|
|
Post by elantric on Oct 27, 2020 14:49:18 GMT -6
www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1990/10/01/obsessed-by-a-theory-of-conspiracy/74afc5ed-43db-4068-a428-88d450391ecc/
OBSESSED BY A THEORY OF CONSPIRACY
By Sandra Sugawara
October 1, 1990
Sometimes in the still of the night, in the quiet of his living room or in the isolation of his car, Bill Hamilton will remember a forgotten conversation with a Justice Department official or a long ago phone call from a competitor or a colleague. And his mind will take that information, mull it over, turning it this way and that, as he tries to fit it into the puzzle that has become his life's obsession.
The puzzle: Why did a seemingly simple contract dispute over a software product evolve into a blood feud with the Justice Department, plunging his District computer software company, Inslaw Inc., into bankruptcy court for almost four years? And was somebody powerful trying to destroy his company?
"He's consumed by that one thought constantly," said his 19-year-old daughter Molly. "I'll see him in the living room and I can tell by the expression on his face that he's thinking about it. ... He's always working on it.".
The 49-year-old former National Security Agency analyst has spent much of his waking hours over the past several years trying to prove a conspiracy theory about his company's plight. Hamilton is convinced that Inslaw's primary product, a software system that enables the Justice Department to keep track of large numbers of legal cases, was the target of politically powerful people who sought to take it away from Inslaw and sell it themselves to the government.
Among his list of suspects are D. Lowell Jensen, a former top ranking Justice Department official, and Earl Brian, a member of Ronald Reagan's cabinet when he was governor of California and a friend of former attorney general Edwin Meese. All those on his list have denied any wrongdoing, in court documents and in interviews.
"To the best of my knowledge, I never met him and I have no knowledge of his operations," said Brian, who is chairman of United Press International and Infotechnology Inc. of New York. Brian said he believes that Hamilton is trying to recover money he has lost over the years "and any story he can come up with that is the least bitplausible hopefully will get him his day in court, from his perspective."
In the course of his battle, Hamilton has alienated some people, who claim that he is hostile to those who do not buy his theory. While acknowledging that Hamilton has a phenomenal memory for facts, they argue that he takes those facts and alters them to fit into his own agenda.
However, Hamilton also has marshaled an impressive list of supporters, including former attorney general Elliott Richardson and Charles R. Work, former president of the D.C. Bar, a lawyer's group. He also has gotten a number of sympathetic stories and editorials from a wide range of reporters and columnists who he regularly bombards with documents, memorandum and press releases.
Confounding opponents, skeptics and some considerable odds, Hamilton has won two crucial courtroom victories.
George F. Bason Jr., the bankruptcy judge who oversaw the Inslaw case, issued in 1987 a scathing condemnation of the Justice Department's behavior, declaring that the agency used "trickery, fraud and deceit" to steal Inslaw's computer software. Senior U.S. District Judge William B. Bryant of Washington backed up Bason's decision, awarding Hamilton $6.1 million in compensatory damages.
The Justice Department has appealed the case and will not discuss its details. A spokesman said that the department has requested that the matter be considered for mediation by the appeals court, in an attempt to settle the long-running dispute.
The decisions, however, did not establish the second half of Hamilton's theory, that Brian, Jensen and others were behind the alleged campaign against Inslaw. So last December Hamilton filed suit in U.S. District Court seeking to force Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and the Justice Department to conduct a "fair and thorough" investigation into his larger conspiracy charges. The latest suit will not bring him any money if he wins, just answers to his many questions.
A Justice Department spokesman said that the department already has looked into the accusations and found nothing. Hamilton argues that those investigations were inadequate. The Justice Department spokesman also noted that a Senate investigation failed to find evidence of a conspiracy against Inslaw within the Justice Department.
However, the Senate report also complained that the Justice Department was uncooperative in the investigation. Unhappy that the Senate probe was not more aggressive, Hamilton has convinced the House Judiciary Committee to launch one of its own. But the results of that investigation are expected to be several months away.
"A lot of people think Bill Hamilton is paranoid. I don't think so," said Leigh Ratiner, who represented Inslaw during the mid-1980s. "Bill Hamilton does not feel unreasonably persecuted. ... Given the facts, it's entirely reasonable to feel the way he does."
Ratiner explained Hamilton this way: "Bill is besieged by the need to find justice and vindicate his life, his management capabilities and look good in the eyes of his family and employees."
But Hamilton said the root of his obsession is justice, not personal vindication. His company will not get a fair break from the government until his enemies are exposed, he said.
"The thing that's important to understand," said Hamilton, "is not only are we determined to get a fair and thorough and independent investigation of this matter, but we have no choice."
When Hamilton says this, he does not pound his fist or shout. His indictment proceeds as a matter-of-fact litany of names, dates, places and conversations, as he peers intently at the listener from behind his wire-rimmed glasses, as if to ask: "Do you get it?"
Or sometimes, after he presents a laundry list of wrongs he believes were committed against Inslaw, a sad but youthful grin will break out from behind his graying beard and he'll quietly shake his head in disbelief.
Software Called Promis Hamilton's pride and joy is a pioneering computer software called Promis (Prosecutors Management Information System), which was designed to help prosecutors and lawyers keep track of their cases.
Initially, Promis was developed with federal funds from the now-defunct Law Enforcement Assistant Administration (LEAA), when Inslaw was the nonprofit Institute for Law and Social Research. But in the late 1970s, when it became obvious that LEAA would be phased out, Hamilton decided to turn Inslaw into a for-profit company and sell the software improvements to the government.
Hamilton, a Notre Dame University graduate and St. Louis native, said he was just a naive Midwesterner back in those days, but even then, he appreciated the value of connections. He hired Roderick Hills, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, as one of his lawyers. A fortuitous choice, Hills introduced Hamilton to an attorney who would come to play a key role in Inslaw's fate: Elliot L. Richardson.
Richardson originally was brought in to serve on a board of directors, but as Inslaw became more and more entangled in its feud with the Justice Department, it was Richardson who would serve as troubleshooter. Richardson's frequent calls, sometimes from airports or late at night, often boosted Hamilton's morale. And it was Richardson who gave Inslaw's case legitimacy in Congress and elsewhere, according to many.
"The more I got into this case, the angrier I got," at what was happening to Inslaw, Richardson said. "It goes to the heart of the integrity of the Department of Justice itself." He added, "In any situation where there is this much evidence ... to just brush aside this evidence is destructive of public confidence."
In retrospect, Hamilton said there were warning signs almost as soon as Inslaw won the three-year, $10 million contract from the Justice Department in March 1982 to install Promis software in the offices of U.S. attorneys across the country. Almost immediately, attorneys for Inslaw and the Justice Department were fighting over which improvements the government had financed and thus owned, and which enhancements belonged to Inslaw.
Hamilton said the dispute became unusually contentious.
Back then, Hamilton thought his problems could be directly traced to the project manager overseeing the Promis contract, C. Madison Brewer III. From 1974 to 1976, Brewer worked for Inslaw. Hamilton said he fired Brewer; the government said he resigned. Brewer declined to comment on the Inslaw case.
Hamilton said he tried to avoid Brewer, letting other company officials negotiate with him, believing that might make things go more smoothly. But by February 1985, the Justice Department had withheld $1.2 million in payments to Inslaw, forcing the company to file a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition, staving off creditors while it attempted to regain control of its finances.
The entire family quickly became drawn into the survival fight.
"Bill and I are down here {at the office} from morning until late at night, and our kids are calling, saying that the sheriff was at the door looking to serve subpoenas to us," said a still angry Nancy Hamilton, Bill's wife, who joined the firm in late 1984 as vice president of administration. "It was very frightening for the kids."
After Richardson tried unsuccessfully for nearly a year to settle the dispute, the Hamiltons decided in 1986 to take the offensive, suing the Justice Department to recover the money they said they had lost.
Competing Program
Hamilton was forever digging through his old appointment books, memos and scribbled notes. One night, he said, he was jolted awake by the recollection of a forgotten conversation: A Justice Department official had confidentially told one of his attorneys that Brewer was not his only problem. At the time, Hamilton had assumed this was a reference to D. Lowell Jensen, a senior Justice Department official.
Before coming to the Justice Department, Jensen had been in the Alameda County, Calif., prosecutor's office, where he had supervised the development of a competing case-tracking software called Dalite. Jensen was disappointed when the Los Angeles district attorney's office and LEAA had opted for Promis, according to Hamilton. He now believes Jensen was part of the Justice Department group that allegedly wanted to get Inslaw.
Jensen, who is now a federal judge in San Francisco, declined to comment, through an assistant.
Seeing Shadows Everywhere
Before long, the Hamiltons acknowledge, they were seeing shadows everywhere.
"By this time, we were really distrusting," said Nancy Hamilton. The Hamiltons even became suspicious of the motives of the law firm they had hired, Dickstein Shapiro & Morin.
Hamilton began hearing from Ratiner, who was the Dickstein Shapiro attorney handling the case, that others in the firm felt Inslaw should stick to the narrow facts of the contract dispute and not go after Jensen.
The Hamiltons concluded that the Justice Department was pressuring the law firm to drop Jensen from the suit and that Dickstein Shapiro was selling out Inslaw to protect its ties with its more politically important clients. The law firm categorically denied Hamilton's assertions during a later court battle with Inslaw over legal fees and a Baltimore bankruptcy judge later ruled in favor of Dickstein Shapiro, clearing it of all malpractice accusations.
But it was these fears that caused the Hamiltons to take a most unusual step. They decided to file the suit themselves, before Dickstein Shapiro could make any changes in the legal papers.
On June 7, 1986, the Hamiltons told Ratiner of their plans. He urged them to wait. "Normally it's easy for a lawyer to intimidate a client," Ratiner said. "But not Bill."
Joined by their six children, ages 3 to 22, the Hamiltons piled into their 1963 Volkswagen and their Oldsmobile station wagon and headed down to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. To photograph the event, they brought along a girlfriend of their oldest daughter Patty.
"It was a big day in our lives because for the first time, we understood what was happening to us and we had an opportunity to protest, it was quite a milestone," said Nancy Hamilton. "It makes me emotional to talk about it even now."
In October, Ratiner called to say he was being fired from Dickstein Shapiro. The Hamiltons said they were convinced it was because of the Inslaw case. Ratiner, who now teaches international negotiations at American University and has a small company specializing in data entry services, declined to comment on the question.
Work, a longtime friend of Hamilton's, was able to work out a temporary truce but Dickstein Shapiro and Hamilton parted for good when the firm concluded that Hamilton had overstated the improvements to the software produced by Inslaw. "
Thus in 1987, Inslaw was preparing to go to trial against the government without a lawyer and in the middle of a bankruptcy reorganization.
A determined Hamilton convinced two lawyer friends in California to fly to Washington and help out with the deposition. For a week, the two lawyers slept in one of the children's rooms in the Hamilton's house and took depositions from morning until night.
When Hamilton's lawyer friends returned to California, he prevailed on Work to take his case.
Work and Hamilton had worked closely together in the early 1970s when Work was an assistant U.S. Attorney, supervising the installation of the LEAA-funded versions of the Promis software. Work also served as deputy administrator of LEAA under Richardson.
Favorable Ruling The ruling by bankruptcy judge Bason in September 1987 elated the Hamiltons.
Bason concluded that Brewer was biased against Inslaw and that the Justice Department's "failure to begin to investigate Inslaw's complaints was outrageous and indefensible. It constituted an institutional decision by the Department of Justice, consciously made at the highest level, simply to ignore serious questions of ethical impropriety ... "
Although the ruling was critical of Jensen, too, it did not spell out the conspiracy that Hamilton said he believes existed.
The celebration over the ruling had barely ended before Hamilton was back on the case, his suspicions inflamed anew. A journalist who knew about Hamilton's fight mentioned to him that the Justice Department had awarded a computer contract to a subsidiary of Hadron Inc., a Fairfax government contracting company.
The reporter explained that Brian owned a major share of Hadron. The reporter also reminded him that the Meeses' had invested in one of Brian's companies. Suddenly, the name Hadron rang a bell. He hung up the telephone, turned to his wife and said: " 'Hadron! I think that company called me to try to buy me in '83.' I went to my desk calender, one of the old ones, started going through those months until I found it: April 20, 1983, with the name Dominic Laiti and his telephone number."
Hamilton remembers the phone call this way: Laiti, then chairman of Hadron, told Hamilton he was interested in the Promis software and wanted to buy Inslaw to get it. Hamilton replied that the company wasn't for sale.
Hamilton quotes Laiti as replying: "We have political supporters at the highest level of the Reagan administration," and "We have ways of making you sell."
Laiti, who is now president of Globalink Language Service, said he never tried to buy Inslaw, nor does he remember ever talking to Hamilton.
Assistance From IBM Bason's ruling pulled Inslaw out of the ditch. On Dec. 31, 1988, the company emerged from bankruptcy with the assistance of International Business Machines Corp. The computer giant had long been interested in jointly marketing Promis software and loaned the company $2.5 million.
Almost a year later, the Hamiltons got more good news.
On Nov. 22, 1989, the Court of Appeals confirmed the bankruptcy court decision against the Justice Department.
The appeals court said "Inslaw performed its contract in a hostile environment that extended from the higher echelons of the Justice Department to the officials who had the day-to-day responsibility for supervising its work."
The court concluded that the government "acted willfully and fraudulently to obtain property that it was not entitled to under the contract."
Tracking Down Leads Inslaw is still at the 15th Street offices where it has been since 1974. The office is filled with sleek furniture, dressed-for-success employees and other trappings of a successful computer software company. It has developed new sales with state and local governments and law firms.
But Hamilton still spends a good part of each week trying to track down leads on the case. He rarely watches television and hates sports. Occasionally he rents videos. One of his favorite movies in recent times was "All the President's Men," about the Watergate conspiracy.
Hamilton also has become a repository of phone calls from people who feel wronged by the government. He said he listens to them all, no matter how far out, because he understands their frustrations and is more that willing to believe the abuses they describe.
Today, suspicion of the government runs in his marrow. Was he like this before? No, Hamilton said.
"It might be that nobody will know who the real Bill Hamilton is again," said Ratiner. "For instance, I can imagine that before this case, he might have been concerned about real people. But now, if you're not talking to him about Inslaw, you're kind of invisible."
Hamilton said he's sad about the times he could not be there for friends, for family and about the part of his life that has been robbed by this case.
"I'm angry," Hamilton finally said quietly, after first skirting around the issue of his feelings. "I have enough anger to last me for a generation."
|
|
|
|
Post by elantric on Oct 27, 2020 15:09:53 GMT -6
www.umsl.edu/~thomaskp/ocup.htm---- by Kenn Thomas
The following article appeared in issue 6.4 (Oct. 97) of Lumpen, Chicago's magazine for
the disenchanted proletariat. The current issue of Lumpen contains the second article in
this series, "PROMIS and Computer Paranoia."
Because circumstances have shrouded Danny Casolaro's death in mystery, the single
aspect of his research that led to it may never be known for certain. Hotel workers in
Martinsburg, West Virginia found the writer dead in August 1991 in what looked like a faked
suicide. The "head's up" warning flashed among students of the conspiracy culture when the
learned files he had on him were missing and the details of his investigative work slowly
emerged from freinds, family and fellow investigators. Casolaro previously had previously
warned these same people not to believe any reports that he might have fallen victim to an
"accident." The fishy circumstances of his death and the probable motivations of his possible
killers remain obvious.
In its "Pig System Analysis" issue, Lumpen treated its readers with a chart outlining
some of the many aspects of Casolaro's investigation of the Inslaw/PROMIS case, a topic that
could fill several pages with similar charts. It has done that, in fact, in places like Time and
Village Voice, with many mainstream magazines attempting to make it look like a crazy
patchwork of nonsense while also back-pedaling on the investigative tributaries that Casolaro
opened up. To its credit, Lumpen followed and publicized the case very early on. In that spirit,
the following report summarizes its main outline and brings readers up to speed on some
current developments.
THE OCTOPUS
Danny Casolaro sought to document and expose sea of covert operatives, super-
surveillance software and transnational spies. He called the monster he saw swimming in that
sea "the Octopus." It consisted of a group of US intelligence veterans that had banded together
to manipulate world events for the sake of consolidating and extending its power. Of course
it involved the Kennedy assassination, but that was just one of many coups and assassinations
pulled off by the Octopus since the end of World War II. The group had come together over
a covert operation to invade Albania that was betrayed by famed British turncoat Kim Philby.
The Octopus had overthrown Jacob Arbenz in Quatemala in 1954. It had targeted operations
against Fidel Castro culminating in the Bay of Pigs. It also had tentacles in the political
upheavals in Angola, Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Nigeria, Chile, Iran and Iraq.
Casolaro had as his main concern Octopus involvement with putting Ronald Reagan in power
--the infamous October Surpise--and the role that played in introducing the PROMIS software
into police systems around the world.
Casolaro's catalogue of membership in the Octopus included such notorious spooks as
John Singlaub and the late CIA director William Colby. As heads of the Phoenix assassination
program in Vietnam they had implemented an early version of the PROMIS tracking software
to keep tabs on the Viet Cong. Other Octopus tentacles included characters like E. Howard
Hunt and Bernard Baker, who later emerged as Watergate burglars. Casolaro focussed on one
person in the periphery of the Octopus as it had developed in the early 1980s, a man named
Earl Brian, crony to Reagan's attorney general Ed Meese. Brian had been given PROMIS to
sell illegally as a reward for paying off Ayatollah Khomeini to hold on to American hostages
until the Carter presidential re-election campaign clearly was doomed. According to Casolaro,
Meese used the US Justice department to steal PROMIS from its developers, the Inslaw group,
which had its connections to the Phoenix program and also had developed the software at least
in part on public money. Two congressional committees eventually agreed, however, that
Inslaw was the legal private owner of PROMIS when the US Justice department shanghaied
it and Earl Brian profiteered by selling it to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Interpol, the
Mossad and other international police agencies as well as to the military. One application of
the modified PROMIS included the ability to track Soviet submarines in previously
untraceable marine trenches near Iceland.
If coded correctly, PROMIS could interface with other databases without
reprogramming, giving it great ability to ostensibly track criminals--but also, potentially,
political dissidents--through the computer systems of various police agencies. Casolaro's main
informant, Michael Riconosciuto added to this the claim that he had personally reprogrammed
PROMIS with a backdoor, so it could spy on the methods of the police agencies that were
using it for tracking. This gave it added appeal as a covert tool. The US could spy on the very
agencies it was selling the software to illegally.
BRIAN GOES DOWN
Earl Brian's role in the PROMIS theft was spelled out explicitly by Inslaw lawyer Elliot
Richardson, another Watergate figure in the New York Times in 1992.. Richardson was the
attorney general who actually stood up to Richard Nixon's corruption during the Saturday
Night massacre. Brian sued over the New York Times article and lost. Richardson had written
the article to encourage investigation of the case, but Brian used the opportunity to start a
nusiance libel suit. On November 29, 1995, the New York Court of Appeals dismissed Brian's
claim and declared that Richardson's assertions came under free speech protections.
Although never prosecuted over the PROMIS allegations, Brian survived only one more
year after the libel suit before other past shady deals began to catch up with him. In October
1996 a California jury convicted him of Federal bank fraud, conspiracy and lying to auditors.
Prosecutors charged that Brian had drafted false documents to conceal the losses of the
Financial New Network and United Press International, for whom he served as chief
executive, in order to obtain $70 million in bank loans for his other concern, a biotechnology
firm Infotechnology.
MARKET AND MIND CONTROL
Interestingly, the pattern of financial impropriety in the case was identical to one that
happened on assassination day, November 22, 1963. Someone named Tony DeAngelis
misrepresented his holdings of thosuands of tons of salad oil with faked American Express
warehouse receipts in order to get bank loans. Exposure of the fraud was the top news story
in the New Tork Times editions that came out before the assassination on that date. Many
people profiteered from the short-selling spree on the markets consequent to that and news
of JFK's murder, including American Express magnate Warren Buffet and a transnational
entity called Bunge Corporation, known in the financial literature of the time as The Octopus.
In a classic work on the JFK assassination, Were We Controlled, psuedonymous author Lincoln
Lawrence argues that DeAngeles, Ruby and Oswald were all mind-controlled in their actions
on that day. (Adventures Unlimited Press is reprinting this book with annotations,
bibliography, photographs and index by Kenn Thomas. Write to POB 74, Kempton, IL
60946.) Add to that the fact that Earl Brian at one time was a brain surgeon, and the other
Watergate-Inslaw connection, E. Howard Hunt, who had a phone relationship with Casolaro,
has also been connected to mind control operations, and the story takes some extremely
interesting speculative turns.
AREA 51 REVISITED
Michael Riconosciuto claimed that he had made his modifications to PROMIS on the
tribal lands of the Cabazon Indians in Indio, California as part of a joint project the tribal
administrators had with a private security firm known as Wackenhut. Wackenhut provides
security services to the notorious secret airbase Area 51. After Danny Casolaro turned up dead
and his current research file missing, other notes found at his apartment later clearly indicated
his interest in this Nevada super-spook facility. The base, of course, had been around since
before it was used to develop the U2 spy plane in the late 1950s and early 1960s, later the
SR71 Blackbird and now the mysterious Aurora super-plane. As Casolaro made his notes about
it, however, it had not yet become the subject of popular lore that it is today. Nevertheless,
Casolaro devoted pages of notes to Area 51.
--more--
|
|
|
|
Post by elantric on Oct 27, 2020 15:11:15 GMT -6
-cont'd-
One theory had it that Casolaro's death had less to do with the Octopus than it did
with manufacturing fraud at Hughes Aircraft. Hughes Aircraft has a long history of exclusive
and secret deals with the US government for aerospace technologies, many almost certainly
involving Area 51. Casolaro had brushed up against this corruption in his pursuit of his
Octopus spook group. A contact he made the day before he died, Bill Turner, gave him
documentation of the fraud at Hughes. Turner noted that Casolaro added these papers to the
ever-present accordion file of current research. After they found Casolaro's body, Turner got
himself arrested on a bank robbery charge in order to remove himself from any further
involvement.
The joint venture between the Cabazon Indian tribe and Area 51's Wackenhut did
exist, at least between 1981 and 1983, and Michael Riconosciuto certainly was involved with
it at least in some capacity. A report from a task force of the sheriff's office of Riverside
County, California placed Riconosciuto at a weapons demonstration with Earl Brian ("of the
CIA") put on by the Cabazons and Wackenhut.
Riconosciuto also claimed that he had a tape documenting threats made against him by
another Justice Department official, but he had thrown it in a marsh near Puget Sound the
night he was arrested on trumped up methamphetamine charges. Casolaro spent many days
searching the Puget Sound bog to no avail, looking for the tape that ostensibly could verify
the claims of "Danger Man," Casolaro's nickname for Riconosciuto. The Puget Sound location
was significant because of its proximity to a famous early UFO event, the 1947 Maury Island
incident. That event--six flying saucers seen by harbor seamen that left behind slag debris--had
been witnessed, or hoaxed, by the business partner of Riconosciuto's father, a man named Fred
Lee Crisman. In the 1960s, Crisman was subpoenaed by New Orleans district attorney Jim
Garrison as part of his investigation of the Kennedy assassination. Some researchers claimed
that Crisman was one of the "railyard tramps" arrested near Dealy Plaza on November 22,
1963; others note that he possibly gave refuge on his Oregon ranch to a member of the
Minutemen, an early militia group investigated by the Warren Commission.
AUSSIE LINK
Little suggests that Casolaro knew of the Crisman connection, or of the significance
it might hold for what he already knew about Area 51 and the other secret airbase that held
his attention, Australia's Pine Gap. Pine Gap is the top secret American underground base
located near Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of the land down under, officially known
as the Joint Defense Space Research Facility. It was built in 1968 officially to share program
data with the Australians.
Renown intelligence defector Victor Marchetti, who served in the CIA director's office
from 1966 to 1969, now acknowledges that he co-authored the secret agreement between the
agency and the Australian Department of Defence on the establishment of the Pine Gap
station. Officially, it monitors spy satellites and intercepts and decodes broadcast
communications between foreign powers unfriendly to the US. One of Pine Gap's important
functions is to monitor geostationary satellites for wide ranging information on enemy
telemetry, radar emissions and telecommunications.
Opposition from the Australians to the base grew as its nature as an espionage facility
outside of Australian control became clear. In his 1987 book Crimes of Patriots, author
Jonathan Kwitny demonstrates that covert manipulation led to the early end in Australia of
the administration of Labor Party prime minister Gough Whitlam because of his opposition
to Pine Gap. Casolaro noted with aggravation Kwitny's inability to see the tentacles of the
Octopus in the affair. "It didn't take many people to design the apparatus that would insure
the renewal of the lease for the Pine Gap installation near Alice Springs, Australia," Casolaro
wrote. "After all, how could a democracy spit up a Prime Minister that could sack the security
of the Western Alliance?"
Indeed, Whitlam was rousted after his public complaints about intelligence agency
deceptions over the tragic US policy in East Timor, and the CIA's funding of Australia's right-
wing Country Party, as well as his opposition to Pine Gap. Whitlam was not driven from
office by an election, but was removed on a technicality by a governor-general he had
appointed, one who had strong ties to the CIA. No doubt the paranoia about this
destabilization of the Australian government by the US fueled rumors about the underground
Pine Gap base involving alien/government collaborations, rumors that Danny Casolaro knew
about that were very similar to what he was hearing about Area 51. Certainly the base's
potential for surveillance also triggered his interest as well. PROMIS had been used in tracking
Soviet submarines; might it also be used to track Soviet satellites? One report told of a
Moscow summit conference in 1972 during which an early Pine Gap satellite picked up
limousine radio-telephone conversations between Soviet missile designers, Andrei Gromyko
and Leonid Brezhnev that revealed a missile secretly being kept from SALT negotiations.
UFO DISINFO?
Back on the Area 51 front, Casolaro was hearing rumors that Michael Riconosciuto had
worked for Lear Aircraft in Reno, Nevada. This connected him to both Bill Lear, creator of
the Lear jet, and often claimed by UFO buffs as having done research on anti-gravity for the
government, as well as John Lear, a former CIA pilot who also hit the UFO circuit with tales
of saucers and aliens in cahoots with the US government. In 1989, a man named Bob Lazar
went public with his claims that he had back-engineered alien spacecraft at Area 51. Lear and
Lazar lectured widely on the UFO circuit in the late 1980s and early 1990s, along with other
UFO lecture celebrities like Bill English and William Cooper. Cooper's 1991 classic, Behold
A Pale Horse, shared the title of the first draft proposal of Casolaro's manuscript that
eventually became titled The Octopus.
After Casolaro's death, Michael Riconosciuto made claims that Casolaro had learned
nothing more than what one of two intelligence factions wanted him to know in order to
embarrass the other faction. One faction was called Aquarius and had a leadership sub-group
called MJ-12, the name, of course, of the supposed secret group founded by Harry Truman in
the wake of the Roswell flying saucer crash. Riconosciuto even told one writer that he had
witnessed the autopsy of an alien body--this long before the famous alien autopsy film began
to circulate. Some have suggested that the tales of extraterrestrials that surround areas like Area
51 and Pine Gap serve as disinformation to deflect attention away from serious issues such as
gun-running and black project weapons development. Casolaro's own view, and the extent of
his knowledge and interest in this tributary from the Octopus research, and whatever he
learned that might have brought the truth closer to the surface of the murky waters in which
he swam, may have died with him.
Steamshovel!
|
|
|
|
Post by Admin Horan on Oct 27, 2020 21:20:37 GMT -6
Wait til we get to the very first episode about the Clintons and the Podestas...
|
|
|
|
Post by marionumber1 on Nov 17, 2020 18:17:40 GMT -6
Danny Casolaro's suspicious death had a parallel a little over a decade later: the "suicide" of Florida state investigator Ray Lemme. Lemme was investigating allegations concerning Florida state house speaker Tom Feeney and a technology contractor that Feeney represented called Yang Enterprises (YEI). The allegations included rigged contracts, overbilling the state, YEI's involvement in Chinese espionage, election fraud, and even potentially human trafficking. A former YEI employee named Clint Curtis who had gone over to the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), one of YEI's state clients, blew the whistle to Lemme, an investigator in FDOT's Inspector General office. Higher-ups in the Florida government (all the way up to Jeb Bush, reportedly) shut down the investigation, but Lemme kept investigating. Weeks after telling Curtis he was about to break the case, he wound up dead in a Valdosta GA motel room. Like Casolaro, he supposedly cut himself in a motel room bathtub, and like Casolaro, his folder full of investigative files was found mysteriously empty. The allegations regarding YEI are similar to the ones regarding the PROMIS software. YEI was accused of inserting electronic backdoors into the software it built for agencies like FDOT and NASA, similar to how PROMIS was used for espionage. (Potentially disturbingly, one of YEI's contracts was the later-abandoned HomeSafenet foster care case management system for Florida's Department of Children and Families. One can only imagine what a backdoor to that might be used for...) In addition to YEI, Feeney also represented Wackenhut, the security contractor and CIA front that was implicated in putting a CIA backdoor into the PROMIS software. And the evident China connection to YEI is interesting because Chinese intelligence also lurks in the background of the PROMIS scandal. It has been widely reported that PROMIS was used for espionage on the global banking infrastructure through the complicity of Systematics Inc., a distributor of back-office banking software owned by Little Rock billionaire and Clinton benefactor Jackson Stephens, who was a business partner with the Riady family of Chinese intelligence fame. |
|
|
|
Post by Admin Horan on Nov 18, 2020 10:07:48 GMT -6
Speaking of "rigged [government] contracts," I think this is the FDR tape where he talks about planting fake news stories about Wilkie and about how when he was a partner at Emmet, Marvin & Roosevelt, he got the job of the vice-president in charge of the New York office of the Fidelity and Deposit Company of Maryland. So, what? Well, you can't even BID on a government contract of any kind until AFTER you are approved for a surety [completion] bond. And you can only purchase such a bond from a SHORT list of banks. Very short. And FDCM was one of the most important. Long story Short: if FDR didn't sign off on your company, you didn't get a surety bond to bid on government contracts. And I think on this tape he explains he got that job BECAUSE of his success in planting fake news stories about Harding.
|
|
