NORMAN.JIM
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The following is a Radio Interview between James Norman, formerly Senior
Editor of Forbes Magazine and now with Media Bypass Magazine and Jim
Quinn DJ of WRRK 96.9 FM in Pittsburgh. In this interview from December
7th, they discuss issues of national importance and STUNNING IMPACT.
Essentially they give out the reason for Vincent Fosters Death, and the
fact that the "resignations" of the Congresscritters is NOT for policy
reasons but because they have been caught with millions in corrupt funds
in Swiss Banks. Read this to learn what the "mainstream media" doesn't
ever tell you...
Quinn's Interview with Jim Norman
QUINN: Jim Norman, former Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine, and
currently writing for Media Bypass Magazine after having uncovered
Caspar Weinberger's Swiss bank account (we do get punished for some of
the truths we uncover,do we not?). Jim is on the phone with us this
morning. Good Morning, Jim.
NORMAN: Hi, how are you?
QUINN: Pretty good. I want to give people a chance to get an idea of
what it is we are going to launch into after 8 o'clock, and I want to
give some background into this. Is it fair to say that since Iran
Contra that the government has sort of been involved in the drug
business?
NORMAN: Yes, it goes way back before then, actually. It goes back even
to the Vietnam War days -- remember the Golden Triangle, Laos, Cambodia
and all that, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it was always on a much
smaller scale. What apparently happened was that in the 80s we got into
it in a big way, basically nationalizing the wholesale importation of
drugs from Central and South America. The idea was that we control it
somehow that way; instead, it has just become the tail wagging the dog,
I think.
QUINN: It's become the funding source for just about anything that the
government covertly wants to do, and for the moneys that various
elements of the government don't want to ask the congress for, nor do
they want congress to know about.
NORMAN: Right. And it's an arms business, too. They are kind of all
tied up together.
QUINN: So it's arms and drugs?
NORMAN: Right.
QUINN: Kenneth Starr is currently our Whitewater prosecutor, and I have
long said on this show that I find Ken Starrr interesting but also
troubling in that there are many elements to the Whitewater scandal.
Part of the laments have to do with banking and have to do with Madison
Savings and Loan, check kiting, stuff that went on with the Arkansas
Development Financial Authority, but basically there are really two
elements -- there is Whitewater and then there is all the stuff with
Mena Airport, Iran Contra, drugs into the country, various unexplained
deaths, one of them Vince Foster, the possibility of espionage on the
part of the first lady, and all of this lies behind a brick wall that
Mr. Starr has been positioned upon to make sure that they get Clinton
but that the fire doesn't burn past that wall; because on the other side
of that wall are Republicans and Democrats. Am I right?
NORMAN: That's right. He is not looking at Mena; he doesn't have the
authority to from Janet Reno. He does have authority to look at the
Vince Foster death, but I think only inasmuch as it relates to the
Whitewater situation. The whole thing is hemmed in and beyond that is
this whole national security blanket that has been thrown over big parts
of this thing that you couldn't touch if you wanted to.
QUINN: It's interesting, I find, that Dr. Henry Lee, who was part of
the defense team for the Simpson trial, has ended up working on the
Vince Foster affair. The word that I get is that he is going to say it
was indeed a suicide. You have to remember something about Dr. Henry
Lee -- he was, oddly enough, the guy that was called in to do some work
on the Danny Casalaro death down in Martinsburg, WV back in the early
nineties. Was it 1991?
NORMAN: I think it was 1991.
QUINN: This was that reporter that you may have heard about that was
found dead in a motel room, supposedly from a self-inflicted wound, even
though the papers (a year's worth of investigative reporting) were all
missing. He was working on the story that he called the "octopus" and
basically it's the same story that you are working on, isn't it?
NORMAN: Yes, I know I'm talking to a lot of the same sources. Danny
supposedly slashed his wrists twelve times, sometimes deep enough to cut
the tendon.
QUINN: Yeah, right. And his files were all missing. Sure, there's a
suicide. Right. And they embalmed his body before they even had a
chance to inform his parents that he was dead.
So it's another "Arkanside."
NORMAN: George Williamson, who is an investigative reporter out of San
Francisco, has been working on that. He has come up with all kinds of
stuff -- other witnesses that have disappeared, people in the hotel who
just aren't there anymore -- disappeared mysteriously.
QUINN: It's interesting. There are a lot of people who are witnesses to
various deaths involved with this Arkansas crowd, Danny Casalaro for
one. Also, the two young boys on the railroad tracks down in Arkansas
who stumbled on the drug operation. A lot of the witnesses around that
have met violent and untimely deaths as well. So here are a great deal
of ugly people involved in this. We are going to get down to what it
all means in terms of government corruption and scandal of immense
proportions that touch both parties. This is really nonpartisan. The
fact that I don't happen to like "President Pantload" doesn't have a
whole lot to do with this; he was just sort of a guy who happened to be
there with his hand out at the time. It all goes back to the late 70's,
right Jim?
NORMAN: Yeah, and even before that. Let's start with the early 80s when
Bill Casey came into office in the CIA under Ronald Reagan. That's when
our government decided to embark on this amazing and extremely
unbelievably successful effort to spy on the world's banks. We did it!
We have been spying on world banking transactions for more than a dozen
years. The way we do it is by basically forcing foreign banks,
wittingly or unwittingly, to buy bugged software and bugged computers
that let our NSA (National Security Agency) which is the intelligence
arm of the government, to basically surveil wire transfers all over the
globe.
QUINN: Let me ask you this. How do you sucker the rest of the banking
community around the globe into buying the software that you are
selling?
NORMAN: First of all you sell to front companies like this company
Systematics in Arkansas, now called Alltel Information Services. They
had another company called Boston Systematics, an affiliate based in
Israel mainly. There is Robert Maxwell, the UK publisher, who is
fronting this stuff. There are a whole bunch of people fronting this.
QUINN: Wait a minute, Robert Maxwell -- isn't he dead?
NORMAN: Yeah, he is now.
QUINN: Didn't he have an unfortunate accident?
NORMAN: Fell off his yacht in the Atlantic Ocean somewhere.
QUINN: Why, isn't that amazing!
NORMAN: The tinkering of it was mainly putting back doors, just a few
lines of code, that would allow somebody to dial into a computer without
leaving any footprints, any audit trail that you were in there. Then
you could go around and look around in files or you could collect
information from a system without the user even knowing it
QUINN: Now this software, which was originally called Promise, was
stolen from a company called Inslaw by the Justice Department. It ended
up somewhere, probably at E Systems or somewhere, and it was converted
into banking software. It Started out as software designed to track
prosecutorial cases around the country. My question is -- Why didn't Ed
Meese just pay the damn bill, and none of this would ever have come to
light! Danny Casalaro was chasing the stolen software when he stumbled
on what it was being used for.
NORMAN: Well, the trouble with it was that they bought it for use in the
Justice Department, but they were going to use it all over the place.
If they were paying royalties on it, Inslaw would know just how
extensive the use was of the software, and they didn't want people to
know how extensively it was going to be used.
QUINN: I see...
NORMAN: Plus, a lot of the profits from the resale of this went back
into private profits. It was customized and resold to the intelligence
community. It became sort of a basic platform database tracking system
for most of our intelligence agencies and many of those abroad. The
idea was "Well, we can all talk to each other now." In fact what it has
allowed us to do is basically rifle through other people's data files
abroad too, because the stuff was apparently being sold to foreign
intelligence agencies and it was also bugged. We have other ways of
basically surveilling and downloading foreign electronic databases. The
whole computer world is much more porous and transparent than anybody
wants you to believe.
QUINN: There is a bank here that I know that uses this software right
here in this town, and I'm sure that there is probably more than one.
Everybody's got it.
NORMAN: In some form or another. It goes under different names now.
It's been modified many times. I think when Inslaw had it, it was a
half million lines of code. I'm told now it's a couple of million lines
anyway. It's gone through many, many modifications over the years.
QUINN: This company, Systematics, which is I believe still 8% owned by
Jackson Stevens at Stevens Inc., who, by the way, is one of the backers
of Bob Dole -- how troubling is that?
NORMAN: He is the co-chairman of Dole's finance committee.
QUINN: That's right! Bob's in town -- Hi Bob -- You'd better explain
this. You'd better explain Mena, too, Bob or it's going to follow you
to the White House. Systematics, I understand, had an attorney who was
kind of off the record doing work for them, named Vince Foster. Is that
true?
NORMAN: Yep, that's true. We've heard that from many, many sources
now. In fact, Jim Leach's committee has established that pretty well
with some of the investigation that they have done. Foster was a
trusted deal guy for Stevens at the law firm. Although Foster never
shows up officially as an attorney of record for Systematics, he was
definitely in the loop, basically smoothing out things between
Systematics and the NSA, which was the main government agency that was
contracting for a lot of this stuff.
QUINN: So this is how Foster got involved in intelligence, right.
NORMAN: Yes, because there is heavy duty code and computer technology
stuff involved here. Apparently, some time in the early 80s he
developed this relationship with the State of Israel. In fact, some of
the same handlers I am told were involved in the Jonathan Pollard case.
They basically nurtured him and groomed him for many years and then
bingo, they hit the jackpot -- he ended up in the White House.
Apparently he convinced Hillary to help him out on some stuff.
QUINN: So... what is Foster involved in? It's the mid 80s...
NORMAN: Mid 80s. Foster is at the Rose Law Firm. Think of him as a
high- level marketing guy between Systematics and the NSA. NSA -- they
have all these spooky contracts that they are trying to find contractors
for. Foster would have been sort of a go-between there. Plus Hillary
was actually an attorney of record for Systematics back in 1978 when
Stevens tried to take over the Financial General Bank shares in
Washington. Those bank holding companies later became First American -
Clark Clifford, Robert Altman, all that crowd.
QUINN: Yeah, the BCCI thing.
NORMAN: Stevens was fronting for the BCCI crowd and trying to take over
this Washington Bank Holding Co. The SEC blocked him at the time,
partly because one of the things he was insisting on was that this
company Systematics which at that time was a tiny little thing in
Arkansas, he was insisting that they be brought in to do all of the data
processing for this multistate bank holding company in Washington.
Hillary represented Systematics in that. Now the thing about
Systematics at the time -- it was before they even got involved with the
bank spying stuff. Abroad for many years, they had been what amounted
to a Laundromat for covert funds for the CIA and the intelligence
community, quite legally, probably. It was done for the national
interest. Somebody had to move this money around and Systematics was in
a perfect place to do it because they owned the computers and a whole
bunch of small banks. They could move this money around electronically
without the bankers even knowing about it necessarily, and it wouldn't
go through the normal clearing houses. The regulators wouldn't see it.
It would just crop up wherever the CIA needed it in whatever bogus front
company account, and it was all just bits and bytes; it was a
cyberbank -- it still is.
QUINN: I'm here with Jim Norman, former Senior Editor at Forbes
Magazine. You know, it's interesting, here is a guy who was with Forbes
Magazine, a respected senior editor who figured probably this would be
his life's work. All of a sudden, he finds himself a defrocked commando
journalist working for Media Bypass Magazine out of what Evanston,
Illinois, or somewhere in Indiana?
NORMAN: Indiana.
QUINN: Yeah, that's right. Now, I got a question. Before we get into
Vince Foster in the mid 80s and Hillary Clinton's role in this, how did
you get onto this whole scandal? Where did you walk through the door on
this?
NORMAN: I came in the back door completely. Look, I had no ax to grind
here against Bill Clinton or the Administration. I hated covering
politics. I thought it was all baloney. I'm just a business writer,
and I never wanted to get enmeshed in this whole Whitewater/Vince Foster
thing, but I started for a couple of years I had been following this oil
company bankruptcy up in Stanford, Connecticut, because I had covered
oil. This thing never made sense to me. There is no reason why this
company went bust and, in fact, when I actually got into it and started
redoing the oil trading transactions, the reason they lost money: they
weren't losing it. They were hiding it. They were parking it off shore
with another company that was financing arms sales to Iraq, cluster
bombs and stuff like that all through the 80s. And, this Chilean arms
dealer, Cardone, who was providing weapons, was also it turns out
brokering some of the sales of this stolen software. Okay, that gets me
into the software story.
QUINN: So that gets you onto the Promise software, and you and Danny
Casalaro are now on the same road.
NORMAN: Right, and then in the process of that, I Started talking to a
whole bunch of rather spooky, strange intelligence community characters,
and I was sitting at a guy's living room down in Kentucky one day. He
was sitting there in the middle of the night blowing smoke rings, and he
said, "yo by the way, Vince Foster, he was under investigation." I
said, "under investigation, for what?" And, he said, "well, it's
spelled 'Espionage.'" BOINK!!...and that's how I got on this whole Vince
Foster thing.
QUINN: So that's how it happened?
NORMAN: Yeah.
QUINN: Okay, now here it is, the mid 80s. Vince Foster is working for
Systematics, and he is coming into contact with the intelligence
community. What is, how did Hillary Clinton and the Israeli Mossad and
all of this come together and what happened?
NORMAN: Well, I think that they had been...look the Israelis were key
partners with us in this bank spying effort. This is a joint allied
government effort, and the Israelis were one of the key front people in
this in selling and supporting this software all over the world so that
people weren't thinking they were getting the software directly from the
U.S. You know, there was an Israeli front company used to sell this
stuff to foreign banks.
QUINN: Well, they sold it to the Moscow bank. I know that.
NORMAN: Well, Systematics did, yeah, and Systematics got involved in
supporting this stuff all over the world, a little company in
Arkansas...go figure. Come on.
QUINN: Yeah, really.
NORMAN: I mean, main software people, they operate in New York and
places like that and not out of Podonk, Arkansas. So, at any rate, the
Israelis had ties into this whole thing all along, and, you know, they
are our friends. We do give them a lot of stuff and share a lot of
stuff.
QUINN: Well, the whole idea was to track terrorist money, and the
Israelis have a great interest in that, and rightly so. There is no
problem here.
NORMAN: The name of this problem was "follow the money for terrorist
reasons," but once you set that up, you can do all kinds of stuff with
it. I mean, we were spying on everybody's money. I think that's
probably how we helped bust the Soviet Union. We found out just how
deep their pockets were, where their money was, who we could bribe. You
know, acting as a financial destruction of their society more than
anything.
QUINN: So, how does Foster get involved in espionage?
NORMAN: Well, I think it was money. Money, money, money. And,
especially you know with this whole political thing, it takes so much
money to run for office. I mean, my theory is that the actual spending
is probably twice of what anybody declares when you add up all of the
soft dollars and everything. I think there is a tremendous need for
money there, and they just weren't real cautious about where it was
coming from. I think this thing about selling state secrets to the
Israeli's and other countries was just a business. It was just for
money. I don't think there was any ideology involved here at all, and
it was one of many businesses. There is also insider trading going on
here. There was the kickback on drugs and arms stuff and so the money
has to go...you have to hide it some way so it goes into Swiss bank
accounts. And Foster would have known that yeah we're tracking this
money off shore, but there is such a blizzard of information that unless
somebody knows exactly what they are looking for they would never find
anything. They thought they could cover this up pretty well so Foster
had...actually he had several accounts, and there was one in particular
in this bank, bank at Villa Switsaria Italiano in Chaso on the Italian
border. It is a little kind of a mafia kind of community there reputed,
and so he was taking the money in there for the payments from the
Swiss. He was going to Geneva every six or eight months, and his
curious one-day trips - I don't think it was for sightseeing.
QUINN: No. I'm sure he wasn't doing any real estate work for Arkansas.
NORMAN: No. The whole thing about money laundering is...you know the
money would go into a Swiss bank. Somebody would have to go physically
and take it out and take it to a friendly bonded dealer or something
like that, buy bearer bonds or other kinds of bonds or something that
you could pledge as collateral for loans back in the states and turn it
back into cash again legitimately, and so that is how money laundering
works. Vince, in effect, was a bag man here because when they go to the
White House all of a sudden they hit the jackpot. There was so much
more goodies there, and, in fact, Deborah Goram, Foster's executive
assistant, testified under oath that Foster had given her two, inch-
thick ring binders from the National Security Agency to put in Bernie
Nussbaum's safe in the White House. What were these binders? Well, I
have talked to brokering experts on this stuff, and they say, "look,
when you are talking NSA binders in the White House, you are talking
mainly one thing, and these are the codes and protocol by which the
President authenticates himself when he has to call up the Pentagon to
say let's go nuke somebody." Now, what was Foster doing with these
things? He had no business with them. He would have had no access to
them. It would have to come from somebody with access to the Oval
Office or the Presidential living quarters.
QUINN: And, who would that be?
NORMAN: Well, I think we know who we are talking about here.
QUINN: We're talking about Hillary Clinton, aren't we?
NORMAN: That's right. She has been under investigation in this whole
thing, too, but I think that they had a strong case against Vince and
not such a strong case against Hillary. But, you see what happened was
and this is another whole part of the story as to how they got onto
Foster. Basically, there was a team of computer hackers and computer
intelligence guys in the CIA who were going through most databases.
They found names there that they identified as being Foster and
Hillary. They put them under surveillance actually before they went to
the White House. I think it was between the election and the time that
they went to the White House, and that's when the alarm bells went off.
They had been surveilling these accounts for a while, and when Foster on
July 1, 1993 bought a ticket to Geneva, a round-trip one-day ticket to
Geneva, these guys said, "oops, he's going to take the money. We're
going to beat him to it." And, they went in. They hacked their way into
the bank and obtained the necessary authorization codes on this coded
account for which no signature is required to withdraw money, by the
way.
QUINN: Right.
NORMAN: They were able to effect their own technically legitimate wire
transfer of this money back to the U.S. Treasury where it sits in a
holding account escrowed for use by the CIA.
QUINN: So, the CIA empties Vince Foster's Swiss bank account of its
ill-gotten money.
NORMAN: Yeah, actually it wasn't the CIA. It was this sort of renegade
vigilante group of guys they called the Fifth Column that has been out
doing this stuff. They don't take any of the money for themselves. The
money goes to the...
QUINN: They just do it for fun?
NORMAN: The CIA only gets the money. It is escrowed for use by the CIA
but only when the CIA gets rid of a bunch of its bad apples there who've
got dirty hands from drug kickbacks, arms.
QUINN: Let's pick this story up. There was a meeting just before Vince
Foster died on the eastern shore of Maryland in which Webster Hubble,
Vince Foster, and some others were present. Okay, this was just before
Foster died. Pick up the story here.
NORMAN: All right. Well, we mentioned July 1, 1993, Foster buys this
round-trip ticket to Switzerland. They raid his account. They take
out $2.73 million. Foster apparently calls up the bank to let them know
he was coming. They say, "Oh, Vince don't you know you took the money
out already?" Boing...that's when he found out he was under
investigation. That's when he got so mysteriously depressed. It had
nothing to do with editorials in the Wall Street Journal. He had his
bank account raided big time, and he knew he was under surveillance, or
he knew he was under investigation. And, that Started this curious
chain of events. Webster Hubble testified that not so much Vince was
depressed, but he was worried. He was afraid to use the White House
telephones. The guy had heart palpitations. He couldn't sleep at
night. His doctor gave him a prescription for sleeping pills. His
sister tried to get him to talk to some psychiatrist. He never got in
touch with them. Instead, he hired a high-powered lawyer in Washington,
Jim Hamilton, this big deal white-collar crime fix-it guy who handles
people who get hauled up for Congressional hearings. And, then there is
this curious meeting the weekend before Foster died. He and his wife,
Lisa, go down to the eastern shore of Maryland for a getaway weekend,
and then, by coincidence, they meet Hubble and his wife down there.
Hubble, also from the Rose Law Firm, at the time the country's de-facto
top law enforcement law officer because Janet Reno in effect was taking
her orders from Hubble. They go over to the estate of Michael Cardoza
who is the son-in-law of Nathan Landau, a big deal Democratic
fund-raiser, and Cardoza is also the head of Clinton's legal defense
fund. Supposedly, this was all poolside chit chat. Baloney, it was
damage control. They were trying to figure out how to contain this
scandal from spreading to other people in the White House, and they were
trying to lean on Vince to get him to, you know, cop a plea, go quietly,
or shut up and don't talk about it. And, in fact, what my sources have
told me is that there was actually a huge payment made to an account
held by Lisa Foster with more than $286,000 on the Friday before that
meeting.
QUINN: Wait a minute, on the Friday before that meeting, Lisa Foster's
bank account gets a deposit of $286 million?
NORMAN: $286,000, yeah.
QUINN: I'm sorry, yeah $286,000. Okay, so does she take it out?
NORMAN: Well, I don't know what ever happened to that money. It is hard
to tell where it came from even. It is all very mysterious to me, but
it sure smells like hush money to me. It's like, "look Vince, don't
worry, we'll take care of your money."
QUINN: You don't know if she wrote a check on it?
NORMAN: Well, I'm told that it came through the hands somehow of Sheila
Anthony, who was Foster's sister and at the time she was a
"congressional liaison" person at the Justice Department, whatever a
congressional liaison is.
QUINN: So she takes the money to Foster, and Foster turns it down?
NORMAN: Well, no...I think he probably accepted it, or it went there.
But, apparently, he was having second thoughts, I think. You know, on
the Monday after they came back from this meeting, the records showed,
the public records showed, that he has a parade of people coming by his
office in the White House saying, "hey, how'd your weekend go, Vince?
You cool with this? I mean, you on board with all of this? Everything
okay?" you know. Then,...
QUINN: A lot of very nervous people in the White House.
NORMAN: That's right. Then, the day he died he had like a two-hour
meeting with another person from the Arkansas contingent there. I think
the problem was that they were afraid that Vince was going to talk or
that he was going to crack under questioning, and here's a guy who was
now, at this point, under intense surveillance. I mean, he had not only
CIA counter intelligence people, but you had NSA. You had FBI
surveilling him. There was a four-person IRS team we know was assigned
to tail this guy, probably in connection with the money laundering
aspect of the Swiss bank account.
QUINN: God, this thing's got everything but floats in the....I mean all
they need is Goofy, a big balloon with ropes on it following this guy
around.
NORMAN: You almost did. I mean, you had the Secret Service with a
bomb-sniffing dog squad out there checking his car in the parking lot.
The video tapes of that gone. The video tapes of the room where they
are stored, gone. I mean, this whole thing is massively covered up, and
I guess it is for national security reasons.
QUINN: Well now, I understand that Foster had a meeting scheduled with
Bill Clinton. I believe it was on a Wednesday.
NORMAN: Right.
QUINN: And, it was the Tuesday he was killed.
NORMAN: Right. Exactly. The question is well, gee, was he going to
drop something in the President's lap and blow the plausible deniability
that he might have on this stuff.
QUINN: Well, this Foster suicide thing is so sloppy. It leads me to
believe that on Tuesday they thought he would take the money and shut
up, and he didn't take it so they had to do something real quick.
NORMAN: Well, that could be it or that even if he wanted to shut up
maybe they were afraid he would crack under interrogation or something.
You know, it is just somebody wanted him real dead, and there is a bunch
of people who had ample reason for it. This was not suicide. It was
not over depression. This was a political assassination carried out on
U.S. soil by foreign government. The Israelis were involved in this.
There was apparently a three person Masad contracted team that went into
the apartment that Foster had gone to that afternoon where he was
apparently lured by a female person from the White House staff who I
think still works in the White House.
QUINN: Now, who would that be?
NORMAN: Well, I...
QUINN: Because, he had sex with her?
NORMAN: That's the impression, yeah.
QUINN: I mean, there was semen on his shorts. There was brownish-blonde
hair on his clothing and rug fibers all over him which may or may not
have had to do with having sex on the floor. It might have been...
NORMAN: No, I think that was because he was rolled up in a rug
afterwards and taken over to Fort Marcy Park. Now, the question is were
elements of our intelligence community involved in helping to dispose of
the body and cover it up some way?
QUINN: Who is the woman in the White House?
NORMAN: I can't say.
QUINN: Patsy Thomason?
NORMAN: No. I don't want to say. I suspect...
QUINN: Dee Dee. Well, she's not there anymore.
NORMAN: That name is known. I mean, she has been identified on these
tapes apparently, but....
QUINN: I think Dee Dee and Bill are doing it, but that's just me.
Anyway, let's get back to the story here. Okay, so I understand at
least you are claiming that there is a videotape of Foster's murder?
NORMAN: Well, of the people entering and leaving this apartment a few
blocks from the White House where it apparently occurred.
QUINN: Has anybody located this apartment? Do you know where it is?
NORMAN: I don't know exactly where it is myself. I am told it is
actually within a few blocks of the White House.
QUINN: Okay, so they lure him here, and they pop him, and there is a
videotape of it or there is a videotape of the people going in and out.
Then, they go to Fort Marcy Park, and they dump him.
NORMAN: Right.
QUINN: Okay, and we've got a witness now that says they saw the two guys
that fit the same description that Patrick Knowlton, the other witness,
to Foster's car. He describes the one guy that threatens him. One of
those people is one of the two that supposedly was walking Foster, who
looked drunk to this guy, into the park, but he says that they laid him
out.
NORMAN: Yeah. I don't know too much about all that stuff, but what I
know is this that Paul Rodriguez is the Editor of Insight Magazine that
came up with this Mr. X source. When Forbes decided not to run the
story for reasons that were kind of mysterious to me at the time and
while I was still there, they gave me permission to publish it
elsewhere. And, as I approached Insight because they are kind of a
gutsy magazine, David Rodriguez made a whole bunch of calls around
Washington trying to corroborate this stuff, and I think he was making
some headway. Then, he gets this visit in person from some military
intelligence guy from the Pentagon who comes to him and says, "Paul, lay
off this story. You don't know what you're dealing with here."
QUINN: No. I think we do know what we are dealing with here. We're
dealing with the biggest scandal since maybe...
NORMAN: And, you got Israeli relations at stake here. You know, the
intelligence community has a lot of joint ventures with the Israelis.
They don't want to "queer" those things. I mean, we do business with
those people a lot, and you know a lot of it is probably quite necessary
but you know there is a scandal here that dwarfs the Jonathan Pollard
case by orders of magnitude really.
QUINN: I want to discuss a couple of things with you. First of all, now
it would appear that a bunch of Republicans picking Kenneth Starr to put
him in charge of this investigation of Vince Foster and the Whitewater
problem in Washington, D.C. On the surface, it looked like they were
going for the jugular, but see Mr. Starr has some background that leads
back to the Inslaw case we discussed earlier in the show about the
Promise software and stuff. He excused himself from that litigation.
NORMAN: And, the reason was because he was the inside counsel at the
William French Smith at the Justice Department in 1982 at the time that
the Inslaw software was expropriated by the government really.
QUINN: Okay. So he really is not in the position to be the pit bull to
expose this. He is in a better position to get Clinton on whatever
Republicans need to get him on and make sure that Republicans don't get
burned here.
NORMAN: I think that's it. Yeah.
QUINN: Okay, now. Given that that's the case and given that the
Washington inside the beltway crowd on both sides of the aisle are
trying to make sure that the fix is in on this, how do you think or what
leads you to believe that this is going to come out and through what
channels?
NORMAN: Well, again, it goes back to resources of mine. Basically,
there are a few good guys in the intelligence community particularly
this handful of people in the so-called Fifth Column who are so incensed
about this bipartisan coverup, the government's inability and
unwillingness to deal with the high level corruption here, they've just
decided to take things into their own hands. They never had government
authorization to go raid the foreign bank accounts, but....
QUINN: How many accounts are there? How many people in the government
right now have Swiss bank accounts filled with money from BCCI, drug
laundering, defense kickbacks, arms trades, I mean all of this nonsense?
NORMAN: Not as many as two years ago. These guys have been out raiding
these accounts. They've pulled back $2.5 billion, more than $2.5
billion with a "B" dollars from 300, 400, 500 of these accounts. There
is probably 3,000 coded Swiss and other foreign bank accounts that they
have been rifling through the computers on.
QUINN: How can there be this many of them and it doesn't come out?
NORMAN: It is because it is endemic corruption. The government is
corrupt. Why should we give the President of South Korea $600
million? ...country more powerful, more worth corrupting, more venal
and with weaker controls for policing this stuff.
QUINN: Well, because we don't believe it can happen here.
NORMAN: That's right. We're Americans. Well, this is greed and money.
But, there is....
QUINN: Well, it's murder too.
NORMAN: That's right, and there have been hundreds of these accounts
already raided, and nobody, NOBODY has been able to stand up and say, "I
was robbed." Why? Because, the money came from exactly what you said -
kickbacks on drugs, kickbacks on arms, insider trading, and they never
paid any taxes on this stuff. They've never disclosed it, and the
minimum sentence for willful tax evasion is ten years, that's the
minimum. So, what you have going on right now in Congress is basically
there is an angel of death. Actually, there is two I'm told. There is
one on the Democratic side and one on the Republican side.
QUINN: Now, do they make their rounds together?
NORMAN: No. It's separately. What I'm told is that the people in
Congress with these Swiss bank accounts who have had these accounts if
they haven't already left, if they haven't had the good sense to already
get their butts out of there they have been delivered, hand delivered a
brown paper envelope with transaction records of their Swiss bank
accounts and within a day or so they get a visit from this angel of
death who says it's time for you to go, time to do some career planning,
you're out of here, we don't want you in the government when the stuff
hits the fan here as it's gonna do in the spring apparently. The
records are going to Starrt coming out. It's going to be obvious.
These vigilantes are just going to take this situation into their own
hands and release this stuff, I'm convinced.
QUINN: These people are real patriots. They could end up dead doing
this.
NORMAN: Some of them may already have. I think...but they've planned
this quite well. I think they've got it down now. They know that if
anything happens to them that the stuff would just come out in a gush so
it would be counterproductive for....
QUINN: Yeah, but I mean is it going to come out in the mainstream
media. You've got the Mena story being spiked a year ago by Katherine
Graham at the Washington Post, and I've uncov...you what I stumbled on a
memo from Paul Keiser yesterday from the editor at the Washington Post
who writes me in this memo a flat out blatant lie. He says that the
authors of the Mena story that was supposed to run January 26, 1995 in
the Washington Post Outlook Section had withdrawn the article before the
Washington Post had decided to run it, and that's just a flat out lie.
NORMAN: Well, it's technically probably true. But, what they've done,
they've left those people dangling by a thread for like 6-8 months. I
don't blame them for taking the story elsewhere as the....
QUINN: Yeah, but no, but Jim they didn't. The type galleys had been
laid, and the artwork had been done. It was supposed...they didn't pull
it until the Thursday before the Sunday it was supposed to run. NORMAN:
Right. Well, technically the Post can say, "oh, we never quieted
you..."
NORMAN: That's what they told me at Forbes, too, about my story.
Finally, I never got a good reason why my story didn't run at Forbes.
Ultimately, they said, "oh we didn't trust your sources." But, actually
what my immediate supervisor said, "we can't say this about
Systematics," which was a big advertiser at Forbes, and we can't say
this about the Israelis.
QUINN: Yeah, right.
NORMAN: That's why didn't run in Forbes.
QUINN: Well, there's actually no proof that Systematics has deliberately
delivered stolen software. I mean, they may not even know that the
software was stolen, and it may be another version of it.
NORMAN: Systematics is under heavy duty investigation though right now
for money laundering because once you set up a system for laundering
covert funds for the government who knows what else you can piggyback on
top of that. The suspicion is that this was the quid pro quo here in
return for laundering supposedly call it legitimate funds that the
intelligence community can piggyback other stuff to.
QUINN: Let's get back to the angel of death here and the resignations in
Congress which have been pretty much attributed by guys like Rush
Limbaugh to the fact that Democrats just don't like being in the
minority anymore, and they don't have the guts or stamina to stick it
out the way the Republicans did for 40 years. And, some of that may be
true, but how many of these people who have said that they are pulling
their hats out of the ring. And, now we have two Republicans. How many
of these people have been visited by this so-called angel of death? All
of them?
NORMAN: Well, the figures I've heard is that I think there's like 25 or
26 so far since the last election who have decided they are not going to
run again or had actually resigned and out of there like Norman Manetta
from Los Angeles. Of those, I'm told about 21 or 22 so far can be
directly attributed to Swiss bank account problems. There is probably
another dozen or so that are going to go that way. Again, there is an
argument that, "oh, we just can't stand the nasty politics in Washington
anymore." Come on, give me a break.
QUINN: Well, I like Patsy Schroeder. She wanted us to believe that now
that the Democratic party is in such good shape she can leave it and it
doesn't...did you see that?
NORMAN: No....
QUINN: That was great. Oh yeah, now that....
NORMAN: Patsy Schroeder, somebody noted on the Internet that at the news
conference where she was announcing she wasn't going to run, there had
already been re-elect Schroeder bumper stickers printed up. I mean,
she....take this guy Ron Coleman from Texas a Congressman down there.
He made his announcement at his supposed re-election campaign kickoff
party.
QUINN: You're kidding? This is right out of a...this is a movie.
NORMAN: That's right. Listen, these people have been confronted.
They've been given 24 hours basically to clean out their desks. That's
what it amounts to.
QUINN: So, they're gonna try and get all these people out who have Swiss
bank accounts before it hits the fan. Now, when do you suppose that
this is going to happen. Can you give us a timetable?
NORMAN: Well, that's happening in tears. I mean, we've already seen a
bunch of departures. I think that the early spring is the timetable.
You know, Wall Street is going to get hit with this stuff too. Now,
every year in the spring soon after the first of the year after these
guys collect their year-end bonuses you have abig exodus. But, I'm told
Wall Street is going to get hit with this big time this year because
those guys were in it too. You gotta remember, there was so much money
sloshing around here...
QUINN: Yeah, really.
NORMAN: ..from arms deals you could not launder all of that money
without the knowing, willing cooperation and participation of major
banks, major brokerage houses, and...
QUINN: Goldman Sachs possibly?
NORMAN: Oh yeah. Look, Goldman...
QUINN: I always found it strange that Robert Rubin showed up when he
did.
NORMAN: His Goldman, they were the chief investment bankers to Robert
Maxwell in the U.K., helped Maxwell loot a half a billion dollars out of
his pension funds, and it now costs a huge amount of money for a
settlement there.
QUINN: It sounds like somebody's calling you.
NORMAN: They still have the bond for ADFA, the Arkansas Development...
QUINN: Whoa, hold on a second. What's that?
NORMAN: That's another one of these...
QUINN: Well no, I know what it is. You're telling me that Goldman Sachs
was holding the bonds for the Arkansas Development?
NORMAN: No, they were the underwriter on a bunch of these $8 billion or
so of bonds that ADFA marketed to who knows whom.
QUINN: Oh man. You know, I have transactions on my desk at home, $80
million of money transfers to the Fuji Bank in the Cayman Islands from
ADFA, the Arkansas Development Financial Authority who I believe never
had more than $8 million to begin with. I mean, where did they get $80
million and what's it going to the Fuji Bank for? The interest rate?
Come on, the Switzerland of the Caribbean. Jim, I gotta let you go. I
gotta wrap this up here, but I want to thank you for joining us this
morning.
NORMAN: It's a pleasure. I'll keep you posted as more develops.
There's going to be more coming down the pike here soon.
QUINN: Well, I'll tell you what. I'm gonna call you later on today.
I'll give you my home number. Let's stay in touch because if what you
say is true and if there are truly some patriots in the intelligence
community who are finally going to blow the whistle on this. By the
way, all of these resignations and the angel of death and all of this I
think is evidence that these people know that this is inevitable that
this is going to come out.
NORMAN: It's like AIDS. I think there are a bunch of people back before
the last election who realized they, in fact, have slept with the wrong
woman or person and that did not run again, but there has been denial,
denial, denial by a bunch of these people. Finally, I think it's like
the angel of death is finally coming around saying, "you gotta go.
Bye. You're outta here."
********************************* ****************************
If you are a talk show host and want to contact either one of these guys
for an interview you can reach James Norman at MEDIA BYPASS MAGAZINE
1-800-4-BYPASS
Jim Quinn can be contacted at WRRK , 7 Parkway Center, Suite 780,
Pittsburgh, PA 15220, Fax Number 412-928-9290, Internet address is
quinn@sgi.net homepage at http://www.warroom.com or Compuserve
72662,3507.
This is the story of the decade...spread this far and wide, printout and
FAX to your local talk show hosts.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Brenda C. Jinkins
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Sussman
Oakland University SBA WWW Administrator
djsussma@jupiter.acs.oakland.edu
http://www.sba.oakland.edu/staff/djsussma/djsussma.htm
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu Dec 07, 1995 10:28 pm CST
From: David J. Sussman
EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
MBX: djsussma@jupiter.acs.oakland.edu
TO: * David Beiter / MCI ID: 635-1762
Subject: Jim Norman - The Still Before The Storm (fwd)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 4 DEC 1995 22:28:58 GMT
From: Ken Cook
Newgroups: alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater
Subject: Jim Norman - The Still Before The Storm
This is the entire text of the James Norman article for the December 1995
issue of Media Bypass magazine.
THE STILL BEFORE THE STORM
by James Norman
By all appearances, things are business as usual in Washington. There
is the traditional budget bickering this time of the year, the partisan
sniping and the backstabbing among Republican presidential hopefuls
angling for pole position next year. Meanwhile, President Clinton and his
ambitious wife manage to hold a comfortable approval rating in the polls,
enjoy favorable press and seemingly have managed to shrug off persistent
"Whitewater" allegations that have dogged his presidency.
But don't be lulled by the mainstream media, which has been hard at
work pooh-poohing these corruption charges and doubts about the official
"suicide" of former White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster. This is
just the eerie still before a storm. A hurricane lurks just over the
horizon. Thunderheads are gathering and looming darker. Distant lightning
can be seen but not yet heard. Straws are starting to blow in the wind.
This government may be on the threshold of upheaval unprecedented since
the Civil War. That is the cryptic message coming from multiple well-
connected sources close to the intelligence community, who say big things
are quietly afoot that could fundamentally shuffle this country's
political deck. And that may be just fine with Speaker of the House Newt
Gingrich (R-Ga.), who sources say is quietly maneuvering to use this
impending turmoil not just to "re-engineer government" but to purge both
political parties and effect what amounts to a bloodless coupe d'etat.
Swept away will be not only a raft of big-name Democratic senators and
congressmen, but also many prominent, oldline Republicans who have been
feeding at the trough of corruption for years. It won't stop with
politicians, either. Prominent Wall Streeters, bureaucrats, military
officers and a slew of intelligence bigshots are also said to be about to
take a fall. Well over 300 names are said to be involved in the scandal.
"Apocalypse soon!" predicts P.P. Willie.
P.P. Willie is actually a dog. But it is also the pen name for a
legendary World War II military intelligence veteran, now living in St.
Petersburg, Fla., who writes for a semi-weekly newsletter called
WASHINGTON REPORT. It is a pithy, irreverent Capitol gossip sheet with a
penchant for pink paper. But it is read with considerable interest by its
5,000 subscribers - mostly in Washington and overseas - because Willie is
known to be well-connected within the intelligent community. In the past
he has been uncannily accurate about goings-on in the spook world. And
times there now are very troubled.
Willie's latest:
"Remember reading about TEA POT DOME? How about WATERGATE? Then came
IRAN-CONTRA. Not bad. All the past WASHINGTON political SCANDALS are ITTY
BITTY compared to one that should surface next year, about early spring.
"You don't suppose a few GOOD GUYS in the CIA, FBI, IRS, and NSA (they
are not many, but they exist) are fed up with tucking their tails and
running in the face of WHITE HOUSE pressure? What if they went public
with TRUE DOCUMENTED stories of ESPIONAGE, MURDER, TAX EVASION, DRUG
DEALING, MILLIONS OF DOLLARS STASHED IN OFFSHORE BANK ACCOUNTS AND OTHER
BIG TIME HANKY PANKY at the very TIP TOP of the WASHINGTON manure pile?
The MAJOR MEDIA would not want to embarrass the LIBERAL DARLINGS. But
WHAT IF A LONDON newspaper and PINK newsletter broke the story? Talk
RADIO would then spread the word across the nation...The odds are this
scandal will break. We hear it's a DONE DEAL."
Whispers of such a spilling of the beans are being heard from multiple,
separate intelligence sources. Specifically, as reported in the August
and October editions of MEDIA BYPASS, a small, vigilante team of CIA
computer hackers dubbed the Fifth Column has managed to penetrate Swiss
and other foreign banks to quietly withdraw what is now an astounding $2.
5 billion in illicit money from coded accounts they have identified as
belonging to government figures.
Starting in 1991, this five-man Fifth Column team has been using its
own Cray supercomputer to break into foreign bank computers, download
vast libraries of data and trace this money to a wide range of illegal
activities, from kickbacks on drug and arms deals to insider trading
profits, software piracy and the sale of state secrets. Oh yes, don't
forget tax evasion.j
The money has been moved to a U.S. Treasury holding account at several
Federal Reserve Banks, escrowed for use by the CIA if and only if the CIA
gets rid of its own bad apples. How could the government hide that much
money, denying under Freedom of Information Act requests that it even
exists? Just ask the National Reconnaissance Office, the government's spy
satellite agency, which recently fessed up to having $1.7 billion stashed
in secret accounts.
More important then the money, however, are the NAMES. Who had these
accounts? Are they still in office? Who has the list and the proof? Are
they using this information to extort political blackmail? Will the bad
guys be able to buy their way out of exposure? One thing is certain:
Whoever controls this phantom roster of corrupt politicians and money
men has this government's private parts in a tightening vise. One man who
may know is Charles S. Hayes, an irascible Kentucky computer salvage
dealer and recently-retired CIA contractor believed to be part of, or
closely involved with, this Fifth Column.
Hayes, corroborating P.P. Willie's report, does declare that all the
names will come out. Eventually. "When we get good and ready," Hayes says.
The Powers That Be can do little to stop him. Any move against the three
remaining Fifth Column compatriots (one has died and another is disabled)
would be certain to unleash the information in a flood.
At least one big name has already been revealed: Vince Foster. Multiple
sources say one of Foster's several Swiss accounts was raided just before
his death of $2.73 million in proceeds from the sale of sensitive codes
and other secrets to Israel's Mossad. Which may explain why the
government is so anxious to portray Foster's death as a simple suicide.
In reality, it could be the loose thread that unravels a massive tapestry
of corruption.
That suicide cover story is rapidly fraying, despite intense efforts by
the White House and Washington establishment to hold it together. For
instance, credible independent handwriting analysts concluded in late
October that Foster's supposed suicide note is a forgery.
Indeed, there are a number of recent tell-tale events that suggest that
something very big is at hand. Among them:
- CIA briefings. Beginning in late October, high-level CIA officials
began sensitive one-on-one briefings with key members of Congress and
those with intelligence committee assignments. No staff members are
allowed. All parties are sworn to secrecy. Less than a dozen lawmakers
are involved. The subject, according to two sources: Espionage activities
of Vincent Foster and his alleged partner - First Lady Hillary Rodham
Clinton - on behalf of Israel's Mossad and perhaps other foreign
governments.
The purpose of these briefings appears to be to prep key leaders for
cataclysmic political events ahead, including the likely indictment and
possible flight to a foreign country of the First Lady and what would
surely be the inevitable removal of Bill Clinton from office.
- Resignations. There has been an unusually large number of veteran
congressmen and senators announcing their resignations, retirements or
switching parties. Among them, Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), former chairman and
now ranking minority member of the powerful Armed Services Committee.
Another is Rep. Norman Minetta (D-Calif.), former chairman of the pork-
laden House Transportation Committee. The official explanation: It's no
fun now that the Republicans control Congress.
But sources claim the real reason is that some of these departees have
been quietly confronted with evidence that they took bribes or payoffs
through Swiss or other offshore bank accounts. Rumor has it that about 30
current members of the House and Senate ahve been identified as having
such foreign slush-fund accounts and that Gingrich is trying to weed them
out before the names become public.
[Since this article was written, three more senators have announced
their retirements. Schroeder of Colorado; Hatfield of Oregon; and Simpson
of Wyoming. This is now the most retirements in Congress since 1896. Jim
Norman was on several radio talk shows recently stating that Schroeder
and Hatfield have been presented with evidence of these secret Swiss
accounts. The Simpson retirement was announced after these radio
appearances- krc]
- Curious denials. Multiple good sources have confirmed a report by
veteran Washington correspondent Sarah McClendon that over the Labor Day
weekend, Gingrich attended a "party" at the home of Vice President Al
Gore that included Sen. Bill Bradley, Attorney General Janet Reno and
some other prominent Democrats, after which Gore and Clinton had a
shouting match.
But everyone said to be involved in the meeting claims it never took
place. Is it because Gingrich was there to deliver the bad news: a
mountain of hard evidence of high-level corruption? Gingrich declines to
be interviewed by MEDIA BYPASS.
This Fifth Column team apparently began its work in the late 1980s.
Their primary assignment was to break into foreign intelligence agency
databases by a variety of physical and electronic means. But the main
means of entry was via secret "back doors" programmed into the modified
"PROMIS" tracking software which our government, under the direction of
CIA spymaster William Casey, managed to market all over the globe, even
to our enemies.
This initial phase of the computer spy effort succeeded in downloading
data from more than 50 foreign intelligence services, including the KGB,
the Mossad and most of Europe's spy agencies, according to various CIA-
related sources. Contrary to boastful claims by the FBI, this is
apparently how Russian mole Aldrich Ames was identified as a double agent
more than two years before his dramatic arrest in February 1994. Is is
also how the CIA found out Foster was working for the Mossad, after
learning that someone in our government was delivering highly sensitive
computer codes to the Israelis; Foster had been a long-time handler of
sensitive computer spy deals and covert money-laundering for the NSA
(MEDIA BYPASS, Aug. 1995). Found along with Foster's name in the Mossad
data base was that of Hillary Clinton, whose name also cropped up as an
operative for at least two other European intelligence services, as yet
unidentified.
At the time of his death, MEDIA BYPASS has previously reported, Foster
was under close counter-espionage surveillance involving members of the
CIA, FBI, Secret Service as well as an IRS team. Two good sources say
they have heard that Saudi Arabia also had agents surveilling Foster. He
knew he was being investigated and was apparently under pressure to cop a
plea to prevent the probe from bringing down others in the White House.
The FBI apparently also knew that Foster's life was in danger: According
to two reliable intelligence sources, on the day of his death, FBI agents
used a pair of bomb-sniffing dogs to inspect Foster's Honda in the White
House parking lot - and probably planted a transponder on the car so they
could track the movements.
White House videotapes of the parking lot, which would have shown that
inspection, have allegedly disappeared, according to this intelligence
source. But sources say the surveillance teams have still photos and
videotapes of Foster's activities on the afternoon he died, July 20, 1993,
showing him entering an apartment. It is here that Foster was apparently
killed, after a sexual encounter with a brownish-blond woman photographed
leaving the apartment afterwards. Also photographed, these sources say,
was the hit squad, apparently "assets" contracted by the Mossad but not
including any agents of the Mossad itself. Foster's body was apparently
rolled up in a rug and deposited at Fort Marcy Park - which is still
closed to visitors as teh FBI supposedly searches for the bullet that
killed him.
Doggedly, the White House and offical Washington, aided by a blinded
mainstream press, continue to claim it was just a suicide, despite the
seriously flawed and widely discredited report to that effect by original
Whitewater Special Counsel Robert Fiske, and a cursory Senate inquiry.
Sources say it is the continuing coverup, now more than two years after
Foster's death, and the brazen nature of Foster's assassination, that has
soured CIA professionals and has prompted them to consider going public
with what they know. Adding to their frustration was the resignation of
reform-minded CIA director James Woollsey last year and his replacement
by John Deutch.
Deutch's job appears to be to keep a lid on things and to protect the
Clintons and the massive, ongoing illegal drug and arms trade that
provides the agency with billions of dollars in revenue completely out of
view of Congress and government watchdogs.
Deutch's recent attempt to use the Aldrich Ames case as a club to
attack the CIA and its past directors has brought the agency's simmering
revolt to a boil. "Deutch had better watch his altitude and attitude,"
said one veteran CIA man. "He'd better get off his soapbox before he gets
indicted himself."
Rumors of CIA involvement in drug trafficking go back to before the
Vietnam war, with heroin trade from Laos' Golden Triangle. But in the
late '70s or early '80s, the agency virtually took over and nationalized
the wholesale importation of cocaine into this country through obscure
airfields like the one at Mena, Ark., on the grounds that it was the only
way to control the drug trade. In other words: "If you can't lick them,
join them." The operation was soon generating vastly more money than ever
imagined - which has come back to line the pockets of top government
officials from the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. The money-
laundering operations have likewise drawn in major banks and brokerage
houses. By some accounts, the revenues still run upwards of $7 billion a
year.
Details of government involvement in this society-wrecking drug trade
are now emerging from various sources. Bits and pieces emerged during the
Iran-Contra and Iraqgate hearings of the 1980s, which produced a million
pages of documents but only a handful of indictments, and fewer
convictions. Perhaps the biggest fish caught was Reagan Defense Secretary
Caspar Weinberger, charged with lying to Congress. He was pardoned by
President George Bush just as Bush was leaving office in 1992. Curiously,
Weinberger's right-hand-man through most of that period was would-be
presidential contender Gen. Colin Powell, who Weinberger had brought up
to be a top military advisor, out of Casey's intelligence empire where he
is said to have served with the NSA and to have been intimately familiar
with the drug and arms flow.
There is also a growing court record of sworn testimony in the wrongful
prosecution case of former CIA contract pilot Terry Reed. Reed claims in
his book, "Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA," that Bill Clinton,
while governor of Arkansas, was well aware of the drug trafficking there
but played along with the game to earn himself the status of an
"approved" candidate for the presidency. With that would come plenty of
financing.
Another source now openly discussing the massive drug business is
retired Navy Lt. Commander Alexander Martin. Martin was, in effect, the
chief accountant for the Reagan/Bush drug operations run by Marine Lt.
Col. Oliver North, through an obscure arm of the White House National
Security Council called the Natinal Programs Office. In a radio interview
with talk show host Tom Valentine last July, Martin spoke not only of
drugs and money, but death. "Out of roughly 5,000 of us who were
originally involved in Iran-Contra, approximately 400, since 1986, have
committed suicide, died accidently or died of natural causes. In over
half those deaths, official death certificates were never issued. In 187
circumstances, the bodies were cremated before the families were notified.
" Martin then said he was lying low.
Not low enough. In late October, Martin was arrested and jailed without
bond in Broward County, Fla., for supposed violation of his probation on
a 1990 bad-check charge. Such small-time charges are a common device used
to squelch and discredit former players in this government-run drug and
arms racket.
Corruption. Most Americans like to think their government is somehow
immune to the kinds of bribery and abuse of public power rampant in
"Third World" countries. The emerging reality is that the exact opposite
is true. The more wealth and power at stake, the greater the incentive to
subvert and corrupt. Sources say the dark truths predicted to be unveiled
by P.P. Willie will be utterly damning.
END OF JAMES NORMAN ARTICLE FOR DEC 1995 MEDIA BYPASS
Posted to Internet by
Ken Cook
Date: Fri Jan 12, 1996 10:39 pm CST
From: snet l
EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
MBX: snet-l@world.std.com
TO: * David Beiter / MCI ID: 635-1762
Subject: Hackers Versus Politicians, Part II
Hackers Versus Politicians, Part II
by J. Orlin Grabbe
Politicians are those annoying people who--drink in
hand--can stare at a uuencoded file for hours, fall into a sexual
reverie involving ASCII entities, and then weave their way to
the nearest TV camera to pontificate about pornography on the
Internet.
But, you ask, if they are so dumb, why are they so rich?
Sometimes the latter is a mystery, reminiscent of the miracle of
the loaves and the fishes.
Take the case of a man who can hardly pay his bills, but
who gets elected to national political office and goes off to
Washington for a few years. Then--lo and behold!--on his
simple politician's salary, he suddenly manages to maintain two
fine homes, one inside the beltway in Chevy Chase and another
in his home town community of Rat's Ass, to purchase new cars
for his wife and himself, to accumulate lakefront property in a
neighboring county, and to stash away a nice sum of cash in a
foreign bank account.
If the "simple politician's salary" bit sounds improbable,
it probably is. Let's face it: many politicians are on the take.
They may have hidden sources of income involving illegal
payoffs from corporations, lobbying groups, or individuals.
Are you a student? Then you will be proud to know that
educational commissions and associations are also a hot new
conduit for political bribes.
This article suggests a few basic procedures for finding
out whether that special politician you have in mind is getting
more on the side than ASCII sex. Honest politicians, of course,
will have nothing to fear from any of the following.
Is what I am about to do legal? you ask. Of course it is.
To reassure yourself, pull out your world-wide web browser and
take a peak at one of the many data service companies, say
Insights, Inc. (located at ). They promise, using only an individual or
business name and/or address, to provide sufficient information
for:
*Preparing Due Diligence Reports
*Locating People or Businesses
*Exposing and Controlling Fraud
*Uncovering & Verifying Background Information
*Identifying and Verifying Assets
How do they get away with this? Simple. They legally search
public records. Much of this public-record information is
computerized, although some of it is not. In any event, I do not
advocate illegal or questionable access methods, or the breaking
of any laws. Checking up on the (possibly criminal) politician
of your choice doesn't have to be a crime.
Still not convinced? Hop over to Infonet
,
which for a fee will mine public records for nuggets like:
*Felony and Misdemeanor Criminal Filings--"Search any court
in the nation for a seven year history of criminal filings and
possible convictions." (Many politicians wait until they reach
office to work on this part of their resume, but some are early
starters.)
*Driving Histories--"Search a three to seven year history of an
individuals driving performance, including tickets and
accidents." (So you don't really care if your politician speeds a
little now and then. But, on the other hand, did that official who
helped him get out of a DWI expect a quid pro quo?)
*Upper and Lower Court Civil Filings--"Obtain a civil litigation
history of any individual in any court in the United States." (Is
there some hidden reason this guy is getting sued all the time?)
*Social Security Number Tracking--"Access all three credit
bureaus to verify the user of a social security number and the
addresses being used." (Having your politician's social security
number is the next best thing to having his Swiss bank account
number.)
*Professional Licensing--"Verify the existence and status of an
entity's license in a specific practice area, such as private
investigation, medicine, real estate and more." (Was your
politician really a world-renowned physicist before returning
home to run for mayor of Rat's Ass?)
*Consumer and Business Credit Reports--"Review account
balances, credit terms and payment histories for an individual or
business." ("So, before he went to Washington, he couldn't pay
his bills . . .")
Well, if they can do it, so can you.
So where do you start? Well, first see what the
politician him/herself has to say about the money flows Federal
law (5 USC app. 6, section 101 et seq.) requires members of
Congress to file *Financial Disclosure Statements* yearly. The
Financial Disclosure form has nine parts:
Schedule I: Earned Income
Schedule II: Payments in Lieu of Honoraria Made to
Charity
Schedule III: Assets and "Unearned Income"
Schedule IV: Transactions.
Schedule V: Liabilities
Schedule VI: Gifts
Schedule VII: Fact-Finding, Substantial Participation,
and Other Travel
Schedule VIII: Positions
Schedule IX: Agreements
Want to see Newt Gingrich's personal finances for the year
1993? Direct your web browser to .
Many state, county, and city elections have similar
requirements, either on a personal or a campaign basis. Want to
see a copy of the *Candidate Campaign Statement-Long
Form-Form 490* for Joel Ventresca, candidate for Mayor of
San Francisco? Visit Campaign Net at .
These statements represent what a politician says he or
she has or gets. But the really interesting items--like those
kickbacks from the Cali cartel--not surprisingly go unreported.
To get the good stuff, you will need your full hacker armor.
The first thing to get is your politician's *social security
number (SSN)*. It's not difficult Your politician loves to be
photographed doing his/her civic duty of voting. Which means
he or she fills out a *voter's registration card* (public
information) which will contain said politician's name, address,
date of birth, party affiliation, and--usually--social security
number. Voter files may be obtained at your politician's local
county court house, as well as on many on-line data bases. A
person's SSN is the common key that links together many
commercial and government data bases.
Can't find the SSN number on the voter's registration
card? Then try *DMV* records. The insurance lobby has made
sure that driver's records are easy to get, along with the details
of any accidents, and critical driver information such as height,
color of eyes, address--and social security number, if the latter
was required information on the form. (California won't give
out addresses, if a request has been filed not to do so--the
"movie star" exemption.) In about 20 states the individual's
social security number is the driver's license number.
Still searching? Then go with the triple whammy of the
major credit bureaus--TRW, TransUnion, and CBI/Equifax.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act essentially implies you must be
contemplating a business relationship--such as selling a car,
renting an apartment, giving a loan, or attempting to collect on a
judgment--with a party to request his credit report. But the
*header* information in the file--such as social security number,
date of birth, address, and spouse's name--is legally available to
anyone, and your inquiry (unlike an actual credit report) will
leave no footprints. The addresses and phone numbers are:
TRW
660 N. Central Expressway, Exit 28
Allen, TX 75002
Automated phone: 800-392-1122
Phone: 800-422-4879
CBI/Equifax
5505 Peachtree Dunwoody, #600
Atlanta, GA 30374-0241.
Automated phone: 800-685-1111
Phone: 800-685-5000
Trans Union
P.O.Box 7000
North Olmsted OH 44070-7000
Automated phone: 800-851-2674
Phone: (714) 738-3800, ext. 6450
Are you a hacker-journalist? Then take a peak at the
National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR;
located at ). Their bylaws prohibit
them from selling data to nonjournalists (not that you want to
*buy* data anyway--we're just exploring *possibilities*). But
data is "sold at or below costs to journalism organizations or
individuals for legitimate journalism uses only." (Doing your
civic duty to keep tabs on your politician is, naturally, a
legitimate journalistic use of the data.) Their data bases include
these publicly-available information sets, among others:
Organization: Government Services Agency
Databases: Federal Procurement Contracts for 1992-1994.
Organization: Federal Election Commission
Databases: Campaign Contributions for the 1991-1994
election cycle.
Organization: Federal Reserve Board
Databases: home mortgage loans covered by Home Mortgage
Disclosure Act (for 1992-1994)
Organization: Federal Aviation Administration
Databases: Service Difficulty Reports, Airman Directory,
Aircraft Registry
Organization: Federal Bureau of Investigation
Databases: Uniform Crime Reports
Organization: Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
Databases: Gun Dealer Licenses
The existence of such data immediately brings to mind a
barrage of possibly relevant questions:
Is there an incestuous relationship between the donors
to your politician's campaign and subsequent federal
government contracts? (It always starts somewhere . . .) To find
out, compare federal procurement data with campaign
contributions. Campaign contribution data from the Federal
Election Commission are supposed to include all contributions
by individuals and political action groups (PACs) to a
politician's federal election campaign. The Government
Services Agency, meanwhile, keeps Individual Contract Action
Reports (ICARs), which has information about the federal
agency granting a government contract, the identity of the
contractor, and the contract dollar amount.
Has your politician recently purchased a new home?
What is its value? What was the down payment? Is he or she
living suspiciously beyond his or her means? What is your
politician's race or gender (DNA sequence?)? To start to
answer these questions, look at home mortgage data. The
Federal Reserve Board started keeping data like this in order to
check on "fair" lending practices. So the Fed began tracking
home and home-improvement loans, as well as bank-purchased
loans. (And just to help the enterprising hacker, when your
politician is buying, or possibly refinancing, a house, most
banks will now ask for his Social Security Number on the Deed
of Trust, especially as the Federal National Mortgage
Association now requires it.)
Does your politician own an aircraft? What's its value?
Did he purchase it with cash? Check the FAA's aircraft
records.
Does your politician own a gun even while advocating
gun control? If he bought the gun from a dealer, ATF records
can help out here.
And so on.
Now let's get to the nitty-gritty: *city, county, and state
records*. The *City Clerk* in your politician's home town will
have a list of business licenses (name, address, date) and
building permits (name, address, cost of construction). The
*County Clerk* or *County Recorder* should have liens on file
(lien holder, payment agreements), a Probate Index (estate
settlements), records of lawsuits and judgments, powers of
attorney with respect to real estate, records of mortgages on
personal property, and bankruptcy papers. Here you can find out
not only the value of your politician's property, but also the
names, addresses, and property values of everyone who lives on
his street. *City and County Courts* will also maintain a Civil
Index (civil actions, plaintiffs and defendants, as well as civil
files: description of any disputed property or valuables), a
Criminal Index (criminal cases in Superior Court, as well as
criminal files), and voter's registration files.
The *county tax collector* will have a description of any
property owned, as well as taxes paid on real estate and personal
property. The *county assessor* may also have maps and photos,
or even blueprints showing the location of yoiur politician's hot
tub. The *Secretary of State* will have corporation files and
possibly annual reports of your politician's company.
Okay, let's go over it again, taking it slow. With your
politician's social security number in hand, you can get header
information from the major credit bureaus. This will give you a
seven to ten year history of addresses, as well any spousal
name or names. The latter is very important, since your average
politician's instinct will be to keep questionable sums of money
and suspect personal assets in the name of his or her spouse,
sibling, business associate, or girlfriend.
Next you go to the state Department of Motor Vehicles,
to find out your politician's tastes in cars, trucks, motorcyles,
boats, trailers, and recreational vehicles. Of course if your
politician leases any of the above, he or she will not show up as
the vehicle owner. So the next thing to do is to run the license
plate number of that Caddy parked out front, since this will give
you the name of both lessee and lessor.
Next you talk to someone who does business with your
politician, and who thus has a permissible reason under the Fair
Credit Reporting Act to run a credit check. This will give you a
listing of all your politician's credit accounts, current balances,
payment history, and payment terms. Any bankruptcies in the
last ten years, or liens or judgments in the last seven years, will
be listed. Did your politician suddenly receive a huge campaign
contribution from some source, soon after your politician found
himself stuck with a quarter million dollar judgment against
him? If so, he won't be the first person who has sold out his
country to pay off a personal financial debt.
What property does your politician own? The offices of
County Recorder and County Tax Assessor will give you the
land value, improvement value, and total assesssed values for
any property. They will frequently have also the amounts
received for any sales, the sale dates, as well as information on
the mortgage-holder or other lender. Did your politician get a
large loan from Washoe International State Bank just about the
time Washoe International State Bank was having trouble with
state banking regulators, who are overseen by a legislative
committee on which your politician sits?
Does your politician own a business of any
consequential size? Then run a business credit check. Who are
(were) your politician's business associates? Who are the
company officers and principals? Or--if as is commonly the
case--your politician is a lawyer, who are the law partners?
Look also for bankruptcies, tax liens, public records filings,
judgments, and UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) financing
statements. These documents may turn out to be filled with all
sorts of unexpected names, dates, and activities.
On what honorary commissions does your politician
serve? Do the commission's audited financial statements show
any payments for services not rendered? This was apparently
what New York Attorney General Dennis Vacco was
wondering, when he noted, on January 9, 1996, in a letter to the
National Center on Education and the Economy: "Statement 11
on your 1990 Federal 990 and Note 5 on your 1990 audited
financial statements indicate that the Center had retained the
services of Hillary Rodham Clinton, a member of the Rose Law
firm, to direct your Workforce Skills Program while she also
served as a member of the Center's Board of Trustees.
Statement 11 of the 1990 filing indicates that Mrs. Clinton
received $23,000 for unspecified services. The 1990 filing also
refers to a second contract, which was reported to be in the
amount of $150,000 covering the period February 1, 1991
through January 31, 1992, and a similar statement appears on
Statement 11 attached to the 1991 Federal 990."
Moreover, did either Hillary Clinton or the Rose Law
firm pay taxes on the sums received? (A little birdie tells me
neither one did.)
The office of the Secretary of State in any of the 50
states can be a source of UCC searches. UCC Indices will show
whether your politician is listed as either a debtor or secured
party. (Okay. So your politician is up to his neck in debt to
Jackson Stephens. That doesn't mean he listens to a word of
political advice Stephens gives him. No way.)
Superior Courts, Federal Bankruptcy Courts, Small
Claims Courts, and city, county, and state tax authorities keep
records of tax liens, court judgments, and bankruptcy filings
These reveal not only outstanding financial obligations, but also
personal and company affiliations, partners, subsidiaries, and
dependents. (Is there a Don Lasater or Don Tyson in your
politician's background?)
Does your politician really have those degrees he
claims? Call the college registrar. Despite what you think,
many politicians don't believe in their own "self-made man"
rhetoric, and will enhance their resumes with unearned degrees.
This in itself may only be a venal sin, but someone who records
falsehoods in this area will likely also lie in others.
Has your politician been in the news? Check your
library's newspaper file, along with reader's guides, and other
news indexes. On the Internet, you can quickly search for your
politician's name among the 8 billion words on 16 million
WWW pages, using the new Alta Vista search utility created by
Digital Equipment Corporation. You can also do a name or
keyword search through all 13,000 Usenet groups. Alta Vista is
located at .
Be sure to read Lee Lapin's book The Whole Spy
Catalog (Intelligence Incorporated, 2228 S. El Camino Real,
San Mateo, CA 94403; ISBN 1-880231-10-7) for literally
dozens of names, addresses, and phone numbers of data
information providers, along with an evaluation of their
services. You don't need to patronize these services in order to
steal ideas from them.
Basically none of these providers specializes in
politicians, so after a little self-education and set-up, you may
be in a position to start your own business in political
investigations. Bill yourself as a 21st Century Sherlock
Holmes. (*Somebody* has to stop the nefarious influence of
DigiCrime, Inc., found at .)
Oh. About those foreign bank accounts. Well, I'll leave
that to your imagination. But a little birdie told me if you call a
military base computer, find an out-dial number, call another
military base, and so on, going through a *minimum* of three
military bases, any trace back will stop at the third military
base.
Whatever you do, don't do anything illegal.
Date: Tue Jan 16, 1996 3:42 pm CST
From: bigred
EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
MBX: bigred@duracef.shout.net
TO: * David Beiter / MCI ID: 635-1762
Subject: Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 7 Num. 02
The following is brought to you thanks, in part, to the kind
assistance of CyberNews and the fine folks at Cornell University.
Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 7 Num. 02
======================================
("Quid coniuratio est?")
-----------------------------------------------------------------
RECAP OF AND UPDATE ON THE NORMAN THESIS
========================================
For those who are tuning in late, here is "our story thus far":
Back around March 4th, 1995, Mr. Sherman Skolnick of the
Citizens' Committee to Clean Up the Courts came out with a story
about a company called Systematics and alleged high-tech spying
being done on foreign banks. (This was covered in CN 4.22 and, so
far as I can tell, Skolnick's phone message, Hotline News at 312-
731-1100, was first to break the story.)
Here is how Skolnick's story appeared in Conspiracy Nation:
A telephone company in Arkansas is called ALLTEL. They have
a subsidiary called Systematics which is a proprietary
espionage operation of the National Security Agency [NSA].
Developed was a highly refined version of the Inslaw
software called PROMIS. Originally designed to keep track of
the caseloads of federal prosecutors, it was adapted to be
used by spy agencies to track people worldwide, by
satellite. The software has a "trapdoor" built into it. So,
the NSA arranged to sell it or give it to supposedly
friendly or other spy agencies: France, Sweden, Israel, and
others. The "trapdoor" was a sort of "Trojan Horse",
enabling U.S. espionage to spy on other spy shops.
Systematics [allegedly] adapted it to be used through low-
orbit satellites, to spy on the computers of central
banks...
Perhaps a better word than "trapdoor" would be "backdoor". The
software sold or given to the unsuspecting banks is said to have
had a hidden "door" through which prying eyes could enter
unannounced. This is worth emphasizing, because some have said it
would be impossible for a hacker or group of hackers to get into,
for example, a Swiss bank. What these critics are neglecting to
factor in is this "backdoor" through which electronic burglars
possessing the "key" could easily enter. This last has not, to my
knowledge, been refuted.
The late White House aide Vince Foster is said to have had about
$2.73 million stashed away in a Swiss bank account. CIA hackers,
perhaps taking advantage of a "backdoor" in the bank's software,
are said to have stumbled across not only Foster's hidden account
but also hidden accounts belonging to members of Congress and
other high government officials. This, it seems, is where these
"public servants" were hiding bribe money they had illegally
received.
But apparently it was feared that breaking such a huge scandal
publicly would cause Grandpa and Grandma USA to fall out of their
rocking chairs. Yet something had to be done. These
congresspersons and others could not be allowed to get away with
their crookedness. While the CIA hackers, known as the "Fifth
Column", are said to have cleaned out the accounts of the
offenders, still it was obvious that some punishment was in
order. Then too, you can't just leave these bribe-takers in
office -- what's to stop them from accepting more bribes?
So it is reported by several independent sources that these
bribe-takers are being told to leave their jobs, or else have
their alleged rotteness revealed. As former *Forbes* senior
editor James R. Norman put it in the December 1995 issue of Media
Bypass magazine (1-800-4-Bypass):
There has been an unusually large number of veteran
congressmen and senators announcing their resignations,
retirements or switching parties... The official
explanation: It's no fun now that the Republicans control
Congress.
But sources claim the real reason is that some of these
departees have been quietly confronted with evidence that
they took bribes or payoffs through Swiss or other offshore
bank accounts. Rumor has it that about 30 current members of
the House and Senate have been identified as having such
foreign slush-fund accounts...
Richard L. Franklin, writing in his monthly newsletter,
"Franklin's Focus" (Focus Press, 1820 Palisades Drive, Appleton,
WI 54915), confirms the charges. He reports that he has checked
with several of his sources and that, "as they say in the trade,
the story now has legs." According to Franklin, a so-called
"Angel of Death" is visiting the various congressional
representatives and informing them that they have just 24 hours
to announce their retirement.
It is beyond dispute that a record number of Senators and
Representatives are suddenly announcing their respective
retirements from public office. What is more, the Norman article
which appeared in the December 1995 Media Bypass is on record as
predicting many of these retirements *before* they actually
occurred. If Jim Norman's name was Jean Dixon or Irene Hughes, he
would be everywhere on the talk shows by now, hailed for his
amazing "psychic" abilities. Yet we hear nary a word of this
remarkable story in our "free" press. To me, the very fact that
this story is not being allowed into the public dialogue -- that,
in itself, says something. Aren't the networks at least hungry
for ratings? Why won't they draw in viewers with these intriguing
and widely-believed allegations? Why too aren't members of
Congress furiously demanding the opportunity to defend their
impugned "honor"? The silence is deafening.
Reporting on the phenomena of the disappearing Congress critters,
the Washington Times, National Weekly Edition (Jan. 8-14, 1996)
declares that "Congress is going through a shakeout." There have
been, says the Times, 49 announced retirements or resignations
since the November 1994 elections. And, it adds, a dozen of them
have bowed out just recently, since Thanksgiving. Well, Times,
here are two more names to add to your "trickle that has grown
into a stream" of retirements: Associated Press reports ("Clinger
to Retire", Jan. 15, 1996) that Rep. William Clinger "said Monday
he will leave Congress after serving 18 years." The AP story
adds, as if it is an afterthought, that Rep. Pat Williams,
Montana Democrat, announced retirement plans on Saturday, Jan.
13th. Clinger says, "It's probably time for me to move on." Says
Williams, "he's homesick." The AP article also notes that the
high number of congressional retirements is the "most in a
century."
So that's the story thus far. Now, thanks to an east coast source
whom I will call "Mr. Mercedes", I have received an audio tape of
Jim Norman's recent appearance on New York radio station WBAI,
marked on the cassette as having been January 10, 1996.
Says Mr. Norman: "This country is in a *major* political crisis."
According to the ex-*Forbes* senior editor, it is "unfolding
right before our eyes."
"For many years," he says, "[Vince Foster] had been a behind-the-
scenes go-between between the NSA, the National Security Agency,
and a company in Arkansas called Systematics -- a bank and data
processing company now owned or controlled by a telephone
conglomerate called ALLTEL... He may have had access to very
high-level code, encryption [and] other kind of computer
intelligence systems."
According to Norman, "More important than that: when [Foster]
arrived in the White House he -- according to sworn testimony by
his executive assistant, Deborah Gorham(sp?) -- somehow or other,
he came to have possession of at least two, inch-thick ring
binders from the NSA, from the White House offices, which my
sources tell me would have been *extremely* sensitive code
materials -- probably the codes, and more important than that,
the protocols, by which the President authenticates himself when
he calls up the Pentagon and says, 'Let's go nuke somebody.'"
"Plus the fact," adds the controversial but respected journalist,
"that we have documented evidence of Foster making periodic, one-
day trips to Geneva. Over every 6 or 8 months he had been making
a one-day trip to Geneva. And multiple sources have confirmed
that he had at least one, if not several, Swiss bank accounts."
Mr. Norman charges that Vince Foster, *and* *Hillary* *Clinton*,
were both under surveillance for espionage at the time of
Foster's so-called "suicide". Norman wonders, "Where would Foster
have gotten access to these very sensitive documents [e.g. the
ring binders with the authentication codes] within the White
House?"
This last rings true when it is recalled that Foster and Mrs.
Clinton had been widely reported as being lovers.
According to Mr. Norman, *significant* national security issues
are lurking beneath the surface of the otherwise dropsical
Whitewater hearings. "Vince Foster, as problematic as his death
is, it's small potatoes compared to what we discovered... In
fact, former intelligence people who have been involved in
computer surveillance of foreign accounts have found *hundreds*
of Swiss, [Grand] Cayman [and] other off-shore bank accounts,
coded bank accounts, maintained on behalf of high-level U.S.
political figures. Both parties. *Many* members of Congress.
Elected officials. Appointed officials. Military officers.
Intelligence community big-shots. Wall-streeters. Bankers."
"There's a massive scandal here, about to blow up. And, in fact,
we're already starting to see it."
[...to be continued...]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I encourage distribution of "Conspiracy Nation."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
If you would like "Conspiracy Nation" sent to your e-mail
address, send a message in the form "subscribe cn-l My Name" to
listproc@cornell.edu (Note: that is "CN-L" *not* "CN-1")
-----------------------------------------------------------------
For information on how to receive the new Conspiracy Nation
Newsletter, send an e-mail message to bigred@shout.net
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Want to know more about Whitewater, Oklahoma City bombing, etc?
(1) telnet prairienet.org (2) logon as "visitor" (3) go citcom
-----------------------------------------------------------------
See also: http://www.europa.com/~johnlf/cn.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------
See also: ftp.shout.net pub/users/bigred
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt.
Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et
pauperem. -- Liber Proverbiorum XXXI: 8-9
Date: Tue Jan 16, 1996 10:32 pm CST
From: bigred
EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
MBX: bigred@duracef.shout.net
TO: * David Beiter / MCI ID: 635-1762
Subject: Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 7 Num. 03
The following is brought to you thanks, in part, to the kind
assistance of CyberNews and the fine folks at Cornell University.
Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 7 Num. 03
======================================
("Quid coniuratio est?")
-----------------------------------------------------------------
RECAP OF AND UPDATE ON THE NORMAN THESIS
========================================
Thanks to an east coast source whom I will call "Mr. Mercedes", I
have received an audio tape of Jim Norman's recent appearance on
New York radio station WBAI, marked on the cassette as having
been January 10, 1996.
[...continued from CN 7.02...]
Here are further excerpts from the program:
JAMES NORMAN:
[Hillary] had actually been an attorney of record for Systematics
which at the time was owned by the Arkansas billionaire Jackson
Stephens, who tried to take over a Washington bank holding
company on behalf of the BCCI [Bank of Credit and Commerce
International] crowd and install Systematics as the data
processing manager of that entire operation. Which is extremely
curious, because BCCI itself was essentially a huge money-
laundering, arms-finance and drug-finance/drug-money laundering
operation.
In the process of going through all this, I actually came across
what turned out to be a Swiss bank account number: it was a 10-
digit, encrypted series of letters... When I turned it over to
some of the intelligence sources who I'd been using on this
story, they ran it through their system. And, actually a couple
of months later, when I asked them, "Gee. Is it possible [that]
Cap Weinberger might have money in these accounts?" They said,
"Well, yeah. Don't you know? That account number you gave us was
Cap's!" In fact, they mentioned that a relative of Howard
Metzenbaum, former Senator from Ohio, was another co-signatory to
that account; that Weinberger had multiple accounts -- not
implausible to me at all.
I mean, here was Weinberger, Secretary of Defense throughout the
Reagan era, during which we had one of the biggest defense build-
ups in history. We also participated in the massive illicit
arming of Iraq with high-technology weapons systems capabilities,
plus the armaments themselves. It was an environment *fertile*
for kickbacks. Payola. Corruption. And, in fact, Weinberger was
eventually indicted by Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh for
lying to Congress, for failing to turn over his diaries. He was
pardoned by George Bush just as Bush was leaving office. And so
he never had to stand trial -- which was probably a merciful
reprieve for Colin Powell, who was Weinberger's chief assistant
at that time, chief advisor.
Weinberger had basically elevated Powell to a high-level advisory
position, and Powell would have been effecting a lot of the
orders that Weinberger was giving him -- about moving arms here,
and drugs there.
And in fact... Weinberger's name has come up in connection with a
Costa Rican legislative investigation, a two-volume report down
there that identifies Weinberger, as well as Ollie North, our
former Ambassador to Costa Rica, and various others as being
personas non grata for helping facilitate a massive drug and arms
operation which helped corrupt that country's society. If those
people set foot down there again, they're getting arrested.
So suddenly it starts to make a lot of sense. And when you think
in terms of Swiss bank accounts and massive amounts of money --
kickbacks -- it explains a lot of stuff that's going on right
now.
What we're looking at here is massive, endemic, high-level
corruption of the federal government. Bipartisan. Democrats and
Republicans. It's been going on for years -- particularly since
the early 1980s. The dollars involved have grown exponentially...
I believe from arms and drugs trading. There is *huge* amounts of
money sloshing around here. And it has corrupted the government
in a fundamental way. The government cannot police itself. The
normal enforcement mechanisms have been compromised: the Justice
Department. The IRS. Customs. The intelligence community.
And what has happened is that there *are* a lot of good people in
our government who have watched this happen, have been powerless
to stop it -- their protests would go nowhere. There's been *no*
effective investigation by anybody of this stuff. And finally,
what had happened was, a small handful of guys -- they call
themselves the Fifth Column. Retired intelligence people. One is
a former CIA contractor. Another is a former National Security
Agency person. I know they're assisted by a variety of other
people of the intelligence community -- they were able to acquire
their own used Cray supercomputer from Clark Air Force Base. It's
apparently an air-cooled and generator-driven machine that can
actually be packed into the back of I think what *looks* like a
refrigerated semi-trailer truck with a satellite uplink. And
they've got this thing rollin' around the country so it doesn't
get nailed.
And so for the last 5 years, they have been downloading,
systematically, tapping into foreign bank databases and pulling
down reams and reams of account data.
[James Norman goes on to describe how this Fifth Column allegedly
raided the secret bank accounts of corrupt government officials,
transferring the money into U.S. government accounts.] For two
years they've been raiding these accounts. Now they're into Phase
II.... Phase I: "Take the marbles." Phase II: "Get them out of
government."
Now, how do you do that? How do you get these people *out* of
government in the most time-efficient and cost-efficient manner?
... Apparently they've been hand-delivering brown manila
envelopes to people in Congress with actual copies of the
transaction records of these Swiss and other off-shore accounts.
The people get about a day to read these things, and then they
get a call from one of *these* guys who I have referred to as the
"Angel of Death". And then the elected official gets a choice:
... You can either announce your retirement immediately, or you
can face immediate prosecution for tax evasion and various other
crimes -- the minimum penalty for which, if you are convicted, is
10 years in prison.
Now when a congressman goes to prison, you lose your federal
pension benefits. And the pensions on these people are
significant. (For instance, Pat Schroeder, congresswoman from
Colorado: relatively young, she's been there a long time... She's
got, over her expected lifetime, more than 4 million bucks coming
to her.) Now I think the implication here is that if you just
shut up, go away, get out of the line of fire -- *maybe* you'll
get lucky and get to keep your pension down the road. There's no
guarantee that you won't be prosecuted.
But what's happened so far: all of these people have taken the
retirement option.
And what you have seen: an unprecedented, record number of
retirements of *powerful* people from Congress. These are not
"back benchers"! Since the end of the last election, until now,
more than 50 Senators and Congressmen have announced their
retirement. In fact, there were two more in just the last couple
of days: a 30-year Republican from Indiana, and a two-term
Democrat from Arkansas.
The excuses they give? *Utterly* *bogus*, frankly. "Oh, we can't
stand the nasty politics." "Oh, I want to spend more time with my
family." "Oh, it's just time to go." It strains credulity. It
just does not make sense -- until you realize there's something
*else* going on here.
[...to be continued...]
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address, send a message in the form "subscribe cn-l My Name" to
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Want to know more about Whitewater, Oklahoma City bombing, etc?
(1) telnet prairienet.org (2) logon as "visitor" (3) go citcom
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See also: http://www.europa.com/~johnlf/cn.html
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Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt.
Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et
pauperem. -- Liber Proverbiorum XXXI: 8-9
Date: Wed Jan 17, 1996 11:58 am CST
From: snet l
EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
MBX: snet-l@world.std.com
TO: * David Beiter / MCI ID: 635-1762
Subject: Hackers Whack 45 Politicians
Early Retirement [of Politicians]
By James R. Norman
Ain't it amazing!
One after another in recent months, big-name U.S. senators
and representatives have announced they are "retiring." Since the
last election, a record 45 members of congress have decided not to
run for relection -- or have outright resigned from office. Not in a
hundred years has there been such an exodus. And it is not over:
dozens of other lawmakers and powerful government leaders are
privately hinting they may be leaving office soon.
Nor are these departees the obscure back-benchers. They
are among the most powerful people in the most powerful
government that has ever existed on earth, with egos to match. Take
a look at the list. Look at all the committee chairmen, or ranking
minority members -- who would be committee chairmen if the
Democrats regained control. Look at the powerful committees or
subcommittees they are on: appropriations, rules, armed services,
agriculture.... Look at the startling last-minute withdrawal of retired
Gen. Colin Powell as a potential candidate for president -- a job for
which many pundits had him pegged as a shoo-in.
Common sense and history teach that people with this kind
of power, pay and perks don't give it up easily or without good
reason. But what are the lame excuses we get?
Senators Sam Nunn and Alan Simpson claim they just don't
have that ol' "fire in the belly" any more. A tearful Rep. Jack Fields
of Texas, Republican chairman of the House Telecommunications
and Finance committee, held a press conference to say he wants to
spend more time with his kids. Veteran Democrat Rep. Patricia
Schroeder says she wants to give up her $133,600 a year job to be
a writer. GOP Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, chairman of the Senate
Labor Committee and the daughter of GOP legend Alf Landon,
wants to go back to her little farmhouse on the prairie.
A common complaint the new retirees bemoan is the high
cost of running for political office in this country. Without a doubt,
campaign spending levels have been going off the charts: in 1992 the
average House incumbent spent almost $1 million on campaign
expenses. Senate incumbents averaged almost $2 million with some
contenders, like tk Huffington squandering almost $20 million in his
losing bid in California. Simpson whines that he has to raise
$10,000 a day for re-election. "Retiring" Sen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ)
outspent his last rival by 10:1 with a $10 million budget and still only
narrowly won re-election.
But these are crocodile tears. The reality is that federal
incumbents CAN raise $10,000 a day easily, with just a few phone
calls and meetings -- far more than their challengers can hope to
garner. And the record shows that loose enforcement of campaign
spending rules and creative accounting have allowed incumbents to
run a myriad of personal expenses through their campaign accounts,
from cars and plush office space to posh vacations. Only a third of
what they raise actually goes for advertising. Then there are the fat
"honoraria" and expense-paid trips for speeches, which can be
turned into valuable PR as charitable gifts if they exceed $20,000 a
year. And as Newt Gingrich has vividly demonstrated, huge payola
from bogus book contracts is exempt from outside income limits.
We are supposed to believe these retirees are getting off this
gravy train VOLUNTARILY? Riiiiiiight. Schroeder already had her
re-election bumper stickers printed. So had rakish Charlie Wilson
(D-Tex.), who had already begun booking air time and newspaper
ad space for his re-election campaign when he suddenly announced
retirement to become a "consultant." Rep. Ron Coleman (D-Tex.),
the up-and-coming young ranking minority member of the powerful
House Appropriations subcommittee on telecommunications,
stunned his supporters by announcing his retirement at what was
supposed to be his re-election kickoff party. His excuse: To spend
more time with his family. No definite plans. Uh huh.
At best, these excuses are disingenuous half-truths. They
utterly strain credulity. And given the sheer number of these
"retirements," you don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize there
is a pattern here. Something else is afoot. Nevertheless, the lazy,
gullible, lap-dog mainstream media swallow this swill and regurgitate
it, imbuing these transparent falsehoods with legitimacy. In recent
weeks "60 Minutes," Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and
The New York Times -- the big-deal media outlets that set the news
agenda for the rest of the nation's wire services, newspapers and
broadcast outlets -- have noted the unusual level of retirements, but
then have explained it away as just a symptom of the nasty tone of
public discourse these days. Especially now that those mean Newt
Gingrich Republicans control Congress, it's no fun any more, the
fawning press seems to say. Awwwwww!
But if that was the case, why would so many powerful
Republicans be leaving as well. Such as Mark O. Hatfield, chairman
of the Senate Appropriations Committee, or Veterans Affairs
Committee chairman Sen. Simpson, or Rep. Robert Walker, a close
confidante and ally of Gingrich who was almost elected House
Majority Leader. All hold safe seats, and though Hatfield is 73, he's
still young by traditional Senate retirement standards. For that
matter, why did veteran Oregon Republican Sen. Bob Packwood,
chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, up and quit
after agreeing to turn over his diaries? Was it really just for kissing
female staffers in the elevators?
Get real! There is a political hurricane brewing here and all
of official Washington and the media are in an advanced state of
denial. By the time Media Bypass published its early warning forcast
in December, "The Still Before the Storm," a gale was already
blowing. Before the magazine could be delivered, Colin Powell had
battened the hatches and withdrawn from the presidential race,
supposedly because of concerns about his wife's past mental
condition. Since then, the pace of "retirements" has increased from
a trickle to a steady stream.
What's going on? As we said in December, you could call it
a coup d'etat of a mortally corrupt government by a handful of
vigilante computer hackers, formerly affiliated with various U.S.
intelligence agencies. After years and years of watching the top
echelons of leadership tainted with kickbacks on drug and arms
deals, insider trading and other payola -- with no agency and neither
major party having the guts to stop it -- this "Fifth Column" team has
effectively taken it upon themselves to clean house.
According to two reliable sources directly connected to this
Fifth Column group, corroborated by multiple, credible, independent
sources in or close to the CIA and other intelligence services, the
clean-up began about two years ago. Phase One: Take away their
marbles. Using the access codes and other data surreptitiously
downloaded through "trap doors" in foreign bank computer software
systems, the Fifth Column began wire-transfering money out of
hundreds of supposedly annonymous foreign bank accounts held by
U.S. government officials. The take so far is in excess of $3 billion.
The money has all been repatriated to the U.S. Treasury, where it is
said to sit in various regional Federal Reserve Banks escrowed for
use by the CIA if and only if that heavily corrupted agency gets rid of
its own rogue elements.
Among the prominent names nailed for millions of dollars
each, according to Fifth Column sources: Nancy Reagan, Henry
Kissinger, Oliver North, Caspar Weinberger, Elizabeth Dole,
George Bush and his sons, Maggie Thatcher.... And don't forget
Vincent W. Foster, Deputy White House Counsel to President Bill
Clinton, who supposedly committed suicide shortly after his Swiss
account was raided in July 1993 for $2.73 million paid into it by the
State of Isreal for high-level codes and other secrets Foster was
suspected of selling (See Media Bypass, August 1995:
"Fostergate").
Now Phase Two of the program has begun: removing the
bad guys from office. Beginning last fall, according to two Fifth
Column sources, somebody started hand-delivering to each of these
retiring "public servants" their own plain manilla envelope. Inside:
detailed transaction records of the culprit's Swiss, Cayman or other
offshore bank accounts. Then about a day after receiving the
envelope, they get a phone call from someone we'll just identify as
the Avenging Angel. The options offered are simple. Plan A:
Promptly announce your retirement. Plan B: face immediate,
widespread distribution of the information to news media,
enforcement agencies or directly to the doorsteps of your
constituents.
Oh, by the way, the minimum federal sentencing guideline on
willful income tax evasion is 10 years in prison. Add to that possible
jail time for bribery, money laundering and violation of federal
financial disclosure rules. Any member of Congress sentenced to
prison is subject to loss of his government pension, which acrues at
the at the very rapid pace of 2.5% of yearly pay for each year
served and vests in in just 5 years. For relatively young long-timers
like Pat Schroeder that could be worth upwards of $4 million;almost
$3.5 million for Rep. Gerry Studds (D-Mass.)
Go ahead. Take your time. Think about it. You have 24
hours to decide.
To a person, so far, these esteemed lawmakers have opted
for Plan A. And from the Fifth Column perspective, a "retirement"
announcement is about as good as an actual resignation. It
immediately marks the culprit as a lame duck, not worth bribing any
more and wielding much less power. And it does not preclude later
prosecution or the eventual release of information. No promises are
made. No deals.
Outrageous! Undemocratic! Extortion! You say. But the
better adjectives would be: dramatically successful, cost-effective
and entirely in the public good When grilled about why anyone
would go to all this effort and risk going to jail for breaking bank
secrecy rules, the Fifth Column reply is: "BOC." Betterment Of
Country.
Is it legal? Is it "authorized" by some government agency?
Well, no. But an army of honest civil servants long squelched from
persuing this high-level rot are tacitly cheering from the sidelines.
Attorney General Janet Reno is said to be fully aware of the effort,
perplexed by it, but is keeping hands off so long as this Fifth Column
team sticks to its commitment that there will be no deals cut and no
favorites played. Besides, can you imagine a jury convicting any of
these hackers of anything? They ought to get medals!
What about Bill and Hillary Clinton? Let's just say they've
got their own problems to worry about and the dust speck called
Whitewater that the mainstream media is finally latching on to is
probably among the least of them.
Of course, from a journalistic perspective, what we'd like is
full and complete disclosure with hard documentary evidence against
these culprits. Above all, there has to be some assurance that All
the bad guys get nailed with equal justice and that nobody will be
able to "buy" their way out of a manilla envelope problem. But from
the Fifth Column viewpoint, which holds the news media in justifiably
low regard, it's the results that count. Not the PR.
Premature release of hard evidence would make it difficult
for the crooks to gracefully step aside under the guise of retirement.
If cornered in broad daylight, they would have to stand and fight.
That would be messy. Witness the Packwood fiasco. And costly:
the average federal white collar criminal prosecution nicks taxpayers
for more than $1 million. If vigorously contested, the costs can
quadruple quickly. So if the goal is to get bad people out of
positions of power quickly and cheaply, the best way is through
persuasion. And the more who are persuaded, the harder it
becomes for the holdouts to play tough. We're talking method, not
just madness.
There is, actually, a precedent for all this. It is called Bop
Trot, perhaps this country's biggest and most successful effort at
cleaning up public corruption. Focussed on state-level political
corruption in Kentucky, the sweep used an elite task force of
investigators drawn from various federal agencies, including the FBI,
IRS, DEA and, yes, calling on the talents of some of the Fifth
Column crowd. It began in the early 1990s and is still under way,
having branched out to other states, including Illinois. In Kentucky,
65 public officials have been indicted and every single one has been
convicted -- almost all of them by pleading guilty. Among those now
in prison: the husband of former Kentucky Gov. Martha Lane
Collins.
But before the Bop Trot indicting began, there were a raft of
resignations and retirements eerily similar to what we are now seeing
at the federal level. Another curious parallel: virtually no media
attention. Aside from some regional news coverage, almost nobody
has heard of Bop Trot. Partly that is because the local U.S.
Attorneys -- themselves often corrupt political appointees noted for
their grandstanding antics -- have been kept mostly in the dark with
the cases handled by special prosecutors. And aside from Media
Bypass, talk radio and the Internet, there has never been any
mention of the Fifth Column by any major national newspaper,
magazine or TV network. Which is fine by us! Let those sleeping
dogs lie.
You have to be deaf, dumb and blind, though, not to see the
other dramatic parallels looming all around us now, which further
validate what our sources have been uncannily predicting for months
and months. Consider:
MEXICO -- Somehow or other, the Drug Enforcement
Administration has found out about hundreds of millions of dollars in
accounts in Switzerland, Luxembourg and England belonging to the
family of Carlos Salinas de Gotari, the former president of Mexico,
and DEA has apparently tipped the Federales. Salinas' sister-in-law
was arrested recently when she tried to withdraw $84 million from a
Geneva bank, believed to be a branch of Citibank. Was the DEA,
not particularly known for its computer intelligence capabilities, itself
tipped by the Fifth Column?
All told, Citibank may have helped move half a billion dollars
of drug money and other graft for the Salinas clan. Could that have
happened without the awareness or even paid-for complicity of top
bank officers? What is a matter of public record is that Citibank
insiders have been dumping shares of Citi's high-flying stock like
mad in recent months, symptomatic of either an expected stock price
plunge or high level management departures. And in mid-December
Christopher Steffen, the chief financial officer of Citibank parent
Citicorp, abruptly left amid a curious smoke screen of lame excuses
by the bank's PR department. Next to go, according to a Fifth
Column source: Citibank Chairman and Chief Executive John Reed
himself, the top dog at America's biggest bank. Something about
gold bearer bonds in another Swiss bank.... Hmm.
CANADA -- Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney is
under investigation by the Mounties over what appear to be
kickbacks of C$50 million (US$37 million) on the sale of $1.8
billion worth of Airbus aircraft to Air Canada. The money
apparently went into one or more Swiss accounts. Mulroney, who
has tried to stymie the investigation by suing the Canadian
government for libel for even asking provocative questions, may also
be under investigation for much bigger payoffs from Columbia's Cali
drug cartel, which had its computer data bases raided recently,
according to a Fifth Column source.
PANAMA -- It now appears likely that former Panama
dictator Manuel Noriega, now in a federal prison in Florida, will win
a new trial on his conviction for drug trafficking. The reason:
Somebody with apparent access to those Cali cartel computer
records discovered that the Cali's paid $1.5 million to the star U.S.
prosecution witness against Noriega, whose supporters have long
claimed Noriega was "set up" for prosecution by the Bush
adminsitration to silence and discredit his claims of CIA and U.S.
involvement in the Central American drug trade. Makes you wonder
what other palms the Calis have been greasing all these years to
protect their cocaine trade into the U.S. Gee, maybe we'll all know
soon.
SOUTH KOREA -- Both of the country's two past
presidents are now in prison, accused of corruption. Chun Doo
Hwan is charged with staging the 1979 coup that put him in power.
He's also being questioned about a $133 million slush fund. His
hand-picked succesor, Roh Tae Woo, is charged with running a
$650 million slush fund of corporate "gifts." Translated to English,
that's "bribes and kickbacks." If the money came from U.S. arms
makers, like, say, Lockheed Martin, that's a crime for which
corporate honchos can go to jail. Once again, the key was finding
that money stashed in English and other bank accounts. Did the
Fifth Column strike again? Gosh, that's hard to prove. It seems
the Koreans just happened to get a plain manilla envelope with some
very interesting bank records.
JAPAN -- Similarly, rumors are swirling that Japanese
Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama will soon resign amid a financial
scandal brewing in that country. You don't think it's possible that
Japan's opposition party got a plain manilla envelope with foreign
banking records in it do you? Besides the corruption of Japanese
politicians, it will be entertaining to learn who in our government has
been on the take from the Japan, which has for many years
maintained a massive, well funded lobbying effort here.
Is it really plausible that both our neighboring countries, as
well as our major Asian trading partners, could be so rife with high
level corruption and yet the U.S. be somehow immune? Are our
controls against corruption that much better than these other
countries? Good enough to overcome the much greater incentive
toward corruption here? Unlikely. It is only by willfully ignoring
reality that we can pretend we are less suseptible to endemic
corrption that other nations. And just as it appears those nations
have needed help from the outside to root out their crooked
politicians, so it is that the only way the U.S. government, polluted
with drug and arms money, will be purged is by what amounts to
vigilante, extra-legal citizen action. That's why we'd like to make our
own modest proposal: Let's all become Fifth
Columnists.
The fundamental truth here is that no government can truly
police itself.
Whatever internal auditing mechanism that is set up can
ultimately be intimidated and emasculated by whomever controls the
purse strings (Congress) or does the hiring and firing (the chief
executive). And forget about the press. They're whimps. If
anybody's going to keep the bastards honest, it is US. You and me.
Here is how we can do it, by just applying the same back-
to-basics gumshoe tactics the IRS uses against us but is too gutless
to employ against Congress and the White House. Find out what
they own when they enter office, and what they have after they've
been there a while. Chances are they haven't bought that million-
dollar DC condo, the Martha's Vinyard summer place and the two
Volvos on just their federal paycheck.
First, write to the Federal Election Commission and ask for
the required semi-annual financial disclosures of your senator or
congresscritter. Then ask questions. Check real estate records,
motor vehicle registrations, divorce pleadings. Stay tuned and we'll
offer more ideas on becoming citizen sleuths. Then, if what you find
doesn't match the official disclosures, send your findings to your local
newspaper or TV station. Copy the FEC and the IRS.
If you don't see prompt action, SEND IT TO MEDIA
BYPASS, and be sure to include the name of whomever you sent it
to first.
As a certain Fifth Columnist is fond of saying: "If it is to be, it
is up to me."
Let's make that "We."
Date: Wed Jan 17, 1996 11:12 pm CST
From: bigred
EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
MBX: bigred@duracef.shout.net
TO: * David Beiter / MCI ID: 635-1762
Subject: Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 7 Num. 04
The following is brought to you thanks, in part, to the kind
assistance of CyberNews and the fine folks at Cornell University.
Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 7 Num. 04
======================================
("Quid coniuratio est?")
-----------------------------------------------------------------
RECAP OF AND UPDATE ON THE NORMAN THESIS
========================================
Thanks to an east coast source whom I will call "Mr. Mercedes", I
have received an audio tape of Jim Norman's recent appearance on
New York radio station WBAI, marked on the cassette as having
been January 10, 1996.
[...continued from CN 7.03...]
Here are further excerpts from the program:
CALLER #2:
...How is it exactly -- I remember when I heard this story first
and I was talking to somebody about it and they said, "Well how
can they possibly get into these bank accounts?"
DR. MICHIO KAKU [Host]:
O.K. Mr. Norman, how *do* you get into another person's bank
account?
JAMES NORMAN:
Let me begin by saying that bank computer systems are nowhere
near as secure as the banks would like you to believe... Granted,
there are many security features built into bank communications
and software systems. But in most large software systems there
are what you call "service entrances" or "back doors" by which
software maintenance people would get in routinely to fix "bugs"
and so forth. If you take that concept, and then consider the
idea that our intelligence agencies, which have an extremely
high-priority collection of financial information, would somehow
or other see to it that they have perhaps their own "back doors"
plugged into these various bank data systems...
*That's* how I got onto the story, actually, was the
proliferation of a customized version of what was called the
PROMIS software. This was, it was designed for tracking legal
cases, originally, [then] customized for use in tracking wire
transfers, sold and promulgated around most of the world's
banking system, had "back doors" in it that would allow -- if you
knew where the "back door" was, it would allow you to basically
dial into a computer system and not leave an audit trail: go in,
snoop around, pull down information, and then leave.
DR. MICHIO KAKU:
I think the key thing, at least from my point of view, is that
we're not dealing with high school "hackers" who, by trial and
error, and guile, try to get into somebody's bank account. We're
talking about former intelligence agents.
JAMES NORMAN:
Right. But let me point this out: a couple of months ago,
Citibank, there were published stories about how a "hacker" in
Russia, armed with no more than a personal computer, apparently
had got into Citibank accounts and was doing, essentially,
exactly the same thing. He was wire-transferring money out of
corporate accounts... to banks in Argentina and Finland -- always
in small amounts so that it would not set off the internal alarm
system... What I am told is that somehow or other, this guy got
hold of the "back door" address at Citibank and was able to use
it.
CALLER #3:
Mr. Norman, outside of WBAI, has word of this gone out?
JAMES NORMAN:
Actually, *this* *story* has become a classic case study in
"guerrilla journalism". Because I think it's too hot for any
mainstream media to deal with. I mean, it's just loaded with too
many problems: first of all, it deals with a lot of background,
"deep throat" kind of sources; the attribution, the documents are
kind of non-existent at this point -- although I think they'll
eventually come out. And you're dealing with a lot of big names
and nobody really wants to rock the boat in a big-deal
publication.
Media Bypass, this little magazine in Indiana, *they* came to me
and asked me if they could run the story, because they had heard
that Forbes [magazine] wouldn't run it; that the Wall Street
Journal and New York Times and everybody else I'd talked to about
it was scared of it. *They* [Media Bypass] managed to corroborate
a key element of it themselves. One of their investigative
reporters knew a guy who used to train IRS agents, who was
talking with one of his former students who was assigned to
surveil Vince Foster at the time he died. And the guy actually
read him some of the surveillance report, off the computer
screen, over the telephone.
And it's not that big of a secret, apparently, within the
intelligence community. There was a *massive* counter-
intelligence effort going on regarding Foster. It apparently
began just after the '92 election, but before the inauguration in
January '93. And for about the 6 months until he died, Foster was
under pretty intense surveillance.
There's a French intelligence newsletter which has also
corroborated the fact that Foster was under counter-intelligence
surveillance at the time he died. There's, Sarah McClendon has
written about it. (She's an old "war horse" Washington
correspondent.)
But the story is just *too*... It's like the media cannot deal
with this. And ultimately I think the media will be on trial as
much as the government for not dealing with this story. Instead,
we've got Media Bypass, we've got talk radio... And the Internet
has actually become a rather successful outlet for this stuff.
And in fact, it's amazing: it has brought a whole bunch of other
people out of the woodwork, talking about this, including a lot
of very literate computer people, financial people.
And I know, particularly, a former Wharton finance professor,
Orlin Grabbe, who has posted a series of his own rather revealing
exposes' on this stuff. [CN -- Archived at ftp.shout.net
pub/users/bigred/og] He, after leaving Wharton, started his own
software company, making software for pricing derivatives. And
the intelligence community came to *him*! And said, "Hey. Can we
use your company to help spy on brokerage houses and banks too?
We want some way to insinuate our people into these computer
rooms." That's what sent *him* up the wall. He said, "Holy
smokes, we're dealin' with the Surveillance State here." And I
think he became a renegade ever since.
Particularly, I think he's also angry about the government's
tirade here on money laundering: it's used, basically, as a tax
raising measure. I mean, they want to go after every little guy
for any kind of cash transaction. But we have, you know, what is
so outrageous about this is, you have a two-tier system: you have
rampant money laundering, drug dealing and kickbacks for the
privileged elite; and you have the government's boot on the neck
of everybody else.
So there's significant grass-roots rage brewing over all this
stuff, and it's gonna find an outlet somehow or other -- even if
it's just WBAI, you and me!
DR. MICHIO KAKU:
O.K. Well, let's hope it gets beyond WBAI.
CALLER #5:
It's obvious that Iran-Contra never stopped. But my question is,
driving along the interstate I noticed that "Next Six Exits, the
NSA." *Who* are the people at the top of the NSA? Who runs the
NSA? Who are they, where do they come from, and how far-reaching
is their power?
JAMES NORMAN:
That's a good question. You call up Washington and they say,
"NSA? 'No Such Agency.'" That's their nickname.
It's a *huge* bureaucracy. It's based at Fort Meade, Maryland.
Their budget is bigger than the CIA and the FBI combined. Their
job was originally signal surveillance.
CALLER #5:
Do we know who the people are, though?
JAMES NORMAN:
When you look it up... I tried to find out, actually, "Who runs
the NSA?" They have a list in this two-inch-thick book on federal
offices I've got. *They* merit about a two-inch thing that only
has about six names associated with it. And I forget the top
guy's name there. I think he's an Admiral who's on assignment to
the NSA.
[...to be continued...]
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