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Homeland Security Moving to Abandoned Insane Asylum

The Homeland Security Department is moving to an abandoned insane asylum.

The department outlined its $4.1 billion plan to consolidate most of its more than 60 Washington-area offices into a massive headquarters complex to be built at St. Elizabeths Hospital compound in Southeast Washington.

Department officials say the move will bring convenience savings and more camaraderie and cooperation among employees.

But employees shouldn’t start packing just yet. Most won’t begin moving to the St. Elizabeth’s Hospital compound in Southeast Washington until 2012 at the earliest, and the entire move won’t be done until 2015.

Homeland Security’s offices are scattered throughout Washington and Northern Virginia, an area that has some of the worst traffic in the nation. Homeland Security decided to start looking for a main headquarters site after a 2005 review ordered by Secretary Michael Chertoff showed people were spending too much time in traffic trying to get to meetings, spokesman Larry Orluskie said.

A headquarters complex “will ensure a unity of effort and command for the secretary, as well as build a culture and a spirit which are essential to having a happy and productive work force,” Undersecretary for Management Paul Schneider told the House Homeland Security subcommittee on management, investigations and oversight at a March 1 hearing.

Senior officials are concerned that a single Homeland Security culture — one that encourages cooperation among components such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Coast Guard — has not yet gelled. Schneider told the committee that grouping most component headquarters together will help foster a “one DHS” culture.

After consulting with the General Services Administration, Homeland Security settled on St. Elizabeths, which at 4.5 million square feet had the most available space in Washington. The District of Columbia will continue to operate the mental health institution on St. Elizabeths east campus. Homeland Security will take over the now-vacant west campus.

Homeland Security considered moving to Walter Reed Hospital, also in Washington, but decided against it because the Pentagon’s planned base closures would not shut it down in time. Homeland Security also rejected other Washington-area locations such as the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium site, which is expected to be demolished, and one of its current headquarters near the Naval Observatory because they either were not under federal control or were not big enough.

But even St. Elizabeths isn’t big enough to house all of Homeland Security’s 22,000 Washington-area employees, who are now housed in 7.1 million square feet.

The Secret Service, US-VISIT, Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, Office of the Inspector General, Citizenship and Immigration Services and science and technology directorate likely will remain off campus, according to an October plan prepared by the department.

Orluskie said that since most component headquarters will move nearly intact to the new compound, little will change about how agency managers work with their employees.

Similar moves have worked in the past. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was scattered among several Washington offices after it was created out of various disaster-related agencies in 1979. Until FEMA’s offices were combined into a single headquarters about 18 months later, the agency was disjointed and employees lacked a strong sense of identity, said Leo Bosner, the American Federation of Government Employees local president for FEMA.

“When they created the C Street headquarters, it did a lot of good,” Bosner said. “People were able to work face-to-face and meld together. . . . You theoretically could do things online [or with teleconferencing], but that doesn’t work all the time. People have got to work together and talk to each other.”

Former Homeland Security inspector general Clark Kent Ervin also applauded the move.“A big problem from Day One has been a lack of cohesion and esprit de corps,” Ervin said. “It’s belated, but it’s better late than never.”

The department estimates it will cost $4.1 billion to develop St. Elizabeths and relocate the department’s offices there. But Schneider said the move will save the department $64 million a year in leasing costs. Homeland Security now rents 70 percent of its office space.

The Coast Guard will be the first to move in 2010, Orluskie said. Homeland Security’s headquarters functions will follow in 2012, and all remaining components will move between 2012 and 2015.

Mental health activist Dorothea Dix founded St. Elizabeths in 1855, and many Civil War veterans received treatment there. John Hinckley has been at St. Elizabeths since he shot President Reagan in 1981. Charles Guiteau, who killed President Garfield in 1881, and poet Ezra Pound also were committed to the hospital. The facility grounds include a cemetery of about 300 Union and Confederate soldiers who died while at the facility.

Orluskie said GSA insists on preserving the site’s historic value and will either leave historic buildings intact or renovate them from within, he said.

http://www.federaltimes.com/index.php?S=2626923

Suspicious Case Held Slide Projector, Not Bomb

A suspicious case that bomb squad technicians removed from in front of a 7-Eleven store on West Main Street Wednesday contained only an old slide projector, officials said.

A suspicious, heavy-set, white man wearing blue shorts and a white shirt placed the case under a pay phone outside the store, disappeared at about 5:30 p.m. and worried store employees called police.

A remote-controlled robot operated by Jackson County [Oregon] Sheriff's Sgt. Eric Fox collected the case. It was placed in a bomb disposal pod and taken to the Jackson County Sports Park in White City where experts had ample space to safely examine it with an X-ray machine, officials said.

X-rays showed only an old slide projector, thus ending the hours-long saga that had closed a section of West Main Street for several hours Wednesday evening.

http://m.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090710/NEWS/907100328/-1/WAP08&template=wapart&m_section=

Related Archives:

Unattended Briefcase Forces Evacuation of San Francisco Ferry Building

"Suspicious Suitcase" at Bayer

"Suspicious Suitcase" at Bayer

A bomb scare forced evacuation of Bayer employees in West Berkeley Wednesday morning, ending only after the Berkeley bomb squad blasted a suspicious suitcase with water and found nothing but papers inside.

Department spokesperson Sgt. Mary Kusmiss said a Bayer security guard called police at 10:03 a.m. after a report of the case, which was left near the base of a light pole on Seventh and Parker Streets.

“Bayer security evacuated several buildings closest to the case,” Sgt. Kusmiss said, and Berkeley officers blocked off Seventh Street in both directions while three members of the explosive ordinance detail donned their bomb suits and x-rayed the suitcase.

Even though the x-rays didn’t indicate the presence of an explosive device, officers used a high-pressure water device to “disrupt” the case and its contents.

“We don’t like to take any chances, and Bayer has some controversy in its history,” Sgt. Kusmiss said.

Once the water had done its job, officers “determined there was no explosive material,” she said.

Traffic was resumed as officers cleared the scene at 1:41 p.m. and Bayer employees were allowed to return to their jobs.

Richard Brenneman
Berkeley Daily Planet
14 August 2008
Bomb Scare at Bayer

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2008-08-14/article/30837?headline=Bomb-Scare-at-Bayer

Related archives:

The Return of IG Farben: Bayer Knowingly Sold AIDS Tainted Products

Unattended Briefcase Forces Evacuation of San Francisco Ferry Building

Sky and Telescope September 2008: "Phoenix Digs In"

 

Gladio: NATO's Secret Armies (Time Magazine 1990)

The cold war was near absolute zero, the Korean War was raging, and the West could almost hear the Soviet tanks gunning their engines on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The U.S. and its European allies were determined not to be caught as unprepared as they had been when the Nazis invaded. So in the early 1950s they began training "stay behind" networks of volunteers. If the Soviet army rolled west, the groups were to gather intelligence, open escape routes and form resistance movements.

Originally advised and financed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, many of the units and their clandestine arms caches were later taken over by the military intelligence organizations of West European countries and coordinated by a NATO committee. "It seemed like a pretty sensible business," recalls Harry Rositzke, a retired CIA officer who handled anti- Soviet operations in Munich in the mid-1950s. "But then, we were all hysterical at the time."

Nor has the emotion completely ebbed now that Europe is remaking itself. Last week in Italy and Belgium, investigators were looking into possible links between the clandestine networks and episodes of right-wing terrorism during the past 20 years. In Rome, Admiral Fulvio Martini, head of military intelligence, testified before a parliamentary committee. Italy's paramilitary group, dubbed Gladio (Sword), had 622 members and 139 stockpiles of arms and explosives hidden around the country, Martini said. When the caches were gathered up in 1972, he added, 10 were found empty. One of them had contained eight kilos of plastic explosive, leading left-wing politicians to voice suspicion that the plastic had been used for the neofascist terrorism that plagued Italy in the 1970s and '80s.

The Belgian government is investigating the possibility that its secret resistance members might have been responsible for a wave of terrorist raids on supermarkets near Brussels in which 27 people were killed between 1983 and 1985. As the accusations echoed across the Continent, France and Greece announced that their clandestine volunteer groups had been disbanded.

The existence of these secret organizations was first disclosed in 1976 by a U.S. Senate committee investigating CIA operations. Former CIA Director William Colby told the story in greater detail in his 1978 memoir, Honorable Men. His first assignment in the agency, Colby wrote, had been to organize stay-behind networks in Scandinavia.

In neutral Sweden and Finland, the groups were created without the governments' knowledge. In NATO countries Norway and Denmark, the units were built with official cooperation. But in addition, Colby revealed, the CIA secretly formed its own backup networks in both Norway and Denmark. Still unknown are how many of these organizations are alive today and what they may have been up to lately.

With reporting by Jay Peterzell/Washington and Robert T. Zintl/Rome

Bruce W. Nelan
Time Magazine
Nov26.1990

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,971772,00.htm

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Thanks again to Global Research:

Operation Gladio: CIA Network of "Stay Behind" Secret Armies
The "Sacrifice" of Aldo Moro

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9556

Corporate America Contravenes OFAC Supplies Bush "Terror" Network

Trading with the 'Enemy'

Today American companies are downright brazen about dodging the sanctions. And why not? On the list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons maintained by the Office of Foreign Asset Control at the U.S. Department of Treasury, only 1% of 3,032 separate entries are Dubai-based individuals and entities designated under the Iraq, Libya and Iran terrorism sanctions programs. On the Commerce Department's current list of 55 foreign end users specifically involved in proliferation activities, there is not one U.A.E. entity; the agency dispatched its first attaché to Dubai only 15 months ago. Since 1999 the government has turned down just 2% of applications to export to the U.A.E.--sometimes snaring unsuspecting entrepreneurs (see box). Officials do point out that 114 end-use checks were conducted in the region between 2000 and 2003, up from 63 checks from 1996 to 1999.

...

Halliburton is far from the only brand that shows up in Tehran. Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Microsoft, among many other U.S. companies, keep Dubai offices and are favorites these days among Iranian traders in Dubai. Reason? Strong demand for "anything high tech for military or oil services," says Bolurfrushan of the Iranian Business Council. "In compliance with U.S. trade laws, it is Microsoft's policy to not sell products to Iran from any of its offices," says a spokeswoman for the software colossus. (Dell says it follows export controls, too.) To curtail the proliferations, the Department of Commerce is strengthening its regulation that punishes U.S. companies that send goods and know--or have reason to know--those goods could contribute to weapons of mass destruction.

http://www.forbes.com/global/2004/0419/041_print.html

Dick Cheney, Iran and Halliburton: A Grand Jury Investigates Sanctions Violations

 

If you do business with terrorists, if you support them or sponsor them, you will not do business with the United States of America  - George W. Bush, Nov. 7, 2001

In order to comply with terrorist sanctions law, neither Halliburton (the U.S. parent company) nor any of its U.S. subsidiaries here or overseas can engage in any decision making with regard to, or become involved in, business transactions between the foreign subsidiary – Halliburton Products and Services – and Iran. The foreign subsidiary must be truly independent in order to legally take advantage of the loophole.

After initially closing an investigation of Halliburton in early 2001, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control reopened the case in January 2004, after CBS News’ 60 Minutes broadcast an expose of Halliburton Products and Services’ longtime business practices with Iran.

In February 2004, Senator Lautenberg’s office provided Treasury Department investigators with suspicious documents (published in this report) that indicate that the Iranians had certain named contacts at Halliburton in 1997 and 1998, when Dick Cheney was CEO. The documents were significant because it was unclear whether these contacts were employed by a U.S. subsidiary, KBR, or the foreign subsidiary, Halliburton Products and Services Limited. As discussed in this report, those two subsidiaries share an office, phone and fax lines in Dubai,  United Arab Emirates.

Full Report

http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:OwEJhOIjjYoJ:www.iranwatch.org/government/US/Congress/Letters-reports/us-congress-lautenbergreport-halliburton-0205.pdf+Iran+Sanctions+loophole&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2

Download us-congress-lautenbergreport-halliburton-0205.pdf (5.3mb)

Operation Phoenix and the SLA

The implication or latent threat of force alone was sufficient to insure that the people would comply - CIA Director William Colby

What we're really doing in Vietnam is killing the cause of 'wars of liberation.' It's a testing ground - like Germany in Spain. It's an example to Central America and other guerrilla prone areas - Bernard Fall, Ramparts. December 1965. 

Nelson Brickham viewed Vietnam as a war that would be "won or lost on the basis of intelligence," and he created [the] Phoenix [Program] as the vanguard in that battle. Unfortunately, the Phoenix front line unraveled faster than the VCI's; dissension between the Americans and Vietnamese, and the CIA and the military doomed the program to failure. And while the insurgents held tight, mistrust of U.S. government policy in Southeast Asia born during Tet 1968 and brought to a boil by the Cambodian invasion, began to unravel American society.

Immediately following the Cambodian invasion, massive antiwar demonstrations erupted across the country. In Ohio Governor James Rhodes reacted violently, vowing to 'eradicate' the protesters. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard responded to his exhortations, firing into a crowd of demonstrators at Kent State College, killing four people.

The spectacle of American soldiers killing American citizens had a chilling on many people, many of whom suddenly realized that dissent was a dangerous in the United States as it was in South Vietnam. To many Americans, the underlying tragedy of the Vietnam War symbolized by Phoenix, was finally felt at home. Nixon himself articulated those murderous impulses when he told his staff, "Don't worry about decisiveness. Having drawn the sword, stick it in hard. Hit' em in the gut. No defensiveness."

Nixon backed his words with actions. He ordered one of his aides, a former Army intelligence specialist and president of the Young Americans for Freedom, Tom Huston, to devise a plan to surveil, compromise, and discredit his domestic critics. The Huston Plan was called evidence of a "Gestapo mentality" by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina.

What Ervin meant by the "Gestapo mentality" was Phoenix in its conceptual sense - the use of terror to stifle dissent. Reflecting Nixon's "Gestapo Mentality," offensive counterintelligence operations were directed against dissenters in America: blacks, leftists, pacifists, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and American Indians. The most famous example may have been mounted by the CIA's domestic operations branch against the Black Liberation Movement; as in Chile, it provoked a violent reaction by security forces and served to justify repression.

Colston Westbrook, according to Mae Brussell in a July 1974 article in The Realist, was a CIA psywar expert. An adviser to the Korean CIA and Lon Nol in Cambodia,  Westbrook from 1966 until 1969 reportedly worked (undercover as an employee of Pacific Architects and Engineers) as an adviser to the Vietnamese Police Special Branch. In 1970 Westbrook allegedly returned to the United States and was gotten a job at the University of California at Berkeley. According to Brussell, Westbrook's control officer was William Hermann, who was connected to the Stanford Research Institute, RAND Corporation, and the Hoover Center on Violence. In his capacity as an adviser to Governor Ronald Reagan, Hermann put together a pacification plan for California at the UCLA Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence. As part of this pacification plan Westbrook, a black man, was assigned the task of forming a black cultural association at the Vacaville Medical Facility. Although ostensibly fostering black pride, Westbrook was in truth conducting an experimental behavior modification program. Westbrook's job, claims Brussell, was to program unstable persons, drawn from California prisons, to assassinate black community leaders. His most successful client was Donald DeFreeze, chief of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). It was Westbrook who designed the SLA's logo (a seven-headed cobra), who gave DeFreeze his African name (Cinque), and who set Cinque and his gang on their Phoenix flight to cremation, care of the Los Angeles SWAT Team, the FBI, and U.S. Treasury agents. 

The Phoenix Program: A Shattering Account of the most Ambitious and Closely Guarded Operation of the Vietnam War by Douglas Valentine. Pgs. 336, 337. ISBN# 0 688-09130-X

Flight of the Phoenix: From Vietnam to Homeland Security

Why Was Patricia Hearst Kidnapped?

Unattended Briefcase Forces Evacuation of San Francisco Ferry Building

An unattended item prompted a bomb scare at San Francisco's Ferry Building today, forcing the suspension of ferry service and the evacuation of the ferry terminal area for about an hour, passengers and Coast Guard personnel said.

Fire trucks, police and Coast Guard crews with bomb sniffing dogs descended on the Ferry Building for what ultimately turned out to be a false alarm that delayed some commuters during the after-work rush hour.

The bomb scare about a mile away from AT&T Park, where Major League Baseball's All-Star Game was being played.

Joann Piccardo, a paralegal from Novato who works in San Francisco, was in line at about 5:45 p.m. for the Larkspur ferry when she noticed the boat that she was supposed to be boarding for a 5:55 p.m. departure sat idling offshore.

"They had diverted all the incoming boats from the pier," Piccardo said. "Then the loudspeaker came on, but you couldn't understand what they were saying, so people were very confused about what was happening. Someone in the crowd said, 'They said we need to evacuate.' "

Passengers were directed around the far side and front of the Ferry Building, Piccardo said.

"We decided to go across the street because you never know," she said with a laugh.

A Coast Guard officer at the scene who declined to give his name said the suspicious item turned out to be a brief case with papers and some kind of satchel. Security teams swept the area, including bringing a bomb sniffing dog onto at least one docked Baylink ferry. A team of coast guard officers with a dog left the boat at about 7:30 p.m. A Coast Guard spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment.

By 7:15 p.m., Piccardo was back in line with about 150 other passengers who boarded the Larkspur ferry after service resumed.

   

John Cote
San Francisco Chronicle
July10.2007
Bomb Scare Forces Evacuation of SF's Ferry Terminal

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/10/BAGGIQUG9A5.DTL

Note:

Apparently there was another identical bomb scare story at the SF Ferry Building during the week of March 10, 2008, but search engine queries yielded zero results.  Or was this a  recycled news item?

Merry Christ.MaSS '007 and Happy '0(H)ate

Three tracks from Ministry's Rio Grande Blood dub remix album: Rio Grande Dub-ya

In the Name of the Father...

Download 07_yellow_cake_hexaflouride.mp3 (6mb)

...the Son...

Download 09_ass_clown_osama_mcdonald_mix.mp3 (feat. Jell-o Biafra) (4.9mb)

..and the Holy Spirit...

Download 11_lies_lies_lies_known_unknown_lies_mix.mp3 (5.4mb)

"it aint easy being mean"

...never trust a junkie...

"Neighborhood's going to Hell"

Southern California Wildfires (2007)

Hell Los Angeles: Constantine (2005)

Download d_storm05.jpg (1991)

9 November als Deutscher Schicksalstag

November 9, 1993. It's still three hours until first light, and all systems are "go." I'll use the time to write a few pages-my last : diary entry. Then it's a one-way trip to the Pentagon for me. The warhead is strapped into the front seat of the old Stearman and rigged to detonate either on impact or when I flip a switch in the back seat. Hopefully, I'll be able to manage a low-level air burst directly over the center of the Pentagon. Failing that, I'll at least try to fly as close as I can before I'm shot down.--The Turner Diaries by Dr. William Pierce., born September 11, 1933.

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Six, Seven. Go to Hell, Go to Heaven.

Jonestown: "Suicide Tape Transcript" (excerpt)

"Suicide Tape Transcript"

JIM JONES: How very much I've tried my best to give you a good life. But in spite of all of my trying a handful of our people, with their lies, have made our lives impossible. There's no way to detach ourselves from what's happened today.

Not only are we in a compound situation, not only are there those who have left and committed the betrayal of the century, some have stolen children from others, and they are in pursuit right now to kill them because they stole their children. And we are sitting here waiting on a powder keg.

I don't think it is what we want to do with our babies--I don't think that's what we had in mind to do with our babies. It is said by the greatest of prophets from time immemorial: "No man may take my life from me; I lay my life down." So to sit here and wait for the catastrophe that's going to happen on that airplane--it's going to be a catastrophe.

...

That plane'll come out of the air. There's no way you can fly a plane without a pilot.

--

The Jonestown Death Tape (FBI No. Q 042) (November 18, 1978)

An audio recording made on November 18, 1978, at the Peoples Temple compound in Jonestown, Guyana immediately preceding and during the mass suicide or murder of over 900 members of the cult.

Download ptc1978-11-18.flac16_64kb_mp3.zip (20.4mb) TRT: approx 44mins

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How many People's Temple members died at Jonestown? 909, 911, 914? The exact number is unclear.

also see:

The Black Hole of Guyana: The Untold Story of the Jonestown Massacre

"911 is Not a Working Number"

Download 911_00.wav

Download 911_01.wav

Phone Recording Archive

Oklahoma's Global War On Terrorism 'Template'

A new license plate template currently available through the State of Oklahoma Department of Motor Vehicles. Just in time for the new Mother Jones article implicating the FBI in the Oklahoma City bombings.

From the Democracy Now! program of August 3, 2007:

To most people the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing is a closed case. Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols were the two prime suspects accused. McVeigh was executed in 2001, and Nichols is serving a life sentence. But a Salt Lake City lawyer searching for the truth behind his brother's death has uncovered a wealth of new information that could implicate the FBI. The documents he dug up through countless Freedom of Information Act requests suggest the FBI knew about the plot to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in advance but did little to prevent it.

I am also currently working on an entry for the new companion blog, al-keme | research archive, titled "Kenneth, What's The Frequency?"