Stan Dai apparently a CIA Junior Commissar & Recruitment Officer

[JackRiddler]

Although I guess he's now ruined his budding spook career and, as they said on Mission Impossible, the "Secretary will deny any knowledge of you or your activities..."

http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2010/01/is-this-the-same-stan-dai-.html

Stan Dai spoke about torture and terrorism at a CIA event in Langley, VA last June, according this event program I found online. Get this, according to the flier, Adam Brandon, the press secretary of FreedomWorks (Dick Armey's town hall mob outfit) was on the same program. David Mark of POLITICO also spoke at the event.

Some highlights from Stan Dai's bio.

B. Career History• Mr. Dai has been involved in JSA since 2001: after attending summer school at Yale, he founded the JSA chapter at Naperville North, served in various Midwest region positions, and was a resident assistant at Georgetown.
• Mr. Dai was the first Assistant Director of the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity in D.C.
• Prior to that, he served as the Operations Officer of a Department of Defense irregular warfare fellowship program.

• Mr. Dai graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the George Washington University. He was the editor-in-chief of The GW Patriot, an alternative conservative student newspaper, a Club 100 Activist of Young America’s Foundation, and an Undergraduate Fellow on Terrorism of the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies.

http://www.trinitydc.edu/programs/intel_center/Documents/Application_Form_-_Intelligence_Scholars.pdf

Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence (ICCAE)
ICCAE Scholars Program
Application Form
The Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence (ICCAE) prepares students
for careers in intelligence. Its curriculum develops the skills relevant to intelligence
community careers, while also allowing students to pursue the major of their choice. The
ICCAE mission emphasizes enabling women, persons with disabilities, and minorities to
pursue professions in the intelligence community. The ICCAE Scholars Program is open
to undergraduate students in all majors who have a minimum GPA of 3.0, who are in
good academic standing, and who are U.S. citizens. Generally, students should apply to
the program no later than the end of their sophomore year.
The Application Process
1. Students should complete this application form including the following materials:
· A transcript of all work completed at Trinity (this may be an unofficial transcript).
· A typed two-page statement of purpose.
2. Students must obtain recommendations from two faculty members. One of the
recommendations should be written either by the Program Chair of the student’s major
program, or by the student’s advisor.
Questions
If you have any questions, please contact Mr. Stan Dai, Assistant Director, ICCAE at:
Phone: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Office: Main 362
Please return this application and all supporting materials to:
Stan Dai
Assistant Director, Intelligence Center
Main 362
Trinity (Washington) University
125 Michigan Avenue, N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20017
202-884-9689
[e-mail]

[WeDidIt]

1. Congress has to hold hearings now.

Mother fuck.

[Kingofalldems]

2. Yep. And a well funded Special Counsel.

[Canuckistanian]

9. Uh, yeah

Too many unanswered questions here.

[arcadian]

3. His Facebook profile pic looks like it was taken in Baghdad.

[RoyGBiv]

18. That's probably Israel ...

Found an old story on him from his hometown newspaper (Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL) - Saturday, June 12, 2004) from when he was at GWU.

He said, "I want to spend two weeks in that country, to know what it feels like. . ."

Another bit on how anti-war protesters "annoy" him from Times Union, The (Albany, NY) - Thursday, March 27, 2003:

"'The people who organize the anti-war movement annoy me,' says Dai, 17. Many classmates who oppose the war are 'well-meaning but naive,' he says. A silent majority supports military action. (Notably, that last sentence isn't in quotes, which suggests some editorializing on the part of the writer -RGB)

"'None of us wakes up in the morning wanting to see war,' he says. But he believes it's necessary in this case.'

"Of the classmates who walked out earlier this month in protest, Dai says only a few knew enough about the issues to explain why they oppose the war.

"'Half the students who left were doing it just because they wanted to ditch class,' he says."

Lovely child ...

[tanyev]

36. Two whole weeks? Wow, that's practically going native.

:eyes:

[MinM]

99. What was he doing there???

:shrug:

[Blue_Tires]

38. he's a scrawny little scumbag rat bastard fuck....

i really hope they were as sloppy covering their connections as they were with the operation...I'd love to see how high up the ladder the buck stops...

[Warpy]

107. ...Or New Mexico

or even on the Gulf Coast after one of the many hurricanes. The buildings in the background don't look much like Iraq.

[WeDidIt]

4. How does a 24 year old embed himself deeply into the intelligence and defense community?

Mother Fuck.

[phaseolus]

... and he's involved in recruiting.

It's not much of a leap to assume he was packing the intelligence agencies with right wing true believers.

[Blue Meany]

77. Georgetown has long been known as a center of recruitment

for the State Department and other government agencies. That's one of the places people go to get an entre into government service, so I don't think there is any great mystery here. But I doubt that he was very important.

[roguevalley]

5. because his daddy gave a wad of cash to cheney/bush

[snagglepuss]

6. How do these unbelievable ignoramuses get such positions? Could this

explain the underwear bomber fiasco?

[glitch]

8. Really good question.

That's what happens when loyalty trumps merit.

[JackRiddler]

11. What do you think the CIA is, after all?

It's a spook army for imposing secret policy by covert means on unwilling subject nations. By definition, CIA is sanctioned to break laws everywhere in the world and then lie about it.

From its beginnings in 1947, it was obvious to its critics that there could never be an effective firewall between all the dirty deeds abroad and the supposed limits on agency action at home. Truman himself came to see that, and he voiced his concerns in an editorial published right after the Kennedy assassination.

Such a system will mass-produce criminal behavior as a matter of course. It will attract individuals who don't care about laws, and who are likely to also act on their own, with or without agency sanction.

What kind of person do you think is going to want to be a spook - meaning, a liar by profession?

[zeemike]

37. And those types who are criminal serve a good purpose.

You can sheep dip them and use them to do the dirty work, and when they no longer useful let the legal system take them away.
this young man will be classified as a lose cannon and left twisting in the wind.

[formercia]

40. A supervisor once told me:

"We like to recruit people with a larcenous nature."

[nashville_brook]

42. here's the whole Truman essay >> "Limit CIA role to intelligence"

Limit CIA Role
To Intelligence

By Harry S Truman
Copyright, 1963, by Harry S Truman

INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21 — I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.

Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.

But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.
Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.

I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.

Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.

I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.

But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

[Octafish]

89. 'Arrogant' CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam

If I may pile on...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6918706

[awnobles]

44. Very much the Truth

Americans somehow think the CIA is cheating for them when in reality they are the muscle for the elite and generally at odds with the American citizenry.

[nashville_brook]

41. i've wondered that since the beginning of the panty bomber episode.

[drm604]

7. Stan Dai's JSA Podcast

http://jsacast.podomatic.com/player/web/2008-03-14T12_00_38-07_00

[bertman]

10. So, intelligence is NOT a prerequisite for Intelligence.

[JackRiddler]

12. When was that ever true?

It's about ruthlessness and willingness to commit crimes, long as these are sanctioned by notions of "national security." Or long as the spook in his freelance wisdom decides that a given crime ought to be sanctioned, and that he's the only one who needs to know about it.

[Snazzy]

13. the possible questions section is special

D. Possible Questions
1. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has defended the Bush administration’s policies on surveillance, interrogation and detention as crucial factors that have protected the homeland. How much valid is the former administration’s assertions that these kinds of policies have prevented another terrorist attack on the United States?

2. President Obama has announced he will close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. He has announced he will close CIA black sites around the world, where they interrogate terror suspects. Says he will make CIA interrogators abide by the Army Field Manual, defined waterboarding as torture and ban it, suspend trials for terrorists by military commission, and now eliminate the label of enemy combatants. By taking those steps, do you believe the president of the United States has made Americans less safe?

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:YTF9E_m3P6UJ:www.jsa.org/georgetown/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/june-23-24-2009-agenda-packets.pdf+Young+America%E2%80%99s+Foundation+stan+dai&hl=en&gl=us&sig=AHIEtbQNR6D_fJbB6nJrDPejV30gzoVQLw

Edit--meant to add: special, as in a special way of getting out the pro-waterboarding and Cheney apologist youth vote and brown shirt glee club special sort of way.

[JackRiddler]

14. "How much valid is"?!

Teh colladge students jus getten lowseer w/dagramma.

[Snazzy]

16. Editor in Chief of GW Patriot

"GW" har har.

[lpbk2713]

15. For a Phi Beta Kappa he certainly got himself caught doing something really stupid.

What a pathetic jerkoff stunt.

[Wilms]

17. What a creep. n/t

[troubledamerican]

19. Watch this thread get banished to a DU cellar ghetto.

[JackRiddler]

20. I see no reason for that - Dai's associations are public record.

And yes, as was obvious all along, he is the same Dai.

Dai bio photo:


Dai perp photo:

(with O'Keefe and Basel, no Flanagan)

[Name removed]

23. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[JackRiddler]

21. Dai also has an "angry penis" (you can't make this stuff up)

http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2010/01/is-this-the-same-stan-dai-.html

In college, Stan Dai co-wrote a satirical work entitled The Penis Monologues, apparently a takeoff on the Vagina Monologues. Here's a taste:

My Angry Penis

MY PENIS IS ANGRY!!!!!!! You want to know what happened to my penis? Joan happened to my penis! There I was, sleeping peacefully when Joan stormed in and dragged me out for “an educational program.” I thought was going to see Mr. Rogers! But nooooooo! It turned out to be the “Whine-gina Monologues!”

[dmr]

22. What's Trinity doing in DC & the Intelligence community?

I certainly don't like that. After seeing what's come out of Trinity during the Bush* administration, those people are none too bright, very closed minded, and definitely not good for this nation.

This stinks rancid problems.

:grr:

[TexasObserver]

24. This really is scandalous. No doubt he's a spook.

He's got the classic spook resume. He's clearly a right wing ideologue. Those guys believe their worst enemies are Americans who oppose their unsavory actions.

[Oilwellian]

25. Guess who funds Dai's "Intelligence Center?"

Office of the Director of National Intelligence
Intelligence Community
Centers of Academic Excellence Program


ODNI IC CENTERS OF ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE
INTRODUCTION

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on behalf of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) established in FY 2005 the IC Centers of Academic Excellence (IC CAE) Program in National Security Studies. The emphasis is on building long-term partnerships with colleges and universities in core mission related academic disciplines to develop eligible talent and competitive feeder pools, that include 1st and 2nd Generation Americans, in support of America’s National Security Mission during the 21st Century.
ODNI IC CAE Program Office performs oversight for ten (10) CAE designated universities. The DNI provides competitive grants ($250K-$750K) to academic institutions to promote the alignment of curricula (e.g. scientific and technical programs of study, international relations, foreign language/cultural immersion) with IC core mission skills requirements articulated in the National Intelligence Strategy, the Strategic Human Capital Plan, and the ODNI 100 and 500 Day Plans.

The goals of the CAE Program are threefold: (1) to develop long-term academic partnerships with accredited colleges and universities that have diverse student populations and courses of academic study that align with IC core skill requirements; (2) to provide financial and technical support to those educational institutions, so that they can shape curricula to meet specific IC needs; and (3) to leverage and cultivate IC relationships with students of those institutions to ensure that the IC has a diverse, highly-qualified, and motivated applicant pool for its mission-critical occupations.

AUTHORITIES
The IC CAE Program design, framework and strategies are executed in accordance with the following guidance — CDA 3-8-2004, Executive Order 13355, Public Law 108-458/Sections 1041, 1042, 1043, 1051; Public Law 108-177, Section 319; and IRTPA S.2845-7 Section 102(A).

http://www.dni.gov/cae/

And who carries out the program?

http://www.carlisle.army.mil/proteus/index.cfm

This looks like another black eye for the Intelligence Community if Dai was one of their rising stars. I wonder if he was trying to recruit O'Keefe.

[JDPriestly]

27. Oh! Boy! What next?

[KoKo]

55. competitive feeder pools, that include 1st and 2nd Generation Americans, in support of (War)

"The emphasis is on building long-term partnerships with colleges and universities in core mission related academic disciplines to develop eligible talent and competitive feeder pools, that include 1st and 2nd Generation Americans, in support of America’s National Security Mission during the 21st Century."

Recruiting kids and grandkids of Immigrants to support war... That's a good one.

[pscot]

58. It's such a relief to know that

a Democratic administration will put a stop to this abusive misuse of intelligence spending. If they ever get a round tooit.

[Hannah Bell]

79. recruit keefe? keefe is *already* someone's operative, imo.

the girl he worked with in the acorn sting, too. she's some gopers daughter, i forget whose at the moment.

[mmonk]

93. Yes, Proteus USA is directly connected to the Office of the DNI.

[JackRiddler]

108. Black eye?

Sounds like sowing chaos all over as usual, and somebody got caught, and it's comfortably deniable, and no corporate media will want to pursue.

If anything comes of this it will either be through a courageous and determined prosecution (make those fuckers sing!) or if Landrieu is very, very angry and willing to do something about it. Given the lame track record of the Senate with various prior attacks on them - no hearings on anthrax in all these years - one can't be too hopeful.

[ChicagoSuz219]

26. If this were a movie...

...I'd be walking out right about now.

[Skittles]

28. yes

deeming it utterly ridiculous :o

[ChicagoSuz219]

31. Seriously. LOL n/t

[gkhouston]

39. If this were a movie...

if would be on the Syfy channel. I'm waiting for the zombies to show up.

[Turborama]

29. K&R Thanks Jack for this very interesting background info

And thanks to everyone else who's added to it.

[Rex]

30. Wow why is it always Repukes

and the CIA that fucks with us domestic slaves? They really hate democracy - to bad Congress won't touch their Frankensteins.

[Rozlee]

70. But, they will gang up on Pelosi when she points out that they mislead Congress on torture memos

The CIA has way too much integrity to do that. They may say that their intelligence was "way off" on Iraq WMD (thanks to Clinton), but Nancy Pelosi committed blasphemy by saying that they mislead the country.

[Ganja Ninja]

32. It's going to be very interesting to see what equipment they had ...

and where they got it from.

One has ties to a US prosecutor.
One has ties to the CIA.
One has ties to David Vitter.
and then there's O'Keeffe the darling of dozen right wing media outlets and websites.

What do you think the chances are of there being more than just these 4 idiots involved in this little caper? :shrug:

It wouldn't surprise me if we find a right wing security firm somewhere in the mix too.

[Brother Buzz]

54. There is an O'Keeffe - Jeff Gannon connection through the Leadership Institute

O'Keefe was a recruiter for the Leadership Institute. Gannon received his journalism "Creed" at the Leadership Institute.

I'm waiting for the "Joe the Plumber" connection to surface, that would be icing on the cake. :rofl:

[TheCentepedeShoes]

33. What's JSA?

Junior Brown Shirts?

[mainer]

94. Junior Spooks Anonymous?

[malaise]

34. Threads like this one are the reason I love DU

Rec

[cactusfractal]

35. Some spook...

Even Agent Maxwell Smart knew you don't "leave your credentials in the truck" when you're impersonating a phone technician. Haven't they heard of Kinko's, even?

Sorry about that, chief!

[Downwinder]

51. How did they get past the desk downstairs without credentials? n/t

[sasquatch]

43. Phi Betta Kappa huh, damn my professor was right about grade inflation

[mod mom]

45. here's more: helped run a "Defense Dept regional defense counterterrorism/irregular warfare program

According to the Phillips Foundation's Web site, Dai was the editor-in-chief of the GW Patriot, an alternative conservative student newspaper, when he attended The George Washington University in 2006. According to information Dai posted in September 2007 on the university's online alumni directory, he lived in Naperville, Ill., helped run a "Defense Deparment regional defense counterterrorism/irregular warfare program" and then became assistant director of the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity Washington University, which prepares undergraduates for careers in intelligence.

-snip

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/01/acorn_gotcha_man_arrested_for.html

different source

[JackRiddler]

48. What is the meaning of "irregular warfare"?

It's their network wars concept. It's psychology and morale and deception and total surveillance and selective killing and mixed paramilitary spookishness.

At the very least (rogue theory) he learned about the tactics and picked up the sense of entitlement to use them and the ideological justifications through these CIA "Junior Spook" and Neocon "Junior Commissar" programs. But his being in so many of these initiatives suggests he's more connected than that. A real fucking protege.

Watch them deny his existence.

Time to roll on your bosses, Dai! Roll!

[mod mom]

49. Here you go (from the source) What is "irregular warfare"?:

http://www.iwsp.cttso.gov/


Enterprise
Exploit adversary economic, financial, logistical, and information business processes.
Sanctuary
Deny adversaries safe operating zones from the physical to the virtual.

Organization
Deter, disrupt, interdict, and disable threat networks using advanced law enforcement tools, training, tactics, techniques, and procedures.

Motivation
Motivate, educate, and equip indigenous partner forces to directly combat violent, extremist ideologies and their practitioners




kind of sounds like he ws in training to become an "economic hitman"

[JackRiddler]

52. Yup. Seems yesterday they wanted to do a bit of "Enterprise" and "Organization"

Thanks!

[mod mom]

53. how much you wanna bet media ignores this connection? Nothing to see here...

move along.

[JackRiddler]

66. Well, you know...

Anything implying this conspiracy had conspirators would be conspiracy theory. You know?

[Rozlee]

73. Well, let's see now. OK. MSN online. Zip. CNN, a blip down on the page in the "politcs" section

What break in by conservative CIA operatives and wannabees into a senators office to bug it? We don't need no stinkin' stories about break ins.

What? This isn't the 1970s when the words "journalism" and "whore" weren't interchangeable.

[JackRiddler]

46. UPDATE 01/27: "More background on Herr Dai"

He was in an ideology promotion program - Foundation for the Defense of Democracies - founded two days after 9/11, and which connects to MANY NASTIES: Perle! Other major neocon and PNAC names! Woolsey! Lieberman!!

All of the following is from dbcooper41 at
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=26855&start=15

dbcooper41 writes:

in addition to being a chinese surname, da'i apparently is an arabic term meaning missionary

http://media.www.gwhatchet.com/media/storage/paper332/news/2004/09/13/CampusNews/Students.Mark.Third.Anniversary.Of.Attacks-716855.shtml

Students mark third anniversary of attacks - Campus News
Mobile Edition: View a mobile version of this pageCollege Media Network An
Independent Student Newspaper
Serving The George Washington University Community Since 1904

Students mark third anniversary of attacks
by Megan Whittemore Issue: 9/13/04 | Campus News
Media Credit: Erin Shea
About 140 people gathered in University Yard Saturday night to
remember the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.


Amber clouds hovered over University Yard Saturday night as the GW community
united to commemorate the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks of
September 11.

Three years after students awoke to terrorists crashing planes into the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, they gathered on the Quad for a vigil organized
by sophomore Stan Dai and junior Cassandra Waite. The two students, who are
fellows with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a non-partisan
foundation that raises awareness of terrorism issues, are planning four more
events this year.
Student Association President Woodard, a GW freshman at the time of the attacks,
told the crowd of more than 400 students that he turned on his television to
witness planes crash into the World Trade Center. Later, while on campus, he
heard the thunderous noise of a Boeing 757 airliner slamming into the Pentagon.

"Some events that are so powerful, they remain with us," said Woodard, who made
the first remarks of the memorial service just after 8 p.m. "It was only three
years ago, but I was right there."

University President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg spoke to candle-holding students
in front of a silhouette design of the New York City skyline, including the Twin
Towers and the words "9/11/2001: I remember."

"The message I'd like you to take away is that we all need to look after each
other, care and love each other a little more," said Trachtenberg, who was at
the Pentagon when it was attacked.

Sharing the perspective of the U.S. government during the attacks, Thomas J.
Kuster Jr., deputy assistant secretary of defense for force planning and
employment, addressed the crowd at the vigil.

"I was in the B-ring of the Pentagon when the plane hit the C-ring," said
Kuster, who was giving a briefing that day.

Kuster called terrorism an "attack on civilization" and urged students to be
aware of the security threats they face.

"Any of you standing here today may be the next victim," he said.
Continued... Page 1 of 2 next >


Stay informed: Print Twitter Mobile RSS Portals: The GW Hatchet GW Marketplace
What GW Reads Alumni Association Privacy Policy • Copyright © 2010 Hatchet
Publications, Inc. • College Publisher powered by mtvU and MTV Networks"

now check out the "foundation for the defense of democracies".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Defense_of_Democracies

considering FDoD was founded 2 days after 9/11/2001 and the collection of heavy hitters on it's board, and it's international scope, i think they deserve a closer look.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Defense_of_Democracies

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) is a policy institute based in Washington, D.C.. FDD was founded two days after the September 11, 2001 attacks to engage in the worldwide war of ideas and to support the defense of democratic societies under assault by terrorism and militant Islamism. "

pretty quick response to 9/11!

"Board of Directors, advisors and fellows
FDD's president is Clifford D. May. FDD's executive director is Mark Dubowitz. FDD’s Leadership Council is composed of prominent thinkers and leaders from the defense, intelligence, and policy communities including Paula Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Bill Kristol, Louis J. Freeh, Joseph Lieberman, Newt Gingrich, Max Kampelman, Robert McFarlane, and James Woolsey.

The members of FDD's Board of Advisors are Gary Bauer, Rep. Eric Cantor, Gene Gately, General P.X. Kelley, Charles Krauthammer, Kathleen Troia "KT" McFarland, Richard Perle, Steven Pomerantz, Oliver "Buck" Revell, and Francis J. "Bing" West.<2>"

FDD initiatives
FDD has initiated the following centers, coalitions, committees and ongoing projects:

The Center for Terrorism Research
The Center for Law & Counterterrorism
The Future of Terrorism
The Coalition Against Terrorist Media
The Committee on the Present Danger

Center for Law and Counterterrorism
FDD believes that the war against terrorism cannot be won on the battlefield alone, and says that Senior Fellow Andrew C. McCarthy is one of the nation’s leading experts on prosecuting the war against terrorists while protecting the civil liberties of Americans.

For 18 years, McCarthy was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. From 1993 to 1995, he led the successful prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. He also made major contributions to the prosecutions of the bombers of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as well as the Millennium plot attack at Los Angeles International Airport.

He joined FDD as a senior fellow in 2004 to address the issue of protecting of civil liberties while fighting terrorism.

In 2006, FDD stated that it tasked McCarthy with laying the groundwork for the Center for Law & Counterterrorism (CLC). This program examines the inevitable tension between civil liberties and national security. The CLC advisors McCarthy recruited include former Education Secretary William Bennett, retired Chief Federal District Judge Michael B. Mukasey, former Deputy Attorney General George J. Terwilliger III, National Review Editor Rich Lowry, Columbia Law School Professor Daniel C. Richman, and FDD Senior Fellow Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official."

this bunch is connected!!!

[sabra]

47. wow - nice work!

:thumbsup:

[gkhouston]

50. So Landrieu was targeted because she chairs Homeland Security.

Think I'll pop an extra big batch of :popcorn:

[TexasObserver]

56. He's definitely a propaganda agent for right wingers.

These guys are GOP criminals, who do this as their jobs in the GOP.

[arcadian]

68. Thanks for doing the digging.

Never heard of this group and never would have if it weren't for Mr. Dai.

[RedCloud]

57. We are going to need tons of popcorn to get through all of this!

:popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn:

[Wizard777]

61. If he's CIA. He's at Langley updating the suicide note in his file.

His friends wanting to take the fast track are practicing looking really sad as they say, he seemed depressed and deep in despair since his arrest. That's their story and they're sticking to it. Sometimes when you lay down with dogs. You get Rabies. Now there's some latin for you. Rabere meaning to rave.

[Botany]

65. links to Fox, the CIA, a U.S. Attorney, and to the right wing?

gotta order so more machines

[sabrina 1]

59. A nasty little spy in his high school and college.

I wonder how many of them there are being funded by Rightwing Think Tanks and the CIA around the country.

What a horrible society they have created.

[denverbill]

60. We need to cut off government funding to this corrupt group.n/t

[WillyT]

62. Big K & R !!!

:kick:

[CanonRay]

63. He's from China; will they deport him?

I'm sure he'll be very warmly welcomed "back home"

[Botany]

64. Popcorn

:popcorn:

BTW should Mr. Dai be waterboarded?

[JackRiddler]

67. Yes, I think he argued in favor of his own waterboarding, did he not?

[BlueIdaho]

69. Will these little shits

roll over on Michael Steele?

[JackRiddler]

71. I doubt that's who's behind this - you can see the suspect list above...

in the list of participants in Dai's group.

Major Bush Regime, PNAC and "neocon" figures all, including nominal former Democrats Woolsey and Lieberman. Architects of the Iraq invasion and prior propaganda about WMDs. Same crew roughly who run a number of campus inquisition groups.

[BlueIdaho]

81. Right then, thanks! nt.

[mod mom]

72. TPM Muck picks up the story:

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/alleged_phone_tamperer_is_young_nat-sec_expert.php

Freeper gets nailed in the comments. Some are hilarious, my favorite someone calling Sarah Palin "Bible Spice" :rofl:

[Ellipsis]

76. rawstory as well "'Tampergate' plotters have links to US intel"

http://rawstory.com/2010/01/men-charged-attempting-bug-landrieus-office-intelligence-links/

[The_Commonist]

74. Wow! Just wow!

I find it amazing that this little spook would get caught up with the likes of O'Keefe.
But then, apparently none of these little shits is all that bright...

[Blue Meany]

75. If he was involved with JSA in 2001, it was when he was only

a sophmore or junior in high school (he graduated in 2003). According to articles in the Chicago Daily Herald from 2001, he was then involved in a voter registration effort organized by Freedom's Answer, supposedly a bi-partisan organization. Was this, then, some kind of front organization for JSA? This needs to be explored.

[hedgehog]

78. I'm not sure which aspect of all this is scarier -

that the CIA is involved in this, that the CIA is beginning to recruit and groom high school sophomores or that the CIA would get involved with people as stupid as Mr. Dai.

[JackRiddler]

80. All three, although none of them is unprecedented.

Well, I guess the recruitment of high school sophomores is unusual for the CIA, if not for more local agencies. But they've always been getting them young and it often runs in the family.

There is nothing new about CIA involvement in domestic dirty tricks, check Operation CHAOS and MK-ULTRA for starters and see where that leads you. (And I'm not assuming direct agency involvement - hell, it almost never works that way any more. Everyone's a freelancer now!)

As for stupid - come on!



(No particular reason why Neil is circled - just the first pic I found.)

What kind of people want to go into dirty tricks and spookville? If they didn't have serious cognitive and emotional issues, wouldn't they be looking, I don't know, to do the movies or market self-help schemes or something?

[Electric Monk]

82. Wow. k&r

[creeksneakers2]

83. There's probably less here than meets the eye

POLITICO
Laura Rozen
Man charged in NOLA-gate scheme did not work for intelligence community

http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0110/Man_charged_in_NOLAgate_scheme_did_not_work_for_intelligence_community.html?showall#

I have to wonder how somebody supposedly smart enough to work for intelligence operations at 24 was dumb enough to pull the stunt at the Senate office. Some of Dai's accomplishments probably sound like more than they really are.

[JackRiddler]

84. Well if *POLITICO* says so, it must be so...

How many times are we going to hear the "too dumb" excuse?

What was smart about the Bay of Pigs? Should we praise the spooks for the times when they were "smart" and had "successes" like the overthrows in Guatemala and Chile?

To take the obvious example, were the Watergate burglars smart? Were all those assholes pulling dirty tricks on candidates during the 1972 campaign (among them one Karl Rove!) "smart"?

I feel no need to account for how "smart" or "stupid" criminals are. They are criminals first.

How about we keep digging, and let others dig, and see where the connections (AND THE MONEY) may lead. Right now with these guys it's veeerry interesting, even if nothing more than freelancing can be shown. It's clear enough where they got the training, the ideology, the impetus, the sense of entitlement to commit crime.

To borrow a phrase from the "war on terror" propaganda, it's clear who their "safe harbors" are.

[JackRiddler]

85. Anyway the point is, investigate these ties and never mind Politico's guesses.

[JackRiddler]

86. This is going to need Landrieu's insistence on an investigation - she is a senator, after all.

What are the chances?

[JackRiddler]

87. Final kick, I guess!

[Octafish]

88. Junior BFEE - James Bond Wannabe Part of Right-Wing Plot to Tamper with Senator's Phones

Who can dream up this stuff?

From our good friends at Alternet.org:

James Bond Wannabe Part of Right-Wing Plot to Tamper with Senator's Phones

One of the men arrested in the plot to bug Sen. Landrieu's phones has ties to the intelligence community -- and an angry penis (according to himself).

AlterNet / By Lindsay Beyerstein COMMENTS: 1

EXCERPT...

The circumstances of Dai's arrest are difficult to square any theory that the men were just checking the protocols of Landrieu's phone system. A federal law enforcement official told the Associated Press that one of the four suspects was arrested a few blocks away in a car with "a listening device that could pick up transmissions." Another anonymous official told MSNBC that the man in the car was Stan Dai. It's unclear why the listening device wasn't mentioned in the affidavit. The U.S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District of Louisiana declined my request for further comment.

In 2008, Dai served as associate director of the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity Washington University. The ICCAE is funded by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and charged with recruiting the next generation of spooks. A university official assured Laura Rozen of Politico that Dai was a civilian whose job with the university ended in 2008 when the grant money ran out.

Last June, Dai was a featured speaker on torture and terrorism at a "CIA Day" for students in the Junior Statesmen of America's summer school. The mission of the Junior Statesmen, according to the organization's Web site, "is to strengthen American democracy by educating and preparing high school students for life-long involvement and responsible leadership in a democratic society." The students visited Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Va., and then returned to Georgetown for a series of lectures.

According to program notes for the CIA-a-Palooza, Dai also served as an operations officer for a Department of Defense irregular warfare fellowship program before he joined the ICCAE program at Trinity. I called the Pentagon to confirm that Dai had worked in this capacity, but the spokesman told me there was no way to answer that question without knowing which irregular warfare fellowship program Dai purportedly worked for. (Who knew there were so many?)

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/news/145457/james_bond_wannabe_part_of_right-wing_plot_to_tamper_with_senator%27s_phones

This ain't no Looeezyanna Watergate. CIA-a-Palooza means "BFEE Wannabe-in-training."

Thank you for an outstanding OP and thread, JackRiddler. Wow!

[JackRiddler]

90. Thanks Octafish! Here's some new info about one BEN WATMORE:

The boys apparently stayed at the N.O. residence of one Ben Watmore, formerly and perhaps still of the Leadership Institute and former president of Students for Life of America. They may have met through Watmore who claims a mentor role for O'Keefe.

The following passage is from a post by "publius" at the Breitbart site, biggovernment.com

http://biggovernment.com/2010/01/28/lawyer-phone-scheme-meant-to-embarrass-senator/#more-66766

Charged along with O’Keefe and Flanagan were Joseph Basel, 24, of Minnesota and Stan Dai, 24, of the Washington, D.C., area. The four are due back in court Feb. 12.

O’Keefe, Basel and Dai stayed with Benjamin Wetmore, a friend of O’Keefe’s, while they were in New Orleans. Wetmore, a 28-year-old law school student, was O’Keefe’s boss when he worked at the Leadership Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based program that trains conservative activists.

Wetmore declined to discuss their stay at his house and what they did while there. But he praised O’Keefe’s work targeting ACORN on his Web site and said he hired O’Keefe in 2006, helping him hone his undercover camera craft.

In an Oct. 16 blog post, Wetmore criticized the Leadership Institute, where he no longer works, for not supporting O’Keefe’s budding activism. Wetmore said he was “nearly fired for buying the initial video equipment that James used.”

So yeah, Wetmore looks like a POI. If so, are these words meant to cover for the "leadership" institute, or genuinely rogue?

BIG CONFUSION if you check "Ben Wetmore" page at zoominfo:
http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Wetmore_Ben_228208485.aspx

Apparently there is a British BW with something called the "Solicitors Family Law Association" (referred to as SFLA) in Kent, and an American one who is definitely our guy from the Leadership Institute and who also had the title of "President, Students for Life of America" (an anti-abortion group who refer to themselves as SFLA!!!). WTF?! Are these two different guys who coincidentally have the same name and the same organizational acronym, or the same guy?!

From zoominfo page:

www.studentsforlife.org/index.php/about/directors/ -
Published on: 12/4/2007 Last Visited: 12/4/2007

Ben Wetmore, President Ben has been the President since 2006 and has been involved with SFLA since 2002.He has worked for the National Catholic Educational Association and the Leadership Institute.He has worked on a variety of campaigns, and has been involved with campus organizing for over four years, and campus activism in various forms for ten years.Ben was involved with starting campus newspapers and publications at the Leadership Institute, where he helped over 125 publications start in less than three years, and he helped train over a thousand activists in 46 states.Ben works at SFLA in fundraising and planning.Email Ben.

This page no longer exists at studentsforlife.org, which apparently has a new president named Kristan Hawkins. Google Wetmore's name on that site, and you find he's no longer mentioned on any live pages there. There are still a couple of PDFs with him as contact:

http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=site:studentsforlife.org+wetmore&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

National Review Press Release 11.21.2007
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
Ben Wetmore. 202-329-8932 [e-mail]. National Review: Students for Life of America. 'Fighting Back' ...
www.studentsforlife.org/wp.../national-review-press-release-11212007.pdf
Abortionist Admits Lying to patients 11.19.2007
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
Ben Wetmore. 202-329-8932 [e-mail]. Abortionist Admits Lying to Patients. Claims a "License to Lie" about Abortion ...
www.studentsforlife.org/.../abortionist-admits-lying-to-patients-11192007. pdf

One of my first questions, if I had a crack at this as an investigator, would be: What kind of "irregular warfare" internship did Dai complete? Under whose management?

Autor Lindsay Beyerstein (um, that's majikthise?) pursued this in an article on alternet, so far without a definitive answer from the Pentagon:

http://www.alternet.org/story/145457/

James Bond Wannabe Part of Right-Wing Plot to Tamper with Senator's Phones
By Lindsay Beyerstein, AlterNet
Posted on January 28, 2010, Printed on January 29, 2010

SNIP

The circumstances of Dai's arrest are difficult to square any theory that the men were just checking the protocols of Landrieu's phone system. A federal law enforcement official told the Associated Press that one of the four suspects was arrested a few blocks away in a car with "a listening device that could pick up transmissions." Another anonymous official told MSNBC that the man in the car was Stan Dai. It's unclear why the listening device wasn't mentioned in the affidavit. The U.S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District of Louisiana declined my request for further comment.

In 2008, Dai served as associate director of the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity Washington University. The ICCAE is funded by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and charged with recruiting the next generation of spooks. A university official assured Laura Rozen of Politico that Dai was a civilian whose job with the university ended in 2008 when the grant money ran out.

Last June, Dai was a featured speaker on torture and terrorism at a "CIA Day" for students in the Junior Statesmen of America's summer school. The mission of the Junior Statesmen, according to the organization's Web site, "is to strengthen American democracy by educating and preparing high school students for life-long involvement and responsible leadership in a democratic society." The students visited Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Va., and then returned to Georgetown for a series of lectures.

According to program notes for the CIA-a-Palooza, Dai also served as an operations officer for a Department of Defense irregular warfare fellowship program before he joined the ICCAE program at Trinity. I called the Pentagon to confirm that Dai had worked in this capacity, but the spokesman told me there was no way to answer that question without knowing which irregular warfare fellowship program Dai purportedly worked for. (Who knew there were so many?)

Irregular warfare is an umbrella term that encompasses everything from counterinsurgency and counterterrorism to military intelligence. If conventional warfare is violence between uniformed armies on the battlefield, irregular warfare is almost a catchall term for everything else. Potential adversaries include guerrilla fighters, as well as international criminal and terrorist organizations. (A classic example of irregular warfare was when CIA operatives recruited Hmong tribesmen to fight alongside Americans in the Vietnam War.) In recent years, there has been an uptick in interest in irregular warfare in various branches of the U.S. military. The CIA's Special Operations Division (SAD) is often regarded as the preeminent practitioner of irregular warfare.

SNIP

Lindsay Beyerstein is a New York writer blogging at majikthise.typepad.com She covers health care reform for the Media Consortium.
© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

Oi, I hope this stuff is pursued!

[MinM]

91. Larisa Alexandrovna: Ratfuckers Strike Again

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7579406

:dem:

[JackRiddler]

92. A Saturday morning cartoon kick is appropriate - given the four of them!

[JackRiddler]

95. Sunday UPDATE: NYT article on the boys...

Long article in the NY Times today has lots of stuff reviewing the many annoying activities of O'Keefe and his buddies (including their New Orleans host, Ben Wetmore) in their never-ending, thinktank-financed campaign to end the cruel victimization of young privileged white college-educated males with fratboy mentalities.

Worth reading, but playing the Landrieu event as a prank gone wrong, and all-too-revealing in that the only thing they found to say about Dai despite his glaring spook connections was this:

One of those arrested was Stan Dai, 24, a former editor in chief of the irreverent GW Patriot at George Washington University, where he published an anti-feminist article lampooning the play “The Vagina Monologues.” His version was called “The Penis Monologues.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/us/politics/31landrieu.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print

NYT, always a friend to C-I-A.

[JackRiddler]

96. UPDATE: 22 Spooks on Campus groups! (Story this week in Counterpunch newsletter)

http://counterpunch.org/cockburn01292010.html

Spooks on Campus – and a New Orleans connexion outside Senator Landrieu’s office

David Price has a major scoop in our latest subscriber-only newsletter. He describes how, across the past five years, without a word of public debate, let alone concern the CIA, has successfully implanted spy schools on 22 university campuses across the country, many of them labeled “Intelligence Community Centers of Academic Excellence” – ICCAE, pronounced “Icky”. It began in 2004,” Price reports, when “a $250,000 grant was awarded to Trinity Washington University by the Intelligence Community for the establishment of a pilot ‘Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence’ program. Trinity was in many ways an ideal campus for a pilot program. For a vulnerable, tuition-driven struggling financial institution in the D.C. area the promise of desperately needed funds and a regionally assured potential student base, linked with or seeking connections to the DC intelligence world, made the program financially attractive.”

Price’s timing is impeccable. Last Monday, the day we were preparing to send his story to press, came news that a group of Fox News’ free-lance buggers - the same who set up ACORN – had been arrested, trying for phone sabotage in Senator Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office. Three of the team were caught inside Landrieu’s office. A fourth was arrested as he sat in a car a few blocks away with what the police described as “a listening device that could pick up transmissions." Another anonymous official told MSNBC that the man in the car was Stan Dai. Dai is a veteran of Trinity Washington University’s spook school,. funded by the “Intelligence Community”. In 2008, Dai served as associate director of ICCAE at Trinity Washington.

How many wannabe Howard Hunts and G. Gordon Liddys are being turned out by the spook schools? As Price writes, “Even amid the extreme militarization prevailing in America today, the public silence surrounding this quiet installation and spread of programs like ICCAE is extraordinary. In the last four years ICCAE has gone further in bringing government intelligence organizations openly to multiple American university campuses than any previous intelligence initiative since World War Two. Yet the program spreads with little public notice, media coverage, or coordinated multi-campus resistance.”

Did any tenured faculty member at the 22 campuses now hosting spook-schools publicly raise the alarm? Twenty years ago there would have been furious demonstrations. Not now. Faculty, most notably at the University of Washington, did write anguished, even angry memos. Price quotes them. But as he writes,

“it’s far from clear that these private critiques had any measurable effect, precisely because they remained private... Tenured professors on ICCAE campuses, or on campuses contemplating ICCAE programs, need to use their tenure and speak out, on the record, in public... the split between the public and private reactions to ICCAE has helped usher the CIA silently back onto American university campuses. The intelligence community thrives on silence.”

Price can be reached at [e-mail].

[JackRiddler]

97. UPDATE: The outlines of the media assisted cover-up are becoming obvious.

The NYT story of today is designed to delineate the acceptable story for this incident, to wit: It was four jerks overreaching themselves, and maybe they should be punished harshly for it, but there will be no mention of Dai's spooky connections (or those of the other three). And certainly none about how the CIA has set up TWENTY TWO campus groups like Dai's - presumably mostly also connected to the neocon money network and the "conservative" movement - all over the country, or what kind of other dirty tricks they may be engaging in. No, Dai is to be presented as emasculated - his "scared penis" story is what you're supposed to remember about him, not his CIA coven on campus or his "irregular warfare" internship at the Pentagon. The latter is just crazy talk.

[Octafish]

104. CIA Infiltration of Student Groups: The National Student Association Scandal

Here's some light on a subject Corporate McPravda wants no part of:

CIA Infiltration of Student Groups:

The National Student Association Scandal

by Phil Agee, Jr.

In February 1967, vice president Hubert Humphrey told a Stanford University audience that recent revelations of CIA activities represented "one of the saddest times, in reference to public policy, our Government has had." He was referring to the momentous exposures, then exploding across the front pages, of CIA meddling in the nation's largest student group, the United States National Student Association (NSA). The 1967 investigations, initially prompted by the editors of Ramparts magazine and authorized by various liberal-minded figures in corporate media and government, brought forth some of the most fully-disclosed operations regarding CIA influence over academia and a host of other domestic groups. Only after a presidential directive and promises by federal agencies to end covert support of domestic groups did the scandal subside. The damage control ultimately allayed such figures as Humphrey, Senator Robert Kennedy, and New York Times editorial page editor John Oakes. Yet subsequent failures to properly regulate covert actions along with legal loopholes and lack of clear policies within academic institutions have left persisting doubts regarding the use to which the CIA has put student groups and the academic community.

By most accounts, the relationship between the CIA and the NSA dates back to the early fifties, when both organizations were still in their infancies. As Tom Braden, who headed the agency's International Organization Division between '51 and '54, recounts in an article titled "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral'," the NSA operation began after Allen Dulles, then in line for directorship, authorized Braden to provide support to domestic organizations in an all-out effort against the "international Communist front." Secret CIA funds were provided in 1952 to then NSA president William Dentzer, who later went on to become AID director in Peru. The New York Times also identified Cord Meyer, Jr. as having headed the NSA operation. However, the ties between the CIA and the National Student Association may actually stretch back to 1950, when, according to a New York Times interview with Frederic Delano Houghteling, then NSA secretary, the CIA gave him several thousand dollars to pay traveling expenses for a delegation of 12 representatives to a European international student conference.

The first congress of the Association, held at Madison, Wisconsin in 1947, had set out to represent the U.S. student community in an emerging international student scene. As the NSA grew, covert CIA influence led to often contradictory behavior between those few who knew and the vast majority kept in the dark. Yet its growing membership also developed a domestic program addressing a range of national and campus-related issues. In 1951 it opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee. Its elected officers participated in the activities of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and it organized counseling on the draft during the war in Vietnam. Much of its domestic role reflected the growing concerns on campuses nationwide with racism and imperialism. On the international front the Association eventually established four full-time overseas representatives based in France, England, Poland and Uganda, and scores of part-time representatives. As conservative student groups such as the Young Americans for Freedom attacked the Association's positions, members of Students for a Democratic Society provided important leadership for campus-based activities.

SNIP...

The impact the Association had abroad was largely due to the funding provided by the CIA. According to the Ramparts article and subsequent reports by the New York Times, U.S. intelligence was providing the NSA as much as $400,000 a year. The CIA was also funneling as much as $1,800,000 to the International Student Conference, a confederation of over 80 national student unions set up in 1950 by the NSA to counter the International Union of Students, a so-called "communist" union which originated the long-lasting International Youth Festivals. The funds were transferred through a double screening process, using first dummy foundations and then foundations with histories of legitimate private philanthropy. "Legitimate" foundations would then pass the funds on to the national office of the NSA.

For at least 15 years, during the fifties and sixties, the NSA appeared to the public and its own membership to be receiving its funding from private foundations such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and government sources including the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the State Department. Labeled by E.W. Kenworthy in the New York Times of February 19, 1967 as "not much more than a mail-drop," the front foundations included the Price Fund of New York, the Edsel Fund of San Francisco, the Borden Trust of Philadelphia, and the Beacon Fund of Boston. Among the more widely mentioned "legitimate" foundations passing the funds along to the NSA were the Independence Foundation of Boston, the San Jacinto Foundation of Houston, and the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs of New York. Not surprisingly, a number of officials of these foundations had past connections with both the federal government and the NSA. Harry Lunn, secretary of the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs, was both NSA president (1954-55) and subsequently worked for the Defense Department, the political section of the American embassy in Paris, and the Agency for International Development. The NSA's international division and part of its national directorate became secret recruiting pools for potential CIA career officials.

CONTINUED...

http://www.cia-on-campus.org/nsa/nsa2.html

Gosh. Who knows? Maybe one day, Corporate McPravda will get around to reporting CIA's connection to US politics?

PS: It isn't just Porter Goss or Lindsey Graham, nor the late Tom Braden.

[JackRiddler]

98. UPDATE: O'Keefe's Right-Wing Sugardaddy (Village Voice expose)

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/09/acorn_videomake.php

James O'Keefe, the activist filmmaker who achieved sudden fame for a series of undercover videos recording ACORN workers, has repeatedly said that he is "absolutely independent" and received no outside funding to make his films. But the Voice has learned that O'Keefe, in fact, has had heavyweight conservative backers who funded the young filmmaker as recently as a few months before his ACORN films were made.

The ACORN videos are actually just the latest of several films O'Keefe has produced and uploaded to YouTube. An earlier film posted in February, "Taxpayers Clearing House" featured nonwhite, working class people being duped by O'Keefe, who led them to believe they had won money in a sweepstakes. That video was produced with the help of a grant -- said to be about $30,000 ((Thiel's spokesman says closer to $10,000 -- see update)) -- from Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook -- an investment which made him a billionaire. Thiel is one of Silicon Valley's more interesting figures: a gay man (according to Gawker's "Valleywag") who has railed against the evils of "multiculturalism." He lives in San Francisco and today runs a hedge fund.

SNIP

O'Keefe, meanwhile, has repeatedly claimed to be financially independent. In an interview with the New York Post shortly after the ACORN videos hit the Internet, O'Keefe claimed to be "absolutely independent." Giles said she had "drained my entire savings" to spend the summer making the undercover videos. O'Keefe estimated his budget at $1,300, and said that Giles had paid for her own plane ticket to California. The couple said they lived off of Power Bars and Subway sandwiches for two months.

But O'Keefe turns out to have a substantial history of being funded by conservative figures. In February, a video called "Taxpayers Clearing House" was posted to YouTube. In it, O'Keefe and others drive around in a van with a logo on the side that looks like the "Publishers Clearing House" vehicle known for showing up and surprising sweepstakes winners with oversized checks. In O'Keefe's video, working class Blacks are shown jumping up and down in excitement - until they learn that O'Keefe is actually delivering a bill for $28,000, their share of the federal banks bailout. O'Keefe told a friend, Liz Farkas, that he had approached Thiel with the idea for the video, and had walked away with "approximately $30,000" to produce it. Farkas told the New York Times this week that she and O'Keefe, who met at Rutgers University, clashed over publishing incomplete transcripts from another sting involving an abortion provider.

Shock tactics knocking at the door of black families with what look like giant sweepstakes checks. The depth of this asshole seems to have no limits.

CIA campus stations (taxpayer money)
+ neocon thinktank money (tax deductible)
+ "conservative" movement mojo (anti-abortion/Christianist)
+ sense of utter entitlement in the means adopted thanks in part to...
+ the delusion that the "liberals" are waging war on white men
-------------------------------------
SERIOUS CLUSTERFUCK OF POLITICAL DISRUPTION CELLS AROUND THE COUNTRY

Now contemplate this:
+ removal of all limits on political spending by corporations.
+ prior removal of accounting regulations on CIA contractors (due to "War on Terror")
+ recent removal of accounting regulations on banks (due to "Financial Crisis")
--------------------------------------
ON THE WAY TO THE MOST FIXED ELECTION IN HISTORY - 2010

Now Mr. Paypal-Facebook Billionaire need no longer even reach into his own pocket. He can fund these kinds of sick psyop projects through his companies as legitimate business expenses, and assuming he's got the right kind of dispensation thanks to "national security" or "financial crisis," legally do it off the books.

Nixon's CREEPs wouldn't recognize this world. They'd think it was an impossible Utopia.

[JackRiddler]

100. UPDATE: Letten recuses himself - Prosecutor is now Jan Mann.

http://www.mainjustice.com/2010/02/01/vitter-to-drop-hold-on-louisiana-u-s-attorney-nominee

Vitter To Drop Hold On Louisiana U.S. Attorney Nominee
By Andrew Ramonas | February 1, 2010

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) will no longer hold up federal nominations in his state after receiving assurance that the job of the George W. Bush-holdover U.S. Attorney in New Orleans is safe, The Times-Picayune reported today.

The Republican senator now will return his “blue slip” on Western District of Louisiana U.S. Attorney nominee Stephanie Finley and other federal nominees, which he had been withholding until he received official word on the status of U.S. Attorney Jim Letten. The Senate Judiciary Committee traditionally does not consider a nomination until it receives a “blue slip” from the nominee’s home state senator.

Vitter had asked the administration to keep Letten, who has led the Eastern District of Louisiana U.S. Attorney’s Office since 2001. Today, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Letten would serve on the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee, which serves as the voice of U.S. Attorneys throughout the nation, sending a strong signal that his job was safe. “This prestigious appointment makes it crystal clear that Jim isn’t going anywhere except on regular trips to Washington to personally advise the attorney general,” Vitter told the newspaper. “The attorney general and I superficially discussed this in our meeting last Thursday and I’m really excited to get it done.”

Letten’s office is handling the case against four men who allegedly tried to interfere with phones at Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office. One of the men, Robert Flanagan, is the son of Western District of Louisiana acting U.S. Attorney William Flanagan. James O’Keefe, who gained notoriety for secret videos of the community organizing group ACORN, was one of Flanagan’s accomplices. Andrew Breitbart, the founder of BigGovernment.com, which employs O’Keefe, said today on Fox News that Letten leaked information on the incident in a “concerted effort” to put O’Keefe in a bad light. Letten’s office denied the allegation.

Breitbart appears to be following a predictable game plan, which we also see in the defendant O'Keefe, of throwing out every possible accusation in all directions, sowing preemptive chaos.

Letten recusing is presumably good, he was a Bush appointee. Probably this was the quid pro quo with Vitter.

The question is what Jan Mann is all about. No clue. (She's the prosecutor who will now handle the case, according to other stories.

Is the press going to surrender on a story that may still just be within their very limited range for acceptability?

And just how supine do the Democrats want to be in an election year, in the face of a concerted dirty tricks campaign with CIA connections, and corporate money near-certain to flow to Republicans on scales likely never before seen in a midterm?

[JackRiddler]

110. THIS STORY SHOULD NOT DROP OUT OF VIEW - NEW THREAD

"We are letting the Repubicans get away with the second Watergate."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7664914

[JackRiddler]

111. And yet... and yet... sigh.

[JackRiddler]

101. UPDATE: Majikthise finds political dirty tricks guide on cache of Wetmore's now retired Web site!

First, anoter story about Letten's recusal (anyone know about Jan Mann?). But see below for some serious ugliness from Wetmore discovered by the intrepid Lindsay Beyerstein - and visit her blog now!

http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2010/02/us_attorney_jim_letten_recused.html

U.S. Attorney Jim Letten recuses himself from Landrieu phone tampering case
By Laura Maggi, The Times-Picayune

February 01, 2010, 6:16PM

U.S. Attorney Jim Letten last week decided to remove himself from the prosecution of four young men arrested for trying to tamper with the phones in U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office.

Assistant U.S. attorney Jan Mann will prosecute the case.

According to a brief news release sent to reporters on Monday evening, Letten decided to recuse himself from the investigation and "potential prosecution" of the men because of "various relevant factors." These factors, which the release stated were discussed with officials at the U.S. Department of Justice, are not named. The recusal decision came the day after the men were arrested last week and the same day they were released from custody, according to the news release.

One of the arrested men, Robert Flanagan, 24, is the son of William Flanagan, who is the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana. The other three men include James O'Keefe, 25, a conservative filmaker who made hidden-camera videos at ACORN field offices, and two out-of-state conservative activists: Joseph Basel, 24, and Stan Dai, 24. Despite Letten's recusal, the case will not be removed to another jurisdiction, according to the statement. Instead, Letten's first assistant U.S. attorney, veteran federal prosecutor Jan Mann, will act as the "Attorney for the United States in this matter," according to the release.

http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2010/02/mentor-to-alleged-phone-tamperers-blogged-about-political-phone-pranks.html?cid=6a00d8341c61e653ef012877476815970c

"Mentor" to alleged phone tamperers blogged about dirty tricks with phones

(Original reporting, please credit Lindsay Beyerstein.)

Justin Elliott of TPM Muckraker points to a new story in the New York Times about Ben Wetmore, a 28-year-old conservative activist who let anti-ACORN provocateur James O'Keefe and his merry band crash at his New Orleans home prior to their arrest for allegedly attempting to tamper with Sen. Mary Landrieu's phones. According to the New York Times, Wetmore was a mentor to a network of right wing provocateurs who embraced various forms of political theater to dramatize their issues on college campuses. Marcy Wheeler's commenter cinnamonape connected the dots between Ben Wetmore and James O'Keefe last Friday.

The page BenWetmore.com now redirects automatically to Newsbusters. A WHOIS search for that domain delivers no information. However, the cached version looks like the personal blog of the now infamous Ben Wetmore, campus provocateur. The cached site is Countermedia. The author, who replies to blog commenters under the name "Ben" writes bitterly about his tenure the Leadership Institute, the conservative group where he and O'Keefe used to work. Amongst other things, Ben assails the Leadership Institute for trying to take undeserved credit for O'Keefe's early video successes. "All the good things at the Institute while I was there happened despite the management, or by going around them. I was nearly fired, as was my boss (former) Cong. Steve Stockman, for buying the initial video equipment that James (O'Keefe) used," Ben wrote last September. He seemed especially bitter that the LI hired and fired idealistic young conservatives capriciously. Where's a union when you need one, eh?

This post, dated Oct 21, 2009, survives in the Google cache:

Disrupting speeches on the cheap

Leftists disrupt speeches by throwing pies, calling names, and chanting stupid stuff.

So uncreative.

Personally I've given advice to disrupt malcontents like Michael Moore using track phones going off with obscenely loud ringers in various locations, as well as a variety of other crazy schemes that I'd rather not go into.

SNIP

But in another cached post dated Sept. 18, 2009, Ben seems to be seriously advocating a dirty tricks robocall to sway elderly voters by impersonating Barack Obama:

Healthcare Independent Expenditure idea

(I wrote this up and sent it to a few friends who I thought could tell me if it was a decent idea or not. Only one responded, and even then without saying whether it was a good idea or not. I'm getting the feeling that I'm either past my prime or unable to get any political scheme funded or people interested anymore. So, I'm posting it here in the resigned defeat of watching another political idea die on the vine.)

Healthcare Independent Expenditure idea

1. Get a voice artist who sounds similar to President Obama

2. Identify and rent lists of elderly likely voters in key areas

a. Senate

Colorado – Bennett
Arkansas – Lincoln
North Dakota – Dorgan

b. House

South Dakota – Herseth
(other potentials)

c. Legal limitations
Check for states where the most favorable regulatory regime exists:
http://winningcalls.com/statelaws.html

3. Record a short spot using the voice artist:

Sterile female voice:
Please hold for a fake message from the President Barack Obama

Obama voice artist:
Good afternoon seniors,
I want to talk to you for a moment about healthcare reform. I know many of you are concerned about losing Medicare and Medicaid benefits and likely cuts to Social Security that will be necessary to pay for my healthcare reforms. However, I want to ask you to end the divisiveness on this issue and support me. I know what’s best for you and even if we do take your benefits, tax your healthcare plan or increase taxes, it will be worth it to provide healthcare to those who can’t afford it. So, please stop opposing me and trust me.
Thank you.

4. Robocall lists with this message. Distribute .mp3 file to other organizations with robodialers.
Labels: activism, election, healthcare, obama, politics

The blog is a fascinating compendium of organizing tactics, movie reviews, and more, um, personal entries. Ben confesses to being a girl drink drunk; he rails against the "lazy bureaucrats" who put up signs telling him he couldn't wander around an abandoned public sanitarium; and asserts that ACLU head Nadine Strossen has no pupils (and therefore reminds him of a demon). Perhaps the weirdest post is the one from last June featuring an animated .gif of Ben's own design framing the slogan "Obama says girls don't poop." Wetmore made his mark in 2002 by insisting on his First Amendment right to videotape a campus appearance by Tipper Gore at American University without her permission. Just goes to show nobody's all bad.

[Octafish]

102. Segretti, Rove, O'Keefe -- Long Line of GOP Dirty Tricksters

From some of the people who know Rove best:

Segretti, Rove, O'Keefe

Richard Whittaker
Austin Chronicle
Thu Jan 28, 1:58pm

Boys will be boys, eh, Karl?As potential links between conservative think tank the Pelican Group, conservative new media maven Andrew Breitbart and the four operatives that tried to mess with a US Senator's phones become clearer, one thought emerges: A bunch of entitled Republican frat boys doing dirty tricks? How very Nixonian and, let's not forget, Rovian.

What's known so far is that four men, all recent graduates connected to the conservative right – James O'Keefe, Stan Dai, Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan – have been arrested by the FBI over allegations that they were planning to tamper with Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's phones. The big question is: Who is surprised by such antics?
Go back to 1972, when Deputy Assistant to President Nixon Dwight L. Chapin brought in an old buddy of his from USC, a former military prosecutor called Donald Segretti. In his autobiography Blind Ambition, White House Counsel John Dean called him Chapin's "campaign saboteur." Segretti called what he did Ratfucking: Childish, frat boy disruption tactics like calling venues for Democratic events and canceling the booking on the day, or ordering a thousand pizzas for delivery to Democratic events, and more serious acts like faking memos on stolen headed notepaper. And where did the term ratfucking come from? It was invented by the USC College Republicans when they were screwing with the USC Democrats.

Segretti was, for some, the light entertainment side of the dirty tricks culture that lead to Watergate (another attempt to mess with a Democrat's phones), but it was still enough to get him six months in jail for distributing forged campaign materials for the Nixon campaign. One of his acolytes was notorious Republican campaign fixer Lee Atwater, who served as campaign manager for Austin resident Karl Rove in 1973 when he ran successfully to be national chair of the College Republicans. That would be Karl Rove who, as documented in Lou Dobose' book Boy Genius, pretended to be a campaign volunteer for Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Allen Dixon and used stolen headed notepaper to send out fake party invites. The same Karl Rove that, as James Moore and Wayne Slater reported in Rove Exposed, was suspected in 1986 of bugging his own suite in the Bill Clements for Governor campaign offices.

Flash forward two decades, and it's a bunch of college conservatives doing the same kind of nonsense. According to reports, Dai was a member of the GW College Republicans in D.C, while Basel has been connected to the University of Minnesota College Republicans. O'Keefe founded the conservative newspaper at Rutgers University The Centurion, and as of the night after his arrest Rutgers University College Republicans was advertising a meet and greet with him. O'Keefe, of course, came to notoriety when he and a female associate played dress-up in order to entrap ACORN operatives. Their sub-Ali G theatrics got lots of media play after O'Keefe's boss Breitbart lead the charge: That ACORN staff called the police on them didn't get so much coverage. That may change now O'Keefe has been caught playing dress-up yet again.

CONTINUED...

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/News/Blogs/index.html/objID943617/blogID/

Lots o' links on the oil-soaked, greasy ratfuckers up there.

[JackRiddler]

103. Thanks Octafish - The lineage is continuous, as this article and many others show.

But what can you do in a country where memories are so short that people seriously believe the Bush Jr. regime was somehow distinct from the Bush Sr. administration, even though almost all of the same guys were in roughly the same positions. (You'll remember they even found a spot for Poindexter!)

In this case, Rove as a young Watergater now seeing a third generation of demon spawn go forth.

[JackRiddler]

105. UPDATE: Good collection of stories on these guys at Salon.com

Among other things, a report of Hannah "Fake Prostitute" Giles distancing herself from her rat of a friend, now that he's been caught and looks bad. So courageous! This deserves a Congressional resolution all its own.

Anyway, the big one is the discovery that O'Keefe runs around in White Nationalist circles and has been very, very explicit about his racism in writing:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/02/03/james_okeefe_white_nationalists/index.html

James O'Keefe's race problem
A photo of the righty stuntman at a white-nationalist confab illustrates a career marked by racial resentment
By Max Blumenthal
Photo by Isis/Salon composite
James O'Keefe, photographed at a white nationalist conference by One People's Project.

Many of the conservatives who gleefully promoted James O’Keefe’s past political stunts are feigning shock at his arrest on charges that he and three associates planned to tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's phone lines. Once upon a time, right-wing pundits hailed the 25-year-old O’Keefe as a creative genius and model of journalistic ethics. Andrew Breitbart, who has paid O’Keefe, called him one of the all-time “great journalists” and said he deserved a Pulitzer for his undercover ACORN video. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly declared he should have earned a “congressional medal.”

His right-wing admirers don't seem to mind that O’Keefe's short but storied career has been defined by a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment. Now an activist organization that monitors hate groups has produced a photo of O'Keefe at a 2006 conference on "Race and Conservatism" that featured leading white nationalists. The photo, first published Jan. 30 on the Web site of the anti-racism group One People's Project, shows O’Keefe at the gathering, which was so controversial even the ultra-right Leadership Institute, which employed O'Keefe at the time, withdrew its backing. But O'Keefe and fellow young conservative provocateur Marcus Epstein soldiered on to give anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism an opportunity to share their grievances and plans to make inroads in the GOP.

According to One People's Project founder Daryle Jenkins, O'Keefe was manning the literature table at the gathering that brought together anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism. OPP covered the event at the time, sending a freelance photographer to document the gathering. Jenkins told me the table was filled with tracts from the white supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic publications that have called blacks and Latinos genetically inferior to whites: American Renaissance and the Occidental Quarterly. The leading speaker was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance. "We can say for certain that James O'Keefe was at the 2006 meeting with Jared Taylor. He has absolutely no way of denying that," Jenkins said. O'Keefe's attorney did not respond to a request for comment on his client's role in the conference. O'Keefe's racial issues can be seen in many of his prior stunts, of course. The notorious ACORN videos highlighted images of himself dressed as a pimp, deceptively edited through hidden camera footage as he baited African-American office workers into making statements that could be perceived as incriminating. There were also lesser-known but equally inflammatory spectacles like the “affirmative action bake sale” O’Keefe and his conservative comrades held when they were students at Rutgers University. During the event, O’Keefe stood at a table in the center of campus offering baked goods at reduced prices to Latinos and African-Americans while whites were forced to pay exorbitant amounts. (Native Americans, he announced, would eat free.)

By O’Keefe’s own account, his racial troubles became acute when he entered the multicultural atmosphere of Rutgers University’s dormitory system. In an online diary that has since been scrubbed from the Web (but not before being captured on Daily Kos), he wrote that he was forced to live on an all-black dormitory floor after refusing to live with the gay roommate he was initially assigned. O’Keefe claimed his next roommate was “an Indian midget ... who smelled like shit.” The roommate left, however, and was replaced by “a greek kid.” The new roommate complained to a residential administrator that O’Keefe had called his neighbors “niggers,” prompting the school to expel him from the dorm. He rejected the accusation as a “complete lie,” writing, “I was lead out of the room crying and screaming at him and my situation, no friends, no one one to talk to, forced to go in front of a black man, Dean Tolbert, to defend myself and help explain that I did not call anyone any names.”

MORE AT LINK

[Matariki]

106. That absurd, circa 1970's 'pimp' get-up could have predicted any of this...

[JackRiddler]

109. Clearly this guy clings to his image of "the other."

[JackRiddler]

112. I was imagining what would have happened if the four men were Arabs...

if the same thing had happened and they had the exact same story.

Would they be out on bail?

Would the story have dropped out of media view?