The FBI Page

A unit of America's secret political police has a new Chief Terrorist. Robert Swan Mueller 3rd is the perfect choice to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation. When you realize what THEY and HE have been into, calling him the new head of a sinister entity will be an acceptable description.

[1] In the late 1920s and 30s, the FBI was in the forefront of subverting Freedom of the Press when it came to the new medium RADIO. The Bureau, under dictator J. Edgar Hoover, saw to it that no one critical of the government or harboring dissident views ever was allowed to have a broadcast license. [This fact somehow does not find its way into books and articles critical of FBI yet is known as an established fact by old-timers in the broadcast field. Chicago's WCFL, call letters for Chicago Federation of Labor, always was a joke. It was never allowed to be pro-labor or to speak out forcefully in favor of unions and the working person.]

[2] To attempt to beat down the formation of labor unions as an opposition to corporate greed, the FBI used provocateurs to bomb certain offices and warehouses and such, using the monopoly press to falsely blame it on labor violence and union organizers. The FBI had as their adjunct the "Red Squads", falsely labeling all dissidents as "Reds". [See, for example, "Protectors of Privilege Red Squads and Police Repression in America", by Frank Donner, University of California Press, 1990.]

[3] Through movie-making fakers, the FBI was given the false image of grabbing bank robbers. Such as in the 1930s. Years later, a retired key agent of the Bureau, with nineteen years of direct experience and knowledge, dared relate to me the Bureau's sordid past. That FBI boss Hoover, in important instances, took bribes from certain bank robbers given a pass. The FBI Chief connived with big-time criminals who owned race tracks and were whiskey manufacturers. To feed his ego, they allowed him to corruptly win at horse racing, his favorite pastime. One booze baron, Rosenstiel, actually set up a crooked foundation named for J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI denied there was a mafia in America. Simple reason the criminal cartel used blackmail against Hoover; they had undercover pictures of Hoover's homosexual activities. [Plenty of details in "Official and Confidential The Secret Life of J.Edgar Hoover" by Anthony Summers, Putnam, N.Y., 1993.]

[4] The offices of the Bureau in the southern states were well aware of the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings of blacks, and bombings of Jewish businesses, and outrages against some Catholics. An FBI undercover operative, Gary Rowe, was given immunity and not punished for murdering a civil rights activist, Viola Liuzzo, in the turmoil in Alabama. The FBI, in fact, gave Rowe a reward. [See, for example, "J.Edgar Hoover The Man and The Secrets", Curt Gentry, W.W. Norton, 1991.]

The Bureau, through their COINTEL Program sought to snuff out the Anti-Viet Nam War Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. The FBI played a key role in "Operation Garden Plot", that is, to put peaceniks in the cemetery, by various bloody dirty tricks; plainly, murder. ["The 1960s and COINTELPRO In Defense of Paranoia", NameBase Newsline, No. 10, July-September, 1995.]

[5] The Bureau played a key role in covering up airplane sabotage. Such as in the Watergate Plane crash in Chicago, one month after Nixon was re-elected President, in 1972. Twelve Watergate figures died in the crash, such as Dorothy Hunt, wife of the Watergate burglar, E. Howard Hunt. Together they had blackmailed two million dollars out of the Nixon White House. They had documents of Nixon's role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The details of the aircrash, supported by 1300 pages suppressed government documents, were in a book written by me and stopped in the press cycle by the Rockefellers, major owners at the time of United Air Lines. [Alas! there are no copies of my book from 1973 available, "The Secret History of Airplane Sabotage". I hope to update it someday and post it, at least in part, on my website.]

[6] Books by assassination researchers document the dirty, bloody role of the FBI in covering up the high-level plot to assassinate President Kennedy. [See, for example, a huge heavily-documented book, "Act of Treason", by Mark North, Carroll & Graf, N.Y., 1991. detailing the role of J. Edgar Hoover.] A former FBI official, later Mayor of Memphis, Tennessee, covered up the role of the FBI in the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [See, "Orders to Kill", by William F. Pepper, Carroll & Graf, N.Y., 1995.]

===Mueller was a key official in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush. Mueller supervised the supposed investigation of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland, December, 1988, about six weeks after the Elder Bush was elected President.

A group of eight or as many as fifty CIA covert operatives were onboard Flight 103. Disgruntled, they were returning from a failed mission to attempt to rescue some American hostages in the Middle East. They blamed the failure on the treasonous acts of the Elder Bush as Vice President. As we showed in exclusive stories, in the 1980s, Bush was the secret PRIVATE business partner of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. Together, they like mafioso, shook down for billions of dollars of "protection" money, the weak, oil-soaked sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf. The secret partnership details were part of the bank records sought to be suppressed by way of an unpublicized federal court suit in Chicago. I was the only reporter attending the hearing. Only one sizeable publication in America dared run my exclusive details, based on interviewing the court participants in the back of the courtroom. A populist newspaper, Spotlight, ran the detailed story on August 19, 1991.

Contrary to CIA regulations, forbidding their people to fly as a group on one airplane, this group of covert units stayed together for what they thought would be their mutual security. At least eight of them were scheduled to finger the Elder Bush for treason in the hostage rescue intentional screw-ups, at secretly arranged hearings set before Congress for early in 1989. Such as, the Elder Bush was a sizeable owner of American LaFarge, the U.S. unit of a French firm, reportedly supplying the ingredients to Saddam Hussein for the making of poison gas to be used against the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War, 1980 to 1988, and also against Iraq's own Kurdish dissidents. A director of the firm was a little-known Little Rock attorney, Hillary Rodham Clinton. She and her husband, William Rockefeller Clinton, were already part of a scheme to be played out in 1992, to install Clinton as President while shadow-boxing against his CIA mentor, the Elder Bush.

Only one newspaper in North America ran a series after the crash, outlining some of the secret arrangements of the units of the American CIA that were snuffed out by the crash. That was in Canada, the Toronto Star. Prior thereto, by phone hook-up, I did radio shows in Toronto with a relative of the publisher who went on the air under a pen-name.

Some were puzzled how FBI agents showed up at the Lockerbie, Scotland crash site in some instances quicker than local authorities.

As stated in an award-winning film documentary about Pan Am flight 103 "Very strange people were at work very early on. Within a matter of three hours there were American accents heard in the town.Over that night there were large numbers, by which I mean 20, 25, 30 people arrived." As reported by British journalist David Ben-Aryeah, in the documentary by producer Allan Francovitch, "The Maltese Double Cross". Francovitch was later murdered as he was working on related documentaries.

As a member of a local rescue team recalled, "We arrived within two hours [of the crash]. We found Americans already there." As an author of a book pointed out "....as odd as the fact that Lockerbie is over 350 miles from London, which is the nearest point an American FBI agent might be. To reach Lockerbie that night from London, even if traveling by air, would have taken far more than one hour considering the sequence of events that would have had to occur. Assuming timely notification, an American agent in London would have had to have been tracked down considering the late hour, notified to pack up for an investigation, rush to Heathrow, board a waiting airplane, fly immediately to the nearest airport that could land a jet transport, obtain ground transportation from there to Lockerbie, then locate the command center. An effort that would require four to six hours at the minimum." "The Medusa File" by Craig Roberts, an investigator and former law-enforcement official.

>From the details, there evidently was PRIOR KNOWLEDGE by the American FBI and the Justice Department. And who was in charge of all this? Reportedly Justice Department, Criminal Division, honco, Robert S. Mueller 3rd. Mueller is quoted as saying in a public statement, "We have no evidence to implicate another country (other than Libya) in this disaster." [From "The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror", by David [M.] Hoffman, Feral House, Venice, California, original edition 1998, page 326 footnote.

By his doings reportedly in the U.S. and Scotland, Mueller falsely shifted the whole blame to Libya and a stop-over in Malta by some Libyans. [Hence the title of the late Francovitch's film documentary, "The Maltese Double Cross".] By so doing, Mueller shifted the focus away from the prior treasonous activities in the Middle-East of the Elder Bush, with the assistance of his sons, Jeb and George W.

The Elder Bush, as President, rewarded Mueller for his treachery on behalf of the Bush Family. Mueller "was named to head the criminal division in 1990, under President George Bush. Dick Thornburgh, then attorney general, says he relied on Mr. Mueller for some of the department's most DELICATE TASKS. Before the invasion of Panama in 1989, for instance, Mr. Bush called Thornburgh in and asked if the drug trafficking case against the Panamanian ruler, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, was solid. Mr. thornburgh says he relied on Mr. Mueller's assurances that the case would stand up; it did. Among the other investigations that Mr. Mueller supervised at the criminal division was the bombing of Pan Am 103, which had crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988." New York Times, July 6, 2001 in a story about Mueller by Neil A. Lewis.(Emphasis added.)

===Shortly after being inaugurated as President, the Elder Bush launched the invasion of Panama in 1989, to kidnap Panama strongman Noriega to shut him up about being lured into private dope trafficking deals with the Elder Bush and sons Jeb, George W., and Neil. Playing a key role in silencing Noriega was Justice Department Criminal Division honcho Robert S. Mueller 3rd. Mueller reportedly arranged to terrorize Florida Federal Judges to lay the groundwork for them absolutely following orders to censor any mention of the Bush Family being implicated in the dope trafficking into which Noriega says he was either inveigled or was entirely innocent of, with Noriega as an Elder Bush arranged CIA operative. Bush had helped Noriega's rise to power by Bush arranging to murder Noriega's predecessor. [The Elder Bush paved the way for Saddam Hussein to the top in Iraq in similar fashion, by arranging to assassinate Saddam's predecessor.]

One of the most outspoken critics of the Justice Department and the FBI on the Federal bench in America was Florida U.S. District Judge Alcee L. Hastings, one of only a very few black federal judges in the South. The FBI, as a reprisal, framed up Judge Hastings on bogus bribery charges. To scare other Florida federal judges that they have to march to the orders of the Bush Family, the Hastings matter was quickly referred to the House Judiciary Committee which voted articles of impeachment. In the impeachment trial in the Senate, contrary to the rules, only a handful of Senators attended or were interested in any way in Judge Hastings plea that he is innocent and was framed by the FBI. The monopoly press, to show him in a bad light, played up a picture of him bending down to get past a barricade blocking the entrance to the Senate as he was on the way to the Senate trial. [Hey, I thought the whole U.S. Senate, not just a couple of them, have to sit as judges in an impeachment trial.] Leave it up to the pressfakers to get a picture of someone they want to demonize, such as prominently showing a pimple on his face. On the other hand, the Rockefellers are always shown smiling and in a good image.

The voters of Florida, however, did not buy the FBI frame up done with the apparent connivance of Criminal Division honcho Mueller. Thereafter, defrocked Judge Hastings was elected and numerous times re-elected as a Democrat Congressman from Florida's 23rd Congressional District. [Another one of the few black federal judges in the South, one from New Orleans, was likewise pickled by the FBI and removed from the bench. An hispanic federal judge in California, after hearing evidence in his court of the treachery of the FBI, pronounced them as the American Gestapo. Within a few months thereafter, as a reprisal, they attempted to send him to jail on bogus federal criminal charges. In that instance, the Judge beat back the FBI/Justice Department frame-up orchestrated by Criminal Division honcho Robert S. Mueller 3rd.

BUT, evidently the federal judge hearing the criminal charges against kidnapped General Noriega got the message. The Judge blatantly and arbitarily ruled that no mention in the court will be allowed of how the Elder Bush and his sons inveigled Noriega, as a CIA operative, into business with them, through the infamous spy-money laundry, Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI. Noriega's lawyers were forbidden to defend him with his role with the Elder Bush and Bush sons, details tending to show Noriega was innocent of the criminal charges. Few in the monopoly press mentioned a fact pertinent to people of the Third World. Noriega as the head of Panama was the ONLY person of color to head up a country in the Western Hemisphere.

===Mueller, as a top honcho of the Criminal Division, was instrumental in suppressing and/or destroying evidence and scaring off and covering up about witnesses to protect the Bush Family from being exposed in their treasonous role laundering assassination funds and funds of sworn enemies of the U.S., through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. U.S. Senator John Kerry (D., Mass.) headed a subcommittee investigating dope and weapons smuggling and terrorist activities. In a heavily censored and watered down version of the facts, even the big-time newsfaker, the New York Times, in a story referring to Kerry and Robert S. Mueller 3rd, said "...John Kerry, who was already in his second term as a senator from Massachusetts when the two clashed in 1991 over whether the criminal division, which Mr. Mueller then led, had been aggressive enough in investigating the BANK OF CREDIT AND COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL, a rogue operation that had ties to drug gangs and gunrunning." New York Times, July 6, 2001, in a story by Neil A. Lewis. (Emphasis added.)

Please note. Senator Kerry is no sweet angel. He is an expert reputed blackmailer and cover up artist. He is married to the widow of the late U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, John Heinz, heir to the ketchup and canned beans fortune. Heinz died in a sabotaged plane crash in 1991, just as he was planning to expose U.S. government complicity in several domestic and foreign political assassinations.

As to the infamous BCCI, Sen Kerry himself had a conflict of interest in that he headed a group of U.S. Senators who accepted campaign funds from the worldwide spy-money laundry-murder machine BCCI. Kerry's subcommittee refused to delve into the highly pertinent Chicago branch office of BCCI and their Chicago twin, a branch of Italy's largest bank, owned in part by the Vatican, Banca Nazionale Del Lavoro, BNL. [Suppressed BNL records as to the secret private partnership of the Elder Bush and Saddam Hussein were the subject of my exclusive story, in Spotlight, August 19, 1991, referred to earlier.]

George W. Bush the tainted OCCUPANT and RESIDENT of the White House, chose Mueller to head the FBI. Mueller has repeatedly demonstrated to the satisfaction of the criminally inclined, treasonous Bush Family, that Mueller obediently follows Bush Family orders to whitewash their criminality and treason. The established FBI pattern of covering up political assassinations, falsely blaming bombings onto domestic dissidents, and such, will no doubt continue with America's new GESTAPO CHIEF, Robert Swan Mueller 3rd.

A forbidden item- Criminal defense lawyers whisper to us, "The women in the FBI office, unlike CIA, are so ugly, I am going to plead all my clients guilty to avoid me having to go again to the FBI office to look at those dogs." We fully expect to be sharply condemned by feminists as well as animal rights activists.

Since 1958, Mr.Skolnick has been a court reformer. Since 1963, founder/chairman, Citizen's Committee to Clean Up the Courts, disclosing certain instances of judicial and other bribery and political murders. Since 1991 a regular panelist, and since 1995, moderator/producer, of one-hour,weekly public access Cable TV Show, "Broadsides", Cablecast on Channel 21, 9 p.m. each Monday in Chicago. For a heavy packet of printed stories, send $5.00 [U.S. funds] and a stamped, self-addressed business sized envelope [4-1/4 x 9-1/2 #10 size] WITH THREE STAMPS ON IT, to Citizen's Committee to Clean Up the Courts, Sherman H. Skolnick, Chairman, 9800 South Oglesby Ave., Chicago IL 60617-4870. Office, 7 days, 8 a.m. to midnight, (773) 375-5741 [PLEASE, no "just routine calls]. Before sending FAX, call.

In espionage parlance, there is the term "LEGEND". That is, the creation of an entirely or mostly fake background to cover up details of a spy-type who has somehow surfaced. For example, right after the murder of President John F. Kennedy, the mass media, without divulging that they got the data from the American CIA, trumpeted the so-called background of Lee Harvey Oswald, who was actually the CIA patsy, falsely designated publicly as the "lone assassin", selected ahead of time, unknown to him, to be blamed for everything, and then murdered right in police custody to stop further questions.

Take the case of ROBERT PHILIP HANSSEN, identified on February 20, 2001, as an alleged "FBI AGENT" who became an alleged "Russian spy". His father, Howard Hanssen, was a Chicago Police officer, ostensibly part of the Chicago Police "Red Squad".

Police in big cities like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, starting more or less in the 1920s, began calling some of their Intelligence Units, "Red Squads". Their mission was to seek out and destroy labor union organizers, anti-government dissidents, and such, on the false theory that ALL such were "Reds". Many outspoken immigrants, because they were activists, because they pressed for higher wages or better working conditions, were jailed without legal formalities or proof that they were "Reds", or simply thrown out of the country, without remedy or recourse.

By the 1960s, "Red Squads" were busy targetting for dirty tricks blacks seeking equal rights sometimes even murdering them; framing up labor activists on false charges of "bombings"; and peaceniks, during the Anti-Viet Nam War period, as supposed violence makers. Documented examples as to how Los Angeles and their police intelligence unit arranged local political murders and mayhem, are in the book, "The Glass House Tapes" [slang for their intelligence unit headquarters] by Donald Freed and others. A New York City "Red Squad"-type officer, undercover, posed as the supposed bodyguard of Malcolm X in 1965, and bent down to be sure he was dead as Malcolm lay mortally wounded on the floor of an auditorium where the outspoken activist was to have given a speech. Some contend the agent of the secret political police arranged for the real assassins to escape and the bloody deed to be blamed on "lone nuts".

A host of details point to the reasonable and obvious conclusion that Robert Philip Hanssen, because he was exceptionally bright, was reportedly recruited when he was a teen-ager, by the American CIA with the reported aid of his father, a reputed "Red Squad" officer. [Recruitment by teachers, family members, and such is typical of the CIA, such as the way they separately selected Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, at an early age, for separate tasks for the spy agency. The Clintons being supposedly "married", actually a marriage of convenience, "a CIA couple".]

In Chicago, the "Red Squad" was part of "Operation Chaos", to disrupt dissidents, and operated under the auspices of the American CIA, NOT the FBI. The American CIA and their puppet, the Chicago Red Squad, became a matter of documented fact in various Federal Court anti-spy cases in Chicago in which this writer and his associates played an instrumental part or actively followed the proceedings, from 1970 and thereafter.

Robert Philip Hanssen became proficient in Russian. None of the accounts, whether in the print media, or radio or television, of the Establishment Press, state exactly where Hanssen studied Russian or how he became good at it. Rather, most accounts in the Chicago local press state he studied dentistry and accounting at Northwestern University.

The monopoly press does state, without real details, that the younger Hanssen got into the Chicago Police Department getting quickly into the elite, super-secret C-5 unit [not merely street work]. They falsely state that C-5 was to condcut internal investigations of police corruption. The C-5 unit was the CIA's operation, as a small group, within the Chicago Police Department.

In Chicago, 1969 to 1975, a group of "street commandoes" that worked with the Red Squad and the American CIA, had as their commander, a retired Naval Intelligence officer. As agents provocateurs, they specialized in infiltrating Anti-Viet Nam War groups, to disrupt them, by urging them to get off their chairs, and start up fighting with the police. The purpose was so the police could disrupt peace parades with violence to be blamed onto the peaceful marchers. Also, to get the dupes arrested and discredit the Peace Movement.

Starting about 1969, and thereafter, I angered the monopoly press by instructing students and others, how to identify provocateurs, by me conducting seminars at non-elite, working class colleges and universities. About the same time, I was the first in the U.S. to identify some of the mass media "reporters" as assets for, or linked to, the American CIA. [We continue to identify some local "reporters" as linked to the CIA, by way of our weekly public access Cable TV Program which reaches a large audience within Chicago.] The big, private, Establishment schools opposed my open discussion of the dirty tricks provocateurs use to discredit grass-roots movements. I also conducted classes on this at a local broadcast school, educating classes how to finger provocateurs and put them out of action. My students became adept. A non-student received my permission to monitor my class. After class he tried to get some of the students into violence. Following my instructions, they traced down his finances to a government spy unit and unmasked him publicly. He fled Chicago.

By 1975, the American CIA and the Red Squad in Chicago began trying to throwaway their expendable "street commandoes", by arranging frame-ups and dirty tricks. The local press began a series of stories designed to blame all the spying and violence on the "street commandoes" who knew that I was an open-minded independent.

These "street commandoes" did not know who else to turn to for help, so they called me. With my friends guarding my address as a precaution, I invited these "cover-blown" spies to my house. On the phone, I started to give them instructions how to find me, and they said "Sherman, don't you understand? On orders, many was the night, we sat in a car, spying on you and meetings at your house, by looking through your windows. Hey, we know how to find your address!" Wow! One of them confessed to me, "Sherman, the higher ups told us to plan to firebomb your house. But we like the way you and your friends go after crooked judges. So, we violated orders. Now they want to jail us on frame-ups, to get rid of us and shut our mouth. Hey, come on, help us go public to finger the CIA, and the secret unit in the Nixon White House we were working for." They brought me the rough typescript of their tell-all book they were working on. I went on some local late-night radio talk shows with one of them who from direct knowledge fingered the CIA and their bloody tricks IN THE U.S. against the Peace Movement and others.

Through all this, the CIA's C-5 unit in Chicago was more or less exposed. So, C-5 Unit Officer Robert Philip Hanssen left the unit in December, 1975, and the CIA assigned him to reportedly penetrate another situation by becoming a supposed "FBI Agent" stationed in Northwest Indiana, just across the state border from Chicago. Hanssen was reportedly to sniff out high-level FBI treason.

Just prior to Hanssen leaving the C-5 Unit, I suggested to some students at the University of Illinois, Chicago Campus, a working class school, that they contact the faculty advisors to see if they would approve of my seminars being conducted on campus, including about CIA provocateurs operating in the United States in violation of the CIA Charter forbidding domestic U.S. operations. When the faculty originally opposed it, a very distinguished looking student offered to help, William Peter Kampiles. He said he could persuade the faculty to agree to have the seminars in the largest lecture hall on campus, in the Behavioral Science Buidling. He was about the only student I saw on campus who came to school each day in a business suit and jacket. He got the faculty okay.

>From various witnesses and circumstances, I found out later my seminars were being secretly taped for the espionage agencies to study my methods of instruction as to provocateurs. I was also shocked to find out a little later that seminar-organizer Kampiles graduated and went to work for the American CIA, as a security guard at their headquarters in McLean, Virginia. While stationed there, he was trusted to go all over the facilities. He somehow grabbed the instruction manual for the super-secret KH-11 CIA satellite which was designed to film over places like the Soviet Union and then as it crossed the U.S., by parachute drop the film package near a secret facility in Tennessee. A sizeable reward was given to local folks there who retrieved the packages and turned them in to a certain address.

In Hammond, Indiana, right near Chicago, Kampiles was put on trial for theft of secrets of the U.S. Government. Kampiles intended to defend against these serious charges by showing that he wanted to do a trick as a double agent, to get promoted within the CIA, in that he sought to use the secret manual to infiltrate the Soviet Embassy while he was visiting in his family's home country, Athens, Greece. The federal judge in Hammond, however, was dying of cancer[which was not widely known outside the courthouse] and had no patience to permit Kampiles' CIA-linked attorney [who had a reported conflict of interest] to defend Kampiles with the necessary details. The Judge was not about to shift the matter over from Kampiles to even more serious treason by high-level FBI officials; these traitors were being reportedly investigated by Hanssen while pretending to be a reputed "FBI agent". Minus a proper defense, and apparently innocent, Kampiles, my former seminar student and seminar arranger, was found guilty of treason, or its equivalent under the federal criminal code, and sentenced by the sick judge to over 40 years in federal prison.

Kampiles had a girl friend who came every day to the trial. Her father reportedly ran a small restaurant in Chicago preferred by quite a number of FBI agents. There was reason to believe that Kampiles and/or others with him were assisting the CIA to keep track of certain FBI people sort of reportedly like what Hanssen was doing. Kampiles' brother from time to time exchanged data with some of us.

Little-known or discussed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has operated all the years without any legal charter or federal statute authorizing it to exist. They were simply created out of the mists and vapors hovering over the Injustice Department. The American CIA, on the other hand, is authorized to exist by a known charter. Whether that charter empowers them also to arrange or finance the assassination of domestic and foreign leaders that the CIA does not like, is another matter. Not adequately publicized is that alleged "President" George W. Bush has quietly revoked the federal edict, entered when Jimmy Carter was President, forbidding the CIA to engage in political assassinations.

Retired "spooks" contend that there are actually five top-level traitors in the FBI giving away to enemies of the U.S., America's "family jewels", profound secrets warranting the death sentence. The U.S. would face a horrendous crisis of crediiblity were the true apparent background of Robert Philip Hanssen to be allowed to come out in the Federal Court record and in the monopoly press. As a clandestine CIA operative reportedly within the FBI, while for years reportedly compiling treasonous criminality data on top-level FBI officials, Hanssen may have a very adequate defense to the matters with which he is charged and of which he may be innocent. Riddled with spies and relying in some instances on American CIA funds to operate overseas bureaus, the U.S. monopoly press is in no position to deal with this subject.

In case some still do not know, the FBI and the American CIA have been fighting each other from the time the CIA was formed. The CIA contends the FBI should not be running overseas bureaus and is poaching on CIA jurisdiction, among other things.

Details mentioned as to the "street commandoes" and their links to the CIA, NOT THE FBI, and links to what was a secret unit of the Nixon White House, are contained in Transcripts of Proceedings in anti-spy cases in the U.S. District Court in Chicago. Those proceedings were NOT in open court, but in a Judge's chambers. Some of the foregoing details are based on little-known voluminous and undisputed court records from those anti-spy cases involving the Chicago Police "Red Squad", "Operation Chaos", and the American CIA. I and members of our group were instrumentally involved in some of those matters and/or closely followed the court matters.

On the other hand, the sparse details in the local press in Chicago on the Robert Philip Hanssen alleged spy case, are misleading as to references to the C-5 Unit; as to Hanssen's father; as to the "Red Squad"; and related matters; which are contained either in stories in the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune, 2/21/01, as well as on Chicago local commercial radio and TV, in their local broadcasts.Why did the local mass media in Chicago falsely state the C-5 Unit, of which Hanssen was a part, was simply to find local police corruption? when in fact C-5 was an American CIA operation in Chicago.

Forgotten History - Friday, July 27, 2001 "Little known facts and overlooked history"

The FBI was no friend of the Civil Rights movement. Led by its director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI did nothing to stop the brutality by Southern officials. When Spelman College professor Dr. Howard Zinn wrote an article, which was reprinted by the New York Times, condemning the lack of Federal pro- tection by the FBI, Dr. Martin Luther King, JR. was asked if he agreed with the report. King replied that he agreed with their findings. This made the director furious and Hoover set out to destroy King.

Hoover, with the permission of attorney General Robert Kennedy, then began to tape King’s phone conversations. With information of extra martial affairs by Dr. King, Hoover had Assistant Director William Sullivan write a letter to the civil rights leader. This is that letter:

In view of your low grade...I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a Reverend or a Dr. And, your last name calls to mind only the type of King such as Henry the VIII.

King look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure they don’t have one at this time that is anywhere near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God. Clearly you don’t believe in any moral principles.

King, like all frauds, your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile. We have to depend on our older leaders like Wilkins, a man of character, and thank God we have others like him. But you are done. Your "honorary" degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done.

No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. You are finished. And some of them pretend to be ministers of the Gospel, Satan could not do more. What incredible evilness. King you are done.

The American public, the church organizations that have been helping-Protestant, Catholic and Jews will know you for what you are-an evil, abnormal beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done.

King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have only 34 days in which to do this. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

For nearly fifty years Hoover ruled the FBI with an iron fist. At one time or another he was praised in every paper across the United States. Whoever stood up to him was destroyed. Every president would, upon coming to office, reconfirm the director. To many in Congress he was a saint. Shame on them. These cowards knew what Hoover was doing but none of them said anything. Courage is rare, and in the case of opposition to Hoover, it was no where to be found.

Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney's civil rights lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland Police will go to trial October 1, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken confirmed at a hearing July 27.

Judge Wilken denied all motions from both sides, including our "Motion for Justice" filed July 2. She also denied the Oakland city attorney's motion to have the case against the Oakland Police dismissed due to a technical omission from the allegations in the suit. The judge said the time to make that point was ten years ago, right after the suit was filed, and she told the plaintiffs to amend the case documents to insert the missing lines. This resulted in filing the new Eighth Amended Complaint, which is newly posted on the Judi Bari Website, http://www.judibari.org

FBI attorney Joe Sher had suggested delaying the trial until next January or February. But Bari-Cherney lead attorney Dennis Cunningham objected to any delay unless the judge would reinstate the case against Special Agent in Charge Richard W. Held, the COINTELPRO veteran who headed the FBI's San Francisco Field Office at the time of the May 24, 1990 car bombing which nearly killed Judi. Judge Wilken denied the delay and refused to reconsider her 1997 dismissal of Held from the case.

The trial will last six weeks, Mondays through Thursdays, from 8:30 AM to 1:30 PM. There will be a six-person jury plus two alternates. Each side will be allotted half of the total hours available for case presentation.

At a hearing on Friday, August 31, Judge Wilken will hear motions in limine from both sides to determine the scope of the case, which in turn will determine what lines of evidence are relevant, and what will be barred as irrelevant. The Plaintiffs' Corrected Motions In Limine document has been newly added to the Judi Bari Website.

As lead attorney Dennis Cunningham declared on the 11th anniversary of the bombing, "It's a good time to go to trial against the FBI!" The bombing case comes to trial just as the FBI faces intense national scrutiny. The upcoming trial is sure to draw national attention to continuing FBI rights abuses against activists like American Indian Movement political prisoner Leonard Peltier and many others, cases which have so far been absent from the drumbeat for reform in Washington.

The federal civil rights suit was filed over 10 years ago, but trial has been delayed by a series of aggressive defense motions followed by lengthy appeals. Cunningham said approximately 30 pre-trial motions have been made since the case began.

FBI and OPD officials arrested Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney within hours after a motion-triggered pipe bomb exploded under the driver's seat of Judi's car in 1990. After two months of false FBI and police claims to the media that they had evidence that Judi was knowingly carrying the bomb, the district attorney refused to file charges due to lack of evidence.

The case was closed, but Judi said that, based on FBI files turned over to her through the lawsuit, the FBI never made any effort to find the bomber, but instead used a phony bombing investigation as a cover for investigating nearly 650 people in the radical environmental movement whose only crime was to receive a phone call from Judi or Darryl. The bomber remains at large.

Judi Bari died of breast cancer in 1997, but her estate and Darryl Cherney have continued to litigate the suit, seeking to clear their names and that of Earth First! from the false charges made against them and to expose the FBI's tactics against lawful political movements that threaten the status quo.

Noted historian Prof. Howard Zinn has agreed to serve as an expert witness in the case. In April, he sent a letter which has been filed with the court and placed on the Judi Bari website.

Howard Zinn wrote: "It is my considered opinion, knowing of the car bomb explosion which injured Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in 1990, and knowing of their speedy subsequent arrest on sensational criminal charges, that the apparent 'frame-up' of the two as supposed bombers as reflected in the evidence described in the "big brief" from Bari v. USA is consistent with the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That history, for many years before 1990, and continuing after that, shows that the FBI has repeatedly attempted to harass, injure, even cause the death of individuals in order to disrupt the activities of organizations critical of government and the Establishment.

"That history indicates that in the pursuit of this disruption, the FBI has again and again violated the constitutional rights of Americans, including their right to freedom of speech and freedom of association. It indicates that the FBI would have been ready, willing and able to pervert the Constitution, and their own law enforcement responsibility under it, in the ways the plaintiffs allege, in the attempt to discredit and "neutralize" a movement like Earth First! and other allied forces working to preserve and protect the environment."

Please visit www.judibari.org and read the new motions freshly added to the Legal Documents section. You'll also find links to them on the News and Features page.

Don't forget to attend the Friday August 31 hearing on the motions in limine beginning at 10 a.m. in Judge Wilken's courtroom at the Oakland Federal Building, 13th and Clay Streets, Oakland, California.

Please forward this update to others you know who would be interested. Let them know they can subscribe to BariNews by sending an email to BariNews-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Is the FBI back in the business of trying to squelch political dissent? An obscure paragraph in congressional testimony this past spring by departing FBI Director Louis Freeh has fanned fears that the agency is planning a surveillance and disruption effort against anti-globalization groups similar to Cointelpro, which focused on the anti-war and Black Power movements in the '60s and '70s.

Freeh delivered his testimony on the "Threat of Terrorism to the United States" before the Senate Appropriations committee on May 10. In the section on "domestic terrorism," Freeh identified "right-wing extremist groups," such as the World Church of the Creator and Aryan Nation, as "representing a continuing terrorism threat." One of the two paragraphs dealing with "special-interest extremists" focused on the eco-sabotage of the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front. In contrast, extreme anti-abortion groups, with their record of murder and clinic bombings, merited only a passing mention.

But it was the final paragraph in Freeh's assessment of "left-wing extremist groups" that raised eyebrows among anti-globalization activists: "Anarchist and extremist socialist groups--many of which, such as the Workers World Party, Reclaim the Streets and Carnival Against Capitalism--have an international presence and, at times, also represent a potential threat in the United States," Freeh said. "For example, anarchists, operating individually and in groups, caused much of the damage during the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Seattle."

"These are extremely dangerous and inappropriate comments," says Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-founder of the Washington-based Partnership for Civil Justice. Verheyden-Hilliard is the lead attorney on a lawsuit against the FBI and other police agencies for civil rights violations during the April 2000 protests at the Washington meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Noting that Freeh's remarks were made in the context of an appropriations hearing, she says that he "may be trying to legitimate funding for a government-sponsored war against the social justice movement."

Freeh's comments do provoke serious concerns. No justification is offered for the naming of Workers World Party, a Marxist group, and Reclaim the Streets, a network founded in London in 1995 that merges protests and raves, as representing potential threats. Freeh seemingly criminalizes all anarchists based on vandalism during the Seattle WTO protests. "By demonizing this movement and suggesting these folks pose a threat," says Verheyden-Hilliard, "they justify declaring some form of martial law [during large demonstrations]."

Verheyden-Hilliard notes that protests in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Washington have been met with excessive police response: illegal arrests, intrusive surveillance, pepper spray and the employment of agents provocateur. Washington police traveled to Philadelphia, Quebec and Genoa to observe protests, while local and state police are cooperating with the FBI on "joint anti-terrorism task forces." She adds: "It appears there's been substantial funding, sending people all around the country."

According to Jon Weiss of New York Reclaim the Streets, activists' initial response to Freeh's testimony was fear "because the phrase 'domestic terrorism' is usually just a packaging tool for the mass suspension of civil liberties."

Weiss suspects the FBI cribbed the terrorist tag from Scotland Yard, based on actions that devolved into riots. Reclaim the Streets' actions in Britain had been nonviolent since the network's founding in 1995, but that changed on June 18, 1999. As part of an international "global street party" to protest the G8 meeting in Cologne, Germany, 10,000 gathered in London's financial district. What started as a street party ended in the trashing of several businesses, including a McDonald's and a bank.

Chuck Munson, an anarchist and co-editor of Alternative Press Review, says the feds are grasping at "broad terms to tar and feather" the movement and dismisses as "demonization" the "insinuation that all anarchists are violent." The real violence, Munson argues, is perpetrated by the police. "They're the ones who bring guns, bullets, gas, dogs and water cannons to protests," he says, "and they use them."

FBI spokesman Steven Berry would not elaborate on Freeh's reasons for targeting anarchists, Workers World and Reclaim the Streets beyond drawing attention to Seattle. But their inclusion wasn't random. "There are a lot of groups in the anti-globalization movement who have exhibited some potential to commit a terrorist incident," Berry insists.

Asked whether these groups or others are under investigation or subject to counterintelligence operations, Berry says, "We don't comment on specific investigations." Berry denies that Freeh's comments were a politically motivated smear. "We recognize that every group has the right to assemble, the right to meet, has the right to exist no matter how abhorrent their message is," Berry says. "The FBI only gets involved when there is a violation of federal law."

Says Weiss, "If blocking a road or having a party constitutes a terrorist act these days, I suppose we're guilty. The FBI is trying to get their mind around the concept that there is a global democracy movement, and they don't quite understand it yet."

"The first lesson in activism is that the person that offers to get the dynamite is always the FBI agent." - Judi Bari.

(This report was written by Noelle Hanrahan in association with the Redwood Summer Justice Project, which pursues Judi Bari's and Darryl Cherney's civil rights case against the FBI and Oakland Police.)

On April 22, 1970, as 22 million Americans rallied across the country on the first Earth Day celebration, FBI agents in over 40 cities were ordered to spy on and infiltrate these events. Senator Edwin Muskie, himself a victim, remarked from the floor of Congress that this surveillance was "a dangerous threat to fundamental constitutional rights." The power of the environmental movement and the challenge it posed to business-as-usual made it an instant target for FBI suppression.

Twenty years later on May 24, 1990, a shrapnel-wrapped car bomb went off under noted Earth First! activist Judi Bari's car seat, nearly killing her and injuring fellow organizer Darryl Cherney. Even more frightening to Bari, as she woke up in the hospital intensive care unit under armed guard, was the realization that a major FBI "counterintelligence" operation against Earth First! was underway.

Within minutes of their arrival on the scene of the blast, the FBI was falsely characterizing nonviolent environmental organizers Bari and Cherney as "terrorists". Within hours, the Oakland Police Department had arrested and detained them for transporting explosives. It was not enough that the two leaders had been physically blown up; the FBI immediately began to orchestrate a disinformation campaign designed to discredit and imprison these activists and destroy Earth First!

What could make nonviolent environmental organizers the targets of repression? Back in May 1990, Earth First! in the redwood region was gearing up for "Mississippi Summer in the California Redwoods," a bold call that would draw thousands of activists to Mendocino and Humboldt counties. Earth First!'s fierce, grassroots, pro-labor campaign of mass nonviolent civil disobedience was determined to stop corporate timber's liquidation of the old-growth forests. Even in the face of the attempted assassination of the key organizers and a well-orchestrated FBI disinformation campaign, thousands came to Redwood Summer, bringing national attention to the destruction of the redwood forest ecosystem. It is a testimony to the power of the movement mobilized by Judi Bari that today, eight years later, protests to save the old growth forests are more dynamic than ever.

"It is absolutely foolish to suggest that the FBI was involved in anything that would obstruct justice." -- Richard W. Held, FBI "These guys are professional liars, who have raised selective memory loss to an art form." -- Judi Bari, Earth First!

FBI Legacy From the moment of its birth in 1908 as the Justice Department's "Bureau of Investigation," a key part of the FBI's mission has been to suppress political dissent. In the early years they used deportations and the career-destroying Palmer raids to target union leaders and communists. Burglary, blacklisting, infiltration, and disruption became standard operating procedure. Later, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Smith Act specifically could not be used to target communists, the FBI took it undercover, developing its "counterintelligence" program dubbed COINTELPRO. In the words of then-director J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO was designed to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" groups whose views the FBI deemed threatening to the status quo.

Richard W. Held was Special Agent-in-Charge of the San Francisco FBI Office 1985-1993 during its extensive COINTELPRO operations against Earth First! Of all the COINTELPRO operatives, Richard Wallace Held's past is particularly brutal and haunting. Held began his career in 1968 in the Los Angeles office of the FBI. He quickly became the lead agent in the "racial matters" squad which focused on what the FBI called "black extremists". Just one year later he was involved in targeting Los Angeles Black Panther Party leader Geronimo ji jaga (Pratt) for "neutralization." Framed for a murder he did not commit, Geronimo spent 25 years in state prison. He was released in 1997 after a judge overturned his conviction based on prosecutorial misconduct. The key witness in the case, Julius Butler, was an informant for the FBI, LAPD, and the L.A. District Attorney's office; that information was kept secret during Geronimo's trial. An uncanny ability to lie under oath, commonly referred to as "testa-lying," is a trademark of rogue law enforcement professionals. Under oath in a deposition for Geronimo's federal appeal, Held remarked on his relationship with Julius Butler: "I think that it may have been relevant, your honor, depending on what the contact was at the time and what else I knew, because I don't recall really knowing much about the case at all anyway." In fact, Held was coordinating COINTELPRO operations in L.A., and Geronimo was at the top of the "Key Black Extremists" list.

Even more damning, Held was the control agent for informant Julius Butler. In two-and-a-half years, Held recorded contact and meetings with Butler 33 times. Contrast Held's repeated denials of knowledge and responsibility with the cold, hard facts, including this from a 1/28/70 memo by Held to the FBI Director: "I request Bureau approval ... to attack, expose, and ridicule the BPP... operation number one is designed to challenge the legitimacy of the authority exercised by Elmer Gerard Pratt."

After a few years in Washington, DC as a headquarters intelligence supervisor, Held was back in the field on the Pine Ridge Reservation three days after the firefight between federal agents and the American Indian Movement (AIM) during which two FBI agents and an Indian man were killed. An FBI memo dated 7/26/75 to the Washington Bureau's Intelligence Division notes, "Supervisor Richard Wallace Held arrived at Pine Ridge, South Dakota Indian Reservation Command Post on 6/29/75, to assist in the RESMURS investigation. He was assigned three important phases of this investigation; namely, the correlation of Bureau-wide informants into the investigation; the establishment of the confidential fund; and the coordination of all intelligence information as it relates to the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the RESMURS investigations... throughout the country ..."

Held's work contributed to the framing of noted political prisoner Leonard Peltier, and to covering up the truth about the agents' deaths and the still unsolved killings of 70 AIM supporters on the Pine Ridge Reservation during the extensive FBI's operations.

From 1979 until 1985, Held was Special Agent-in-Charge of the San Juan, Puerto Rico office. There he presided over a politically-oriented paramilitary campaign against the Puerto Rican Independence movement, creating files on 74,000 individuals. In his last operation in Puerto Rico, Held led 300 FBI agents and U.S. marshals in raids all over the island, trashing office and homes and arresting scores of activists. One advocate of Puerto Rican independence said the raids made "even the desire for independence a crime." Held left Puerto Rico in 1985 to head the FBI's San Francisco, California field office.

Held Turns His Sights on Earth First! In the year before the car bombing of Bari and Cherney, a shocking and classic political disruption campaign was conducted against Earth First! in Northern California. In the months just prior to Redwood Summer, the disruption was intense. Bari, Cherney and other Earth First! organizers received over 30 death threats from March to May, 1990. Fake Earth First! press releases were circulated in the community and to the press, falsely connecting the Earth First!ers with violence and sabotage. Local law enforcement refused to investigate the death threats, signaling their tolerance for violence against environmentalists. "If you turn up dead, Judi," Mendocino County Sheriff's Sgt. Steve Satterwhite told Bari, "then we'll investigate."

The FBI's very act of blaming Bari and Cherney for the bombing that nearly killed them, and their repeated feeding of damaging and bald-faced lies to the press about evidence in the case, are both classic components of a "counter-intelligence" campaign. The FBI's own files refer to the use of informants, yet even now the full scope of their actions remains hidden.

Coincidence or COINTELPRO? In depositions in Bari's and Cherney's civil rights lawsuit, FBI agents repeatedly denied that there was an investigation against Earth First! in California prior to the bombing. Yet, documents at first withheld and blacked out, then later released, show that the FBI field reports written at the time of the bombing stated Bari and Cherney were "subjects of an investigation in the terrorist field."

The Arizona FBI Sting Operation In 1988, a major FBI sting operation was launched against Earth First! in Arizona. In a cynical attempt to discredit and criminalize Earth First!, the FBI spent $3 million and employed over 50 FBI agents, extensive wiretaps, body wires and overt entrapment in order to arrest Arizona Earth First!ers for conspiracy to down power lines.

At the heart of Operation THERMCON (short for "Thermite Conspiracy") were undercover FBI agent/provocateur Michael Fain and informant Ron Frazier, who infiltrated a group of environmental activists in Prescott. Though unsuccessful, the FBI worked long and hard to entrap these individuals into using explosives to down power lines. Apparently the FBI sought to involve Earth First! with explosives in order to create a sensational case against them. This would serve to discredit Earth First! and provide justification to conduct illegal investigations and operations against the political and First Amendment activity of the environmental movement nationwide. Busted on May 30, 1989, in the Arizona desert, four people were caught with a cutting torch attempting to disable a power transmission tower leading to a pumping station of the central Arizona project (CAP). CAP is a billion dollar pork barrel project to carry Colorado River water uphill across hundreds of miles of desert to water the lawns of Phoenix and Tucson. Judi Bari laughingly called this, "the only joint FBI-Earth First! action ever to take place." Undercover FBI agents picked the target, drove the truck, and taught the activists to use an acetylene torch. The FBI paid informant Ron Frazier $54,000 cash in exchange for implicating the Earth First!ers, and granted him immunity from prosecution for various crimes.

"The first lesson in activism is that the person that offers to get the dynamite is always the FBI agent," joked Judi Bari.

FBI Lies Exposed It was in the context of such a massive undercover operation against Earth First! that the FBI terrorist squad responded en masse to the bombing of Bari and Cherney in May of 1990. Special Agent John Conway, who was one of the main case agents assigned to the bombing, had also handled the San Francisco FBI office's substantial field work on the Arizona "THERMCON" sting.

It is striking that after failing in a major COINTELPRO operation to tie Earth First! with explosives in Arizona, the FBI again tried to smear and defame nonviolent environmental activists as terrorists by falsely charging Bari and Cherney with transporting the bomb that was meant to kill them.

In his deposition in the Bari/Cherney lawsuit, Held insists that he was completely out of the loop and unaware of the case, even though other FBI agents contradict his testimony and have said that they briefed him on a regular basis.

Key Questions Remain Were Judi Bari, Darryl Cherney or Earth First! subjects of an ongoing investigation in "the terrorist field" as agents claimed in FBI reports? If so, where are the files? Was this investigation authorized? Were they under FBI surveillance when they were bombed? What does the FBI know about who bombed Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney? And finally, why have they never made any attempt to catch the real bomber?

In search of answers to these questions, the Redwood Summer Justice Project will continue to expose secret FBI operations against Earth First! as we pursue the civil rights lawsuit against the FBI and the Oakland Police.

(This article refers to the actions of FBI Special Agent Richard Wallace Held. For clarification, his father Richard G. Held was Associate Director of the FBI.)

Between 1987 and 1990, in a conspiracy to entrap and "pop Dave Foreman [founder of Earth First!] to send a message," the FBI spent $3 million, used 50 agents and conducted more than 1000 hours of wiretaps. A key informant was paid a total of $54,000. 1981-1990, activists opposed to the U.S. foreign policy in Central America (as well as a dozen U.S. Senators and Congressmen) were subject to FBI harassment. The FBI's "investigation" of CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) involved 59 field offices and 200 incidents of death threats, intimidation, and break-ins. In August 1985, Richard W. Held led 300 FBI agents and U.S. marshals in raids throughout Puerto Rico, trashing offices and homes and arresting scores of activists. The FBI's overall operations resulted in the creation of files on 74,000 individuals. In 1975, Richard W. Held was involved in the FBI's cover-up of the 70 deaths of American Indian Movement supporters at Pine Ridge in South Dakota. On the scene after an FBI operation which resulted in the deaths of two FBI agents and one Indian man, Held helped lay the groundwork for the framing of AIM leader Leonard Peltier for murder. Peltier remains wrongfully imprisoned to this day.

On April 27, 1970, Richard W. Held requested and received permission from J. Edgar Hoover to "neutralize" actress Jean Seberg. Held placed an anonymous letter with a Hollywood gossip columnist regarding the parentage of Seberg's unborn child. On August 7, 1970, Seberg, nearly 7 months pregnant, attempted suicide. On August 23rd, she gave birth prematurely to a baby girl. Weighing less than 4 pounds, the baby died. Seberg's transgression? Her support of the Black Panther Party.

Beginning in 1970, FBI agent Richard W. Held, an architect of COINTELPRO vs. the Black Panthers in L.A., helped orchestrate the 25-year false imprisonment of Geronimo ji jaga (Pratt). Held and others engineered the frame-up of Geronimo by withholding critical information that the prosecution's key witness, Julius Butler, was an FBI operative.

On Dec. 4, 1969, Chicago police and the FBI assassinated Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Hampton, who was alive but wounded after the initial assault, was then executed at close range. William O'Neal, an FBI informant, provided a detailed floor plan of Hampton's apartment; he was paid $30,000.

In 1963, the FBI turned their attention to Martin Luther King, Jr., and sought to destroy him through a campaign of wiretaps and harassment. In one incident, the FBI confronted King with a compilation of secretly recorded tapes, threatening to release them to the press if King did not commit suicide before accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

From 1943-63, the federal civil rights case Socialist Workers Party v. Attorney General documents decades of illegal FBI break-ins and 10 million pages of surveillance records. The FBI paid an estimated 1,600 informants $1,680,592 and used 20,000 days of wiretaps to undermine legitimate political organizing.

Sources available on request. To order more copies of "AMERICA'S SECRET POLICE" contact Redwood Summer Justice Project at the address below

To be placed on the mailing list to receive updates on Judi Bari's lawsuit against the FBI, or to make a tax deductible contribution to help fund the lawsuit, please contact: REDWOOD SUMMER JUSTICE PROJECT P.O. Box 14720, Santa Rosa, CA 95402 Phone (707) 887-0262 or FAX (707) 887-0865 email: rjf@judibari.org

Barbara Grant says she relied on science in her analysis of what happened at the Branch Davidian compound.

Tucson optics consultant Barbara Grant used science - not politics - to determine that law enforcement agents likely fired guns at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in the moments leading up to the building burning to the ground.

A November 2000 report said agents fired no shots at Branch Davidians that day in 1993. Grant spent two years studying infrared tapes taken by the FBI between 11:18 a.m. and 12:15 p.m. on April 19, 1993, from a plane circling 4,000 to 6,000 feet above the compound.

A 51-day standoff between the Branch Davidians and federal agents ended that day after a fire engulfed the compound following efforts to drive the occupants out by using tear gas and demolishing portions of the structure. About 80 people died, and some survivors were severely burned.

Grant, speaking to about 50 people at Thursday's Arizona Optics Industry Association luncheon meeting, showed segments of the FLIR infrared sensor tape that recorded temperature variations at the compound, including several sequences of multiple, sequential high-temperature "flashes" aimed toward the building.

"I believe the most likely explanation of the flashes is gunfire," Grant said. She said the series of flashes occurred periodically until about 12:10 p.m., when the compound burst into flames. Her research focused primarily on a multiple flash sequence at 11:28 a.m.

A report on the incident, released Nov. 8, 2000, by Waco Investigation Special Consul John C. Danforth, states "unequivocally" that "government agents did not shoot at the Branch Davidians on April 19, 1993."

Casey Stavropoulos, public affairs press assistant at the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C., said late Thursday that she had no information on Grant's investigation. "I don't have anything to comment on in response to what her findings are," Stavropoulos said.

A Justice Department representative said earlier this week that the agency stands behind the Danforth report's findings.

Other explanations of the flashes have included a malfunction of the FLIR sensor and heat from the sun glinting off debris at the compound.

The Danforth report states: "It is concluded with a confident level of certainty that of all of the analyzed flashes seen on FLIR videotapes from April 19, 1993, between 10:41 a.m.-12:16 p.m. are caused by solar or heat reflections from single or multiple objects. "The results from this investigation have shown, with a confident level of certainty, that the flashes on the FLIR videotapes from April 19, 1993, between 10:41 a.m.-12:16 p.m. cannot form evidence of gunfire."

Grant said her study showed the sensor malfunction and debris reflection scenarios are far less likely to explain the infrared flashes than the muzzle flash of weapons. "I would discount the first one," she said. "For the second one, in our experiments we found glass gives a pretty awful reflection in the infrared spectrum - not like visual light, it appears as a vague glow, not like the flashes that appeared on the tape."

She said that debris would have to be shiny, elevated and precisely aimed at the FLIR sensor in the moving aircraft to work as an explanation for the heat flashes. Grant said that unlike Danforth's report, she would not claim to be 100 percent certain of her findings.

"My mind is still open. If someone can come up with a better solution, I will be glad to consider it," she said. "I am saying this is the most likely conclusion."

"It was valid science," Arizona Optics Industry Association member Keith McLeod said of Grant's presentation. "It wasn't schlepping one side or the other. It was simply taking basic high school and college analysis to dismantle the FBI's position."

Kathleen Perkins, CEO and publisher of OpticsReport, said, "This is a fine example of how optical engineers can find thorough solutions to problems."

Grant, a 1989 University of Arizona Optical Sciences Center graduate, is an electro-optical engineer who specializes in radiometric measurement and data analysis. This involves the measurement of light and the analysis of data obtained from optical instruments. She has worked as a Tucson-based electro-optics consultant the past four years.

She said she was drawn to the Waco controversy and wanted to approach it from a technical, analytical angle, avoiding the emotion and politics that had crept into some other investigations.

"I stayed very much in the technical realm. There is more technology here than you can shake a stick at," she said. "I haven't accepted a dime of money from anyone. I wanted to make this as objective as possible."

Grant and local attorney Dave Hardy, who pursued a Freedom of Information Act suit for two years to get the FBI to surrender a copy of the FLIR tape, made their own infrared tapes of weapons firing at a local shooting range for comparison.

These tests at the Desert Trails Gun Club and Training Facilities showed that muzzle flashes could last four times longer than the government said was possible, and helped Grant show that muzzle flashes would appear on the 30-frame-per-second FLIR videotapes.

By Cheryl W. Thompson Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, December 16, 2001; Page A02

The FBI was warned 11 years ago that agent Robert P. Hanssen might be spying for the Russians, but the bureau failed to investigate for nearly a decade, according to a new book on one of the most damaging espionage cases in U.S. history. In "The Bureau and the Mole," Washington Post reporter David A. Vise writes that Hanssen's brother-in-law, Mark Wauck, an FBI agent in Chicago, discovered in 1990 that Hanssen "was hiding thousands of dollars in cash" in his house and "spending too much money for someone on an FBI salary." Wauck reported his suspicions to his supervisors in Chicago, telling them he thought Hanssen was spying for the Russians. The book contends that the FBI did nothing, allowing Hanssen to continue spying for 10 more years. "The FBI could have cracked the Hanssen spy case in 1990," Vise writes in the book. "It was a gargantuan blunder." Hanssen's espionage compromised numerous U.S. national security secrets and led to the executions of at least three Russians who were spying for the United States. He pleaded guilty in July to 15 counts of spying for Moscow. The book also says that Hanssen placed a hidden, closed-circuit video camera in his bedroom so his best friend in a nearby room could watch him have sex with his wife, Bonnie. In testimony before a federal grand jury, the friend, Jack Hoschouer, confirmed that he watched the Hanssens have sex, the book says. Bonnie Hanssen had no knowledge of the camera. Hanssen turned this and similar episodes into an erotic story that he posted on the Internet, according to the book. An appendix to the book contains a number of sexually explicit stories he also wrote about his wife and placed on adult Web sites. .... The book depicts Hanssen as a deeply religious and conservative man, a loner who became a computer expert. .... The book also says that Hanssen has told several people that he was intimate with a stripper he befriended during his marriage, a fact the woman has denied in previous interviews. The woman, Priscilla Sue Galey, met Hanssen at a District strip club where she worked and the two became friends. Hanssen spent untold sums of money on her, she has said, buying her a Mercedes-Benz and jewelry and footing the bill for a trip to Hong Kong, where, "Hanssen has told several people, he had sex with Galey," according to the book. But Galey steadfastly maintains that Hanssen, a Roman Catholic, only wanted to save her soul. ....

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