The anti-Muslim movement seems to have geared up in the fall of 2007 as the Counterjihad Brussels 2007 conference was held in the European
Parliament, followed by a second day of working groups in the Flemish
Parliament, with activists from 14 nations networking "to resist the increasing Islamisation of their
countries," according to a press release issued October 19, 2007 under the moniker Vigilant Freedom Europa with responses requested to the email address, gaia2600@hotmail.com.
Speakers for the conference included David Gerald Littman (married toGiselle Orebi Littman, an Egyptian refugee who publishes under the alias of Bat Ye’or); Dr. Arieh Eldad, member of the Israeli Knesset (endorsed in February 2008 by blogger Pam Geller, who also reported on the Brussels conference); Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, Director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and
Christianity; Sam Solomon, Director of Fellowship of Faith for Muslims
and author of the Charter of Muslim Understanding; Dr. Marc Cogen, Ghent
University; Dr. Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of Islamic
Antisemitism and frequent contributor to FrontpageMagazine.com; and Laurent Artur du Plessis, author of a forthcoming book
on shariah finance.
Littman, Bat Ye'or, with Shimon Peres
David Littman's wife, the author known as Bat Ye'or was one of the greatest inspirations for the manifesto put together by Anders Breivik. At a Meeting with Shimon Peres, June 1, 2008the couple were honored for their participation in “Operation Mural: Casablanca 1961,” along with numerous members of the Israeli Mossad.
On page 1414 of this 1515-page tome, he wrote:
April/May 2002 I am the Norwegian delegate to the founding meeting in London, England and ordinated as the 8th Justiciar Knight for the PCCTS, Knights Templar Europe. I joined the session after visiting one of the initial facilitators, a Serbian Crusader Commander and war hero, in Monrovia, Liberia. Certain long term tasks are delegated and I am one of two who are asked to create a compendium based on the information I have acquired from the other founders during our sessions. Our primary objective is to develop PCCTS, Knights Templar into becoming the foremost conservative revolutionary movement in Western Europe the next few decades. This in relation to developing a new type of European nationalism referred to as Crusader Nationalism. This new political denomination of nationalism will become the foremost counterweight to National Socialism and other cultural conservative political denominations, on the cultural right wing. Everyone is using code names; mine is Sigurd (the Crusader) while my assigned mentor is referred to as Richard (the Lionhearted). I believe Im [sic] the youngest one here.
Was there a connection dating back to 2002 that can be traced to any known operatives of similar persuasion in Britain?
Paul Ray's "Lionheart" Blog
Paul Ray with St. George
Prior
to his departure for Jerusalem in 2006, Paul Ray had a computer shop in the town of Dunstable, where he
lived in a rented flat, approximately five miles from Luton. After watching a childhood friend become a heroin addict and die after years of agony, Paul says he watched Pakistani Muslims continue to desecrate his Christian community with hard drugs, unabated by any effort on the part of police to stop them. His own attempts to do so led to death threats and forced him to flee his country. He started the blog under the profile of Lionheart, as he explained in a post on April 12, 2008:
It was only through a divine encounter when
I was in the Holy Land over Christmas 2006/2007 that this blog was made
possible. My path crossed with a computer expert whilst staying in
Jerusalem, and he helped me by setting this blog up and then showing me
how to run it, before that time I had never heard of blogs and I had
never really written anything since school 15 years ago. Since then I
have been able write my thoughts and experiences down for others to
read.
Much of his blog dealt with "drug dealing gangs of Pakistani Moslems from Luton who are connected to Al Qaeda," further described in a 3 February 2007 post entitled "Dunstable
- Death threat & the Al Qaeda connection," as he
interpreted the events:
Afghan poppies for heroin
95% of the Heroin on the streets of Britain comes from Afghanistan through Pakistan and is owned and controlled by Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda
has a stronghold in this country within the Bury Park Pakistani Muslim
community of Luton. Every level of the drugs trade from the top to the
bottom in Heroin and Crack cocaine in Luton is controlled by Al Qaeda, it has to be owned and controlled by them because they need the money to finance their 'war of conquest' against us.
Paul Ray aka Lionheart
On January 3, 2008, according to the Luton & Dunstable Express, DC Ian Holden, hate crime officer of the Bedfordshire Police, contacted Mr. Ray by an
email stating that he needed to report to the police station on
February 19, 2008 to be arrested on suspicion of the offense of stirring
up racial hatred by the material written at his blog, which was
allegedly a violation of sections 18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order
Act of 1986.
"Rather than returning to England to meet with police that February, Paul Ray called
the newspaper office from South Carolina in the USA to report that he
would instead be making an application for political asylum. He
continued speaking through his blog, which was then reported on by the
local newspaper, which reprinted a conversation between Ray and police in the March 15 edition. Notwithstanding his remarks to the contrary, Ray did return to Dunstable to meet with police and was arrested
in late March 2008. He bailed out of jail and was told to return in May
when he would either be charged or charges would be dropped. On May 28,
he gave the update situation concerning his arrest.
The thread of events which began to occur in May 2009 would lead up to the formation of the group connecting Paul Ray to the right-wing faction of the English Defence League.
Who are the English Defence League?
On September 11, 2009, the BBC headline asked the question: "Who are the English Defence League?" Its answer to that question serves as a brief history of the EDL, which had been organized the previous summer:
Over the summer the English Defence League has staged about half a dozen demonstrations around England. In Birmingham, about 200 pretty fired-up young men came to the city to protest against "Islamic extremism and terrorism"....
This week the BBC secured exclusive interviews with some of the organisation's leaders. At a building site north of London, we meet "Tommy". He won't give his real name because he says he will be targeted by extremists. Joining Tommy is an older man called Alan, from London. Later, a young man from Luton turns up with a mixed-race teenager from north London, who Tommy says is the head of the "youth wing"....
The English Defence League emerged from the angry scenes in Luton last March when a group of Muslims protested as the Royal Anglian Regiment paraded through the town on its return from Afghanistan. ...
Nick Lowles is the editor of Searchlight, which campaigns against far-right extremists. He says that the English Defence League should not be written off because it poses two risks."What we are seeing is the formation of a street army, people who will travel around the country to fight," he says.
"Into this mix you can get [far-right] organisations winding them up - let's go here or there, here's some money - giving them some organisational support, that kind of thing.
A month later Paraic O'Brien
of BBC Newsnight's October 10 edition gave readers a few more answers.
I spoke to the leader of the Luton division, a man calling himself Tommy Robinson - though that is not his real name.The
real Tommy Robinson was an infamous football hooligan with the MIGs,
the Men In Gear firm associated with Luton Town Football Club. According
to this Tommy, EDL's raison d'être is to take a stand against the rise
of radical Islam on Britain's streets. When you ask the rank and file
though they will tell you they are just anti- Muslim. Over the last five weeks I have got to know some of EDL's main players.
So,
who are they? Part of the problem with answering that question is they
do not quite know themselves. The organisation is about seven months old
[which would thus place its birth in March 2010] and only started gathering
any kind of momentum after 10 Muslim extremists staged an anti-war demo
at a Royal Anglian Regiment parade in Luton in March this year....The
leader of the youth division is Joel, an 18-year-old who lives with his
grandparents. His father is Irish, his mother Afro-Caribbean and Joel
grew up in multi-cultural Harrow, North London....Joel denies that there
is any militant undertone behind the balaclavas
and black shirts, but as he talks you get the feeling he enjoys the
drama of it all....
About a fortnight ago I was invited along to a pub near the Barbican
in London. The leadership of EDL were meeting some potential sponsors. One of them was an IT consultant working in the City. They were offering technical expertise to EDL.
One of first photos of Alan Lake
This Barbican meeting could only have been during the last week of September 2009, if Paraic O'Brien was being truthful. Another British newspaper, the Telegraph disclosed in a report appearing at approximately the same time, that Alan's last name was Lake, and elaborated further:
One of the organization’s principle strategists is a man calling himself Alan
Lake, who works as an IT consultant in the City and has helped create the
organisation’s intranet. Mr Lake, who is 45, single and originally from the
north of England, has advised the Far Right Swedish Democrats on tactics. He
told the Daily Telegraph that he became interested in Islamic writings some
four years ago through a love of Arabic music and became alarmed by the
religion’s “supremacist” aspect.
I meet two of the EDL's key figures in a Covent Garden pub - a
respectable looking man called Alan Lake, and a man who goes by the
moniker 'Kinana'. Lake is a 45-year-old computer expert from
Highgate, north London who runs a far-right website called Four
Freedoms. This summer he contacted the EDL and offered to both fund and
advise the movement.
The full alias of Lake's companion at the meeting, Kinana Nadir, said to be a "key figure in the 4 Freedoms Community, [who] has attended EDL demonstrations with people from the International Civil Liberties Alliance," and who was interviewed by the American Tea Party, where he was referred to as "an English Muslim spy."
Yaxley-Lennon, R. Spencer, Geller
By October 9, 2010 it was reported in the Guardian/Observer that an alliance between the Tea Party and the EDL had been struck, as well as linking the EDL to Pamela Geller. It was also alleged that "Lake is also believed to have been in touch with a number of anti-Islamic Christian evangelical groups in the US." Today's 4 Freedoms Library website is quite sophisticated in a chat room style setting, and the administrators are listed as:
Founder: Alan Lake Membership Management: Kinana Comment Moderation: Paul Collings Researcher: Shiva
We will pick up with Alan Lake and his associates in a subsequent post.
"Reaction should have been, if it was genuine, should have been six
months earlier. So it was postponed until the 11th of September. They chose this date, 11th of September to carry a certain
message."
Mohamed Magarief, with Ann Curry
President Mohamed Magarief of Libya knows without a doubt that the movie "Innocence of Muslims," produced by Egyptian immigrant to the United States, Noukala Basseley Noukala, had "nothing to do with" a deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. According to NBC News:
Magarief said there were no protesters at the site before the attack,
which he noted came in two assaults, first with rocket-propelled
grenades on the consulate, then with mortars at a safe house....Magarief told [NBC News' Ann] Curry that based on the accuracy of the assault, he
believes the attackers must have had training and experience using the
weapons.
Although U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice initially claimed the attack to have been inspired by the cheap, poorly made movie,White House Press Secretary Jay Carney last week said it was "self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack."
National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Glen Olsen, a 1988 Harvard Law School graduate (completing his legal studies just months before Obama entered Harvard Law), who previously served as general counsel for the National Security Agency, said the perpetrators were likely an offshoot of al-Qaida, similar
to its North African branch-- al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb--which
has been among the beneficiaries of the shift in power from Al Qaeda’s central leadership in Pakistan to its far-flung affiliates across the Middle East and Africa. This shift was likely accelerated by the killing in Pakistan in June 2012 of Abu Yahya al-Lib, the deputy to Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri,
by an American drone strike.
After two figures who reportedly replaced Osama bin Ladin were recently killed by drone attacks--Ayman al-Zawahri, an Egyptian surgeon, and Abu Yahya al-Libi , Qaeda commander who became Mr. Zawahri’s deputy after Bin Laden’s death in in 2011--it was predicted that increased violence would occur.
New Muslim Groups Taking Over?
According to Eric Schmitt's excellent analysis published on June 7, 2012 in the New York Times, it was expected that younger, more
impetuous fighters would vie to seize the mantle of global leadership, and he predicted the most likely group to present itself would be:
the affiliate in Yemen, formally known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,
or A.Q.A.P., who three times in the last three years have tried
unsuccessfully to blow up commercial airliners bound for the United
States. The most recent plot was thwarted last month
when the suicide bomber turned out to be simultaneously working for the
Saudi, British and American intelligence agencies. .
Schmitt continuing by saying "Al Qaeda’s wings in Yemen, North Africa and even Iraq have had little
difficulty sustaining a wave of violence, a trend that is likely to
continue well after Mr. Libi’s death, officials said." He then detailed a list of possible groups where violence may erupt:
In Iraq a few
hundred "Sunni extremists" said to have ties to Al Qaeda’s branch were likely responsible for at least some of the major bombings against the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
There is certainly no shortage of suspects of outside groups which may have been active in Libya. What is somewhat comforting to westerners, however, is the fact that the U.S. State Department and its consultants, whoever they are, seem to be much more knowledgeable than the previous Republican administration about these Muslim groups working to thwart attempts by a segment of the population within these areas in the Middle East wishing to depart from theocratic control of their governments.
Although it didn't happen instantly, it seems that American officials are getting around to realizing what really occurred in Libya. Eli Lake of The Daily Beastreported earlier this morning:
The intelligence officials who
spoke to The Daily Beast did so anonymously because they weren’t
authorized to speak to the press. They said U.S. intelligence agencies
developed leads on four of the participants of the attacks within 24
hours of the fire fight that took place mainly at an annex near the
Benghazi consulate. For one of those individuals, the U.S. agencies were
able to find his location after his use of social media. “We had two
kinds of intelligence on one guy,” this official said. “We believe we
had enough to target him.”
Another
U.S. intelligence official said, “There was very good information on
this in the first 24 hours. These guys have a return address. There are
camps of people and a wide variety of things we could do.” ...
The Daily Beast reported last week
that the U.S. intelligence community was studying an intercept between a
Libyan politician and a member of the so-called February 17 militia,
Libyans charged with providing security for the U.S. consulate in
Benghazi. More intelligence has come in that shows members of Ansar
al-Sharia, an al Qaeda–affiliated group operating in and around
Benghazi, were attempting to coerce, threaten, cajole, and bribe members
of the militia protecting the consulate.
Reuters issued a report this week stating that the government in Libya
"placed two powerful freelance units in the city under the command of
full-time army officers on Monday. Commanders of two units which
have, with official sanction, been providing security since the
overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi were ordered removed and the men of the
February 17 Brigade and Rafallah al-Sahati militia put under army
orders. A third unit, Libya's Shield, would also change leadership, an
official said."
On
Friday evening, hundreds of protesters angry over last week's killing of
the U.S. ambassador to Libya stormed the compound of the Islamic
extremist Ansar al-Shariah Brigade militia suspected in the attack,
evicting militiamen and setting fire to their building. After taking
over the Ansar compound, protesters then drove to attack the Benghazi
headquarters of Rafallah Sahati where militiamen opened fire on the
protesters, who were largely unarmed, leaving at least 20 wounded, and
several killed according to hospital sources.
In an article one year ago, given the cumbersome title, "Titanic Battle or Insider Trading? The S&P Downgrade and the Bilderbergers: All Part of the Plan?," Ellen Brown off-handedly dropped a couple of interesting dates closely connected to what she refers to as the Bilderbergers' One World Company, Limited, a term borrowed from author, Daniel Estulin, acknowledged Bilderberger expert.
Numerology--Tool of the Illuminati?
Those dates were August 5 and September 11, which she then qualifies the importance of by adding:
"But we don’t need to turn to numerology to find a motive for proceeding with the downgrade."
Why did she not explain that reference to "numerology," and instead backed off from citing those dates as crucial in understanding who was behind the downgrade?
This blog is reprising Ellen Brown's article in order to emphasize the importance of that numerological analysis and to alert readers about an upcoming book that will both give further credence to her story and will leave no stone unturned to explain what Ms. Brown backed away from. The book's author, S.K. Bain, states in the soon to be published book:
Work on the Pentagon mega-talisman started on September 11th, and then the structure was attacked on that very same day exactly 60 years later in an act of synergetic magickal destruction saturated with Sirian/Luciferian energies. In similar fashion, the August 5th commencement date for the Statue of Lucifer and the Twin Towers mega-talismans brought them under the spell of the Silver Star, with the towers being born on 8/5 and destroyed on 9/11 under the watchful eye (and torch) of the Illuminated One.
This book will blow your socks off. Watch for it next spring. To receive updates relating to S.K. Bain's book, The Most Dangerous Book in the World: 9/11 as Mass Ritual, go to the bottom of the page, to the framed excerpt box, and register for a free account, which enables you to receive regular news releases from the publisher about this and other TrineDay publications.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
But for the meantime, focus on what Ellen Brown had to say about the motives of those who instituted the downgrade of U.S. securities one year ago.
Titanic Battle or Insider Trading? The S&P Downgrade and the Bilderbergers: All Part of the Plan?
by Ellen Brown
What just happened in the stock market?
Last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose or fell by at least 400 points for four straight days, a stock market first.
The
worst drop was on Monday, 8-8-11, when the Dow plunged 624 points.
Monday was the first day of trading after US Treasury bonds were
downgraded from AAA to AA+ by Standard and Poor’s.
But
the roller coaster actually began on Tuesday, 8-2-11, the day after the
last-minute deal to raise the U.S. debt ceiling -- a deal that was
supposed to avoid the downgrade that happened anyway five days later. The Dow changed directions for eight consecutive trading sessions after that, another first.
The volatility was unprecedented, leaving analysts at a loss to explain it. High frequency program trading no doubt added to the wild swings, but why the daily reversals?Why didn’t the market head down and just keep going, as it did in September 2008?
The plunge on 8-8-11 was the worst since 2008 and the sixth largest stock market crash ever. According to Der Spiegel, one of the most widely read periodicals in Europe:
Many
economists have been pointing out that last week's panic resembled the
fear that swept financial markets after the collapse of US investment
bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Then as now, banks stopped lending each other money. Then as now, banks' cash deposits at the central bank doubled within days.
But
on Tuesday, August 9, the market gained more points from its low than
it lost on Monday. Why? A tug of war seemed to be going on between two
titanic forces, one bent on crashing the market, the other on propping
it up.
The Dubious S&P Downgrade
Many
commentators questioned the validity of the downgrade that threatened
to be another Lehman Brothers. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for
Economic and Policy Research, said in a statement:
The Treasury Department revealed that S&P’s decision was initially based on a $2 trillion error in accounting. However, even after this enormous error was corrected, S&P went ahead with the downgrade. This suggests that S&P had made the decision to downgrade independent of the evidence. [Emphasis added.]
Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, was also skeptical, stating:
[E]verything
I’ve heard about S&P’s demands suggests that it’s talking nonsense
about the US fiscal situation. The agency has suggested that the
downgrade depended on the size of agreed deficit reduction over the next
decade, with $4 trillion apparently the magic number. Yet US solvency
depends hardly at all on what happens in the near or even medium term:
an extra trillion in debt adds only a fraction of a percent of GDP to
future interest costs..... In short, S&P is just making stuff up — and after the mortgage debacle, they really don’t have that right.
In an illuminating expose posted on Firedoglake on August 5, Jane Hamsher concluded:
It’s
becoming more and more obvious that Standard and Poor’s has a political
agenda riding on the notion that the US is at risk of default on its
debt based on some arbitrary limit to the debt-to-GDP ratio. There is no
sound basis for that limit, or for S&P’s insistence on at least a
$4 trillion down payment on debt reduction, any more than there is for
the crackpot notion that a non-crazy US can be forced to default on its
debt.... It’s time the media and Congress started asking Standard and Poors what their political agenda is and whom it serves.
[A]fter the market close on Friday August 5th, we received word that S&P CEO Deven Sharma [whose first job in early 1980's was with Bush-connected Dresser Industries] had taken control of the ratings agency and personally led the push for a U.S. downgrade. There is a lot of evidence that he has deliberately tried to trash the U.S. economy.
Even after discovering that the S&P debt calculations were off by
$2 trillion, Sharma made the decision to go ahead with the unethical
downgrade. This is a guy who was a key contributor at
the 2009 Bilderberg Summit that organized 120 of the world's richest
men and women to push for an end to the dollar as the global reserve
currency.
[T]hrough
his writings on “competitive strategy” S&P CEO Sharma considers the
United States the PROBLEM in today’s world, operating with what he
implies is an unfair and reckless advantage. The brutal reality is that
for "globalization" to succeed the United States must be torn asunder . .
.
Also named by Schwarz as a suspect in the market manipulations was Michel Barnier, head of European Regulation. Barnier triggered an alarming 513-point drop in the Dow on August 4, when he blocked the plan of Hans Hoogervorst, newly
appointed Chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board, to
save Europe by adopting a new rule called IFRS 9. The rule would have
eliminated mark-to-market accounting of sovereign debt from European
bank balance sheets. Schwarz writes:
We
all should be experts on the dangers of mark-to-market accounting after
observing the U.S. banking crisis of 2008/2009 and the Great Depression
in the 1930s. Mark-to-market was repealed at 8:45 a.m on April 2, 2009,
which finally put a stop to the short term liquidity crisis and at the
same time ushered in a stock market recovery. Banks no longer had to
raise capital as long term stability was brought back to the system. The
exact same scenario would have happened in 2011 Europe under
Hoogervorst's plan. Without the threat of failure by those banks who
hold high amounts of euro sovereign debt, investors would be free to
move on from the European crisis and the stock market could resume its
fundamental course.
Schwarz notes that Barnier, like Sharma, was a confirmed attendee at past Bilderberger conferences. What, then, is the agenda of the Bilderbergers?
The One World Company
Daniel Estulin, noted expert on the Bilderbergers, describes that secretive globalist group as “a
medium of bringing together financial institutions which are the
world’s most powerful and most predatory financial interests.” Writing in June 2011, he said:
Daniel Estulin
Bilderberg
isn’t a secret society.... It’s a meeting of people who represent a
certain ideology.... Not OWG [One World Government] or NWO [New World
Order] as too many people mistakenly believe. Rather, the ideology is of a ONE WORLD COMPANY LIMITED.
It
seems the Bilderbergers are less interested in governing the world than
in owning the world. The “world company” was a term first used at a
Bilderberger meeting in Canada in 1968 by George Ball, U.S.
Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs and a managing director of
banking giants Lehman Brothers and Kuhn Loeb. The world company was to
be a new form of colonialism, in which global assets would be acquired
by economic rather than military coercion. The company would extend
across national boundaries, aggressively engaging in mergers and
acquisitions until the assets of the world were subsumed under one
privately-owned corporation, with nation-states subservient to a private
international central banking system.
Estulin continues:
The
idea behind each and every Bilderberg meeting is to create what they
themselves call THE ARISTOCRACY OF PURPOSE between European and North
American elites on the best way to manage the planet. In other words,
the creation of a global network of giant cartels, more powerful than
any nation on Earth, destined to control the necessities of life of the
rest of humanity.
...This explains what George Ball ...
said back in 1968, at a Bilderberg meeting in Canada: “Where does one
find a legitimate base for the power of corporate management to make
decisions that can profoundly affect the economic life of nations to
whose governments they have only limited responsibility?”
That base of power was found in the private global banking system. Estulin goes on:
The
problem with today’s system is that the world is run by monetary
systems, not by national credit systems.... [Y]ou don’t want a
monetary system to run the world. You want sovereign nation-states to
have their own credit systems, which is the system of their currency.... [T]he possibility of productive, non-inflationary credit creation by
the state, which is firmly stated in the US Constitution, was excluded
by Maastricht [the Treaty of the European Union] as a method of
determining economic and financial policy.
The
world company acquires assets by preventing governments from issuing
their own currencies and credit. Money is created instead by banks as
loans at interest. The debts inexorably grow, since more is always owed
back than was created in the original loans. (For more on this, see here.)
If currencies are not allowed to expand to meet increased costs and
growth, the inevitable result is a wave of bankruptcies, foreclosures,
and sales of assets at firesale prices. Sales to whom? To the “world company.”
Battle of the Titans
If that was the plan behind the market assaults on August 4 and August 8, however, it evidently failed.
What turned the market around, according to Der Spiegel, was the European Central Bank, which saved the day by embarking on a program of buying Spanish and Italian bonds.
Sidestepping the Maastricht Treaty, the ECB said it would engage in the
equivalent of “quantitative easing,” purchasing bonds with money
created with accounting entries on its books. It
had done this earlier with Greek and Irish sovereign debt but had
resisted doing it with Spanish and Italian bonds, which were much larger
obligations. On Tuesday, August 16, the ECB announced that it was
engaging in a record $32 billion bond-buying spree in an attempt to appease the markets and save the Eurozone from collapse.
Federal
Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was also expected to come through with
another round of quantitative easing, but his speech on August 9 made no
mention of QE3. As blogger Jesse Livermore summarized the market’s response:
... [T]he markets sold off rather rapidly as no announcement was made about QE3.... It wasn’t until ... the last 75 min of market activity [that]
the DJIA gained 639 pts to close at a day high of 11,242. That begs the
question, where did that injection of capital come from? The President’s
Working Group on Financial Markets? Or did the “policy tools” to
promote price stability by any chance include the next round
of Quantitative Easing unannounced? Was that QE3 Incognito, Ben?
Titanic Battle or Insider Trading?
That
leaves the question, why the suspicious downgrade on August 5, AFTER
the government had made major concessions just to avoid default, and
despite the embarrassing revelation that S&P’s figures were off by
$2 trillion? Suspicious bloggers have pointed out that Lehman Brothers
was brought down by a massive bear raid on 9-11-08, echoing the disaster of 9-11-01; that the S&P downgrade hit the market on 8-8-11; and that the S&P fell exactly 6.66% and the Dow fell exactly 5.55% on that date. In Illuminati lore, these are power numbers, of the sort chosen for power moves.
But we don’t need to turn to numerology to find a motive for proceeding with the downgrade. On August 12, Money.MSN reported that it “wasn't much of a surprise”:
Wall Street had heard a rumor early on that the downgrade was coming. News sites reported the rumor all day. Unless
it was all a huge coincidence, it's likely that someone in the know
leaked the information. The questions are who and whether the leak led
to early insider trading.
The Daily Mail had the story of someone placing an $850 million bet in the futures market on the prospects of a US debt downgrade:
The
latest bet was made on July 21 on trades of 5,370 ten-year Treasury
futures and 3,100 Treasury bond futures, reported ETF Daily News.
Now
the investor’s gamble seems to have paid off after Standard and Poor’s
issued a credit rating downgrade from AAA to AA+ last Friday.
Whoever
it is stands to earn a 1,000 per cent return on their money, with the
expectation that interest rates will be going up after the downgrade.
The Securities Exchange Commission announced on August 8 that it is investigatingthe downgrade. According to the Financial Times, the move is part of a preliminary examination into potential insider trading.Whatever
can be said about the first two weeks of August, their market action
was unprecedented, unnatural, and bears close observation.
Ellen Brown
is president of the Public Banking Institute and the author of eleven
books. She developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil
litigation in Los Angeles.In Web of Debt, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” Her websites are http://WebofDebt.comand http://PublicBankingInstitute.org. Ellen Brown is a frequent contributor to Global Research.Global Research Articles by Ellen Brown
Aftermath of August 5, 2011
As it turns out there was no interest rate increase. Instead Bernanke announced:
To promote the ongoing economic recovery and to help ensure that
inflation, over time, is at levels consistent with its mandate, the Committee decided today to keep the target range for the federal funds
rate at 0 to 1/4 percent.
After being criticized for the downgrade, Peter Rigby,
a credit analyst at S&P, told Bloomberg in a telephone interview:
“Ratings are really just a rank ordering of our opinion of
relative credit worthiness based on our criteria. It’s
neither an objective nor goal or intent to determine yields or
prices. Obviously, investors do that using a whole host of
information and different investors have their different
valuation objectives.”
Conspiracy
researchers from the 1990's may remember a few of the building blocks
that went into creating what is now known as Analex. Analyzing these
components is a good refresher course that shows how corporate America
works hand-in-hand with the military-industrial complex and with
powerful politicians who would give a helping hand to advance their own
political goals and the monetary goals of those who help them get
elected. All, of course, under the guise of national security.
Through its subsidiaries and operating units, Alexandria, Virginia-based Analex Corporation offers information technology, systems engineering, security services, and intelligence services in support of homeland security, aerospace, and defense-related projects. Aerospace services are provided to such clients as
NASA,
the United States Air Force,
Lockheed Martin Corporation,
Boeing, and
the National Reconnaissance Office.
These services include control dynamics, failure modes
effects and critical analysis, launch integration, mission
assurance, stress analysis, and systems integration. Analex's
medical services provides software and system engineering services
to medical product and device manufacturers. The company's
commercial engineering services unit is involved in such areas as software
integration, system integration, database design and development,
imaging technology, engineering research and design,
electromagnetic compatibility, and software development.
Wholly owned subsidiary Beta Analytics International, Inc.
provides security services to both government and non-government
clients, ranging from high-tech information assurance and
technology protection to access control at client sites. Another
subsidiary, ComGlobal Systems, Inc., primarily serves the Department of Defense, offering information technology for weapons systems and command and control systems.
Subsidiary SyCom Services
develops software engineering services for use in civilian and
military radar systems, signal analysis, and other communication and
database systems. Analex is a public company listed on the American
Stock Exchange.
5904 Richmond Highway
Alexandria, Virginia 22303 U.S.A.
Telephone: (703) 329-9400
Fax: (703) 329-8187
Web site: http://www.analex.com Public Company
Incorporated: 1964 as Biorad, Inc. Employees: 920 Sales: $94.4 million 2004 Stock Exchanges: AMEX Ticker Symbol: NLX NAIC: 541519 Other Computer Related Services
From Biorad to Hadron--1964
Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) indicate that Analex was incorporated in New York in 1964 as Biorad, Inc. and four years later assumed the name Hadron, Inc.According to the Washington Post in a 1986 article, the company was originally involved in the manufacture of industrial laser products, then "shifted gears in the late 1970s to focus on professional services."
Barron's offered more details in a 1988 article, maintaining that
"the outfit emerged in 1979 from the ashes of Xonics, a notorious high-tech fiasco."
Members of top management were accused by the SEC of fraudand manipulating the company's stock pricein order to use the stock to acquire other companies.
Dr. Earl Brian, 1974
"In 1979 Dominic Laiti gathered a group of former Xonic executives and bought Hadron. By 1983, the company was lauded in the press as an 'investment banker's dream.'
For the child had, it appeared, inherited the parent's
acquisitive streak, snapping up nine companies in just three
years." While Laiti led the investor group that owned Hadron, it
was Xonic's former president, Dr. Earl Winfrey Brian,
who called the shots. He was politically well connected, friend
to President Ronald Reagan and the head of Regan's Justice
Department, Ed Meese, and, if speculations are true, he had a hand
in a number of scandals, including the October Surprise of 1980
that supposedly kept the embassy hostages in Iran until Regan was
inaugurated as president, the Iran-Contra affair in which a rogue
operation traded arms for hostages, and the selling of sensitive
crime-tracking software to the intelligence services of foreign
governments, an incident in which Hadron supposedly played a bit role.
The history of the Central Intelligence Agency's role with man-made drugs is long and ugly. One of the most revolting aspects as been the manner in which so-called professionals armed with the cloak of government secrecy have dallied and dabbled with innocent people's lives, all under the lame cover of national security.What a joke it would be, had they not destroyed so many people. Now, another shooting makes us wonder whether the same thing continues unabated. Is there a hidden connection between James E. Holmes and some secret research project funded by the CIA?
It's been over 50 years, but Wayne Ritchie says he can still remember how it felt to be dosed with acid. He was drinking bourbon and soda with other federal officers at a holiday party in 1957 at the U.S. Post Office
Building on Seventh and Mission streets. They were cracking jokes and
swapping stories when, suddenly, the room began to spin. The red and
green lights on the Christmas tree in the corner spiraled wildly.
Ritchie's body temperature rose. His gaze fixed on the dizzying colors
around him.
The deputy U.S. marshal excused himself and went upstairs to his
office, where he sat down and drank a glass of water. He needed to
compose himself. But instead he came unglued. Ritchie feared the other
marshals didn't want him around anymore. Then he obsessed about the
probation officers across the hall and how they didn't like him, either.
Everyone was out to get him. Ritchie felt he had to escape.
He fled to his apartment and sought comfort from his live-in
girlfriend. It didn't go as planned. His girlfriend was there, but an
argument erupted. She told him she was growing tired of San Francisco
and wanted to return to New York City. Ritchie couldn't handle the
situation. Frantic, he ran away again, this time to the Vagabond Bar
where he threw back more bourbon and sodas. From there, he hit a few
more bars, further cranking up his buzz. As he drank his way back to
Seventh and Mission, Ritchie concocted a plan that would change his
life.
Victim of MK-ULTRA
Tries to Rob Bank?
Now in his mid-eighties and living in San Jose, Ritchie may be among the last of the living victims of MK-ULTRA, a Central Intelligence Agency
operation that covertly tested lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on
unwitting Americans in San Francisco and New York City from 1953 to
1964.
"I remember that night very clearly, yes I do," he said in a recent
interview. "I was paranoid. I got down to where I thought everyone was
against me. The whole world was against me."
After the day had bled into night on Dec. 20, 1957, Ritchie returned
to his office in the Post Office Building and retrieved two service
revolvers from his locker. He was going rogue.
"I decided if they want to get rid of me, I'll help them. I'll just
go out and get my guns from my office and hold up a bar," Ritchie
recalls. "I thought, 'I can get enough money to get my girlfriend an
airline ticket back to New York, and I'll turn myself in.' But I was
unsuccessful."
Out of his skull on a hallucinogen and alcohol, Ritchie rolled into
the Shady Grove in the Fillmore District, and ordered one final bourbon
and soda. After swallowing down the final drops, he pointed his revolver
at the bartender and demanded money. Before joining the marshals,
Ritchie served five years in the Marines and spent a year as an Alcatraz prison guard. But the cop had suddenly become the robber.
It was over in a flash. A waitress came up behind him and asked
Ritchie what he was doing. When Ritchie turned around, a patron hit him
over the head and knocked him unconscious. He awoke to a pair of police
officers standing over him. Ritchie says he had expected to get caught or killed.
The judge went easy on him and Ritchie avoided prison. He resigned
from the Marshals Service, pleaded guilty to attempted armed robbery,
paid a $500 fine, and was sentenced to five years' probation.
Ritchie's story is certainly peculiar, but not unique. Other San
Franciscans were unsuspecting participants in a strange research program
in which the government effectively broke the law in an effort to fight
the Cold War.
George White's Personal Diary
Seymour Hersh first exposed MK-ULTRA in a New York Times
article in 1974 that documented CIA illegalities, including the use of
its own citizens as guinea pigs in games of war and espionage. John Marks expertly chronicled more of the operation in his 1979 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.
View from 225 Chestnut
There have been other reports on the CIA's doping of civilians, but
they have mostly dished about activities in New York City. Accounts of
what actually occurred in San Francisco have been sparse and sporadic.
But newly declassified CIA records, recent interviews, and a personal
diary of an operative at Stanford Special Collections shed more light on
the breadth of the San Francisco operation.
There were at least three CIA safe houses in the Bay Area where
experiments went on. Chief among them was 225 Chestnut on Telegraph
Hill, which operated from 1955 to 1965. The L-shaped apartment boasted
sweeping waterfront views, and was just a short trip up the hill from
North Beach's rowdy saloons. Inside, prostitutes paid by the government
to lure clients to the apartment served up acid-laced cocktails to
unsuspecting johns, while martini-swilling secret agents observed their
every move from behind a two-way mirror. Recording devices were
installed, some disguised as electrical outlets.
To get the guys in the mood, the walls were adorned with photographs
of tortured women in bondage and provocative posters from French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
The agents grew fascinated with the kinky sex games that played out
between the johns and the hookers. The two-way mirror in the bedroom
gave the agents a close-up view of all the action.
George White
The main man behind the mirror was burly, balding crime-buster George H. White, a Bureau of Narcotics maverick who made headlines breaking up opium and heroin rings in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America,
and the U.S. Few knew he doubled as a CIA spook for Uncle Sam. He
oversaw the San Francisco program, gleefully dubbing it Operation Midnight Climax.
"[White] was a real hard head," said Ritchie, who regularly ran into
him in courtrooms and law enforcement offices in downtown San Francisco.
"All of his agents were pretty much afraid to do anything without his
full approval. White would turn on them, physically. He was a big tough
guy."
American chemist Sidney Gottlieb
was the brains behind White's brawn. It was the height of McCarthyism
in the early '50s, and government intelligence leaders, claiming fear of
communist regimes, were using hallucinogens to induce confessions from
prisoners of war held in Korea, and brainwash spies into changing
allegiances. What better way to examine the effects of LSD than to dose
unsuspecting citizens in New York City and San Francisco?
The mind-bending laboratory on Telegraph Hill was called "the pad" in
White's leather- bound journals. White's widow donated 10 boxes of his personal effects to Foothill College in Los Altos Hills after he died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1975. Now warehoused at Stanford, the journals, letters, and photographs provide a window into the mischievous life of a secret agent during the Cold War.
1955 S.F. directory; White at 2454 Vallejo, 2 miles from safehouse
Truth Serums in the OSS
Before White joined the narcotics bureau, he worked in the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), a World War II-era intelligence agency that preceded the CIA. In
a quest for truth serums, White and other OSS agents slipped
concentrated tetrahydro-cannabinol acetate (THCA) into the food and
cigarettes of suspected communists, conscientious objectors, and
mobsters in the 1940s. The experience wasn't a prerequisite for working
in MK-ULTRA, but it helped.
Dr. James Hamilton, a Stanford Medical School
psychiatrist, knew White from their OSS days. He was among the small
group of researchers who had clearance to the pad. Gottlieb visited,
too, but Operation Midnight Climax had no regular medical supervision.
And that became problematic. The first CIA brothel that White and
Gottlieb ran in New York City had already gone awry. U.S. biological
warfare specialist Frank Olson
either jumped or was pushed from a 10th-floor hotel window in 1953,
nine days after the CIA gave him LSD. When a CIA chemist, who was
sharing the hotel room with Olson, met with police, they found White's
initials and the address of a Greenwich Village
safe house on a piece of paper in his pocket. The New York City
operation was temporarily suspended when police investigated Olson's
death, and restarted later.
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb in Charge
White, a native Californian and former San Francisco newspaper reporter, yearned to return home. In 1955, Gottlieb let him. Aside from Gottlieb's scattershot visits, White, now a "CIA
consultant," had free rein over the S.F. safe houses. Ritchie says that
White's right-hand man, Ike Feldman, ran around dressed like "a hot-shot
drug dealer." Ritchie adds: "He tried to act like Al Capone."
The pad quickly became something akin to a frat house for spies.
"Eight-martini lunches" were enjoyed regularly, White noted in his
journal. And on some occasions he watched the dubious research unfold
while sitting on a portable toilet a friend donated to him. It was his
"observational post."
What went on in the pad, apparently stayed in the pad.
1955 San Francisco directory
Dr. John Erskine
has lived next door [at 233 Chestnut] to the location since 1954. "I had a feeling that
things went on there that were none of my business. It wasn't overt.
People weren't screaming out the windows," says Erskine, standing
outside the acid house.
The property is undergoing renovation. Just a few months ago, a
construction crew pulled microphones, wires, and recording instruments
out of the walls.
Ruth Kelley was a singer at a San Francisco club called The Black Sheep. Her
unexpected trip into another dimension happened to her onstage. Young, attractive Kelley caught White's eye, though she rejected his
advances. White or one of his men eventually dosed her with LSD just
before she went onstage, according to a deposition of Frank Laubinger,
a CIA official who led a program in the 1980s that made contact with
victims of MK-ULTRA.
"The LSD definitely took some effect during her
act." Kelley reportedly went to the hospital, but was fine ... once the
effects of the drug, that she didn't know she was on, wore off.
North Beach
How test subjects were chosen by the agents varied. In the case of
the Telegraph Hill safe house, working girls would pick up johns in
North Beach bars and restaurants, then bring them back for
experimentation and observation. Other times, White and his wife would
host dinner parties where guests might get dosed with a hallucinogenic
cocktail without their knowledge. And seemingly random San Franciscans
like Kelley were victimized for no other reason than their paths crossed
with White and his men at the wrong time. White wrote in his diary how
he slipped acid to unsuspecting civilians at local beaches, and in city
bars and restaurants.
Fun, Fun, Fun...until
There were two other Bay Area safe houses where the CIA researched
LSD and other chemicals: Room 49 of the Plantation Inn at Lombard and
Webster streets [only .6 of a mile from White's home], and 261 Green [Greene?] St. in Mill Valley [north of San Francisco in Marin County], not far from Sausalito.
***
Dr. Timothy Leary
CIA operatives also admitted to experimenting with LSD themselves. In a 1970 letter to UC Berkeley psychiatry professor Harvey Powelson,
White wrote how he "served as a guinea pig from time to time. [Note: Powelson also worked with Timothy Leary, who was the Director
of the Kaiser Foundation Psychological Research from 1952
to 1958.] My
personal observation was that the effect of all of these drugs was
essentially the same, except for the degree or extent of the effect.
THCA was more potent than marihuana [sic] and LSD more potent than THCA.
So far as I was concerned, 'clear thinking' was non-existent while
under the influence of any of these drugs. I did feel at times I was
having a 'mind-expanding' experience but this vanished like a dream
immediately after the session."
By all accounts, White enjoyed the undercover work he was doing.
Perhaps a little too much. He would write in a 1971 letter to Gottlieb,
"Of course I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I
toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun.
Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal,
deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the
All-Highest? Pretty Good Stuff, Brudder!"
Few inside the CIA even knew about MK-ULTRA and its sub-projects. The domestic experiments escaped scrutiny for a decade, until President John F. Kennedy, smarting from the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, forced CIA director Allen Dulles,
who first signed off on MK-ULTRA, to resign. The agency's activities in
San Francisco were so secret that not even the CIA's new director, John McCone, was informed of them when he took over in 1963.
"The concepts involved in
manipulating human behavior are found by many people both within and
outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical," he wrote,
questioning whether the clandestine activities were even legal. "Public
disclosure of some aspects of MKULTRA activity could induce serious
adverse reaction in U.S. public opinion, as well as stimulate offensive
and defensive action in this field on the part of foreign intelligence
services."
Earman noted numerous civilians grew ill from the effects of the
psychoactive drugs they were secretly slipped, and it would be
embarrassing if doctors were to discover what the government had been
doing. He recommended closing the safe houses. Yet high-ranking
intelligence officers called for the continuance of Midnight Climax.
"While I share your uneasiness and distaste for any program which tends
to intrude upon an individual's private and legal prerogatives, I
believe it is necessary that the Agency maintain a central role in this
activity," wrote Richard Helms, then the CIA's deputy director of plans.
Testing of unwitting individuals was suspended in 1964, at least
officially. Still, the CIA safe houses in San Francisco and New York
City continued to operate for a year and a half longer. Scrutiny of the
program intensified at CIA headquarters in Virginia, and subsequently
the Bay Area safe houses shut down in 1965. New York City's operation
stopped in 1966. Intelligence officers conceded that the drug-testing
exposed the agency to a serious "moral problem."
Fire Marshal at Stinson Beach
The fun was over. White retired from law enforcement in 1965 and became the fire marshal at Stinson Beach [near Mill Valley]. He wrote a swashbuckling autobiography titled A Diet of Danger
that crowed about his Bureau of Narcotics adventures. It conspicuously
left out Operation Midnight Climax. Publishers rejected the book in
1971.
Lawmakers were incredulous when they learned of the CIA's secret plots. But specifics at the time were scant.
Helms, one of MK-ULTRA's original architects, succeeded McCone as CIA
director in 1966. Before Helms and Gottlieb resigned in the early
1970s, they ordered all of the project's paperwork destroyed. A massive
paper purge occurred in 1973, just as Washington found itself in the
throes of the Watergate scandal. In an attempt to clean house, that same year new CIA Director James Schlesinger
ordered agency employees to inform him of illegal government
activities. That's when he learned of Olson's fatal plunge in New York
City, and the acid tests.
It didn't take long before details leaked to Hersh. The investigative journalist's groundbreaking article in the New York Times
exposed the CIA's vast illegal domestic surveillance programs. The
government had been screening U.S. mail, wiretapping journalists'
phones, and plotting assassinations. And, oh yeah, it had also been
dosing hundreds of civilians with LSD, as well as significant military
populations, in the name of defense. Americans demanded answers.
Donald Rumsfeld, then chief of staff for President Gerald Ford, and Rumsfeld's deputy, Dick Cheney,
wanted Hersh prosecuted for revealing government secrets. But Ford
didn't heed their advice. He appointed a committee chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller
to investigate the intelligence improprieties. U.S. Sen. Frank Church
also headed a congressional investigation of CIA malfeasance in 1974,
and Sen. Edward Kennedy held hearings on MK-ULTRA in the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research.
While most of the CIA's records detailing the top-secret programs
were destroyed, bureaucratic bumbling spared a cache of 20,000 documents
from the shredder. In 1977, Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, filed a Freedom of Information Act request, which provided him with many redacted versions of the surviving MK-ULTRA records.
Then, in exchange for immunity from prosecution, Gottlieb answered
questions before the Senate. To gain "firsthand knowledge," he said,
agents "extensively" experimented with LSD on themselves before giving
it to the public.
Kennedy tried to put it in perspective. "There is a light side to it,
but there is also an enormously serious side," he said. "There are
perhaps any number of Americans who are walking around today on the East
Coast or West Coast who were given drugs, with all the kinds of
physical and psychological damage that can be caused."
CIA Grants to Universities, Etc.
CIA Director Adm. Stansfield Turner
testified that 44 colleges and universities, 15 research foundations
and pharmaceutical companies, 12 hospitals and clinics, and three penal
institutions across the country were used for MK-ULTRA research that
included LSD, painkillers, and other drugs.
Using a front organization, Gottlieb distributed millions of dollars
in drug research grants to Stanford, UC Berkeley, and other
institutions, which only later learned the money's source. Stanford
acknowledged its faculty received close to $40,000 over eight years from
the CIA's secret program. It had hosted several studies on the effects
of drugs on interrogations, and also spent money developing miniature
lie detectors and other spy equipment.
Lawmakers denounced the CIA's covert domestic activities, but
ultimately no disciplinary action was taken. Gottlieb and the others
behind the acid experiments were not prosecuted or punished. But the innocent victims of these programs had to be notified, the
Senate subcommittee concluded. Tracking down victims proved difficult,
since so little of that data survived the CIA's paper-shredding.
A victim's taskforce was established, but despite estimates of
hundreds, maybe thousands of people exposed to the CIA's mind-control
program, records show only 14 of them were notified.
Dr. Olson's family sued the government, claiming the scientist's
death was not actually connected to the LSD he took. They claimed a
government operative pushed him out of the window so he wouldn't divulge
information about a classified CIA interrogation program concerning the
use of biological weapons in the Korean War. Olson's family ultimately
accepted an out-of-court settlement from the U.S. government for
$750,000. There have been other lawsuits, including a class-action from
alleged victims of the CIA's programs in Canada, and other reparations
have been paid.
The Vietnam
Veterans of America filed suit in San Francisco federal court in 2009,
claiming at least 7,800 soldiers were, without their knowledge, given as
many as 400 types of drugs and chemicals, including sarin,
amphetamines, barbiturates, mustard gas, and LSD by the Army and CIA.
Just last month, the group filed a petition in San Francisco seeking
class-action status. The suit does not ask for money but instead seeks
to overturn a 1950 Supreme Court decision that effectively insulates the
government from liability under the Federal Torts Claims Act. The vets
also want to discover the substances and doses they received, and get
care for any resulting health conditions.
George White at Same Christmas Party!
In spring 1999, Ritchie opened a copy of the San Jose Mercury News and read Gottlieb's obituary. Then it hit him.
"I didn't know that name at all. I'd never heard of him," Ritchie said. "But what caught my eye were LSD and George White.
George White was a supervising narcotics officer in 1957 in San
Francisco and I knew him. When I read the article, it said he was
working with the CIA testing mind-control drugs with the help of
drug-addicted prostitutes. I put it together. He was drugging people
without their knowledge. I thought, 'My God, how could he have done that
to me?'"
Ritchie began his own research into the CIA's drugging activity, and
grew convinced the CIA dosed him. Ritchie brought a lawsuit against the
United States and its agents, claiming his attempted armed robbery at
the bar was set in motion when agents slipped LSD into his drink at the
Christmas party. White's journal puts him in the same place as Ritchie the day the
dosing and robbery occurred. An entry in White's leather-bound book for
Dec. 20, 1957, reads: "Xmas party Fed bldg Press Room."
Ritchie's complaint leaned heavily on the deposition of Feldman, the
former agent under White. Feldman's testimony was at times
incriminating, contradictory, and combative. "I didn't do any follow-up,
period, because it wasn't a very good thing to go and say 'How do you
feel today?' You don't give them a tip. You just back away and let them
worry, like this nitwit, Ritchie," Feldman said in a deposition.
A district court ruled in 2005 that Ritchie failed to prove that an
LSD-induced psychotic disorder triggered his failed robbery attempt. The
judge called it "a troubling case and that if indeed true [Ritchie] has
paid a terrible price in the name of national security." Noting that
federal agents in San Francisco were doing "things that were
reprehensible," the judge concluded "it was not clear by a preponderance
of the evidence that Mr. Ritchie was administered LSD. It may be what
happened. But we don't operate on hunches." To this day, Ritchie says he
is "absolutely shocked" he lost the case.
Now house-bound and suffering from emphysema and other ailments — all
of which he attributes to old age — Ritchie isn't bitter about his
long, strange trip. He simply chalks it up to the government doing the
best it could during difficult times.
"They thought they were helping the country," Ritchie said.
