Tag: conspiracy

New Evidence Implicates CIA in 1971 Attack on Cuba with African Swine Fever Virus

“Cuban Outbreak of Swine Fever Linked to CIA” headlined a January 9, 1977, article by Drew Featherston and John Cummings in Newsday, a Long Island, New York, daily paper. It began,

With at least the tacit backing of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officials, operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971. Six weeks later an outbreak of the disease forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide animal epidemic.

A U.S. intelligence source told Newsday he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at a U.S. Army base and CIA training ground in the Panama Canal Zone, with instructions to turn it over to the anti-Castro group.

The 1971 outbreak, the first and only time the disease has hit the Western Hemisphere, was labeled the “most alarming event” of 1971 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. African swine fever is a highly contagious and usually lethal viral disease that infects only pigs and, unlike swine flu, cannot be transmitted to humans. There were no human deaths in the outbreak, but all production of pork, a Cuban staple, came to a halt, apparently for several months. . . .

The U.S. intelligence source said that early in 1971 he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at Ft. Gulick, an Army base in the Panama Canal Zone. The CIA also operated a paramilitary training center for career personnel and mercenaries at Ft. Gulick. . . .

Another man involved in the operation, a Cuban exile who asked not to be identified, said he was on the trawler where the virus was put aboard at a rendezvous point off Bocas del Toro, Panama. He said the trawler carried the virus to Navassa Island, a tiny, deserted, U.S.-owned island between Jamaica and Haiti. From there, after the trawler made a brief stopover, the container was taken to Cuba and given to other operatives on the southern coast near the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay in late March, according to the source on the trawler.

It was an explosive story, reprinted in newspapers across the country. The CIA officially denied it six days later, in response to a request from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, but the Newsday reporters had cited so many corroborating sources, with such specific details, that the denial was not widely believed.

The most compelling reason for trusting the credibility of the Newsday report was that the only place in the Western Hemisphere where the virus was known to have been kept before the outbreak in Cuba was at the secret Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC) laboratory off the eastern tip of Long Island, where local Newsday reporters had been cultivating sources since the one and only time reporters had been allowed inside in October 1971.

Plum Island had hosted the U.S. Army Chemical Corps base at Fort Terry from 1952 to 1956. According to Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons since 1945 by Mark Wheelis and Lajos Rózsa, the mission at Fort Terry was “to establish and pursue a program of research and development of certain anti-animal (BW) agents.” (a.k.a. biological weapons) The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) took over from the Army in 1956.

President Richard Nixon ordered biological weapons research to cease in 1969, but in 1975 the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence revealed that the CIA had continued to maintain a stockpile of biological agents and toxins in violation of the order.

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State sanctioned secrecy: NSA’s criminality shield

Enacted at the height of the Cold War, the NSA Act gives the agency radically sweeping powers to withhold any information from public disclosure. Specifically, Section 6 of the Act states “…nothing in this Act or any other law…shall be construed to require the disclosure of the organization or any function of the National Security Agency, or any information with respect to the activities thereof, or of the names, titles, salaries, or number of the persons employed by such agency.”

NSA has used that blanket authority to try to keep secret details about its lethal 9/11 intelligence failure. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit I brought on behalf of the Cato Institute against the Defense Department (NSA’s parent organization) in January 2017 has, after over three-and-a-half years in federal court, partially punctured NSA’s veil of secrecy over the cancelled TRAILBLAZER and THINTHREAD digital network exploitation (DNE) programs.

In brief, during the five-year period leading up to the 9/11 attacks, a bureaucratic war raged inside of NSA over the best way to handle the exploding volume of digital communications the agency was trying to keep up with. On one side was a group of veteran NSA cryptographers, mathematicians and computer scientists who developed a cheap, extremely effective, and Constitutionally compliant in-house DNE system codenamed THINTHREAD. On the other side was then-NSA Director Michael Hayden, who favored an unproven, external, contractor developed DNE system called TRAILBLAZER. When then-GOP House Intelligence Committee staffer Diane Roark got the THINTHREAD team development money and language in the FY 2002 Intelligence Authorization bill directing wider deployment of the cheaper, off-the-shelf THINTHREAD system, Hayden refused to deploy it as directed — even though THINTHREAD, still in prototype development, was already producing intelligence NSA couldn’t get from any of its other existing systems.

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The Court of God: How a Catholic Secret Society Took Over SCOTUS

Leonard Leo is a board member of the Opus Dei’s Catholic Information Center (CIC), where sitting U.S. Attorney General, Bill Barr, and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, also once served. The Catholic lay group has been described as one of the world’s “most powerful and politically committed” secret societies, with direct ties to the Vatican as a “personal prelature,” an official status awarded by John Paul II that made sure the group only answers to the Pope himself.

Founded in 1928 by a Spanish priest and lawyer, Opus Dei, wouldn’t become the agent of global fascism until later in the twentieth century when the CIA began funneling money to an Opus Dei think tank in Chile called the Chilean Institute for General Studies (IGS) after it drew support for the overthrow of democratically elected president Salvador Allende from Chilean bishops, and was a pivotal cog in the implementation of Operation Condor – a transnational intelligence operation running through Southcom to aid South American right-wing dictatorships in the 1970s. Many of the members of IGS went on to become cabinet officials in Pinochet’s military junta.

The Pope’s special designation was the result of Opus Dei’s covert role, assisted through William Colby’s CIA, to effectuate damage control after the collapse of an Italian bank in the late ‘70s led to multiple investigations by Italian authorities that uncovered a concerted effort to disrupt and dismantle left-leaning groups or political parties in Europe by financing so-called “stay-behind units” of former Nazi soldiers and other extreme right-wing elements through a global money-laundering, drug-running and assassination network involving the highest echelons of the U.S. government, the Holy See and the Sicilian Mafia.

Known as Operation Gladio, it was only as the scheme was unraveling in the late 70s that Opus Dei began to play its vital role in covering up the movement of billions of dollars worldwide to prop up dictatorships in Latin America, as well as acts of subversion and sabotage throughout the old continent. In 1984, the organization was recruited to reorganize the Vatican’s finances, which were then under heavy scrutiny from Italian investigators.

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Trial Of Sept. 11 Defendants At Guantánamo Delayed Until August 2021

The setbacks keep piling up in the long-delayed 9/11 case in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

A new U.S military court judge has canceled all hearings in the case until next year and delayed the start of the trial of the five defendants charged in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks until at least August 2021.

Jury selection had been scheduled to begin in January 2021, but the new judge — Col. Stephen F. Keane, who began overseeing the case in September — said a delay is necessary due to pandemic travel restrictions and his need to familiarize himself with the case.

Many Guantánamo attorneys say even the revised start date isn’t realistic, given that legal proceedings there have been at a virtual standstill since February, when the coronavirus began limiting access to the island.

“I do not expect that the trial will begin in August of 2021 because there’s just too much ground to cover between now and then,” said James Connell, lead attorney for Guantánamo prisoner Ammar al-Baluchi, who is accused of funding the 9/11 hijackers.

Tuesday’s delay order by Judge Keane, the fourth judge to oversee the 9/11 case, is the latest stumbling block at Guantánamo’s problem-plagued military court and prison, which NPR found has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $6 billion since 2002.

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U-Haul Seen Distributing Shields, Weapons to Louisville Rioters Rented to Holly Zoller of Soros-Connected Louisville Bail Project

The U-Haul that began distributing riot supplies in Louisville immediately following the announcement that no officers would be charged for Breonna Taylor’s death was rented to Holly Zoller of the Louisville Bail Initiative.

The pre-parked truck was loaded with shields painted with anti-police messages, umbrellas, gas masks, and other riot supplies.

Zoller confirmed it was her in a phone call from a concerned citizen who pretended to work for the rental company. You can listen to it in full at the end of this article.

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