The Voice of the White House

Washington , D.C. May 24, 2008 : “The son of a top CIA official has laid his hands on a thick file of transcribed conversations between a writer and a retired senior CIA man. I have read through them and find them to be very entertaining (if you like black humor) and very enlightening. What old men with fond memories will say to a good listener is absolutely amazing.

Now we can expect CIA officials, retired and active and a number of the Washington in-crowd to play the Joe Lieberman card and demand that these be removed from the internet. Joe, who is a congenital asshole, wanted some pro-Arab postings taken down because they offended him. Wait until McCain reads what this ex-CIA boss has to say about him! You will hear him in Georgetown with the windows shut.

The CIA are still torturing people but are being very careful about it. We now know that the FBI agents working with them, were horrified by their brutality and reported their illegal actions to their senior officials in Washington . None of the agents, to their credit, would dirty their hands with this perverted and sadistic behavior but I note that their seniors sat on this.

Having read over period reports on some of this, all of it highly classified, it is my feeling that some of these perverted shits should be arrested and put on trial so the rest of the world can see the genuine filth and evil that the worthless Bush has deliberately unleashed. We ought to try Bush and give him a fair trial before we find him guilty, but that will never happen. “

Conversations with the Crow

On October 8th, 2000 , Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA's Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer's Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley 's widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley 's CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley , died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda , Md.

After Corson's death, Trento and a well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson's bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled 'Zipper.' This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley 's involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The  small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento 's house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA's actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA's horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA's activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious 'Regional Interrogation Centers' in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid "historians" and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley 's survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of  highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by  DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton  conspired to  secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files our of the agency. Crowley did the same thing  right before his own retirement , secretly removing thousands of pages  of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago , Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in military intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

One of Crowley ’s first major assignments within the agency was to assist in the recruitment and management of prominent World War II Nazis, especially those with advanced intelligence experience. One of the CIA’s major recruitment coups was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler’s Gestapo who had fled to Switzerland after the collapse of the Third Reich and worked as an anti-Communist expert for Masson of Swiss counterintelligence. Mueller was initially hired by Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA,  who was running the Gehlen Organization out of Pullach in southern Germany . Crowley eventually came to despise Critchfield but the colonel was totally unaware of this, to his later dismay.

Crowley ’s real expertise within the agency was the Soviet KGB. One of his main jobs throughout his career was acting as the agency liaison with corporations like ITT, which the CIA often used as fronts for moving large amounts of cash off their books. He was deeply involved in the efforts by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile , which eventually got him into legal problems with regard to investigations of the U.S. government’s grand jury where he has perjured himself in an agency cover-up

After his retirement, Crowley began to search for someone who might be able to write a competent history of his career. His first choice fell on British author John Costello (author of Ten Days to Destiny, The Pacific War and other works) but, discovering that Costello was a very aggressive homosexual, he dropped him and tentatively turned to Joseph Trento who had assisted Crowley and William Corson in writing a book on the KGB. When Crowley discovered that Trento had an ambiguous and probably cooperative relationship with the CIA, he began to distrust him and continued his search for an author.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas  in 1993  when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. . In 1996, Crowley , Crowley told Douglas   that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley ’s story but only after Crowley ’s death. Douglas , for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

In 1998, when Crowley was slated to go into the hospital for exploratory surgery,  he had his son, Greg, ship two large foot lockers of documents to Douglas with the caveat that they were not to be opened until after Crowley ’s death. These documents, totaled  an astonishing 15,000 pages of CIA classified files involving many covert operations, both foreign and domestic, during the Cold War.

After Crowley ’s death and Trento ’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley ’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley ’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas . No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.

All of this furor eventually came to the attention of Dr. Peter Janney, a Massachusetts clinical psychologist and son of Wistar Janney, another career senior CIA official, colleague of not only Bob Crowley but Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Jim Angleton and others. Janney was working on a book concerning the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official, and later the mistress of President John F. Kennedy.  Douglas had authored a book, ‘Regicide’ which dealt with Crowley ’s part in the Kennedy assassination and he obviously had access to at least some of Crowley ’s papers. Janney was very well connected inside the CIA’s higher levels and when he discovered that Douglas had indeed known, and had often spoken with, Crowley and that after Crowley’s death, the FBI had descended on Crowley’s widow and son, warning them to never speak with Douglas about anything, he contacted Douglas and finally obtained from him a number of original documents, including the originals of the transcribed conversations with Robert Crowley.

In spite of the burn bags, the top secret safes and the vigilance of the CIA to keep its own secrets, the truth has an embarrassing and often very fatal habit of emerging, albeit decades later.

While CIA drug running , money-launderings and brutal assassinations are very often strongly rumored and suspected, it has so far not been possible to actually pin them down but it is more than possible that the publication of the transcribed and detailed Crowley-Douglas conversations will do a great deal towards accomplishing this.

These many transcribed conversations are relatively short because Crowley was a man who tired easily but they make excellent reading. There is an interesting admixture of shocking revelations on the part of the retired CIA official and often rampant anti-social (and very entertaining) activities on the part of Douglas but readers of this new and on-going series are gently reminded to always look for the truth in the jest!

Date: Saturday, January 27, 1996

Commenced: 11:02 AM (CST)

Concluded: 11:25AM (CST)

EC: Hello?

GD: Mrs. Crowley. This is Gregory. Is Robert available?

EC: I think he’s upstairs. Greg was supposed to come over….let me call him for you.

GD: Thanks

(Pause)

RTC: Gregory! How are you?

GD: Emily says you’re expecting your son…

RTC: He’s probably not coming. Never mind. If he comes, I’ll tell you and we can talk later…in the afternoon.

GD: I talked to Corson about a foreword for the next Mueller book. I know we mentioned this but are you willing to contribute?

RTC: Certainly. Have it out in a few days or I can work it up and fax it to you. OK?

GD: Fine. Thanks a lot for this.

RTC: It’ll just make me more popular, that’s all. How are you coming with the next one?

GD: About halfway through. I’ve decided to put in the counterfeiting business and probably do a hit on the Gehlen mob…

RTC: That ought to frost Critchfield’s worthless balls!

GD: And I was there, don’t forget, and I know where the bum hid the money. I was thinking about doing a number about Willi (Krichbaum). He was Critchfield’s top recruiter. Wait until they find out good old Willi was a Gestapo colonel and Mueller’s top deputy in the Gestapo!

RTC: More fun and games. You really do like to twist the nuts, don’t you?

GD: Only if they don’t come off in my hands.

RTC: Lois would never miss them. What else goes in?

GD: Well, I owe Corson the thing on Kronthal. He goes in for sure. Maybe Wisner too.

RTC: Remind me to tell you about the time Frank got caught in Rock Creek giving a blow job to a black exchange student. Fine thing for a southern gentleman to get caught at.

GD: Mississippi or something.

RTC: Originally one of the New York Gardiners. Gardiner’s Island . Old family. They had holdings in Montana , if memory serves me…of course names elude me…but holdings in Mississippi too. Poor Frank was a first class nut case. You know about blowing his brains out all over the garage roof? Yes, I told you that, didn’t I. Couldn’t follow through on his promises to the Hungarians of our military intervention if they rose up against Stalin….

GD: But Stalin died in 1953 and that business was in 1956…

RTC: Yes, yes, of course but I meant the Stalin empire.

GD: Understood. Theory and practice.

RTC: What else new and exciting to drive them bats?

GD: Wallenberg…

RTC: Who cares about that hebe?

GD: Well, the gits started the story that the Russians got him…

RTC: We made that one up…

GD: But Mueller said the Gestapo bagged him and offed him in some farmyard..

RTC: Had it coming. Listen, Gregory, what do you want to do about the Kennedy business? I guess there’s still interest in it. God…fifty thousand books and all of them fuller of shit than a Christmas turkey.

GD: How many did your people write, sponsor and publish? I mean to deliberately drag carmine herrings across the path?

RTC: Lost track. Hundreds. One thing Wisner did was to build up a very cooperative media and that includes book publishers.

GD: I could consider that.

RTC: Maybe after I’m dead and gone. It would be better.

GD: Fine. Question here?

RTC: Shoot.

GD: Was Oswald a patsy?

RTC: Sure. He worked for us once in Japan … at Atsugi…and also for ONI. Not high level but he was a soldier after all.

GD: How would I handle that?

RTC: Let’s claim he worked for Hoover ! Why not?

GD: I mean, did he actually?

RTC: Christ no. Poor idiot. Jesus, what a wife! First class bitch. Thought Lee was a millionaire and when she came here, she would strike it rich. Turned out she lived in a slum and she had to put up with a loudmouth husband and then got stuck with a kid. No wonder she did what we told her.

GD: Women are not easy to deal with. They are either at your feet or your throat…

RTC: Oh, the truth of it all! Emily is a lovely person but I tell her nothing. And let me ask you that when you talk with her, for God’s sake, don’t talk shop with her. It would just stir her up. Most Company wives are a pack of nuts. Did I mention Cord’s wife?

GD: I don’t think so. I…no, I don’t remember. Cord Meyer?

RTC: Right, the Great Cyclops. Or the One-Eyed Reilly.

GD: In the center of his forehead?

RTC: Lost it in the Pacific. Glass.

GD: The wife?

RTC: What?

GD: You mentioned his wife…

RTC: Ah yes. He married the daughter of Pinchot just after the war…

GD: Gifford?

RTC: Correct. The governor. Very attractive woman but her sister was even better. She married Bradlee who is one of the Companies  men. He’s on the ‘Post’ now. Cord’s wife was what they call a free spirit…liked modern art, runs around naked in people’s gardens and so on. Pretty but strange and unstable. She and Cord got along for a time but time changes everything….they do say that, don’t they?…They broke up and  Cord was so angry at being dumped, he hated her from then on. She took up with Kennedy. Did you know that?

GD: No.

RTC: Oh yes indeed. Kennedy had huge orgies out at 1600 with nude women in the pools and all that. Even had a professional photographer come in and take pictures of him in action. Old Jack loved threesomes, the occasional dyke and God knows what else. It was Joe’s money that shut people up, including his nasty wife…

GD: I thought she was a saint. Old family…

RTC: Bullshit! Family is Irish, bog trotters, like Kennedy. Not French at all. A greedy, lying and completely nutty woman. Never liked her. One generation here and they give up washing clothes and put up the lace curtains in the family parlor. What was I saying?

GD: About Cord’s wife…

RTC: Oh yes. After Mary…that was her name…Mary. You haven’t heard about her?

GD: No.

RTC: After Kennedy bought the farm, ex-Mrs. Meyer was annoyed. She became the steady girlfriend and he was very serious about her. Jackie was brittle, uptight and very greedy. Poor people usually are. Mary had money and far more class and she knew how to get along with Jack. Trouble was, she got along too well. She didn’t approve of the mass orgies and introduced him to pot and other things. Not a good idea. Increased chances for blackmail or some erratic public behavior. But after Dallas , she began to brood and then started to talk. Of course she had no proof but when people like that start to run their mouths, there can be real trouble.

GD: What was the outcome?

RTC: We terminated her, of course.

GD: That I didn’t know. How?

RTC: Had one of our cleaning men nail her down by the towpath while she was out for her daily jog.

GD: Wasn’t that a bit drastic?

RTC: Why? If you knew the damage she could cause us…

GD: Were you the man?

RTC: No, Jim Angleton was. And Bradley, her brother-in-law was in the know. After she assumed room temperature, he and Jim went over to Mary’s art studio to see if she had any compromising papers and ran off with her diary. I have a copy of it…

GD: Could I see it?

RTC: Now, Gregory, don’t ask too many questions. Maybe later.

GD: Did anyone get nailed?

RTC: Some spaced out nigger was down there but he had nothing to do with it. Our people came down on that place in busloads to help out the locals but they were searching for the gun. Our man was supposed to have tossed in into the water but it never made it in and one of our boys found it in some bushes, half in and half out of the water. Beat the locals to it by about ten seconds. Very close. See, it was one of our hit weapons that never had serial numbers. Not made that way.

GD: Ruger made a silenced .22 during the war for the OSS . No numbers, parkerized finish.

RTC: Same thing.

GD: Couldn’t they have talked sense into her?

RTC: What did Shakespeare say about angry women?

GD: ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’

RTC: Exactly.

GD: She had children?

RTC: Some. One was killed by a drunk driver. Caused all kinds of friction in the family as I remember.

GD: Mayer. He was tied up with Alan Cranston?

RTC: Yes. The one-world crap.

GD: I knew Cranston and his family. United World Federalists. He married into the Fowle family and I was a friend of one of the members. Ultra left-wing. Was at his house by the golf course one time and the bedroom bookshelf was jammed with Commie books…Debray, Mao, Lenin, Marx, Engels, Kautsky and on and on.

RTC: Cord was under investigation by Feebie for that.

GD: Phoebie?

RTC: Slang for FBI. We’ll have to talk about Cranston …he left the Senate..

GD: I know. I nailed him. The savings and loan business. I got inside skinny on this and tipped off the media. ABC people. It went on from there.

RTC: Good for you. Cord was tied up.

GD: You didn’t like him.

RTC: Nasty, opinionated, loud and a general asshole.

GD: What did he think about doing his wife?

RTC: Ex-wife. Let’s be accurate now. Ex-wife. When Jim talked to Cord about this, Cord didn’t let him finish his fishing expedition. He was in complete agreement about shutting her up. Gregory, you can’t reason with people like her. She hated Cord, loved Kennedy and saw things in the Dallas business that were obvious to insiders or former insiders but she made the mistake of running her mouth. One of the wives had a talk with her about being quiet but Mary was on a tear and that was that.

GD: Yes, I think there’s something there.

RTC: But not while I’m breathing, Gregory. Not until later. And it wasn’t my decision. I was there but Jim and the others made the final decision. You know how it goes.

GD: Oh yeah, I know that one. But to get back to the foreword. No problem?

RTC: None at all.

GD: I don’t think Tom Kimmel will like that.

RTC: I’ve heard from him on that. He doesn’t like the idea that Bill and I approve of you. I wouldn’t tell him too much if I were you. You can tell me things and sometimes you can tell Bill but Kimmel has a mouth problem.

GD: I helped him with the Pearl Harbor matter…

RTC: Don’t bother. What else is going to be in the next book?

GD: Something on the Duke of Windsor .

RTC: Gregory, I think my son is about to come up here so perhaps we can get together later today. Call me after 6 tonight if you wish. Sorry but weekends can be busy here.

GD: Understood.

(Concluded at 11:25AM CST )

SECRECY NEWS

from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2008, Issue No. 50

May 23, 2008

INTEL SURVEILLANCE COURT GETS TWO NEW JUDGES

Two new judges were named to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court this week, Secrecy News has learned, one a Clinton appointee and one a Reagan appointee.

Judge Mary A. McLaughlin of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and Judge James B. Zagel of the Northern District of Illinois were appointed to seven year terms on the secret court by the Chief Justice

to replace Judge James G. Carr and Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton, whose terms expired on May 18.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is responsible for reviewing and approving government applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for domestic electronic surveillance and physical search of suspected foreign intelligence agents or terrorists.

But it does more than that. The Court also reinterprets the terms of the Act in an undisclosed fashion, producing in effect a body of "secret law," a matter discussed at an April 30 hearing of the Senate

Judiciary Committee.

"The FISC has in fact issued... legally significant decisions that remain classified and have not been released to the public," observed Judge John D. Bates, a member of the FIS Court , when he denied an ACLU motion for disclosure of portions of those decisions last December.

The appointment of new judges to the FIS Court assumes particular importance today because of a proposal pending in Congress that would refer existing lawsuits alleging illegal warrantless surveillance to the secret FIS Court in what would likely be a severely constrained adjudicative process. The proposal is being considered as an alternative to granting outright immunity to telephone companies that allegedly cooperated with the President's surveillance program.

Judge Mary A. McLaughlin was appointed to the bench in 2000 by President Clinton. She was formerly an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia , and a special counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on terrorism during the Ruby Ridge hearings in 1995.

Judge James B. Zagel was appointed in 1987 by President Reagan. Judge Zagel is "an intelligent, tough-minded jurist," said the Chicago Council of Lawyers, a public interest association, in a 1991 evaluation. However, "some lawyers are concerned that he will bring a political agenda to bear in certain classes of cases."

The new appointments were confirmed for Secrecy News today by Sheldon L. Snook of the administrative office at the D.C. District Court.

A new appointment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, an appeals court, has not yet been formally announced, he said. But the Providence Journal (RI) reported on April 14 that Judge Morris Sheppard Arnold of the 8th District had been named to the Review Court .

An updated roster of the membership of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/court2008.html

"During calendar year 2007, the Government made 2,371 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for authority to conduct electronic surveillance and physical search for foreign intelligence purposes," the Justice Department told Congress in the latest annual report on FISA activity.

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/2007rept.pdf

HPSCI: CLASSIFICATION OF CYBER SECURITY PROGRAM IS "EXCESSIVE"

The National Cyber Security Initiative, which is "the single largest... and most important initiative" in next year's budget, is being conducted under "excessive classification," the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) said in its new report on the 2009 intelligence authorization act.

For the cyber security program to function as intended, "it will require a partnership with industry unlike any model that currently exists. The excessive classification of the [Initiative], however, militates against the collaboration necessary to achieve that partnership."

That view coincides with the recent assessment of the Senate Armed Services Committee regarding overclassification of the cybersecurity program (Secrecy News, 05/15/08 ).

The 121-page House Intelligence Committee report is full of grist for the intelligence policy mill.

The Committee flexed its oversight muscles by imposing a limit on spending for covert action to no more than 25 percent of the allocated funds until each member of the Committee has been briefed on all covert actions.

"The obligation to report to the committees is not negotiable," the report declared. "It is not an obligation that the President can ignore at his discretion. It is not an obligation that can be evaded by claiming that briefing the congressional intelligence committees will require other committees to be briefed. It is not an obligation that can be evaded by broad assertions of executive power."

The Committee would establish a new Inspector General for the entire intelligence community, and would impose new limits and new reporting requirements on intelligence contractors.

The Republican minority said that more should have been done to combat unauthorized disclosures of classified information:

"We are disappointed that the Committee has held no hearings and conducted little to no substantial oversight on this issue during this Congress. In addition, we are concerned that the issue is becoming increasingly politicized, sometimes under the false premise that there are 'good leaks' and 'bad leaks'. The Committee should take a firm and clear position that no unauthorized disclosures of classified information should be tolerated."

The minority also insisted that "the United States does not torture," a view that is increasingly hard to reconcile with the public record, including a new report from the Justice Department Inspector General that catalogued many abusive forms of interrogation by U.S. military and intelligence personnel.

See the House Intelligence Committee Report on the 2009 Intelligence Authorization Act, H.Rep. 110-665, May 21:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2008_rpt/hrpt110-665.html

AN ONLINE INDEX TO AIR FORCE HISTORICAL RECORDS

A new searchable index of hundreds of thousands of documents held by the Air Force Historical Research Agency has been created by private researchers and posted online.

http://www.airforcehistoryindex.org/

The index does not provide access to the underlying documents, which must be requested from AFHRA. Nevertheless, it has several interesting features.

For one thing, it represents a step forward in improving accessibility to declassified government records. The new Air Force index provides a simple illustration of what can be done to alert the interested public to the existence of particular records, and suggests how much more still needs to be done, including providing online access to the records themselves.

Second, the new index represents an unusual, implicit public-private partnership. Researchers gained access to the Air Force bibliographical data and installed a search engine on top, then posted it online in the  public interest. The researchers said they preferred to remain anonymous.

NARA ESTABLISHES "CONTROLLED UNCLASSIFIED INFO" OFFICE

The National Archives and Records Administration today announced the establishment of a new Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) Office that is intended to lead the implementation and oversight of a new White House policy on CUI, which is unclassified information that is deemed to require protection from disclosure (Secrecy News, 05/12/08).

The CUI Office, to be headed by Information Security Oversight Office director William J. Bosanko, is tasked with developing implementation guidance, training, and oversight of the new government-wide policy.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2008/05/cui052208.html

CHINA 'S ECONOMIC CONDITIONS, AND MORE FROM CRS

Noteworthy new reports from the Congressional Research Service, obtained by Secrecy News, include the following.

" U.S. Nuclear Cooperation With India : Issues for Congress," updated May 20, 2008 :

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL33016.pdf

"Nuclear Weapons: The Reliable Replacement Warhead Program," updated May 19, 2008 :

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL32929.pdf

"Suits Against Terrorist States By Victims of Terrorism," updated May 1, 2008 :

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/terror/RL31258.pdf

" Syria : Background and U.S. Relations," updated May 1, 2008 :

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33487.pdf

" China 's Economic Conditions," updated May 13, 2008 :

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33534.pdf

The Forgotten Dead

May 26, 2008

by Brian Harring

brianharring@yahoo.com

May 23, 2008, Lt. Jeffrey A. Ammon, 37, of Orem , Utah , died May 20, as a result of injuries suffered from an improvised explosive device in the Aband District, Afghanistan. The sailor was attached to Commander Navy Region Northwest, Bangor , Wash. , and serving in Afghanistan as a member of Provincial Reconstruction Team Ghazni.    Pfc. Howard A. Jones, Jr., 35, of Chicago, died May 18 in Chicago from injuries sustained when he was struck by a hit-and-run driver while on leave from the Iraq theater of operations.  He was assigned to the 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley , Kan.

May 21, 2008, Lt. Col. Joseph A. Moore, 54, of Boise , Idaho , died of natural causes May 20 in Djibouti . He was assigned to the 124th Wing, Idaho Air National Guard, Gowen Field , Idaho .  1st Lt. Jeffrey F. Deprimo, 35, of Pittston , Pa. , died May 20 in Ghazni , Afghanistan , of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.  He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 103rd Armor Regiment, Pennsylvania Army National Guard, Williamsport , Pa.

May 20, 2008 , Cpl. William J. L. Cooper, 22, of Eupora , Miss. , died May 19 while supporting combat operations in Helmand Province , Afghanistan . He was assigned to 1^st Battalion, 6^th Marine Regiment, 2d Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune , N.C. Pvt. Branden P. Haunert, 21, of Cincinnati , Ohio , died May 18 in Tikrit , Iraq , of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky. Master Sgt. Davy N. Weaver, 39, of Barnesville, Ga., died May 18 in Qalat, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Georgia Army National Guard, Macon , Ga.