The Slaughterhouse Informer

A Compendiium of Various Official Lies, Business Scandals, Small Murders, Frauds, and Other Gross Defects of Our Current Political, Business and Religious Moral Lepers.

Presenting a new magazine that contains material that is not found elsewhere and is very difficult to post on the Internet. The ‘Voice of the White House’ will appear in each issue containing material not found on TBR News for very obvious reasons.This publication will appear once a week, on Wednesday, every week, will be ten pages in length and is available by subscription only. The price is $5.00 a month and can be paid via PayPal or by check, sent to ‘Morris Productions, 1350 E. New Yort St. Ste A2-190, Aurora, Il 60504.’ If you don’t like it, and Bush supporters can read the Drudge Report for free, you can cancel at any time.

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., October 9, 2008: “This heavily-suppressed story about the Iranian ship laden with highly radioactive waste, bound for the eastern end of the Mediterranean, is typical of how the government sits on inconvenient stories. They imposed a silence on the Forward Base Falcon disaster and have not posted all the U.S.dead in Iraq and now we have the interrupted saga of the MV Iran Deyanat being blocked from all regular media sites. The story, cut off initially by a dismissive article in late September in the ‘Long War Journal,’ a “very friendly government (DoD) entity” was renewed by an article by Brian Harring at the beginning of October. It then got a tremendous reading around the world…in the millions…but never a word in our controlled press, or government-controlled sites like ‘Wikipedia’ basically controlled in toto by the CIA.

Mr. Harring had over 1,500 emails in five days, most of them very favorable but some from the lunatic fringe (one shown below, ed) For those who have not heard of this business, I will supply some input, to include confidential material not published.

On August 21^st, 2008, the Iranian MV Iran Deyanat, a 44468 dead weight tonnage carrier. that is  owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) - a state-owned company run by the Iranian military that was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury for its false manifests and traffic in forbidden nuclear materials, was seized by Somali pirates to be held for their usual ransom.

The ship had set sail from Nanjing, China, July 28, 2008 

The Old Nanking Port of Nanjing is the largest inland port in China, yearly reaching 108.59 million tons in 2007. The port area is 98 kilometers (61 mi) in length and has 64 berths including 16 berths for ships with a tonnage of more than 10,000. Nanjing is also the biggest container port along the Yangtze River; in March 2004, the one million container-capacity base, Longtan Containers Port Area opened, further consolidating Nanjing as the leading port in the region.

During her stay at Nanjing,  the MV Iran Deyanat was loaded primarily with eight cargo containers, lined with lead and with electronic locks. The 20 ft containers are  8’ wide, and carry a load of 48,060 lb per container. This special container cargo had a total load of 384,480 pounds which consisted of packaged of nuclear waste that originated at the Tianwan 1&2 Atomic plants from Jiangsu Province (built in 2007) Once the radiation death of many of the pirates (16) became known, reporters attempting to contact responsible officials in the Pentagon and the Department of State were told these officials refused to comment on any of the implications of the cargo. The ship’s manifest was falsified but the deadly cargo was supposed to be headed for Rotterdam and an unspecified “German client.” 

Much of the story was covered in a London Times article which was subsequently removed from that paper’s archive and the initial story was tailored by the ‘Long War Journal,’ a website with close connections to the Department of Defense and the CIA. It tended to dismiss the entire question of a radioactive cargo and instead, discussed unspecified chemicals.

Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, Commander, US Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain Combined Maritime Forces,  said the U.S.-led coalition patrolling the Gulf of Aden “does not have the resources to provide 24-hour protection for the vast number of merchant vessels in the region,"

                Russia said it will soon join international efforts to fight piracy off the Somalia coast.However, it will conduct its operations independently, RIA-Novosti news agency reports Navy commander Adm. Vladimir Vysotsky as saying . "We are planning to participate in international efforts to fight piracy off the Somalia coast, but the Russian warships will conduct operations on their own," he said.

Russian nationals are frequently among the crews of civilian ships hijacked by pirates off the Somalia coast, notes RIA-Novosti.

                At the beginning of June, the UN Security Council passed a resolution permitting countries to enter Somalia's territorial waters to combat "acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea."

                The American media has given no coverage of any kind to this incident,

                Russian sources have disclosed that when American Naval personnel, attached to the U.S. Fifth Fleet,  finally boarded the MV Iran Deyanat and took all of her crew, including the Iranian captain, into what was called “protective custody,” and while the opened cargo container containing Chinese atomic waste was being sealed and decontaminated, the bridge and the captain’s quarters were thoroughly searched.  An “intensive” interrogation of the initially recalcitrant captain plus documents obtained from his safe showed a truly horrifying picture to the trained naval intelligence people.

                The Deynant was not the only cargo ship to load containers of radioactive waste at Nanjing; and  two others had preceded her July, 2008 visit. The problem is that the captain did not know either the names of the two Iranian -controlled ships nor their destinations.

                His destination was the eastern end of the Mediterranean but it now appears that the ship was not intended to be blown up. Instead, the eight cargo containers were to be taken to the Israeli port of Haifa on the Mediterranean. Haifa is the largest of Israel's three major international seaports, which include the Port of Ashdod, and the Port of Eilat. It has a natural deep water harbor which operates all year long, and serves both passenger and cargo ships. Annually, 22 million tons of goods pass through the port..In 2007, the U.S. DHS’ CBP initiated a joint security agreement with Israel whereby U.S. agents, working with Israel, would develop and install programs to protect the ports from terrorist attacks..

                CBP’s Container Security Initiative, (CSI), is a cooperative effort with host country governments to identify and screen high-risk shipments before they leave participating ports. More than 80 percent of all cargo containers destined for U.S. shores originate in or are transshipped through 55 CSI ports in North, South and Central America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

                 CSI addresses the threat to border security and global trade posed by the potential for terrorist use of a maritime container to deliver a weapon. CSI proposes a security regime to ensure all containers that pose a potential risk for terrorism are identified and inspected at foreign ports before they are placed on vessels destined for the United States.

                The initiative seeks to:

·         Identify high-risk containers. CBP uses automated targeting tools to identify containers that pose a potential risk for terrorism, based on advance information and strategic intelligence.

·         Prescreen and evaluate containers before they are shipped. Containers are screened as early in the supply chain as possible, generally at the port of departure.

·         Use technology to prescreen high-risk containers to ensure that screening can be done rapidly without slowing down the movement of trade. This technology includes large-scale X-ray and gamma ray machines and radiation detection devices.

        If a cargo container ship sails from another port that has the U.S. –controlled CBP system, and does not stop at another port enroute, it is able to enter another port equipped with the CBP system and unload its cargo without interference.

        Let us say that a mythical ship, the Extreme Venture, picks up a cargo at an approved port and sails off to another port that is also approved. Again, if a country or entity wanting to take a dangerous cargo to the same port, it need only paint out its name, change its radio call signs, and using the methodology instituted by the U.S., enter, for example, the port of Haifa a day in advance of the real Extreme Venture. Having passed all the approved requirements, it can enter the harbor, proceed to an assigned dock, unload its containers onto waiting trucks and sail out of the harbor without let or hindrance. And the next day when the real Extreme Venture arrives, one can expect that the security people would be in a state of frenzy. By that time, the fake Extreme venture has put yet another name on her bows and stern, run up another flag and using shipping information easily available on the internet, become another innocent cargo ship among many.

                The American view, known to several other countries, is that as both the United States and Israel have been at the forefront of violent verbal attacks against, and threats of violence to, Iran, they are now the prime targets of what, at the worst case scenario, could amount to a commercial delivery of least 16 containers of deadly radioactive material, mixed with high explosives.

                 One of the largest cargo container ports in America, Long Beach, California, has DHS inspection teams at work on a round the clock basis but because of the huge volume of traffic, only 2% of the cargo containers can be checked thoroughly at any given time. This means that should another Iranian cargo container, sailing under a false flag and with a false manifest, dock at Long Beach and offload her deadly cargo, there is a 98% chance that it could avoid any kind of inspection, be loaded onto waiting trucks and shipped to destinations all over the United States.

                It is extremely doubtful if the Bush administration would attack Iran but because they have been in loud support of an even louder and more threatening Israel, our useless President, [fully responsible for the deliberate removal of  vital controls over the American banking industry that has caused the boom-and-bust we are now paying for,] has, by his loud but empty threats against Iran, put millions of Americans at potential risk of a terrible death by radiation poisoning.

                This explains the stunned silence on the subject of the Deyanat affair and the tight blackout imposed on any news of her or the purpose of her cargo of powdered death.”

Evidence grows that Israel, with U.S. aid, is preparing to attack Iran
October 9, 2008

by Joel Brinkley   

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

                Month after month, the nation's attention seems to ping-pong back and forth between the world's two egregious nuclear malefactors, North Korea and Iran.

                For the last few weeks, all eyes have been on North Korea, as the nation's idiosyncratic leadership began reopening a plant that manufactures weapons-grade plutonium. Christopher Hill, an assistant secretary of state, met, to no effect, with North Korea's leaders in Pyongyang last week - a visit that would have been inconceivable while hawks still dominated the Bush administration.

                But, as anyone might guess, the problems in Iran did not suddenly freeze while everyone looked east. In fact several recent developments leave the strong suggestion that Israel is preparing to attack Iran - with significant help from the United States.

                You may remember that Israel carried out a major military exercise involving more than 100 F-16 and F-15 fighter jets over the Eastern Mediterranean last June. At the time, American officials said the exercise appeared to be a rehearsal for a bombing attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. And Shaul Mofaz, an Iranian-born former army chief of staff and defense minister, warned that "if Iran continues with its program for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack" - just as Israel bombed a suspected nuclear site in Syria last year.

                The likelihood of an American attack has diminished. American commanders "think it would complicate the situation in Iraq and the region," John Bolton, the former U.N. ambassador, told me. He favors an attack but says "the Bush administration was much more inclined to do it a few years ago." Secretaries Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates, at State and Defense - relative moderates within the Bush administration - now dominate discussion of issues like this.

                Would Washington support an Israeli attack? Recently, the administration has given clear signals that it would not. But then, why did the Pentagon announce last month that it planned to sell Israel 1,000 new GBU-39 bunker-busting bombs? They are small weapons that can be dropped from the wings of the fighter jets in Israel's air force. Each can penetrate 6 feet of reinforced concrete. If several aircraft hit the same target the total penetration could be much deeper.

                Why does Israel need those bombs? Israeli military analysts have been saying they are for attacking underground weapons depots in Gaza or southern Lebanon. Perhaps.

                But then, why about the same time did the Pentagon agree to sell Israel sophisticated upgrades for the country's Patriot anti-missile missiles - and send more than 100 technicians to install them? If Israel attacked, Iran has warned that it would fire volleys of ballistic missiles in response.

                And there's more: Just last week came the news that the United States has deployed an advanced early-warning radar system in Israel for detecting incoming missiles. It is so sophisticated that, for now, U.S. Army crews will be stationed there to operate it.

                Bolton and others advised against "reading all of that into this," as he put it. The United States continually sells military equipment to Israel. Most years the United States gives Israel about $2 billion in military aid, and it must be spent on American arms.

                What is more, Abbas Milani, an expert on Iran at Stanford University, told me that the Iranian press of late has been saying "the time is past" when the United States might attack. And while there is some concern about Israel, the Iranian papers correctly note that the country is locked in negotiations to form a new government that aren't likely to be settled for several weeks. Israel would not attack before a new government forms.

                At the same time, though, Israelis certainly saw Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the Iranian president, telling the United Nations last month that "the Zionist regime is on a definite slide toward collapse, and there is no way for it to get out of this cesspool."

                Still, all of this may be a hall of mirrors. The United States may be arming Israel purely for defensive reasons. Israel's military exercises and blustery threats may simply be the state's way of warning Iran. On the other hand, the Bush administration's statements cautioning Israel may simply be an attempt to prevent Iran from blaming Washington if Israel does attack.

                In any case, Bolton said, "Israel's decision will not be based on what the Pentagon wants." And if Israel does attack, Iran will consider Washington responsible, no matter what the administration has said.

                "So if the U.S. is going to be blamed anyway," Bolton offered, "we ought to go ahead and assist them."

Letters from the Back Wards

October 9, 2008

by Brian Harring

www.brianharring@yahoo.com

                Every so often, I get strange emails from very angry people, most of which are merely annoying but a few are truly funny. Some time ago, when I covered the Forward Base Falcon disaster, someone claiming to be a “GI stationed in Baghdad” wrote that there were no explosions at the base other than a box of flares that went off in a vacant field and that the military hospital where the many casualties were sent did not exist. Unfortunately for the writer, his IP number showed that he was living in Vienna, Virginia at the time he wrote the denial and there was considerable information on the blasts on Google, many from major news sites in Europe and a long article, with many pictures of the allegedly non-existent military hospital. So much for that government shill. Now, I have been contacted on the Iran Deyanat story by a Greg Bacon who expressed great concern over the accuracy of the story. It is clearly evident that Mr. Bacon has a very difficult time grasping  relatively simple issues but this in no way prevents him from displaying his preconceptions with vigor and error.

From:

"Greg Bacon”19Gibson74@getgoin.net

To:

“brian harring" brianharring@yahoo.com

Sent:

Oct 7, 2008, at 1:04 PM,:

Greg Bacon says:

Mr. Harring:So the Iranian ship would be at least 12 miles away and even further out?

Response: Yes, absolutely. So what does that have to do with the subject? Do you think a big cloud of radioactive dust only goes three miles before it falls down?

And the dirty dust cloud will reliably drift over 12 miles to land on Israeli coastal cities?  Uhh, isn't one of the big hang ups about using a dirty bomb is that you need a wind blowing from a certain direction for a certain period of time to make it effective?

Response: The prevailing daytime winds are on-shore from the west during the year, and off-shore at night.

Yet these diabolical Iranians are somehow going to make an wind blow towards Israeli cities?  

Response: Golly, if the winds blow from the west and the bomb is detonated west of Israel, I guess the material would have no choice but to drift east over the coastal Israeli cities. Unless, of course, they decided to go the other way and descend on New York instead.

A dirty bomb set off inside a city probably won't give the ones who set it off the kind of results they had hoped for, yet we're supposed to think that one set off from over 12 miles away will?

Response: I don’t think you have a clear grasp of the situation here. Maybe I should reduce it to a simpler level for you. A large cargo ship off the coast of Israel blows up. It is carrying eight (8) large cargo containers of highly radioactive waste in the form of powder. The material in the cargo containers, all eight of them, would naturally be blown up into the air and to some altitude. The winds always are blowing towards the east. The ship is to the west. The particles will blow to the east. Eventually, the detritus contained in the afordsaid cloud will come to earth. Earth, in this case, would be anything underneath it. By looking at a map, what is underneath it should be Israeli cities and towns. Possibly even a farm or two. Descending particulant is not too choosy about where it falls.

The Israeli's are quite capable of setting off dozens of thermonuclear explosions over Iran.  They have nuclear tipped ballistic missiles and they have subs with nuclear tipped cruise missiles. They wouldn't have to worry about their shiny new F-16(I)'s getting shot to hell over Tehran, they could send in the mushroom clouds from far away.

Response: How do you know this? The Israelis have been boasting about their enormous nuclear arsenal for years and as to the fleet of submarines, all armed with deadly missiles, where might the fictional submarines go to launch their missiles? The Persian Gulf perhaps? The stories about nuclear weapons are just that; stories. We like to call it propaganda at the day school. And you think these stories would so terrify the Iranians that they would never dare to do a dirty deed like setting off a huge dirty bomb of the Israeli coast? Get real, why not.

As for comparing Pearl Harbor's surprise attack with some Israeli scenario,  that's a stretch. Israel has been gaming attack scenarios in their IDF war rooms for decades.

Response: Wow, that’s really news. That would mean that a large Israeli navy is stationed, permanently, at the eastern end of the Med and any ship within range of Israel is always boarded and searched. They do this all the time, even with cruise ships. Again, get real. Do you have any idea how many commercial carriers exit Suez on a given day? Look it up. Three or four? Hundreds. And many keep on going up to Cypress, Haifia in Israel or nearby Lebanon or even Syria. Theory sounds so interesting but practice is much better..

They probably have run numerous what-if computerized war games.

The country stays damn near on a war footing 24/7, due in no small part to their paranoia and their fear of the "P" word, peace.  To say that they'd be caught off guard by an exploding ship 12 miles away is not to be believed.

Response: I see. By God, they would hear the electronic fuses at work and rush to the scene with fire extinguishers. No, they could not stop such an attack and the direct result of it would be hundreds of thousands of deaths. Wishful thinking and mindless theorizing does not stop determined attacks. Your counterarguments ought to have common sense as a basis, not wishful thinking.

This whole thing is being rigged and set up by various elements in Israel and her rabid supporters in the US.  Wait until the crooks, liars and con artists on Wall Street and DC get thru looting the American wallet early next year.

Response: What, pray tell, does the financial collapse in America have to do with the Iranian fanatics setting off a dirty bomb in the eastern Mediterranean? You might as well talk about the HAARP nonsense or Remote Viewing.

That's when someone like FOX will start running stories--again--about some nefarious plan by the Iranians to set off some type of dirty bomb. And that's when the US House will again try to push thru the measure of blockading Iran.

For now, the Zionists that have a chokehold on America will push scary tales about those nasty Iranians wanting to detonate an atomic device as an EMP over America's heartland.

--- On Wed, 10/8/08, Greg Bacon <19Gibson74@getgoin.net> wrote:

From: Greg Bacon <19Gibson74@getgoin.net>
Subject: Re:
To: brianharring@yahoo.com
Date: Wednesday, October 8, 2008, 5:30 AM

Bravo, Mr. Harring, your masters in Tel Aviv must be pleased.  Of course, Israel doesn't have any nukes, or custom made German subs, those are fictions also. Just ask Mordechai Vannunu about those nukes...Oops, you can't, since Israel has forbade him from talking to foreigners ever since they let him out of jail after 18 years imprisonment due to his taking about Israeli nukes.

If you call yourself a journalist and don't know about the Israeli subs carrying nukes, then either you are lazy and don't actually investigate before writing or you're on the payroll of Israel.

A dirty bomb set off 12 miles away would directly cause Israeli deaths in the hundreds of thousands?  To use your words, get real. The actual nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't cause those kinds of deaths, yet a dirty bomb will?

And pray tell, how does an explosion lift dust far enough into the atmosphere to cause this scenario?   Guess those terrorists will have some type of bomb that first lifts the cargo container to a certain height, then explodes it so the dust will... blah, blah, blah.

If you don't see the relationship between the Israeli-Firsters in Congress trying to pass that Iranian blockade bill and this dirty bomb story, then I feel for your readers

Give the Pentagon or better FOX News a call, they are always needing a agitprop writer such as yourself.

Response from Brian Harring:

Mr. Bacon:

I can tell from your rantings and predictable gibberish, that you are one of the loonies that bombard me with silly crap from time to time. I checked out your shabby website and like you, it is full of garbage; badly written, illogical… and highly entertaining to read….if you like fiction.

You ought to join forces with Sorcha Faal, the HAARP people, the insane fugitive Chris Bolleyn, the 9/11 Truth idiots,, the Remote Viewing people and last, but not least, the bipedal chimps who run the various Evangelical sites and squeal endlessly about the fictional Rapture, talking in tongues and the imminent return of Jesus H. Christ.

I don’t know how many regular viewers you have but aside from your relatives, I would imagine something in the neighborhood of 400 a day is reasonable, considering the quality of the site.

 My article on the ship, on the other hand, got about 475,000 viewers in two days. If you can beat that, sonny, you can give up your present  job as poster boy for the Special Olympics and join the staff at the FIX News that you gabble on about. Of course I will publish some of this hilarity in the future as I am working on the’ Nut Fringes on the Internet’ and I am delighted to add you to the stew.

And might I recommend that you take a Midol and try to calm down? Prozac obviously does not work. I will go back to writing facts and you can do anti-Semitic humor.

North Korea said to be deploying missiles

October 9, 2008

Reuters

VIENNA/SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea has reportedly deployed more than 10 missiles on its west coast for what appears to be an imminent launch, and diplomats said on Thursday the North has barred U.N. monitoring throughout its nuclear complex.

Those potentially destabilizing moves came amid reports that the United States has offered to remove North Korea from its terrorist blacklist this month in an effort to keep a nuclear disarmament pact from falling apart.

It would be an unprecedented test if North Korea fired all 10 of the surface-to-ship and ship-to-ship missiles, but intelligence sources quoted by the Chosun Ilbo paper said they thought the North may launch five to seven of them.

North Korea has forbidden ships to sail in an area in the Yellow Sea until October 15 in preparation for the launch, an intelligence source told the paper.

A South Korean defense ministry official declined to comment on the report but said the government had no indications of unusual activities in the North.

North Korea has a history of timing its missile launches during periods of increased tension or negotiation to signal a hard line, analysts say.

U.S. nuclear envoy Christopher Hill visited Pyongyang last week in a bid to convince North Korea to return to a disarmament-for-aid deal and halt plans to restart an aging nuclear plant that makes bomb-grade plutonium.

Kyodo news agency, quoting unidentified Japanese government sources, said Hill agreed that Washington would not make verification of Pyongyang's uranium enrichment program or proliferation activities a condition of delisting.

The United States suspects North Korea has a parallel uranium enrichment program in addition to its plutonium-producing reactor in Yongbyon and that it has proliferated nuclear technology to Syria.

IAEA MONITORS

Analysts had speculated Hill may have reached some kind of understanding in Pyongyang that is delicate in nature and requires the support of the other parties in the nuclear talks -- China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.

A Japanese foreign ministry spokesman said he could not immediately comment on the report.

Washington said it would take North Korea off the terrorism list -- bringing economic and diplomatic benefits -- once a system had been agreed to verify Pyongyang's nuclear program.

In Vienna, diplomats said the International Atomic Energy Agency will announce on Thursday its monitors have been barred throughout the Soviet-era Yongbyon nuclear complex.

North Korea has vowed to rebuild the largely dismantled Yongbyon in anger at not being removed from the blacklist.

Pyongyang ousted the monitors from the plutonium-producing area of the complex two weeks ago and vowed to start reactivating the facility within days.

But at the time, it let the IAEA continue verifying the shutdown status of other parts of Yongbyon. The IAEA's tools included surveillance cameras and seals placed on equipment.

"This (shutdown of IAEA monitoring) was anticipated if things didn't move on the diplomatic front," said a senior Vienna diplomat. "Now we'll see if things move. Whether the monitors go back depends on someone else negotiating this thing; it's not the IAEA."

Admiral Timothy Keating, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, said he had not seen any increased military activity in North Korea, "nor have we responded in any way with any military posture changes."

The United States put North Korea on its list of state sponsors of terrorism for the 1987 midair bombing of a South Korean airliner over the Andaman Sea that killed all 115 people on board.

(Reporting by Jack Kim in Seoul, Linda Sieg and Yoko Kubota in Tokyo, Mark Heinrich in Vienna; Writing by Bill Tarrant; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2008, Issue No. 98
October 10, 2008

 ARMY INTELLIGENCE VIEWS KIDNAPPING AND TERRORISM

                Kidnapping and other forms of terrorist violence have developed into a significant form of asymmetric conflict, according to a new U.S. Army manual (pdf) that describes the theory and practice of kidnapping with numerous case studies from recent years.

                "This document promotes an improved understanding of terrorist objectives, motivation, and behaviors in the conduct of kidnapping," the 168 page manual states.

                See "Kidnapping and Terror in the Contemporary Operational Environment," U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command Intelligence Support Activity, 15 September 2008.

                The manual on kidnapping is the sixth supplement to "A Military Guide to Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century," an Army instructional series, portions of which are labeled "for official use only." A copy of the set was obtained by Secrecy News.


SCATTERED CASTLES: IC DIRECTIVE ON PERSONNEL SECURITY

                The Office of the Director of National Intelligence today released a series of policy documents governing security clearances and access to classified information for intelligence community employees.

                Intelligence Community Directive 704 (pdf) and five accompanying policy guidance documents set forth policy on security clearance background investigations, adjudicative guidelines, clearance revocation and appeal processes, reciprocal acceptance of security clearances, and more.

                Intelligence Community Policy Guidance 704.5 (pdf) identifies "Scattered Castles" as a comprehensive database of IC security clearance authorizations, which can be used to verify clearances.

                With minor technical changes, the new directive and accompanying guidance appear to closely replicate the previous policy under Director of Central Intelligence Directive 6/4.

                See ICD 704 and the supporting guidance, along with other IC Directives, here.

Melamine, poisons and the misappliance of science

The takeaways from rogue Chinese food additives

October 6,  2008

by George Smith, Dick Destiny

The Register

As melamine alerts reverberate around the world in the wake of China's dairy export industry, it affords us an opportunity to look at bad chemistry while considering the scale of the global food market. And how vulnerable consumers are when garden-variety greed, not terrorism, is the driver in mass poisonings.

In the first quarter of last year, the Chinese company, Xuzhou Anying, was advertising dust of melamine as something it called "ESB protein powder" on the global market trading website, Alibaba. "The latest product, ESB protein powder, which is researched and developed by Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co., Ltd... Contains protein 160 - 300 percent, which solves the problem for shortage of protein resource," it boasted.

Awkwardly worded and a bit fishy, it nevertheless apparently hooked North American pet food makers and animal feed distributors - specifically ChemNutra, Menu Foods and Wilbur-Ellis - who lost control of their supply chain and weren't able to resist claims - which should surely have raised eyebrows - for an apparently magical protein powder. In this way, melamine found its way into a great deal of pet food as a protein extender. Xuzhou's money gig ended when someone went too far and upped the dose enough to cause precipitation in the kidneys, killing and sickening a large but not easy to track number of pets.

News stories from a year ago initially noted that melamine was not originally thought to be that toxic. But, at the time, few knew that it had a use as a processed food adulterant chosen specifically because it tested as protein. Paradoxically, it's also used in chemical combination with urea to make plastics, one example being toilet seats made in China, and bought at the local hardware store by this writer.

China makes a lot of melamine and the country also manufactures and exports tens of billions of dollars worth of powders and concentrates for use in processed food. Readers can see where this is going. Completely stamping out criminal rings making and diverting melamine for use in processed food is going to be a long process, if it can be done at all.

Nitrogen, yum...

Ironically, urea used to be used as a food adulterant, too. In the US, as late as 1985 the compound had been used to step on wheat to boost nitrogen determinations and profit for the seller.

Now, just in case one gets the idea this is bagging on China too much, consider it takes two parties to make this crime work. The people who make and sell the melamine. And the western firms in the food industry working the territory for the best possible deals, in the process giving up tight supervision and quality control of their suppliers.

An additional lesson, as if any were actually needed, was furnished by Baxter International, a US company which had worked through another US partner, Scientific Protein Laboratories, in outsourcing heparin production to China. Heparin is used in kidney dialysis patients and certain operations. Tainted with an altered form of chondroitin sulfate, the contaminant, cheaply produced from pig cartilage, was probably chosen because it cost about one twentieth of actual heparin isolation. It also had great similarity to the anti-clotting agent in cursory testing. In the US, Baxter's subpotent contaminated heparin is thought to have caused at least nineteen deaths.

From these incidents, one can tell there's a bit of actual science being maliciously applied in the course of finding cheap things with a certain utility in stepping on food additives and drugs for increased profit.

With the case of melamine, there is probably a range of doses of it which, cynically, are sub-optimal for the generation of kidney stones and sand in the urine in mammals. When someone becomes too greedy or careless and the amount is pooched too high in tons of baby milk powder, there's a disaster which exposes the operation, and the arrests start.

Oops, there goes the supply chain...

In this arrangement for profit, bad elements in China (as well as western firms) have cooperatively achieved subversion of what are supposed to be trusted sources. Islamic terrorists can only dream about such inside access to critical supply chains. The desire for profit is a much better motivator than the desire to create simple terror.

So as melamine criss crosses the globe in Ritz crackers for Korea, cookies for Holland, in chocolate for Cadburys, in White Rabbit Creamy Candies for the Asian markets in California, and in the products of internationally manufacturing American food giants like Kraft, Heinz and Nabisco, what's that stabbing pain in your lower back?

Oh, it's just a twinge of the old lumbago, you think.

Bootnote: "Country-of-origin labeling finally became a reality on Tuesday for meats, produce and some nuts sold in American supermarkets," reported the New York Times this week. But many processed foods are exempt. Guess what kinds of foods melamine gets into. Rhetorical question, obviously. ®

George Smith is a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, a defense affairs think tank and public information group. At Dick Destiny, he blogs his way through chemical, biological, and nuclear terror hysteria, often by way of the contents of neighbourhood hardware stores.

Conversations with the Crow: Part 35

Editor’s note: When we ran the first conversation  in this series, there was the question of reader interest and acceptability. It is pleasant to report that our server was jammed with viewers and the only other tbrnews story that has had more viewers was our Forward Base Falcon story that had a half a million viewers in less that two days. We are now going to reprint all of the Crowley conversations, including a very interesting one on John McCain,  in chronological sequence. It is also pleasant to note that two publishers and three reporters have all expressed concrete interest in the Crowley conversations. It is even more pleasurable to note that a number of people inside the Beltway and in McLean, Virginia, have been screaming with rage!

                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: Friday, February 7, 1997

Commenced: 11:55 AM CST

Concluded: 12:35 PM CST

RTC: Hello there, Gregory. I hope you’re feeling better than I am.

GD: You have a cold?

RTC: No, getting old. Some advise Gregory. Don’t get old. The worst part isn’t forgetting things, it’s remembering. And knowing you are helpless to correct the present. But there still is correcting the past.

GD: Historians do that all the time. Hitler lost so Hitler was always wrong. Roosevelt won so Roosevelt was always right. Saints and sinner. It depends entirely on who wins.

RTC: True. I told you I once met Roosevelt, didn’t I? My father got me in to see him. Old and shaky but still clever. Phony old bastard, one thing to the face and another to the back but very shrewd in political circles. He set up a powerful movement but as soon as he hit the floor, they started to dismantle it.

GD: Müller was filling me in on the anti-Communist activities he was involved in. McCarthy and all of that.

RTC: Well, Franklin put them all in and Truman threw them all out. Most of them were Jewish so we were all accused of anti-Semitism but we held all the cards then and they knew it so criticism was muted. It wouldn’t be that way now, but times change.

GD: They always do and a smart man changes with them.

RTC: Sometimes, the older forms are better.

GD: Yes but people grow tired of old forms and want new ones. A revolution might mean more money and power for some and death or disgrace for others. The wheel does turn.

RTC: So it does. I wanted to give you a little background here, Gregory, about you. You see, at one time, these others wanted to set up a sort of private think tank. They wanted to call it after the oracle of Delphi. Tom Kimmel, Bill Corson, the Trento ménage, Critchfield and others. But they wanted me to be the honcho.

GD: And why you?

RTC: I have the connections with the business community. I could get big money people behind the idea. It was a sort of miniature Company if you will. Money and power. We always called it the Company because it was a huge business conglomerate. But anyway, this think tank would bring all of us lots of money. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel too happy with the makeup of it. Kimmel is pompous and entirely too much obsessed with his late Grandfather, the Trentos’ are very lightweight but aren’t really aware of it and poor Bill is a perpetual wannabe, running around trying to sound like a great keeper of various unknown secrets. We tried Costello. Tom liked him because of his Pearl Harbor writings but I never liked him. There was a screw loose in his brain somewhere. And of course being a fairy didn’t improve his objectivity. I gave up on John after his trip to Reno. He hated you, you know.

GD: My heart is breaking. I should have given him some of my old shorts to chew on.

RTC: Now do let’s be serious, Gregory. John was a spiteful person but I got the impression he thought you were much worse than he was and since he was hiding his perversions, he probably thought you could see through him. I think people get that impression. That you watch and see too much. Of course, it doesn’t help that you run your mouth and say terrible things about self-made saints. Anyway, I didn’t want John involved and then I began to have some interest in you. Of course I couldn’t put you forward for the group because Kimmel detested you and Bill didn’t know where to turn. He liked you but always listened to others in making up his mind. When I ditched Costello and Bill knew you and I were talking, Kimmel went through the roof. He didn’t like me talking to you and spent much time getting his oafs at Justice to ring me up and tell me how terrible you were. Tom likes to get others to do his dirty work, I noticed long ago. The Trento family didn’t know you and Bill is actually afraid of you. So the private study group for profit more or less died a natural death. I wanted to include you but they did not so there it ended.

GD: I would have had no problem working with you but not with the others. Bill is a lightweight, Kimmel a gasbag and the one Trento book I tried to read was hopeless.

RTC: Yes.

GD: ‘And slime had they for mortar’ Genesis 11:3.

RTC: Citing Scripture, Gregory? I thought the Devil did that.

GD: He does. Daily. Now we call him Pat Robertson.

RTC: Where’s your Christian charity?

GD: I sold it to buy a gun.

RTC: Yes. Well, to get back to the subject here, which is the fact that these gentlemen do not like you but I do. They have stopped yapping about you because I told them to shut up but no doubt they still run around behind my back and try to stab you in the back. Never to the face but in the back.

GD: Not to change the subject, Robert, but why do you really call it the Company?
RTC: Because it’s a huge business. We are one of the most powerful businesses on the planet, Gregory. We make enormous sums of money, have established a tight and very complete control over the media, have the White House doing as we tell them to, overturn foreign governments if they dare to thwart our business ventures and so on.

GD: Business ventures?

RTC: A generalized case in point. A left-wing nigger gets into power in the Congo. The Congo has huge uranium deposits. Will Moscow get the uranium? The Belgian businessmen come to us for help. We agree to help them and we get into a civil war and murder Lummumba. One of our men drove around with his rotting corpse in his trunk. The head of the UN starts to interfere in matters so we have an aircraft accident that kills him very dead and stops the interference. We tell the President about the uppity nigger but not about poor dead Dag. We tell them what we want them to hear and nothing more.

GD: And the business aspect?

RTC: The drugs, of course, bring in astronomical amounts of loose money. And if some rival group cuts into the business, we get them removed. Ever read about huge heroin busts somewhere? Our rivals going down for the third time. All of this is part and parcel of the Plan.

GD: Sounds like the Templar’s Plan.

RTC: Ah, you know about this, do you? Which one of the seven dwarves enlightened you? Not Kimmel but probably Bill.

GD: Actually no. I was speaking of the Plan of the Templars…

RTC: Ah, you see, you do know that. You knew Alan was an initiate, didn’t you?

GD: Well, not in so many words. Didn’t the Templars get disbanded for having too much money? I think they killed DeMolay…

RTC: Now don’t change the subject here. They were never really disbanded but they went underground. Do you know how much money they had? The French only got a little bit of it. Now let me know who told you?

GD: You did, actually. Just now. I was thinking of Umberto Eco’s excellent ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ and his discussion of the survival of the Templars.

RTC: I missed that one. Is that an old book?

GD: No. Late ‘80s if I remember. Brilliant historical pastiche. Eco’s an Italian scholar and the book is wonderful although I doubt very few people in America would understand a word of it. They don’t teach history in our public schools, only political correctness. You can no longer look for the chink in someone’s armor anymore because Asians are terribly offended and you dare not call a spade a spade.

RTC: Yes, yes, I know all that. Stunts the mind.

GD: It’s my impression, based on my visits to your town, that they don’t have any minds to stunt.

RTC: Don’t forget, Gregory, that I was in government service as well.

GD: There are always exceptions, Robert.

RTC: Many thanks for your kindness, Gregory. The Templars have always had money but they have been an underground power for so long, they are set in their ways. We are public and they are not so there is a sort of joint partnership here. As I said, Dulles was taken in when he was in Switzerland. One of the Jung people as I remember. They can open doors, Gregory, don’t ever think they can’t, but they are always out of the sunlight.

GD: Like the mythic vampires.

RTC: Custom and usage as they say. We have common interests, believe me.

GD: Catholic group?

RTC: Not anymore.

GD: Well, I had an ancestor in the Teutonic Knights and they really never went away. And the Knight’s of Malta still have some influence in Papal matters. Interesting about the Templars, though. I thought Eco was just a good story teller. Could be. Secret societies have always intrigued parts of the public. The dread Masons, for example. Of course before the French Revolution, they had a great deal of clandestine power in France but now I think they’re just a high class fraternal organization. Müller told me that the Nazis were obsessed with the Masons but when the Gestapo got around to really investigating them, they found nothing sinister at all. Just a social organization and nothing more.

RTC: You know quite a bit about so many interesting things. I can see why you got on with the kraut and why the rat pack here hates you. I must ask you please not to discuss this business with anyone. I would also ask you not to put it into anything you write concerning me. The Kennedy business is bad enough but no one would believe a word of the other business.

GD: I agree, Robert. But if I have to give up a really interesting story, can I get more information on Kennedy/

RTC: Yes, I can send you more. I did give Bill a copy of the Russian report but nothing more. He started bragging about this so I basically shut him down. Of course it doesn’t really say anything but once is enough when someone starts to leak out material they have sworn to keep silent about.

GD: And have you tested me?

RTC: I don’t need to. You aren’t trying to make points with the bosses like they are. I hate to say it because I am friendly with all of them but they are just a bunch of useless asskissers. You certainly are not.

GD: No, I am not. I don’t trust anyone in the establishment. My God, you ought to listen to what the Landreth people were telling me, I want to wet myself, that they can put me on the cover of Time magazine. Of course I really believe them and I would like nothing better than to have my picture on the cover of Time magazine. It used to be a good news magazine but now it worse than People Magazine which sells very well in the supermarket check out lines. And right next to the National Enquirer which is probably written by the same people.

RTC: I think the day of the printed paper or magazine is dying. We still have our hand in on that game. We moved to television but that is also losing out so we are moving into the internet. But don’t ask me about that because I know nothing about it. We view the internet as very dangerous because we can’t begin to control it. Set up a few people with money and push them. Hope for the best you know but doubtful.

GD: The Templars story is interesting, mainly because I read Eco and know something about their early days.

RTC: When the conspiracy idiots babble on about secret societies, they don’t have any idea what they’re talking about. They go on about the CFR and the Masons but they don’t know the half of it.

GD: Did you ever read Mills’ The Power Elite? Came out in ’55 and is a little out of date but very good.

RTC: Can’t say as I have. Didn’t you mention this once? No matter. I might have but years ago. Speculative?

GD: Concrete, realistic and so on. The reason why the American public is so wrapped up in conspiracy theories is because they have lost all faith in their government and most of our major institutions such as banks, the press, mainline religion and so on.  I remember the so-called OPEC panic when the price of gas at the pump went up every ten minutes. There was no OPEC crisis but just the oil companies creating a panic so they could make huge profits. Ever notice, Robert, how the price of gas at the pump soars just at the beginning of summer when everyone drives on trips and then comes down in winter when no one drives? And how the price of fuel oil drops off in summer when no one needs it but then shoots up every winter when everyone does? Tell me, are these accidents?

RTC: Of course not, Gregory, of course not.

GD: I’m surprised that people don’t pick up on this.

RTC: They won’t pick up on anything at all and what if they did? A little talk here and there and they pay the bills.

GD: And the sheep get shorn again.

RTC: Yes, if you want to put it that way. That’s why they’re there, isn’t it?

(Conclusion at 12:35 PM CST)

Inside Account of US Eavesdropping on Americans

U.S. Officers' "Phone Sex" Intercepted, Recorded, Shared Across NSA Listening Post

October 8, 2008

by Brian Ross, Vic Walter, and Anna Schecter

ABC News

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

"These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and "collected on" as they called their offices or homes in the United States.

Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad's Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.

"Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another," said Faulk.

The accounts of the two former intercept operators, who have never met and did not know of the other's allegations, provide the first inside look at the day to day operations of the huge and controversial US terrorist surveillance program.

"There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect," said President Bush at a news conference this past February.

But the accounts of the two whistleblowers, which could not be independently corroborated, raise serious questions about how much respect is accorded those Americans whose conversations are intercepted in the name of fighting terrorism.

US Soldier's 'Phone Sex' Intercepted, Shared

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.

"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.

Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall's "smoke pit," but ended up feeling badly about his actions.

"I feel that it was something that the people should not have done. Including me," he said.

In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden, now director of the CIA, said private conversations of Americans are not intercepted.

"It's not for the heck of it. We are narrowly focused and drilled on protecting the nation against al Qaeda and those organizations who are affiliated with it," Gen. Hayden testified.

He was asked by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), "Are you just doing this because you just want to pry into people's lives?"

"No, sir," General Hayden replied.

Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said "all employees of the US government" should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance."

"They certainly didn't consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game," said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on the country's warrantless surveillance program.

"This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law," Turley said.

Listening to Aid Workers

NSA awarded Adrienne Kinne a NSA Joint Service Achievement Medal in 2003 at the same time she says she was listening to hundreds of private conversations between Americans, including many from the International Red Cross and Doctors without Borders.

"We knew they were working for these aid organizations," Kinne told ABC News. "They were identified in our systems as 'belongs to the International Red Cross' and all these other organizations. And yet, instead of blocking these phone numbers we continued to collect on them," she told ABC News.

A spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, Michael Goldfarb, said: "The abuse of humanitarian action through intelligence gathering for military or political objectives, threatens the ability to assist populations and undermines the safety of humanitarian aid workers."

Both Kinne and Faulk said their military commanders rebuffed questions about listening in to the private conversations of Americans talking to Americans.

"It was just always, that , you know, your job is not to question. Your job is to collect and pass on the information," Kinne said.

Some times, Kinne and Faulk said, the intercepts helped identify possible terror planning in Iraq and saved American lives.

"IED's were disarmed before they exploded, that people who were intending to harm US forces were captured ahead of time," Faulk said.

NSA job evaluation forms show he regularly received high marks for job performance. Faulk left his job as a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh to join the Navy after 9/11.

Kinne says the success stories underscored for her the waste of time spent listening to innocent Americans, instead of looking for the terrorist needle in the haystack.

"By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it's almost like they're making the haystack bigger and it's harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody," she said. "You're actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security."

The NSA: "The Shadow Factory"

Both former intercept operators came forward at first to speak with investigative journalist Jim Bamford for a book on the NSA, "The Shadow Factory," to be published next week.

"It's extremely rare," said Bamford, who has written two previous books on the NSA, including the landmark "Puzzle Palace" which first revealed the existence of the super secret spy agency.

"Both of them felt that what they were doing was illegal and improper, and immoral, and it shouldn't be done, and that's what forces whistleblowers."

A spokesman for General Hayden, Mark Mansfield, said: "At NSA, the law was followed assiduously. The notion that General Hayden sanctioned or tolerated illegalities of any sort is ridiculous on its face." 

The director of the NSA, Lt. General Keith B. Alexander, declined to directly answer any of the allegations made by the whistleblowers.

In a written statement, Gen. Alexander said: "We have been entrusted to protect and defend the nation with integrity, accountability, and respect for the law. As Americans, we take this obligation seriously. Our employees work tirelessly for the good of the nation, and serve this country proudly."