corporations. All told the process took a few years of full time work by over a hundred programmers. Not all of them were completely witting. But many were and a significant number of them no longer work for Halliburton or the CIA. Programmers change jobs readily. They are not like CIA operatives who can only work for one country after having invested a lot of time in training that cannot be transferred. Those programmers that leave take the strategies for covering up corruption with them elsewhere. No one at Halliburton recalled them and retrained them out of using their old methods. That means that they kept on making software at other companies that exposed the CIA's and Carlyle's financial crimes, if their excuses and records were compared with those. That means that the CIA's front companies, Carlyle, and the Bank of International Settlements in Basel are at risk of exposure of their crimes when other companies are investigated. There are many investigations already in progress. One of the main reasons that the Justice Dept. does not make progress on hardly any of them is because there is a lot of pressure on them to not go through with any investigations. Those in the know fear that it will start unraveling this whole ball of yarn.
That situation is worse than I have explained to you properly yet. There were many Defense Contractors who in secret made their own creative accounting cover up software. The CIA tried to get all of the Defense Contractors to come to a conference to upgrade to use methods which would be compatible with the CIA's and Halliburton's. That was after those 2 ironed out their differences. That conference was offered in early 2004; that is how long it took for the programmers to make a reasonable software merger. The conference had to be cancelled 'for lack of interest'. The Defense Contractors heard via the grapevine that many millions of dollars had to be spent to make their systems compatible and refused to come. I believe that no serious effort has been made since to make the systems not incriminate other companies when they print out a false set of books.
That means that investigators should take 3 or more separate investigations of companies that had business transactions and start comparing the books. The CIA in trying to get Defense Contractors to come to that conference put out all sorts of true information to frighten them into coming. That included the information that it had run tests of multiple companies books being compared and that even looking at one month of data was often enough to prove that the books were cooked. I was not directly involved in overseeing that project after the 4 months were up. I had left the CIA in late May 2002 and was not forced back into it until Oct. 2003. Even so, in early 2004 my opinion was sought on how to get ALL Defense Contractors to that conference. I thus had an opportunity to spend almost 2 days reviewing the tests that the CIA had done. Remember that it was the CIA and Carlyle Industries that could easily be exposed by simpler cover-up technologies so they had a lot of incentive to study the problem thoroughly. They found that even if they just focused on the Defense Contractors making 80% of the Defense dollars spent, they still had 24 different software cover-up schemes to make 'compatible'. When they looked at how to make themselves compatible with the top 90% of the Defense dollars that figure went from 24 to 134. They considered the cost not worth it to shepherd 134 companies through redeveloping their software. So, the conference they were intending to host just invited the top 80% dollar companies. They did not have to be making military products to have financial transactions and cover-up software that would prove the books of the CIA front companies were cooked. Even a company like Pepsi being investigated could cause them a problem, IF THE COOKED PRINT OUT WERE COMPARED IN DETAIL AT THE LEVEL OF A MONTH OF TRANSACTIONS. The CIA decided though to limit its invitations to actual military equipment makers! They did not even include the makers of torture equipment, civilian stun guns, and espionage bugging equipment. They were seriously betting on investigators not comparing the records of separately held companies.
That means a strategy for uncovering the proof of corruption at Carlyle Industries is for investigators to compare its books with companies that it had business with (outside of Halliburton and CIA fronts).
However, the CIA had also proven that there were computer book making scams which exposed Halliburton. That is like the mother of the murderer trying to give her son an alibi by saying that he is allergic to gas fumes so he wouldn't have gone into the victim's house. It still points to the axe in the wood pile. Plus it is not a very plausible alibi in the first place which is even worse. How did the mother know the victim used gas to heat with if her son had not been in the victim's house? Why did the son look to see what type of heating she had--was it to try to explode the house to cover up the crime, or was it another way that he thought of to kill her? Let me explain it now in terms of the computer software cover-up programs.
Suppose that Halliburton sold on its billing books a product=A in Lot Size=100, in Quantity=X at Price= Y to the Buyer=Pentagon on date=MM/DD/YYYY. Most invoices have all that data on them, IF THEY ARE CIVILIAN INVOICES. The Pentagon helps the Defense Contractors cheat by not requiring all of that information on their invoices. The price and lot size is often left off. The Quantity refers to the number of Lots in the box, not the number of Items in the box! That is to make it so that the average receiver cannot tell by looking at the contents of the box if it is all there. Instead they have to look at the side of the box which tells them how many lots it should contain. One can package the same gismos in clear plastic sacks in 1s, 2s, 3s, 10s, or 100s and the receiver will 'assume' that each plastic bag is a 'lot's worth.
By leaving the price off the invoice the receiver is unable to judge easily on his experience of the price of goods whether a shipment is shorted by looking in the box. The CIA did an experiment in which it tested receivers at some of its front companies whether they knew the price of the goods going through their hands. It tested receivers who got accurate information on invoices, those that got artificially twice the price on them, and those that got half the price on them and those that got no price information at all. The results of the study showed that the receivers by the end of 3 months usually had a pretty accurate idea of the price of the military goods, even if the price was not marked on the invoices or boxes. They figured it out by talking to others including those who made the deliveries. They figured it out fastest and most accurately when the goods were overpriced. That was because they wanted to prove that those goods could not possibly cost that much. That was why the CIA switched to a different method from the most obvious one which is just to overcharge. That overcharge method was the one that had been favored by Halliburton originally. It is the one that most businesses try first and use until they are caught doing it and forced to stop. But no price information also incited the curiosity of receivers and although they learned the information the slowest of the groups, they did eventually have a pretty accurate idea of it. The strategy that caused the receivers to be the most inaccurate was to keep shifting the prices around like random noise; one day it costs 20 dollars, the next week 10 dollars, and the week after 30. That is what sales are designed to do---to confuse the consumer's price intuition. So, the CIA's front companies had gone to using that most sophisticated of the ways to throw the receivers off.
A company using the gross overcharge method caused the receivers to investigate and learn what the real price should have been and that undercut the CIA's method. This is just one example of the difference in strategy directly applied to the receivers. But one could apply that same idea in cooking the books. One could over-inflate the amount on a line of an accounting ledger, undercut it, omit the line, add a line, or vary the amounts on similar transactions. The CIA, as if it were a professional crime institution, had also studied how accountants catch on to the books being cooked. They had then studied how to print false books to try to prevent them from catching on. They concluded that varying the price randomly around the number that they wanted kept the accountants from seeing the patterns of the corruption as well. For example, if the accountant came to have a firm belief that 1 lot of Product A cost 200 dollars, then if a carton of A had a cost with a 300 at the end of the number, the accountant become suspicious that the lot sizes had been changed.
So here was the CIA varying the prices of the goods that its front companies sold almost every month. But suppose that it is selling those goods to Halliburton when it was using a cost inflation idea of cheating. Halliburton had an incentive to inflate the cost of its purchases in order to justify the high cost of what it sold to the military. So, it had been fairly standard practice for it to take the highest price that the CIA front company ever charged it for that product and put that on its books for regulators as its cost. Comparing the two sets of books then shows that there is a problem--in this case it looks like Halliburton is cheating.
So, Halliburton sometimes changed strategies to a more sophisticated way of cheating. That way of cheating took the real price that the CIA front company charged them for a product and doubled the charge on its books. It then thought it could claimed that the CIA front company had 'accidentally' only recorded exactly half of the charge. It figured that it could say that the front company had promised it a 50% discount but that it had never delivered on its promise. The CIA front company would then look bad for 'billing' Halliburton at the regular cost but pocketing half of the billed price into someone's pocket. The CIA creative accounting people did not like that plan. It was something that Halliburton had already done on multiple occasions. The CIA had lots of fronts with lots of customers and worse problems it wanted hide than merely jacking up prices. Some of its fronts were fictitious and made no products at all. Some of its fronts had some real customers and many fake customers in order to launder money. The CIA software people in the creative accounting dept. wanted to make the CIA's crimes 'undetectable'. The Halliburton people wanted just to 'sneak by' until caught.
End of Case 3
Case 4: Halliburton's Rigging a Back Door in the Pentagon Accounting Computer
Let me make things clearer with a real world example from early 2002. It was brought to my attention that Halliburton had already awakened the ire of a govt. investigator. We have already seen that Halliburton had already both over billed and short shipped. The buyer was the helpless taxpayer.
The investigator worked at the GAO and had access to both Halliburton's bills and the Pentagon's payment of those bills. But there was a problem. Those bills and the payments did not match up. In spite of the bills being grossly inflated in the first place, the payments exceeded the bills! That was not by a little, it was by about 35%!
The GAO investigator was the same man who had come to talk to me in my office. He remembered me and that I had tried to contact him at the end of 2001. So, he had asked to speak to me by calling the CIA. The CIA would not let my phone ring whenever he called. But by happenstance one of the many times he tried to call me I picked up the phone to try to call someone else. So, we connected. I agreed to meet with him outside of the CIA and later that same day we met at a restaurant in McLean not far from CIA Headquarters.
He had with him copies of all of the materials that I had faxed over to him. He started by asking me questions on them and taking notes. He was particularly interested in documenting where I had picked up each document. Then he asked me what I knew of the Pentagon overpaying Halliburton. It had been 2 weeks since the CIA's creative accounting dept. alerted me to that problem. By then I knew a great deal about how that Pentagon over billing occurred.
Rumsfeld had let Halliburton set up offices inside the Pentagon just like Tenet had let them at the CIA. That was the result of secret executive orders signed by Bush, Jr.. I had by that time a copy of that executive order and handed it to the GAO investigator along with many other documents that I brought to that meeting. National security was being trashed by the Bush Administration and what I did had the potential to help restore national security. None of the documents would have helped the Russians, the Chinese, etc. wage war against us. I had had that independently verified by CIA analysts before I handed over those documents. Correcting the theft of funds would help US national security.
One of the documents that I handed over was the list of Halliburton personnel at the CIA and at the Pentagon. Their physical offices were together in each location with their own security personnel. I verified that with my own eyes the next time I had occasion to go to the Pentagon 20 minutes drive away. In addition, I handed over a document that listed their job title from their CIA or Pentagon badge application which is all that personnel in those locations had on them. Even a visitor to the CIA had to fill out such a form. The amount of checking on that person's background to get that badge is a call or fax to the FBI to make sure that they are not on a wanted list. The CIA also checks their name and Driver's license against its 'suspected foreign agents' and after 911 its 'suspected terrorists' list.
But no one called to verify that they were not felons who had served their time already. Thus, when I checked I found that "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA" who was then already my boss for 10 hours a week was a felon who had served time on a felony conviction of fraud. Not unsurprisingly then, one of the top men at Halliburton's Pentagon Suite was his partner in that crime who had also been convicted of a felony.
Their felony crime was stealing new vehicles bought by the US Army in large numbers while they were en route to be delivered to the Army. They had then been sold overseas and the profits pocketed.
His Pentagon badge listed him as an 'accountant'. I could find no evidence that he had been to business school unless one counted his jail time as that. His resume that I found elsewhere where he served as a board of Director on a company listed a business school during the time he spent in prison, about 4 years. I called up that business school and asked if they had a 'prison outreach program'. They said no. I asked them if they had a graduate by that name and they declined to comment. But when I faxed them a copy of the man's resume after a cover letter on CIA letterhead saying that he was posing as a graduate of their school they issued a denial that he had ever enrolled. I gave all those papers to the investigator.
Then I gave him the proof that Halliburton's CEO Cheney had known that they were felons by the fact that he had blocked a background check on them when they went to a White House function that he hosted.
In addition, I gave that investigator the proof in the form of several documents together which showed that this Halliburton felon posing as an accountant had caused the Pentagon to overpay Halliburton. I want to go through that evidence in more detail because it is instructive.
My memory might get some of the details wrong but the gist of what I say would be correct, according to the science of memory (See the book Memory, Trauma, and the Law by law professor Alan Scheflin).
The evidence that that Halliburton felon was the man responsible for the overpayments by the Pentagon was 4-fold.
First off, I had a memo from Cheney to him that was handwritten and addressed to him personally which directed him to "make sure that the Pentagon pays us all that it owes us and then some". The memo appeared to have been hand delivered. The CIA's forgery dept. verified the note as Cheney's handwriting and not a forgery. I try to do careful work. So their statement to that fact was a document that I handed over with the original of that memo.
The next piece of evidence was a letter sent by that felon to a friend and co-conspirator, in this case my Halliburton boss. In that letter he bragged "I am getting more than we bargained for out of the Pentagon". It went on to encourage him to meet with him to 'find out how'. I intercepted this letter before it got to my Halliburton boss, copied it and then put it onto his desk. I was thus witting to the fact that they were going to discuss that topic at their next meeting.
The third piece of evidence was a tape of their conversation at that meeting. On that tape the Pentagon felon bragged with delight about how gullible people were at the Pentagon. He spoke about his going into the Accounting Dept. of the Pentagon and making friends with some of them. He managed to bring his own programmer in to "check the bills from Halliburton" on the excuse that they had not been paid on time. Then his programmer had managed to insert code by calling up the Halliburton computer from the Pentagon's Accounting computer to "check if all the outstanding bills had been paid". That code put in a back door into the Pentagon's Accounting computer so that Halliburton could later change the amount that the Pentagon would pay whenever they wanted. The reason Halliburton had gotten caught was that someone forgot to change their billings up to what they had put in the Pentagon's computer.
The fourth piece of evidence that I gave him was my boss having one of his programmers insert that same code into the CIA's Accounting computer. I waited until he did it and then I collected the evidence, the code. The code from the CIA's Accounting computer with a couple of lines before and after it to show where it had been inserted was the fourth piece of evidence. That evidence was on a computer disc. I had one of the accounting people sign it as coming from their computer.
I had first taken all that evidence to my boss Tenet to give him a chance to correct the problem of Halliburton ripping off the American taxpayer via the CIA and Pentagon. He looked at the evidence and said, "Well, you certainly have done a thorough job as usual." Then he offered to send the evidence over to the White House to 'correct the problem'. I immediately picked up the evidence off his desk and walking out of his office said that I could do that myself. I did send a copy of the evidence to the White House. I did that after I met with the GAO official. The White House managed to block the investigation. But the evidence was not destroyed. Why have I waited all this time to tell others about that evidence until now? Because before I feared that the White House was strong enough to destroy the evidence.
I could go on about this case but without the evidence it is perhaps futile to do so. And with the evidence it is unnecessary. I thus hope that others with a stable address will write to the Head of the GAO and demand that this case be unblocked and prosecuted.
End of Case 4
(Submitted to the Committee on Saturday May 17th, 2008)
Case 5: Was Rumsfeld Criminally Negligent in Protecting US Troops and National Security?
This is another case that grew out of my moving documents from the Pentagon to the CIA on DCI Tenet's orders in Aug. 2001. The cases that I am giving you are not a complete set of those that I was involved in. But I am selecting them to give you as complete an understanding as this overview format can. This was a case that I started addressing while collecting the documents in Aug. 2001. It was brought to my attention by a Colonel at the Pentagon who handed me a stack of documents ON THE CONDITION THAT I WOULD READ THEM THAT NIGHT. It was a pretty big stack, over an inch high. It took me until 4 am in the morning before a had a firm grasp on the case he had handed me.
Since I was in an office at the Pentagon, it was easy for me to immediately start investigating it. The hour was late, but that was a good time to look for and collect the computer files and other documents that I wanted to go with the Colonel's documents.
By morning, I had had no sleep, but I had collected much evidence and laid it in the inbox the desk of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Unit's Head. The amount of evidence was over 2 inches high of documents and 4 computer discs, one of which was from the accounting office.
The Colonel who had handed me that case then spent all morning in that office giving that Head his eye-witness testimony on the case. That testimony covered only one fourth of the case, and I sent in another 3 Pentagon officials in the afternoon to flesh the rest of the case out. Having the rank of a 2-star general was essential to that effort. It would not have happened had I not out ranked the Head of the Criminal Investigation Unit at the Pentagon as he was loath to investigate. It would also not have happened had I not personally breathed down his neck repeatedly during the day by going in person to check how he was doing. Each time I came by I insisted that he give me a full briefing on his investigations so far. I did that 4 times over the course of the day.
I did not dictate the content of his investigation, but I did insist that he be vigorous in it. I mention this practical framework of the case because I am mainly interested in the larger issue that these cases were not getting resolved. Thus I have so far in this case given none of the specifics of the case to avoid distraction by them. The Colonel giving me the case had been to that Criminal Investigation Unit several times previously to file complaints. He was never satisfied that they were investigated. I was able to confirm that. Each time the investigations were dead ended. It was clear to me by the end of the day that the Criminal Investigation Unit of the Pentagon was professionally dedicated to covering up corruption, not investigating or correcting it. I later took some steps to make sure that that was not due to Russian, Chinese, or foreign interventions to harm US National Security. That I did have a mandate to do from the CIA wherever I went on assignment. That mandate had been put in place by an executive order of President Clinton. It was could not be over-ridden except by a duly elected President. Thus, I had some discretion to act outside of the direct orders of the Director of CIA, Tenet, or the Chief of the JCS. But I could not press that beyond the limits at which it would break due to political practices. In the process of that investigation of possible foreign influence behind the corruption, I ran across a wide-reaching high-level conspiracy to defraud the US taxpayer. I will be delineating that further in this series of about 12 cases.
The documents that the Colonel had handed me were on the development and purchasing of a new free-standing artillery unit. If you have not already seen the painfully funny movie/documentary, Pentagon Wars (1989) on the Pentagon's approval of the Bradley troop carrier, I recommend that you watch it. This case was remarkably similar. The weapon, a piece of artillery, did not work as well as an older brand and it was dangerous to use. Two men had died in the testing of it. But the Pentagon kept on ordering it. The Colonel knew that the problem had to be kickbacks as there was no other rational explanation of it. But without that proof the case was had been repeatedly closed as 'unfounded'. He did not have the espionage background needed to able to collect that evidence. As a result he was stymied.
By morning I had been able to lay financial transactions on the top of the inbox. They showed that at least 2 generals had accepted kickbacks straight into their US bank accounts from that company. Those transactions occurred in the week after they voted to buy more of those artillery pieces. The amounts of the transactions were large relative to their salaries which is how the CIA gages the effectiveness of bribes. Any amount greater that 15% of a person's monthly salary is almost certain to have swayed their decision making processes. In each case, the amount of the transaction was more than the general made in a month!
A CIA officer accepting that amount of money from the KGB or a foreign source would likely have had a bullet put through his body by the CIA, or been tried for treason. Yet, at the Pentagon these kinds of actions were largely tolerated, as if they did not undermine National Security. That was not at all the case. In order to fight a war effectively the equipment has to work and be safe to use. Selling a secret a foreign power might or might not make a difference in the outcome of a war; not having good equipment was sure to make a difference. In this case, the company making the artillery was a foreign one and the generals had been paid from a foreign bank. It certainly should have raised a red flag in anyone's mind. The CIA should have immediately been called in to investigate. But they had not been. Some months previously the Colonel had put in a complaint to Rumsfeld about the lack of investigation by the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Unit on this case. In it he had cited the fact that the company making the artillery was a foreign one and raised the issue as to whether it was a deliberate attempt to sabotage US National Security by selling them 'worthless junk'. He had asked Rumsfeld refer the matter to the CIA. That had not happened.
By afternoon, I had the financial records to show that 5 generals had gotten large kickbacks from that foreign company in the week after the vote. In addition, I had the signed confession of one of those men. I did not use threats or torture to get it. I did use friendly persuasion. Not only did he confess, but he admitted in writing that there was a conspiracy to ensure that that group of generals got the kickbacks. They had met not just once, but at least twice to conspire on how to ensure that the order went through. Rumsfeld had cancelled a competing meeting that dealt with National Security issues without explanation. That allowed 2 further generals to attend the second meeting. There were 6 generals at that second meeting, if I remember correctly. The next day they quietly resigned in the face of the investigation. One of them told me privately but refused to put it in writing that Rumsfeld had cancelled the competing meeting 'in order for us to organize and get that artillery approved' for Pentagon purchasing.
The next day, that Colonel brought me 10 similar cases, since I had solved that one to his satisfaction. It was my last day at the Pentagon on the assignment to pick up the documents Tenet ordered I collect. I did not have time while at the Pentagon to solve them, so I undertook to mentor the Colonel in how to collect the evidence of bribes. During the course of that day he managed to collect evidence well enough to resolve one of those ten cases ad hoc. The guilty party also quietly resigned. He had also been bribed by a foreign company. At least in that case the product worked. It was not a case of the Pentagon ordering the product. It was a case of the guilty party selling them on the black market from his office inside the Pentagon to other Pentagon officials.
The product was a foreign lap-top computer. Military secrets were almost sure to be put on them given the location that they were sold on. They had not been vetted by the Pentagon to ensure that they did not have a back door on them to transmit information back to that country. They were popular at the Pentagon for their advanced conference video call capacities. I took one of them back to the CIA with me where it was verified that the laptop did have the function of acting like an advanced bug to steal files, audio, and photographic images. The optics on it were advanced enough to read documents off the desk of and wall behind the user! It automatically turned itself on and focused on text. Even before I verified that the laptop had been designed to steal military secrets, it was clear from the outer circumstances that that was likely to be the case. Otherwise, why not sell it in some other location? The laptop cost a lot more with those advanced spy systems on it then a regular user could afford. That was why it was only offered for sale inside the Pentagon--the foreign country was paying so that it could be sold very cheaply and out compete other laptops at the Pentagon. About 500 of those laptops had already been sold at the Pentagon. The Colonel had pressed the Criminal Investigation Unit to investigate those black market sales. They had not, nor had the matter been referred to the CIA for investigation.
The Criminal Investigation Unit was not willing to press charges even after being presented with the evidence that the Pentagon official had taken a foreign bribe! I could not press the issue any further because Rumsfeld had over ruled me. He had already sent the Head of the JCS down to the Criminal Investigation Unit's Head to tell him not to prosecute the 6 Generals. I had called Rumsfeld while he was in his office to protest that--he refused to take my call. Rumsfeld nixed prosecution of our cases but we still managed to get the resignations. Rumsfeld blocking the prosecutions gave an ongoing green light to corruption at the Pentagon.
I did collect the evidence that Rumsfeld sent General Shelton, Chief of the JCS down to prevent the prosecution of the 6 generals. I collected a copy of Rumsfeld's phone call to Shelton. In addition, I collected the security camera evidence that General Shelton promptly went down and talked to the Head of the Criminal Investigation Unit. Alas, the audio on it was not useable. However, the action that the Head took in not prosecuting the 6 generals or the laptop selling official speaks for itself as the evidence.
In addition, I collected evidence that that Head of Criminal Investigations had not prosecuted a number of other corruption cases in which the evidence of guilt was abundant and solid. Furthermore, I had collected a van load of corruption related documents which proved that corruption was wide spread at the Pentagon. My orders from Tenet were to deliver those documents to the CIA. There was nothing in those orders that prevented me from Xeroxing as many of them as I could without delaying that delivery past the time that Tenet had requested delivery.
I had been in the espionage business collecting documents for over thirty years. When doing so will aid National Security, one has a duty to collect them and try to deal with them in a way that accomplishes that goal. It should therefore not surprise anyone, that I had ALL of them Xeroxed during the course of the 10 days that they were collected. That is, although it was clear to me that I could not get the corruption appropriately dealt with at the Pentagon, I still had hopes to one day be able to somehow succeed.
There were a number of moving vans removing documents from the Pentagon on that day. I had already stated that this was only one of three categories that Tenet ordered me to collect. I thus had the cover to load one van full of the copies of the corruption documents. The question was where to send it to get the corruption cases prosecuted. I did not have a good answer to that. I sent it to an Army base where I trusted the integrity of the commander to secure it, until I did have a good answer. I believe it is still intact at that Army base.
The cases, many of them, have grown old. But as I looked into the matter of how to get them prosecuted, the facts were not encouraging. The White House was against it. My boss Tenet was against it. Rumsfeld was against it. The Head of the JCS was against it and the later replacement not for it either. The Justice Dept. had not investigated the obvious Halliburton corruption and put them out of business and some of their personnel in prison, as it should have on the evidence. In short, there was no mechanism by which to get them prosecuted because the corruption was being protected from the top.
That dismal state of affairs is barely better today than it was in Aug. 2001. So, why bring any of these cases to your attention at all? I believe that that state of affairs will change soon. I have hope that the US will regain its claim to be a civilized nation and require its leaders and officials to be honest and free of corruption.
I have no doubt that when the legal system starts to prosecute corruption appropriately, that the Commander of that US military base will turn over that van load of documents to it. Until then there is no reason to do so given the risk that they could be shredded or burned. It was my duty to my country to protect the evidence of the corruption to the best of my ability until said time that it could be appropriately acted upon. It is a sad chapter of history that it has been almost 7 years in which it was not reasonably likely that would happen.
Because I wanted to make progress towards a day in which those cases would be handled appropriately, I handed the evidence over on Rumsfeld blocking the investigations. Before I left the Pentagon I sent that evidence by courier to the Director of the FBI. Rumsfeld's corruption was happening in the United States and it was within the jurisdiction of the FBI, not the CIA to follow through on it. When the FBI did not act to enforce the law appropriately, that was more evidence of a conspiracy at levels above Rumsfeld to allow corruption.
That artillery case should still exist in the files of the Pentagon. That case is relevant evidence in the larger case of whether the US Administration is criminally negligent in not prosecuting corruption cases. I allege that it is and that its failure to do so has led to the death of US troops from faulty and shoddy equipment. The two men who died in the testing of that artillery should not have died. Earlier tests of the artillery had shown that it 'jumped' to the left when fired nearly 20% of the time. It was a very heavy piece of equipment. On the earlier tests it had injured about 25 men and sent a handful of them to the hospital. When the heavy gun jumped as the man looked through the sighting, it had caused brain concussions and knocked men unconscious. Other serious injuries were the result of the artillery falling over onto the person firing it. In one of those incidents the artillery had caused massive hemorrhaging into the soft tissue of the leg. The man had had to be hospitalized. If I remember correctly, he had had to undergo emergency surgery to repair a rupture to his femoral artery. That crush injury to his artery was so severe that in the medical report I read the surgeons had considered amputating the leg.
Engineers evaluated the artillery and decreed it 'unsound'. They cited that it was poorly designed and poorly manufactured. It was made in a foreign country where manufacturing processes were substandard as a general rule. They had written that the artillery was unstable on its base even when not being fired. And speculated that it jumped to the left because the quality control at the factory was so poor that the bore was not straight. There was not a single reason, not even a cheap price, to recommend it for purchase by the Pentagon based on the objective evidence that I read.
Yet the tests of it were continued even after it was clear that it was shoddy equipment and unsafe. That happened because obvious corruption was not corrected.
Up to this point in this case, I have omitted all the defining details of those two combined cases in which it was clear that Rumsfeld should have referred to the CIA for investigation and should have had prosecuted for corruption. Now I will fill in some of those details.
The maker of the artillery was part of the Carlyle Group. That was a clear conflict of interest for a sitting President to be making money off of weapons that they were being sold to the Pentagon. It was not until I returned to the CIA that I was able to confirm that the US Administration was making money off the sale of that artillery. The money made from the sales of the artillery did have a pathway to the Bush accounts. It took me longer to collect the banking records which linked the sale of the weapons to the Pentagon to the exact payment amount into the Bush accounts. It was while I was writing software to query the CIA's creative accounting computer that I came across the transactions. CIA shell companies were used to hide the funneling of the money from the artillery manufacturer to Bush's accounts. 9.6% of the Pentagon's payment for the artillery ended up in Mr. Bush's private accounts. About 2.4% ended up in Rumsfeld's account.
Rumsfeld had, according to the Pentagon documents I later obtained, taken several steps that indicated that he endangered the men's lives wittingly. His signature was on a memo that directed many more of the artillery ordered and 'retested' even though one man had already died from being crushed beneath it when it jumped to the left. If I remember correctly, the number ordered was 1,000. It certainly seemed excessive for testing purposes, given that nearly 20% of the previous batch had "jumped' to the left. The sight for the artillery was on the left so there was no way to reasonably fire it without being at risk of bodily harm.
It was clear that Rumsfeld already knew about the first death; he had signed a previous memo ordering people not to talk about it. In addition, he had taken steps to ensure that the first death was not properly investigated. I had been told by a Pentagon official who overheard it that Rumsfeld had told a member of his staff to list the death as an "off duty" death. The official was one of the three I sent in the afternoon to give his statement. Further proof of that was that the form was signed by a member of Rumsfeld's office. Normally, that form should have been signed by the dead soldier's commanding officer. Rumsfeld had the power to override that standard operating procedure, but his staffer signing that form did not. Since that form should have been signed by a Commanding Officer and the staffer was not one, it appeared that Rumsfeld did not sign it in order to avoid having his name attached to that blatant lie. When I checked the death certificate it listed the cause of death as MVA for Motor Vehicle accident. Yet, many military officers had been at the test and in the record of the test they had written that this man had been crushed under the artillery piece. It also recorded that he had been sent to the hospital. I verified that the hospital received him from the ambulance shortly after the test and that he died at the hospital soon thereafter. The Death Certificate appeared to be a forgery or faked as it was dated 2 days after the hospital records showed that he died. Also I could not find a physician by the name of the signer of the death certificate at that hospital. There was a physician by that name in the US; he only worked inside the Pentagon. He was the physician who attended Rumsfeld whenever he was sick inside the Pentagon, but not when he was outside of it. The man who died was stationed on a base in another state, if I remember correctly, in Maryland at Edgewood Arsenal. There was no record of his ever being inside the Pentagon, the death certificate thus appeared to have been signed at the Pentagon with that cause of death per Rumsfeld's orders. That evidence strongly suggested that Rumsfeld tried to cover up the death of the first man as due to that artillery's defects.
Another of the three Pentagon officials I sent in the afternoon had been an eye-witness to the tests and the injury of both men who died. The last of the three had written the report on the artillery being unsafe prior to the death of either man.
The artillery was manufactured by a Saudi Arabian company with close business ties to the Bush Family. They were having financial trouble because they could not find a market for their products. Their products had a bad reputation in the Defense Industry. A video clip I watched at the CIA which showed their table set up at an outdoor Defense Contractor's Weapon Expo in Saudi Arabia showed that people purposely avoided stopping to look at their table. It was not a subtle finding. The table next to theirs was doing a brisk business. Not all Saudi weapons makers should be judged on the performance of this one.
I allege that Rumsfeld knew the poor reputation of this company when he placed the order for about 1,000 more of the artillery. The Pentagon keeps lists of its preferred companies and companies to avoid purchasing from. That company was on the Pentagon's list to avoid. Rumsfeld had to sign a 'waiver' in order to make that purchase of the artillery that killed that second man. That, in my opinion, was criminal negligence. And it was criminal negligence in which he personally took a kickback.
As to the laptop case, the company making it was Japanese. I believe that the motivation was not to undermine US National Security but for the purposes of industrial espionage--to best position them to sell computer and electronic products to the Pentagon. But I cannot prove that. The case is quite troubling in light of the violation of US National Security. Rumsfeld, by not investigating and prosecuting corruption cases, left the Pentagon open to any agent of a foreign power with money in their pocket. Thus his actions which disabled US National Security in practice had both active and passive components.
Nations fall easily due to corruption from within. Without corruption from within, they are hard to defeat even in battle. With corruption within, often no battle is needed to take them over. Corruption is an extremely serious violation of National Security as this combined case shows.
I did brief my boss DCI Tenet on my findings above after I had determined their National Security implications. He showed no great interest in my presentation and rushed off in the middle of it. He twice declined my invitation to reschedule that briefing. It was clear that he had no intention of seriously trying to correct the problems even as related to the foreign penetration problems at the Pentagon.
End of Case 5
(Submitted to the US Congressional Committee on Government Oversight and Reform on Saturday, May 17, 2008)
Case 6: Toasters, Traitors, and the Criminal's Hideout
Because I did not do a good enough job of explaining the software methods to cover-up how computer can 'cook the books', I find that I have to write down more cases to give you a full understanding. The cases are interesting and relevant, so that is not the problem.
[Note: the first part of this case presentation appears not to be relevant to the corruption cases, but will later be shown to be. So, please bear with me.]
This case came to my attention during about May 2002. At that time, I was overseeing the software development in Case 3 in order to learn how to expose these cases later. I was in my office when "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA", call him HallCIA for short, barged into my office without even knocking. I automatically moved my phone cord out of his easy reach his time. He sat down in a chair and launched into a long rambling semi-incoherent description of his latest Halliburton problem. Frankly, I thought he was on drugs. It was my medical opinion as well. I told him that I would look into the matter and politely asked him to send his head programmer up to give me a 'fuller explanation in technical terms'. He became enraged at the implication that his explanation was unclear and tore my door off its hinges and left a hole in my wall with his fist. Fortunately, I managed to duck and dodge the blows that he rained down in my direction. Had his coordination not been thrown off drugs, he certainly would have managed to have his fists make contact with my body. He made such noise with yelling that the building security people of the CIA showed up promptly. They apologized for him saying "He sometimes gets like this" and "There is nothing we can do about it". I was busy with pressing intelligence matters and it was afternoon before the head programmer came up to my office.
In the meantime I had filed a charge of attempted assault against my Halliburton boss with the CIA security office, told Tenet in person the problem and showed him the considerable damage to my office. The CIA security people took photos of that damage. I had also faxed in a complaint to the nearest FBI station on the attempted assault charge. That had taken up almost all of the intervening time of about 3 hours. Thus, an official from the FBI called me shortly into my discussion with the Head Programmer. The FBI man asked me why I believed that the assailant was on drugs. I listed his dilated pupils, his change in gait and his in-coordination as well as his sudden violent behavior without provocation. The Head programmer then asked to speak to the FBI official and gave many more reasons to believe that his boss was on drugs. Those reasons included seeing him take them by mouth before his "erratic episodes" and brag about his ability to take drugs without it affecting his behavior. The FBI official then mentioned that the assailant had a previous record for assault with a deadly weapon. He warned me to 'stay out of the man's way'. I explained that he was my boss and the FBI official recommended immediately leaving my workplace until the assailant was arrested. He recommended that to the programmer as well since the assailant might retaliate for his giving information to the FBI. Thus it was that we moved our meeting to outside of the CIA and continued it at a local restaurant. It was about 2:30 pm and the restaurant was essentially empty. Our section of it was isolated from prying ears.
The Head programmer then proceeded to lay out the case in a way that I could understand it. One of Halliburton's subsidiaries, in so much as it carried a different name, had made "a big mistake". Instead of overcharging by a factor of 10 like it was supposed to, it had overcharged by a factor of 100. This is similar to other known cases where the Pentagon was charged and paid $200 for a wrench, etc. That "big mistake" had brought it to the attention of an official at the Pentagon responsible for fighting fraud. Halliburton now wanted a 'quick fix', a cooking of the books. They wanted make it look like that product had cost to produce it at least 50% of that charged price. The item was a small appliance, a toaster. It should have cost under $20 dollars on the open market, but Halliburton had charged almost $2,000 for each one. And it was a big number of them in the order so Halliburton had netted about $1.2 million from picking them up cheap at a discount appliance warehouse. They had not even made the item. It was worse than that. They had 'fenced' the items--they were stolen. They had no bill of sale for them and did not even order the parts they went into the manufacturing of them. They had raided the discount appliance warehouse pretending that they were FBI officials and the toasters had to be picked up because "they caused house fires".
Ok, now you begin to see why the first part of the story was relevant. The whole case was like a drug-crazed crime caper.
I had not known that Halliburton had impersonated FBI officials in another state when I was on the phone to them. But the Head Programmer had and he had decided that he had to report his boss's drug use so that the FBI did not come after him later. That did not quite make sense to me. I felt like I had fallen into Alice in Wonderland. I let it pass for then, hoping to make sense of it shortly. But before that happened the FBI showed up at the restaurant and said that they wanted 'to talk to' the programmer. They led him away in handcuffs as soon as they figured out he was not armed. That was about 20 minutes into my discussion with the programmer. The food had not been served yet. I then offered to tell the FBI everything that I knew. They were not much interested in staying to hear it, thinking that I was the man's girlfriend. When I told them that he had just told me that Halliburton's people had impersonated FBI official to commit grand larceny, they agreed to listen. They insisted that the interview be at the station. I ended up talking to the same man who I had spoken to on the phone about 4 hours before. He said "You sure get around" and "Some crowd you hang out with". I then explained that I worked for the CIA and showed him proof of that. He whistled and called in his boss. They then both listened to me recount what the programmer had told me. They quickly confirmed that the small appliance discount warehouse in the town I mentioned had been 'raided by people who said that they were FBI'. I think that town was in Indiana, if I remember correctly. It took them longer to verify that the FBI had not done that. I got anxious to go back to the CIA to finish up my pressing intelligence work.
Meanwhile, they had set up to arrest my Halliburton boss when he returned to his house. Then suddenly while I was still in their office they got a call to release the programmer and call off their investigations. That included not arresting my Halliburton boss for the attempted assault. They were absolutely floored. I asked them who had ordered them to back off. They said it was the Deputy Director of the FBI. I asked to use their phone. They handed it to me. I then called the Director of the FBI. It was Mueller by then and I knew him well enough to get through. I asked him in a non-judgmental tone why he was calling off the arrest of the man who had assaulted me in the past and tried to do so again that morning. He said he hadn't done that. Then later in the conversation he realized the convergence of the two cases and realized that he had called off all FBI action against that known felon. He also realized that it would look bad if it hit the press. He asked me "Are you going to go to the Press about this?" I replied "It looks like I will have to in order to get justice served." He said, "Give me your number, I will call you right back." I told him at that point that I was sitting in an FBI office and had just explained to two of them that Halliburton impersonated FBI officials to pull a heist of toasters. He laughed. Then he asked the names of the FBI men at my location. He asked for the exact spelling. It appeared that he ran a check on them of some kind. I feared that he was checking to see if they were on the take enough to be able to order their silence in the matter. He called back about 15 minutes later. He said, "Sorry, orders from above. It has to be this way. No arrests of those 2--ever." I was shocked and said, "So, you are just going to let this man kill me next time." He said he would have to call me back. He never did!
I did not go back to my office that day until after hours and after I had verified that HallCIA had already gone home. I had to wait until after 7 pm. That put me seriously behind schedule on an important mole case. That had the strong potential to effect National Security--the mole was inside the CIA from an "unfriendly country". I was not happy about that delay---so many hours of my day had been wasted by Halliburton being inside the CIA where it did not belong and did not behave itself. Really, it was worse than having that unfriendly mole in the CIA. But I needed to work on the mole problem so I got down to work on it.
Shortly thereafter that Head programmer showed up inside my office without knocking. I still had no door. He thanked me for getting him out of jail. I admitted that it wasn't me and it appeared to be the White House. He said "That figures". He then explained to me that the FBI had been after him off and on for about 4 years and that joining Halliburton was the only thing that worked to stop them. He said that he had killed a man and that 'it looked real bad afterwards'. He had apparently dismembered the man and left the pieces laying around at the scene of the crime. He said he asked to be transferred to the CIA's section of Halliburton after he heard it opened. He hoped that he would learn how 'to clean up better next time".
I told him that I was very busy and that he would have to manage the Halliburton mess by himself without me. He left and I got back to work on the mole case. But about an hour later Tenet called and ordered me to go help the programmer. I reminded him of the mole case and how the mole was stealing CIA documents every day as he left the building. He did not care enough to change the order. I reminded him that Halliburton had already eaten up more than 10 hours of my time already that week. He still did not budge. Nothing worked.
I ended up staying up all night and half way into the afternoon down at the Halliburton's creative accounting computer. I procured and fed coffee and donuts to the programmers and made sure that they did not fall asleep. I also had them each give me briefings on what they were doing. In that way I learned a lot and performed my role of overseer up to people's expectations without having to add any illegal advice. It is very hard to keep your nose clean in this business. But with tremendous effort one can do better than most people at it.
The stolen toasters were among the cheapest models in the industry. They did not even have a dial to set how browned you wanted the bread. They did not have a way to adjust the width of the slice it would accept. The slot was big enough but the metal holder for the bread would only accept the thinnest slices. I know because I asked for one to be sent by courier and it arrived in the middle of the night. The programmers groaned when they examined it. They had been trying to justify the cost on "its extra features". I had told them that they had better check the toaster and not Halliburton's product blurb on it before they went down that road. The blurb was stolen from a high-end GE model verbatim. It had nothing to do with the toaster that Halliburton's alias has sold to the Pentagon. Halliburton made aliases to protect the parent company from lawsuits and settlements. Towards morning I was told by another Halliburton bigwig at the main headquarters not to keep the programmers overtime. He was a Vice President, if I remember correctly. He said that 'if it comes to that, we will just close down this company as bankrupt and open another one the same day under another name. I asked him about the cost of moving. He said "No cost, we didn't have 'a factory at a fixed location'". I asked him about the other products of the company. He admitted that they were 'all reclaimed'. He said 'there is a lot of reclaimed stuff in the world' "we just know how to find it'. I teased him to keep the information flowing in a light hearted way and said "Did you go to a second hand FBI shop?" He laughed. He said "We have more of those where those come from--we get them new for a discount." I asked him if he could get one in my size and told him what size that was. He said, "Sure, no problem." I offered to pay him the cost. He said, "No cost." I insisted on paying him the exact amount. He said "Nothing. But you can pay for the shipping, if you like. I said fine. It arrived by FBI courier! It was from the FBI directly, brand new. The wheels in my mind were spinning. I was beginning to put 2 and 2 together to get 4.
I had insisted that the programmers take the toaster apart and count the number of parts. They had been making up part name and costs for them by the hundreds. There were only about a dozen parts in the whole thing:
1) Cord
2) Plug for cord
3) Crumb pan
4) Metal shell
5) Two sets of slice holders
6) 4 heating wires
7) 4 frames to wrap the wires on
8) A lever to pop the toast up
9) a knob on the lever
10) a bi-metal thermal detector
11) 4 knobs for feet
12) an internal frame and screws
13) the release mechanism
14) springs
They had already named and priced over 200 parts for that toaster. They had already written code to make the fake books for that factory that manufactured that toaster. But it was all a virtual reality that had no reality to it. That was their standard operating procedure! They accused me of trying to sabotage their efforts by making them look at the actual toaster and how it was made!
So, any investigation of the books has to start with real products already delivered and taking one of them apart to count the parts! It also needs to start with a site inspection to ensure that there is a factory making those goods that that company owns.
When I forced them to use the toaster's actual parts in their accounting scam, they then went to claiming that they were made of titanium or even "platinum alloys" to justify the cost. They wrote transactions for buying platinum and for the equipment to make special alloys of it. They knew all about such jargon and the equipment that a factory would have to have to make such alloys. The cost was going to be justified then on how expensive the manufacturing of those special alloys were.
I looked at the toaster and saw only chrome, steel, and some aluminum. I asked them how they were going to justify not just using those ordinary cheap material to make the toaster. One of them said "You don't get it. No one cares. Everyone is already part of this scam. Who is there left to bust us?" Another one said, "We get away with doing this day in and day out because no one checks. If you weren't here we would be done already. We make up the books for about one fake factory a day. That is our normal rate of production and you are slowing us down."
I called Tenet when he normally got up at home and explained to him what they said. I told him "I am just in the way here, let me get back to my regular work." He said "They might check this time. That is why I have you there. I want it to stand up to scrutiny. I said, "And what if someone asks to have an onsite inspection of the factory?" He said he hadn't thought of that. He said that he would call me back. He did, about 30 minutes later. He said that it had never happened before. He said that accountants just looked at the books, not even the products and so were easy to fool. He told me "forget the toaster, just make the books hold up to inspection".
Before I continue I want to backtrack a bit. I checked to see who FBI Director Mueller called while I waited for his answer. He called Cheney. I made a copy of that phone conversation. It was on record at a number of places. I did the same when Tenet said he had to check. He called Cheney and then Cheney had him also double check with a third person, a Halliburton employee. That person's sole job was to deal with investigators. I later went out to visit that man. He had in his files every case of an investigator worrying one of Cheney's companies. He let me look through his files to prove to my satisfaction that no corruption investigator had inspected a factory. He was very proud of his cover-up skills. He bragged that they were better that the CIA's and that he could beat me at this game any day of the week and twice on Sunday. He assumed that I was playing the same game he was since HallCIA and Tenet sent me out to see him. He then spent half a day teaching me "to be a pro at it like me". He said that what he did was a form of psychological warfare when the investigators came. He said "make them pay in their own time for every piece of information that they get out of you". "You have to give them information, it doesn't have to be real." "But make sure to waste as much of their time as possible each time they contact you." Take 2 hours to find each piece of paper. Time yourself at it. Make sure that you don't give them anything faster than that. Keep them on hold while you "look" for the information. Never call them back. Make sure they have to call you. Make them wait 30 minutes just to get you each time. They will get tired of investigating your case and more onto someone else's. They want to make progress and advancements just like anyone else. Make them go elsewhere to do that." At the end of the day I thanked him and he gave me his phone number. I asked him if I would have to wait 30 minutes. He said, "No, that's not the listed number. I always pick up that phone immediately. It could be the President calling me. He calls me for advice, you know. He always does what I recommend." I asked him if Cheney did. He swore briefly and said that he and Cheney "went way back" but that they didn't always see eye-to-eye. He said that Cheney mostly took his advice but sometimes didn't have the patience to do it right.
The software team had decided before I arrived downstairs that the factory would make just one product, this toaster. That simplified their work. They were into production. They did not want any unnecessary complications in making a good set of books. They started with the outer facts the Pentagon had, that 1000 toasters had been bought, each one costing $1,891 dollars. When the numbers were jacked up they were jacked up like in supermarkets, $1.99, $5.99 etc. But they liked to make it look like it reflected real costs a bit, so they would let the last digit be low, or another digit not follow the 9999 pattern.
They then added to the books they were creating on the computer 'ordered parts'. They liked to do that by listing transactions from known suppliers that some of Halliburton's real factories did business with. They had listings of real transactions with those companies for many parts over many years. A part might be listed as a $19.99 dollar appliance rack from General Electric. The programmer added it to their books and changed its title slightly like $19.99 rack for the appliance. That would then morph into one of the 4 slice racks in the toaster to add $79.96 to the cost of the toaster. Then a fake shipping order might be added to move those 4 racks from the actual Halliburton factory to the fake address for this alias. That fake address might be a real factory, even a real Halliburton factory making something else. Since the advent of maps with aerial views it was important to have an address with a big factory already on it.
If doing that was not enough to get the price up they might add 'metal plating' or additional chrome plating "to enhance durability". Then they could claim that that $19.99 single rack cost them $89.52 to make in their factory and $358.08 for 4. They might say the metal plating enhanced its heat resistance or its anti-corrosion properties. It might even make some kind of sense that one would want that in that part. But the fact would remain that it was completely unnecessary and the toaster would work fine without it.
Then one might add a "scratch resistant" finish or a finish that wouldn't show a scratch because it was 'brushed'. Of course, that adds nothing to the toast that comes out. Unless one sees the product you don't know if it was added.
If the books were not cooked up to CIA standards for cover-ups, then there would not be a real transaction as a basis for each part at the corresponding GE factory etc. During the time that I was overseeing the efforts of those software programmers about half the time they did not have a real transaction to match the number and type of part. Small and common parts were not hard for them to morph into a part for the toaster. But specific function, like the bimetal thermal detector, and shaped parts, like the toaster's outer shell, were harder for them. Some company's transactions had very vague part descriptions like "Metal Housing" or "Holder" without giving size, shape, or function. Those companies were almost always witting parts of this conspiracy to defraud the taxpayer. It impairs efficiency not to have parts described accurately. So, then there has to be another reason for it that is making them money to do it that way--corruption! So, when you see books where the real transactions, as listed in the part seller's books, are vague parts, then you should suspect that the buyer's books are cooked. You may not be able to tell well by looking at the one set of books. Those could look perfect, especially if you are dealing with a piece of equipment that you have never disassembled or even seen before.
The books that were produced in this instance were inspected. Tenet was correct about that risk to Halliburton. But it was hardly something that should have taken precedence over a national security issue.
They passed that inspection even with the actual toaster Halliburton had sold them on display at the inspection!
I had been intuitively correct that the books had to reflect in this case the actual features and numbers of parts. They did not take the toaster apart but they peered into it from top and bottom with the crumb pan open. Tenet sent me the security camera pictures and an audio of that Pentagon inspection taking place. There were 4 Pentagon Generals doing the inspection and not an engineer among them! They were obviously already bribed and I later proved that with their bank statements. They were just looking for an excuse to pass it. How can anyone justify spending $1,891 on a toaster for 1,000 of them in bulk when one could buy a better one for $19.95 down at the mall without a volume discount?
Since there were no glaring inconsistencies on the fictitious books the 4 generals passed it. There needs to be engineers and cost cutting experts with real veto power to prevent this corruption from going on. All one had to do is set a $19.95 toaster down next to that one and ask the generals to justify the extra cost according to its real function-- making toast. They would not have been able to do that.
I sent all of proof of that scam to that same GAO officer in the previous cases. That included the financial records of the generals, the real transactions and what those parts looked like and were for, and how they were morphed by software into expensive parts He then asked me to send him one of those toasters. I did. I sent the one that I had requested at the CIA and that we had dissembled. He asked me to meet with him again. I told him that it had become too dangerous for me to do so. Shortly, thereafter I drove to Canada to live. I drove there without stopping at a hotel, using a credit card, or making a single call even from a pay phone.
I hoped that corruption would be cleaned up. It was not. I do not fault that GAO officer. He was an honest man of courage and integrity. His boss shut down that investigation, no doubt on orders from the White House or one of their power brokers like the Director of the FBI or Director of CIA.
Now I want to talk more about the mole problem as it relevant to this case. A mole is a person inside an agency who is acting as a traitor to give secrets to a foreign power. The motives can vary and include bribes or blackmail. The CIA knew that it had a mole because one of its bugs at the Russian Embassy in Washington D.C. recorded the news of just delivered CIA documents. I had been assigned by Tenet to investigate who that mole was starting just before I was handed the Halliburton factory problem by HallCIA. I was then required by Tenet to keep working on the Halliburton problem until it was finished about 2 pm. Then I was exhausted and went home to sleep. The next day I got the FBI with a warrant to raid a flat looking for CIA documents. I was present at the raid and we recovered the CIA specifications for the CIA's communication satellite that NASA had just launched into orbit. That included the security codes for the encryption algorithms which were set at the time of launch. The launch was the morning after the FBI did not arrest HallCIA while I was still forced to work on Halliburton's book cooking project. Those security codes meant that someone could change from the ground the encryption codes to their own and listen it to everything the CIA said to its stations overseas. In essence, it was like having a bug into the CIA and all of its stations. It was an extremely serious violation of US National Security, one of the most serious in the history of the CIA had it not been caught. It was later verified that although the documents were recovered, the mole had already faxed those security codes directly to Moscow soon after the launch.
The mole was a Halliburton employee who had never been vetted by the CIA! The Russians had approached him and offered him money. In addition they offered not to expose his criminal background. He was a prime candidate for blackmail by the Russians; keeping his job meant having to hide his felony conviction. The CIA had not run a criminal background check on all of those Halliburton employees but the Russians had!
The CIA has rules that prevent it from hiring drug takers for the same reason; they are too high a blackmail risk, and thus a mole risk. Since the CIA never vetted the Halliburton people they never even asked them if they took drugs under a lie detector test like they normally do. And the CIA never even did drug tests on the Halliburton people.
When I showed Tenet the documents that I recovered from that Halliburton man's flat he was shocked. He immediately called the Director of the FBI and thanked him for his help in recovering them. I asked Tenet to ask the FBI Director to arrest the Halliburton traitor. Tenet sent me out of the room to discuss it. He called Cheney. Cheney told him no, that that man was his friend and that they could never arrest him. The phone was on speaker and I heard everything. I cried for my country that it had been taken over by crooks who were traitors as well.
I could not stand to be in such a corrupt institution and under such a corrupt govt. That was the moment in 2002 that I decided to leave my country.
After the CIA knew that its new satellite's security codes had been stolen, it had to figure out what to. It decided that it could not use that satellite because its security had been too compromised. That satellite cost the US taxpayers over $3.6 billion dollars. It sits in orbit unused.
The man responsible for that was the man I called on these pages HallCIA. I have not used his real name because Cheney threatened to kill me himself if I ever mentioned his name or the name of his partners in crime. I also have not mentioned them because no one is prosecuting these cases, so it makes no sense to risk one's life for nothing. HallCIA and the Head programmer were moved back to Halliburton's main office, just like the priests sexually abusing children were moved to a different parish.
They were never prosecuted.
End of Case 6
(Submitted to the Committee on May 18, 2008)
Case 7: Halliburton's Stolen Federal Salaries
[Note: this case is another facet of Case 6 which needs to be read first to have the back ground for this one.]
The FBI uniform I was sent by Halliburton came with all of the necessary accouterments to falsely claim that I worked for the FBI. Without asking for it, that package included an FBI badge and number, the paperwork to join the FBI and get a salary, and the FBI official acting also as courier to swear one into the actual FBI! As the CIA's Special Operation's Advisor, I decided to test how good the FBI's vetting procedure was for people inducted into it via Halliburton's back door; I joined the FBI by signed on the dotted line.
The next day I went back to that closest FBI station in that uniform. They let me in without thinking even once about it. I then introduced myself as from another FBI office, giving only the name of the Station--"DC Headquarters". Then I asked for a desk to start working on a case. I was given a desk. No one had even yet asked for my name! I started making phone calls on their FBI secure lines. I called up a judge on their phone list under WARRANTS and explained why I needed a warrant to search a flat. I used a generic reason; "I want to catch the crooked bastard by getting the evidence." After telling him that I had searched flats before but never before been assigned to get the warrant, he talked me through how to do it, including what information on the form would sway him to do it. He also told me which FBI form I needed to fill out and when he would be available to sign it. After doing so, I asked another FBI officer if he had time to pick up the warrant for me and help me search the flat. He agreed and in the hopes of 'seeing some action' other of his buddies joined in. No one had asked my name or vetted me in any way whatsoever.
I had been at that exact station two days before when the Halliburton programmer I had been with in a McLean restaurant was arrested. Earlier in the day, when he gave evidence to the FBI by phone on HallCIA's drug use he had given his name. After the FBI hung up it ran his name through their computer. Since they had advised us to leave the workplace, they started looking for him in the vicinity of where we had called from. When we called them their phone system gave them an address for our location. Apparently, the CIA phones are set up not to give the CIA's address as the FBI did not know that we were working at the CIA until I later told them.
He was arrested for 1ST DEGREE MURDER OF AN FBI OFFICER! By that second visit to that FBI station, I had proof that the FBI officer he had murdered was a bonafide one with proper papers and vetting in the FBI's personnel archives. The FBI had fingerprint and DNA evidence to prove that the Halliburton programmer was the murderer. They even had a trial and a conviction of the man for that murder. He had feigned a fainting episode right before the reading of the sentence and been taken to a hospital. He assaulted the hospital guard inside his room and left him unconscious in his bed. Then he impersonated the guard using his uniform. He later went to a lawyer who put in a motion to declare the trial a mistrial on the grounds of a technicality--- the defendant had not been present at the reading of the sentence. The fact that the criminal had committed a second nearly deadly assault the same day in apparent good health was omitted from that motion.
The FBI-Clandestine CIA raid that I organized was on the private flat of HallCIA. It was not at his house where he lived with a prostitute whom he pimped, according to a CIA file. He did not keep his contraband items there as there were too many unsavory people coming through his house. At the flat the FBI confiscated drugs in pusher quantities and also illegal weapons, including unregistered machine guns, explosives and hand held artillery that could blow holes through a wall for illegal entry. He had one bedroom devoted just to weapons, with shelves devoted to about half-kilo packages of drugs. It was equipped with a padlock.
CIA top secret documents were strewn all over the bed, dresser and floor of the master bedroom. It looked like a hurricane had hit the bedroom even before we arrived. The padlock was broken on the door to the weapons and drug room and the door was open when we arrived. But the drugs were still neatly on the shelves. The flat may have been raided by Russian intelligence before we arrived; leaving the CIA documents behind as cover-up after copying them. Or it could be that HallCIA was just that messy and disorganized as to leave his drugs and weapons unsecured. The FBI collected fingerprints and I collected the CIA documents.
After the raid I returned to the FBI station and filled in the appropriate forms to write a FBI report up on the raid. As I was doing so, the two FBI officers who I had spoken with two days before walked by the desk I was using. They did a double take seeing me in the FBI uniform. I had not changed my hair color or how it was done. I told them that I had just tested FBI vetting and security procedures for a report I was writing for the CIA. I explained to them that I had just successfully impersonated an FBI official to the extent of going on a raid with them, and not one had yet asked for my name or run it through a background check. I showed them the CIA top-secret documents the raid had netted and they laughed at the ruse I had played on the FBI. They were not laughing however when I explained how I had gotten that FBI uniform and signed the papers. They checked on their computers; I was not yet registered on the rolls of the FBI. I asked them to arrest all of the appropriate Halliburton people involved in that scam. They called the Director of the FBI and I also spoke to him. He refused to authorize the arrests. He told me "Write up your report and let me read it first". I offered to drive over immediately with the evidence. He refused to make time to see me. I immediately faxed him a short report and enough evidence to warrant the arrests. Nothing happened. But the next day when the local FBI checked my name again they called me to let me know that I was officially part of the FBI now per their computer.
I sent promptly sent in a full report to the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon on this scam to sign up Halliburton employees as their officers and have the US taxpayer pay their salaries. Just like Halliburton over billed, some Halliburton employees were collecting three US govt. salaries; one from the Pentagon, one from the FBI, and one from the CIA. I wrote in my report that I had signed up in all three places via Halliburton's scam to see how long it would be before those scams were stopped. I put on the three forms separate Swiss bank accounts. The point was to use the accounts as evidence of Halliburton corruption when those cases came to trial; I have not touched a cent of that money.
The Directors of the FBI, the CIA, and the Chief of the JCS that I sent those reports to did not implement my list of recommendations; one of them was to shut down all those public salaries going to Halliburton employees. At least they had not been implemented as of about Summer 2004 when I last checked those accounts. Another recommendation was to make sure that everyone on those salaries and in those agencies is properly vetted and drug tested as per that agency's usual security measures.
Because I was concerned that my recommendations would not be acted on, I sent copies of those letters, the forms that I had signed, and the numbers of the Swiss bank accounts to the GAO. In my cover letter to the GAO I told them that I had given them the authority to check the balances in those accounts by written authorization to the Swiss bank. I hoped that seeing the US taxpayer's money streaming into those accounts would give them incentive to prosecute those cases promptly! Since the banks were not in the US, I doubt that coercion applied to the bankers will erase those accounts, but I could be wrong. Since I had long been a covert CIA person, those communications with officials and the banks were under aliases. The GAO however has all of the proper information to check those accounts and to prosecute these cases. I myself no longer remember the aliases and account numbers--I couldn't access that money even if I wanted to. I never intended to use that money so I did not record those aliases and numbers into my personal effects. In 2004 when I checked the accounts, I did so from within the CIA by pulling up the report that I had written to the DCI. I have no way to check those accounts now so I do not know whether that scam, as evidenced by a single person's accounts, has been stopped.
When I checked in 2004, 2 years had passed. The US taxpayer had paid;
via the CIA about $80,000.00 each year for a total of about $160,000.00
via the FBI about $50,000.00 each year for a total of about $100,000.00
via the Pentagon about $80,000.00 each year for a total of about $160,000.00
or roughly $420,000.00 total into those 3 Swiss accounts.
I really do not remember the figures so well as I did not consider the amounts relevant to my life. But I sure hope the that GAO will check and make sure that those cases are prosecuted--I want to stop that lose to the taxpayer.
I also checked on whether Halliburton continued paying those employees if it signed them up for a federal salary. The answer was no, except for rare exceptions. HallCIA had continued getting a Halliburton salary while getting one at the CIA but the Head Programmer had not.
When I checked in 2004 the number of Halliburton employees getting
a CIA salary was over 200,
a FBI salary was over 400,
and Pentagon over 300.
Suppose that the total for that is about 1,000 salaries each at 50,000 a year. That would be $50 million a year of fraud. Over the 8 years that Cheney has been in the Vice President's office that could easily add up to $400 million in savings for Halliburton in not having to pay salaries. No wonder it was so easy to get that FBI uniform and salary sent out to me by talking to a Halliburton VP.
Other Halliburton programmers had complained to me that they took a 'cut in pay' to work at the CIA location. I asked them why they did it then. They said "the takings are good" and "Halliburton fences the items for us in a 50-50 split".
End of Case 7
(Submitted to the Committee on Monday, May 19, 2008)
Case 8: Halliburton's Thieves inside the CIA & the Predictable Consequences
When I heard that Halliburton's people were stealing from inside the halls of the CIA , alarm bells went off inside my head. The items inside the CIA which were easiest to carry out were its documents! And any computer that one stole inside the CIA was likely to have top-secret information on it in spades. It was a counter-intelligence person's nightmare---and now it was mine! The fact that the Head of their Halliburton section at the CIA had just sold the CIA's communication satellite encryption security codes to Moscow burned in my mind. The Russians had paid him $20,000 for that. He had no clue as to their black market value. It made me worry that the Russians and the Chinese could buy every secret inside the CIA for a price that they could afford.
More than one Halliburton person at the CIA had admitted to me that they were stealing to make up for their cut in pay. Halliburton had switched them to Federal salaries, making the CIA pick up the tab. One Halliburton person at the CIA had told me that they were all stealing enough to make up for that cut in pay. Thus, the first thing I did was find out what those 40-odd people used to earn at Halliburton. I had the CIA's accounting office print out for me what the CIA was now paying them. My mouth dropped open in shock. Each one of them would have to steal over $10,000 worth of CIA secrets or goods a year to break even. In some cases the cut in pay was much higher. One man took a $50,000 a year cut in pay when he switched to the federal salary. At the average $23,000 cut in pay, the 40 workers together had sustained a $920,000 cut in pay. I had been told that Halliburton was fencing the goods in a 50%-50% split. So, about 2 million dollars worth of good at black market prices would be stolen from the CIA, if they actually made up their lost salaries stealing. That made my mind spin into over gear. I started thinking back on the history of the mole hunts at the CIA and FBI and what the moles had been paid and what they had sold.
Here is an example from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames;
Ames was assigned to the CIA's Europe Division/Counterintelligence branch, where he was responsible for directing the analysis of Soviet intelligence operations. He had access to the identities of U.S. sources in the KGB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB and Soviet military. The information Ames provided led to the compromise of at least 100 U.S. intelligence operations and to the execution of at least 10 U.S. sources. He ultimately gave the Soviet government the names of every American agent working in their country. The Soviets paid Ames approximately $4.6 million...
Ames is, to date, the highest paid spy in American history, and is one of five known spies to have earned the "big money" ($1 million or more). Clyde Conrad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Conrad , Larry Wu-Tai Chin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wu-Tai_Chin , John Anthony Walker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker , and Robert Hanssen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen are the other four....
On February 22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_22 , 1994 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994, Ames and his wife were formally charged by the United States Department of Justice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Justice with spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. Ames could have faced the death penalty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_penalty , since his betrayal had resulted in several CIA "assets" being killed.[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames#cite_note-PowellTreason-9 However, he received a sentence of life imprisonment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment , and his wife received a 5-year prison sentence for conspiracy to commit espionage and tax evasion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion as part of a plea-bargain by Ames.
I walked down to the office a very high ranking CIA analyst, about 3rd in the hierarchy that department, a man I trusted. People advance inside the CIA by one of two means normally, being very good at what they do or being very good at lying to please those above them. The heads of each section were often in the latter category as a general rule. I asked him how many secrets the Russians could buy for $2 million a year, if they had 40 moles able to walk the halls of the CIA. In the posing of the question I explained that the hypothetical moles would be assumed to be good criminals without formal espionage training. I asked him what effect that would have on National Security.
He asked me if this was a conversational gambit or a request for a formal report to answer my question. I thought about it a moment and then said the latter. That meant that I had to go get a signature on a form. By submitting to Tenet a request for 10 separate reports on a wide variety of important topics, I quickly brought the analyst the signed form he needed. He whistled in surprise when he saw the assignment given to him in black and white. Then he asked me "Is this about the Privatized Employees invasion of the CIA?" I said yes. He said, "I have been urging Tenet to let us study that risk for months. No go. How did you get this when I couldn't?" I explained to him my method and also that the Head of the Halliburton group had just sold the CIA's Communication Satellite Encryption Security Codes. He hadn't heard that--Tenet had put a lid on it even within the CIA. I promised to show him the proof. I came back and gave him and a few of his top staff an hour long briefing on what I had learned. One man was in tears as I finished. Another said, "This marks the end of US National Security". Another said, "No, US honor died already and no memo was sent announcing its funeral."
I asked them what information they needed to make a proper assessment. They said that it would help them if I could get how much the 40 people were actually making off their thefts inside the CIA and a list of what they were stealing.
I came back the next day with the list of how much each one had been paid by Halliburton in "bonuses" the code word for fenced items, and what each "bonus" was for. That list of what each bonus was for was like what the programmers did in morphing an appliance rack into a bread slice rack. It was not an accurate description but it related to the item in a fairly straightforward way.
I showed the list to Tenet and tried to brief him on how dangerous it was. He did not want to hear. Tenet had not followed my recommendations that would have stopped the thefts. And he did not want further reasons why he should do so.
The Director of CIA (DCI) is a political appointee of the White House. He serves at their pleasure. He can be fired by them as soon as he does something they don't like without them having to prove that he did anything wrong. That in effect, always makes the DCI the White House's intelligence lackey. They are usually chosen for their anticipated ability to look "clean" while acting to prevent real Congressional oversight. The usual ruse is for the DCI is to say, "I didn't know". By having a DCI from outside of intelligence, that ruse is usually bought by the Congress. They enable that ruse by not insisting that the DCI has a deep understanding of intelligence when his nomination is approved. The Congressional oversight of the CIA is a joke--a meaningless exercise usually no better than the Warren Commission at exposing the truth. DCIs often make decisions that old timers in intelligence with integrity cringe at because they are so bad, ridiculous, unworkable, or corrupt. Tenet's predecessor, a chemist by profession, John Deutch, had gotten in serious hot water for violating CIA security procedures;
Soon after Deutch's departure from the CIA in 1996 it was revealed that classified materials http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_the_United_States were being kept on several of Deutch's laptop computers designated as unclassified. In January of 1997, the CIA began a formal security investigation of the matter. Senior management at CIA declined to fully pursue the security breach [ i.e. Tenet]. Over two years after his departure, the matter was referred to the Department of Justice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Justice , where Attorney General Janet Reno http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Reno declined prosecution. She did, however, recommend an investigation to determine whether Deutch should retain his security clearance.[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Deutch#cite_note-deutchinvestigated-2 President Clinton pardoned Deutch on his last day in office. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Deutch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Deutch
The stolen items were going out the door, including computers, without the actions needed to stop them or any reasonable possibility of prosecution. I thought hard about what could be done. I wanted to get the CIA's counter-intelligence committee back in control of what left the building as much as possible. That meant they needed to have veto power over what was being sold. To do that we needed to have Halliburton submit those items back to the CIA for its review. I called Cheney and begged him to send a memo over to Halliburton setting up a program to do that. I even faxed him a memo that all he had to do was sign to get that to happen. He did not deny that Halliburton was selling items stolen from the CIA. He did not deny that he had the power to make that change at Halliburton by sending the memo. He did not deny that he had the power to order Tenet to institute effective measures to stem the tide of thefts. As the phone recording of that call shows I kept briefing him on the problem while he kept saying that he refused to discuss the matter with me. I sent a copy of that call over to the GAO because it showed that I had in fact managed to inform Cheney of the seriousness of the thefts. In that call I cited that the likely consequences were the shredding of National Security and unnecessary deaths of its covert personnel.
Another way to slow the thefts was to try to get as high a price for each of them as possible. But I didn't want to educate Halliburton or its workers how to do that. Using the profit motive as the carrot, I did figure out how to both get as high a price as possible and institute professional oversight. I set up a surveillance operation behind Cheney's and Tenet's back to actually inspect each item that Halliburton fenced from the CIA. That is, I had an ex-CIA operative with counter-intelligence experience whom I trusted apply to Halliburton. I instructed him to offer to "help them fence their CIA goods and get higher prices for them". Call him Alan for short. A Halliburton VP, the same one who sent me the FBI uniform, sent me a thank you letter for referring Alan. He no doubt believed that I was corrupt and making a kickback. It was to my advantage to foster that image of myself without it actually being true. In my position it was best if everything I did could be interpreted as corrupt at the same time as I was collecting the evidence for prosecution.
That operative, Alan, ended up terribly overworked in no time. The analysts and I had been off by a factor of 3 in the amount being stolen from the CIA. We did not find that out until the Halliburton people realized that they could get more money by making sure that Alan sold the goods for them. That meant Alan had to sell them at on average much higher than twice what they could get for them themselves, even by selling directly to the Russians. That was not as hard as it would have been with regular stolen goods; the Halliburton people did not know their true worth on the Black Market. It was not something they could find out on the internet or at eBay. They did not have the intelligence contacts needed to find the highest paying people in Foreign governments. Alan could make a better profit selling a document to a rich government such as France, which would have been very bad in the hands of the poorer Chinese or Russians. Before that Halliburton had sold mainly to the Russians. The French were very helpful to us in keeping many things out of the hands of the Russians. They had wised up quickly as to our problem and how to help us. The UK was less helpful because they could get that same information by merely filing a request for it. The French were not as tight into the CIA though they were still US allies.
We needed top dollar for the stolen items because we had to make up for the fact that we were not selling all of the items due to their national security risk. We were hiding the fact from Halliburton's management that we were sending items back to the CIA. We could not send computers back as it was impossible to ensure that the Russians etc. had not altered them in the meantime. Those had to be scrubbed clean using a special erasing procedure. But it was possible to send back documents. We had initially thought that it would be only 10% of the items that had to be vetoed on National Security grounds. But as we got a better understanding of what was being sold via Halliburton that figure went up to a little over 50%. Both that CIA counter-intelligence committee and analysts group (AKA oversight committee) were overseeing which items to veto. They were also overseeing how to bring items safely back into the CIA.
Alan quickly needed more staff to find top bidders. This time instead of making the choice, I referred that decision to the oversight committee within the CIA. I then checked to make sure that they had picked people that I agreed were honest. One of them 'flunked out'. He couldn't sell things at a high enough price on the black market.
The oversight and its "Private Eyes" were doing an excellent job at it when I left the CIA in late May 2002. I had not made a cent off of this extra effort and risk on my part. I tried to ensure that they did not make kickbacks either.
Months after I left, they again attempted to get Tenet to address the problem correctly. They demanded that Tenet lock the unvetted people out of the building. In the process of showing how serious the security violations were, they revealed the oversight operation. That ended up revealing that they were recovering about 50% of the items and about 30% of their black market worth. Tenet informed Cheney of that and Cheney ordered an end to the oversight. I later sent copies of those calls to the GAO. The Russians and the Mossad had a complete set of White House calls, including for sale. The CIA also had a fairly complete set.
When I was forced back into the CIA in Oct. 2003 from Canada with threats and worse, I heard about the troubles that the oversight people had suffered over the intervening 16 months. They had been unable to do oversight for a period of 4 months. During that time Halliburton had fired their Private Eyes, the ex-CIA operatives that they had there. Halliburton had hired its own experts on Black Market Intelligence Pricing and sold all of the stolen items without regard to US National Security. I sent over to the GAO about a dozen phone conversations of Halliburton's high officials demonstrating their reckless disregard for National Security and the lives of covert operatives. The oversight people at the CIA called those 4 months "The Blackout".
It was only after a major national security catastrophe that they manage to get Tenet to insist that Halliburton rehire their ex-CIA 'Private Eyes'. That catastrophe is hard for me to write about without crying. The oversight people briefed me on it when I returned. The first day I came back to the CIA's Headquarters they kept me up all night telling me about it. I cried many times that night for my country and the harm that had been done to her. I cried for the people who had died so brutally and unnecessarily.
Many, many more intelligence professionals lost their lives from Cheney's selling secrets than lost their lives to the traitorous behavior of Aldrich Ames. Ames is serving a life sentence for what he did. Cheney's Halliburton people were still working at the CIA and stealing there because of his protection of them! They were still walking inside the halls of the CIA everyday and going into its offices to 'have a chat'! It was such an egregious violation of National Security that some oversight members quit the CIA. Others said to me;
"Why should we look like criminals who are enabling this theft"? "We are not making a cent off it." "Yet we have been threatened by Tenet that we will be put in prison because we know of the thefts and hence must be guilty of them." "We are being treated like criminals because we are trying to stop the most dangerous of these sales."
I later collected a memo from Cheney to Tenet which said that the oversight of the sales by the CIA was cutting into profits and had to be stopped. It recommended imprisoning all of those in the CIA suspected of being a bottleneck in US corporate profits. Tenet prohibited the oversight within a week of receiving that memo. The GAO has a copy of the memo and also of the memo that Tenet sent out threatening imprisonment if anyone was found to have decreased US corporate profits. They also have the later memo Tenet sent which threatened imprisonment if anyone knew about stolen goods and did not report it to the designated official. Those who had reported thefts to that official had been fired soon afterwards. Thieves do not report stolen goods, people with integrity do--until it is clear that it is pointless and dangerous to do so. I also sent the GAO the document suggesting this ruse of a new designated official as a way to stop the oversight.
That designated official never prosecuted a case of theft against a Halliburton person. He came from Halliburton! He had been recommended for the job by HallCIA to Cheney who then recommended him for the job. I sent over to the GAO a tape of the phone conversation between HallCIA and Cheney. On it HallCIA says that the man he is recommending will stop the losses of revenues "from our CIA sales". Later he brags about one of his sales to Russia of "one of our CIA products" and says, "too bad we can't make more of them". It was clear that he was referring to the stolen goods that Halliburton stole from the CIA, not products that Halliburton made and sold to the CIA.
The designated official was not vetted by the CIA. He was stealing from the CIA while working out of the Halliburton offices. I sent to the GAO a signed statement from a CIA security guard who caught him carrying a computer of the CIA's out the front door. That man could have used the back door out of their offices manned only by Halliburton's guards. He was so used to stealing from the CIA and getting away with it that he forgot and used the front door. That is what he told the guard "I forgot" "Give me a hand and we'll take it out the back door." The Halliburton guards did just that. They helped the Halliburton thieves load CIA computers into their private cars. I sent the GAO several CIA security camera clips of that. The CIA had massive amounts of security camera data showing that. The CIA security people were afraid to report the thefts that they saw because they did not want to lose their jobs without it even cleaning up the problem. By the time I returned to the CIA, 16 people had lost their jobs from reporting thefts to the designated official Tenet's memo directed them to use.
No one at the CIA knew about the item sold during the blackout that caused the National Security Catastrophe until after the Catastrophe happened. The first sign of that catastrophe was a dead body lying on a sidewalk in a foreign city. The body had been the teenage daughter of a CIA officer. The body was no longer recognizable, even by her father. The body was identified definitively by dental records. Her face had been peeled off in small strips. The forensic evidence revealed that she was still able to bleed and struggle during most of the time that was done to her.
The next sign of the Catastrophe was another unrecognizable body. This time of a 6-year-old boy of a US diplomat. The injuries were the same. The CIA concluded that the villain was the same man.
The next sign was an 11-year-old child of a US school teacher in Africa. She was divorced and her husband had once worked for the US State Department. Perhaps he had been CIA under diplomatic cover, but the CIA refused to comment. I saw the photos of the dead bodies. They were too horrible for words.
Could it be that I was recalled to the CIA against my will in order to get my special operational skills to track down the villain? The day I got back to the CIA the first thing Tenet did was hand me these pictures and ask me to find The Killer. He had given me the pictures of 23 victims who had all died the same way. All of them were children of people who could have been in the CIA. About 22 of them did have a known parent or guardian in the CIA.
What he failed to tell me, or give me the photos, for was the over 100 adults that had been killed using the exact same modus operandi. One of them was in the CIA's morgue at that moment. That I had to find out that night from one of the 'oversight' committee members.
I do not want to go more into the investigation which I did yet. This case is really about the thefts from the CIA. The item that was stolen from the CIA that was responsible for those deaths was a computer. That computer had not gone through the hands of one of the ex-CIA operatives. Its contents not been thoroughly erased. It took work and time to do that; the disc had to be erased and written over 50 times. Halliburton's bosses did not care about National Security or the risk to CIA covert operatives, if they were exposed. Neither did key people at the White House judging by the outing of Valerie Plame to get back at her husband. Halliburton had sold that computer stolen from the CIA's personnel Department without erasing the disc even once! I later recovered that computer from a location inside the US still. It had Personnel Department engraved into the metal of it in easy to read print. It is not as if Halliburton could not known that the names and addresses of CIA people and their families were on it. They didn't care enough about National Security and the lives of those protecting it. They refused to turn it on, insert a CD Erase disc and let it sit overnight. They did not have to plug in the mouse, the keyboard, or a monitor to do that. All they had to do was plug it in and insert the CD and wait until the CD turned the computer off again.
I was able to prove that it was the same computer. It still had the CIA's personnel files on it and many of the victims had been selectively deleted from where they should have been in that list. When I compared that file to the current CIA's personnel file, the comparison program marked those deletions in red. The selective deletions showed that the owner of the computer was getting tipped off by someone high up in the investigation of the deaths inside the CIA! The US Administration managed to suppress the news of the murders almost completely, after its ties to the computer started showing up in the CIA's internal investigations. No one in the media had connected the isolated cases across the globe. The motivation of the deletions was obviously to try to cover-up the guilt of the owner's role in those murders. There were about 86 deletions in a file of thousands of names. Each deletion was a victim as already known by the CIA up to a certain date about 2 weeks earlier. No victim that the CIA had on its investigation list by that point had failed to be deleted on that stolen computer. The odds of that happening by chance alone was practically speaking---exactly zero!
In addition, I later obtained evidence that firmly tied the secondary ownership of that computer to those who committed the actual tortures and murders. There was many more than one murderer. What they had in common was membership in a kind of paramilitary quasi religious cult. The members of that paramilitary cult had a group commitment to kill a person once a month. The Mafia usually only requires its members to kill once to get into it. This group required their members to kill once a month to stay in good standing in it. A manual on how to 'please the Lord of Darkness' had been published by a member of that cult. It recommended that the best way to do it was to torture people to death using the modus operandi I have indicated above. That manual had been distributed by the owner of that computer with that CIA Personnel file suggested as the targets. The man who bought the computer was indeed a paramilitary type, with a large collection of weapons, many of them unregistered. He was a Republican and had sponsored fund raising events in his State to support the Bush and Cheney election in 2000. His journal writings showed that he intended to help Bush and Cheney get support for their "War on Terror" by making it appear that Muslims had killed CIA people and their families. He apparently got that idea after he bought this computer and realized what use those names and addresses could be put to. Not a single of the murderers was a Muslim as far as I am aware; they were members of this 'Reverse Christian' paramilitary group. The literature of the group showed upside down crosses as an emblem.
The reason that others in the CIA had not tracked him down and pinned the instigating of the murders on him was political. Like HallCIA, and the Head Programmer from our earlier cases, he was well protected. It was not that CIA investigators had not suspected him. It was that they did not know what to do with their suspicions and even their evidence after they got it. I was the booby prize winner--the fool at the CIA who had before been willing to buck the silence at great risk to myself.
There was precedence for giving me a job like this. At one point a CIA officer had sold a list of MI6 officers to the KGB during the Cold War. The KBG had started killing them off. I was given the job to stop them from continuing. And they had stopped, whether or not it was due to my efforts was a matter of hot debate within the CIA. But some people credited me with having had some influence in the matter.
The Republican who bought that computer was apparently a friend of Cheney and Bush; they had invited him to the White House. They had been present when he picked it out among a number of other CIA stolen computers. I found the White House Security camera footage of that event. The GAO has a copy of it. The payment is shown on the video. The man took hundred dollar bill(s) out of his pocket and handed that to Bush. Bush hesitated and then handed it to Cheney. The footage of that computer being carried out of the room by a guard follows about 20 minutes later. The room had about 20 computers from the CIA in it to start with. The security camera tape shows Bush and Cheney repeatedly coming into the room with a prospective buyer and taking cash in varying amounts. That continued until all the computers were gone. Some prospective buyers remained in the room for over an hour exploring the contents of the computers before deciding on a purchase. I checked with the CIA and found that no CIA vetting of those buyers had occurred. Most did not have security clearances. Some of them had prior felony convictions and had been let into the White House "on orders from above". The sale was 'by invitation only' with Bush and Cheney controlling the invitation list.
The earlier tape shows Cheney directing Halliburton employees in where to set the computers up. Care and time was taken to plug them in and connect them to monitors, mice, keyboards, and arrange the room nicely with a mouse pad under each mouse. The GAO has a copy of that tape too.
The manual on how to torture people that way and the file of CIA Personnel was sent overseas and domestically through the mail whenever a buyer purchased of a snuff film from that man. His poorly kept records showed that he had mailed out at least 2,000 such CD's with the Manual and file on them. His records omitted the address that he sent them to in about 50% of the cases where he marked payment received and product and "How-to" sent.
Thirty of the murders were solved already by local foreign authorities by the time I was given the case. Of those the How-to CD was found in 28 of them. Presumably it had been overlooked in the other 2, or the wrong party may have been charged or the How-to thrown out by the criminal. It certainly was as suspicious as a murder weapon and I was surprised that even 28 of them had been recovered.
Unfortunately, the murders had continued after those arrests. This catastrophe was a very difficult problem for the CIA to correct. It was caused by allowing White House officials without training in intelligence to set intelligence policies. It was also caused by their corruption that sold our National Security to the highest bidder. And it was caused by their refusal to prosecute corruption cases.
That refusal to prosecute corruption cases was not due to a general leniency towards criminals on the part of the US Administration. Bush as Texas governor had executed a record number of criminals, if I remember correctly. The science of memory shows that it is not accurate for all of the peripheral details, but is accurate for the gist of the events. Bush rarely protected anyone from the death penalty. The one man whom Bush, Jr. as Governor of Texas had granted clemency to was Henry Lee Lucas, a man with paramilitary training who was a notorious serial killer and child abuser. Much can be learned by searching on the name of Henry Lee Lucas on the internet. There is some concern that Bush granted clemency to people rather like he appointed them, due to personal ties, cronyism, or to do favors for friends. Certainly there was no merit in the case of Lucas involved in the decision to grant him clemency; his murders were many and extremely violent.
The actions of Bush and Cheney were criminally negligent at the very least.
At least 168 CIA officers and their family members were brutally tortured to death as a direct result of them.
The CIA covered it up and pretended it never happened on Tenet's orders.
The notorious traitor Aldrich Ames had not sent out instructions to torture and kill anyone. He had sold one copy of a list of CIA operatives in one country to one buyer. He was in prison for life.
That Republican fund raiser sent out over 2,000 copies of all the names and addresses of the CIA officers and their families in all countries. He had sent them out with hate propaganda and incited others to kill them. He had sent that to people who were known murderers who had a commitment to kill again. And he had sent it out as a challenge--are you man enough to kill a CIA person? His group offered 'Advanced Membership Privileges' to anyone who succeeded at the task.
It was very curious that someone close and high up in the investigations at the CIA was tipping him off, since he was targeting CIA officers. I was able to supply the GAO with the evidence as to who was doing it. He was getting calls and faxes directly from Cheney and Tenet. Tenet's faxes included the names of the victims to date. He was being assisted in his cover-up at a very high level.
I investigated if the Russians or another foreign group had put him up to this as his methods seemed too effective to be that of an individual's. I found no such evidence of a foreign government or its operatives being behind it. I found many ties to US underworld organizations. The most ties were however directly to Halliburton. According to Halliburton's records which I sent the GAO, he had headed one of their subsidiaries before it went bankrupt. When I looked up that old company I did not find a building on the aerial to correspond to the address. That subsidiary was selling intelligence and paramilitary gear. It specialized in recruiting mercenaries worldwide. It made me wonder if those killing the CIA had done so as a kind of recruitment test; those getting away with it and being able to prove it getting the job. I started looking into whether he was on Halliburton's books as CEO of a new subsidiary. As soon as I started that investigation, Cheney called and told me to 'back off or else'. I asked him what the 'else' referred to because it certainly sounded like a death threat to me. He hung up on me. Then he called me back about 10 minutes later and offered to set up a face-to-face meeting with that computer owner. I agreed and asked for a time and a place. He hung up--apparently his offer was just to threaten me that he would sic that man on me. I sent copies of those calls to the GAO also. They should still have them.
That Halliburton mercenary recruiter was never prosecuted. Cheney and Bush would not allow it.
The computers were plugged in when they were sold at the White House. The security tape shows Bush and Cheney briefly scrolling through the programs and contents of the computers to impress the buyers.
They knew they were selling un-scrubbed computers from the CIA.
Cheney and Bush were never prosecuted for selling those computers with National Security Secrets on them.
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