Ladies and Gentlemen,
How much happens around you that you never know about? If your neighbor drops a fork in their kitchen, do you hear about it? Well, maybe you do if you have a neighbor that just can't resist telling you every time they drop a fork.
There is so much that happens in this world that neither you, or I, ever hear about.
So... meet me after the fold...
For those who have followed my diaries you know a few things about me already. For those who haven't, let me bring you up to speed.
I spent 10 years active duty military Air Force as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Specialist. I held a Top Secret security clearance with access to NATO material, CNWDI (Critical Nuclear Weapons Design Information) and NOFORN (No Foreign National release). I spent another 6 years in law enforcement as a road officer. In that time I rose from patrolman to Field Training Officer and ultimately Road Sgt.
Do you remember when the military retired the SR-71 Blackbird? I do. It was in 1990 that they officially retired the SR-71 Blackbird, but the rumors about its impending retirement had been flying around for a few years. I was stunned when I first heard they were going to do it. So stunned, in fact, that I phoned my father. Who was he you ask?
My father is 20 years Navy retired. He left the Navy and began work at McDonnell-Douglas, a military contractor. When McDonnell-Douglas didn't get the contract for the next generation stealth fighter they got bought out and he went to work at Boeing until his retirement.
I remember our conservation. I asked him, "dad, why would they retire the highest flying, fastest aircraft on earth?" He replied, "they have better." Oh, I forgot to mention, my father... well... he was also, at one time, part of the Skunk Works. If you don't know what the Skunk Works was, try here.
Skunk Works—an official alias for Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Programs, formally Lockheed Advanced Development Projects Unit—has been responsible for a number of famous aircraft designs, including the U-2, the SR-71, and the F-117. Its largest current project is the F-35 JSF (Joint Strike Fighter), which will be used in the air forces of several countries around the world. Production is expected to last for up to four decades.
The replacement for the SR-71 was the F-117. Go figure, huh? (Ok... lots of people bringing out the SR-71 was Recon and F-117 a bomber; true. And yes, satellites are probably being used now... but the only confirmed plane we had come out since the SR-71 was the F-117.)
I had never heard a thing, even with my clearance level, but my father, he knew what I didn't; that the F-117A was already in development.
The F-117 was developed from two prototype models that were designated as XST "Have Blue". As early at 1977, these prototypes were used in a series of evaluation trials that sought to finalize the reality of stealth technology in common-use aircraft for the military. Later developmental aircraft appeared as five FSD designated models in 1991 and ended with the United States Air Force receiving an initial order of 59 F-117A Nighthawk production models in mid-1982, achieving full operational status by 1983.
With the public kept in the shadows, the world would have to wait until 1988 till the stealth fighter was unveiled. The system itself would be utilized in Operation Just Cause during the 1989 invasion for the very first time, dropping laser-guided bombs on targets in Panama with good results. The Nighthawk system would receiving world-wide coverage a few years later as part of the opening salvo in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, accounting for over 1,000 sorties by the end of the air war over Iraq.
The F-117 was operational before I even entered the military. It was operational years before they retired the SR-71. Did you know it? I surely didn't. We supposedly had publications on every aircraft in our inventory... we just didn't have that one.
My father and I have had many conversations over the years about many different things. There is a DVD out for rent at your local movie rental store. It is titled, "Why We Fight". Go rent it (or watch it for free... h/t to Halcyon!). I watched it with my father who spent 20 years working in the Military Industrial Complex. When we finished watching it, my father laughed. He said, "you know, if I hadn't of worked in it, I'd have said this was bullshit... but I did... and it is all true."
My father has been in, worked in, areas where he knew things I never had a clue about. I have been to areas, worked in areas, seen things, that he never had a clue about. My wife, who worked in a military message center with a TS clearance of her own, saw and read things that I never had a clue about.
I have been to places that didn't "officially" exist; aliens need not apply. I have been told, "if you see something and you have no idea what it is, you didn't see it." I have been told, "if you leave this Area and wander into another Area, you will disappear for 3 days." That is quite a threat to tell someone; that they will flat out disappear for days. Needless to say, no one wandered off.
When I went to the Explosive Ordnance Disposal refresher course, we traveled to Washington DC and visited many different agencies. While we were at one of them (I will not say which), we sat in a room with microphones (literally) dangling from the ceiling. I won't say what the subject matter was... but the "instructor" had an overhead projector... and he goes, "I can't show you this next slide", as he puts the slide up onto the screen anyway. I can tell you that I didn't want to know what I read on it. But I know it now, and, many don't.
I even know just how close Baghdad came to being turned into a glass factory at one point and the world never knew it.
Sharon recently threatened to "take the proper steps to defend its citizens" if Iraq launches missiles against Israel. He told the Jerusalem Post that in 1991, the US "did not take enough steps to protect Israel or to prevent attacks on Israel" and if "Israel is harmed, if we suffer casualties or if nonconventional weapons of mass destruction are used against us, then definitely Israel will take the proper actions to defend its citizens".
In 1991, Israel bowed before the insistence of then President George H.W. Bush not to respond to 39 Iraqi Scud missiles in order to preserve the support of the Arab nations for war against Baghdad. Sharon is using the threat of Israeli involvement in the next Gulf War, which would spark a broader conflict in the Middle East, to extract maximum political, military and economic concessions from Bush junior.
You say, "but that was a threat we all knew about! We knew that Bush Sr. kept Israel out of the Gulf War". Yes, I'm sure you did. But there was a reason why that pressure came so hard, so quickly.
August 1990
The first test of the Arrow ATBM is unsuccessful.
—Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, "Israeli Missile Milestones," Risk Report (6) 2, November/December 2000, <http://www.wisconsinproject.org>.
Nice word; unsuccessful. Yeah, it was so unsuccessful that Bush Sr. crapped his pants and told them to back off. That was how "unsuccessful" it was. Yeah, it was so unsuccessful that everyone in my unit shit our pants as we sat in Saudi Arabia.
Even with what I have done, where I've been, my own knowledge of things that never got press time is but a fraction of the many things that occurred; things that I never knew happened. Oh no, I'm not ringing my own bell here; I am bringing out that there are many people who know things that you, and I, have never even heard about.
L. C. Johnson diaries on DKos. What does he know that neither you or I know about? I'd bet many things. I'll bet that he has seen what the terrorist "boogyman" really looks like. I'll guess that is the reason he seems so dismissive at times of the idiots that have been making headlines recently. I think I would have the same thoughts if I knew the people who graced our headlines were little kids wearing silly masks on Halloween compared to the real threat lurking in the shadows.
Ray McGovern, another ex-CIA person, has given talks around the country. What does he know that neither you, or I, know about? He knew enough to stand up in Atlanta, GA, and flat out ask Donald Rumsfeld why he was lying to America. That's how much he knew.
We can toss in the NSA, FBI, NSA and every other government 3-letter agency worker. What do they know that we don't?
Most of these people go through their lives, never divulging what they knew. Sometimes, what they know is that a crime was committed, or that the government was acting improperly, and they become whistleblowers.
Russell Tice knows things that we don't.
Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the National Security Agency, is now a whistleblower the agency would like to keep quiet.
For 20 years, Tice worked in the shadows as he helped the United States spy on other people's conversations around the world.
"I specialized in what's called special access programs," Tice said of his job. "We called them 'black world' programs and operations."
But now, Tice tells ABC News that some of those secret "black world" operations run by the NSA were operated in ways that he believes violated the law. He is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the NSA in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists.
Mr. Tice worked in `black world ops`? Quick - grab the tinfoil! He knows things you don't and the word "black" is in there somewhere!
Do you remember Stephen Heller?
A whistleblower in Los Angeles is in legal trouble and needs our help. Stephen Heller is alleged to have exposed documents in Jan. & Feb. 2004 which provided smoking gun evidence that Diebold was using illegal, uncertified software in California voting machines. The docs also showed that Diebold's California attorneys (the powerful international law firm Jones Day) had told them they were in breach of the law for using uncertified software, but Diebold continued to use the uncertified software anyway. Heller is alleged to have come across these docs while temping as a word processor at Jones Day, and he is further alleged to have taken the docs and exposed them to the bright light of day. Now, after sitting on this for 2 years, the Los Angeles District Attorney, under pressure from Jones Day, is going after this whistleblower with 3 felony charges, each of which carries the potential of time in state prison. Here is a story in the LA Times. Heller's lawyer believes the 2 year wait to file charges was due to the then-impending 2004 election, and that Diebold and their attorneys didn't want the information to be made public in the lead up to the election.
What? Problems with Diebold and voting machines? Quick - yell CT and maybe he'll go away!!!!
A whistleblower brings out about Phizer making profits off of taxpayer money?
(CBS) Tuesday on Capitol Hill, lawmakers heard a startling story: an insider's account of an under-the-table deal between a top government scientist and a major drug company.
CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian reports that it involves valuable human tissue samples, collected for the public good, that allegedly wound up being used for private research and private profit.
Dr. Susan Molchan, a former clinical researcher inside the National Institutes of Health took an oath, then blew the whistle.
Molchan said that a collection of unused spinal fluid samples — a treasure trove of biological material, many painfully given up by Alzheimer's patients — for a study on the disease, disappeared without a trace from her laboratory's freezer at NIH.
Nothing to see here folks... move along.
The government bungled an AIDS study so says a whistleblower?
WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal officials involved in a U.S.-funded study in Uganda endangered the lives of hundreds of patients testing an AIDS drug because of careless and negligent research practices, a government whistleblower said Tuesday.
Dr. Jonathan Fishbein said officials at the National Institutes of Health overlooked problems with the way the study was being conducted on the AIDS drug, nevirapine, which was being used to protect babies in Africa from HIV infection during birth.
The consequences of their failure "have grave and sometimes fatal implications for the lives of real patients," Fishbein said at a hearing before a panel of scientists at the independent Institute of Medicine. The Institute was asked by NIH to review the Uganda study.
Did you know that? I didn't.
Who hasn't heard of Sibel Edmunds, the FBI whistleblower who got gagged and railroaded by the government?
But the unusual situation Edmonds finds herself in -- one that she describes as 'Kafkaesque' -- is also quite unnerving. Even though Congress and the Justice Department's own inspector general determined that several of Edmond's complaints about abuse and incompetence had merit, she lost a lawsuit against the FBI. When she appealed, this strange scene took place:
- 'My attorney stood up and argued the case about the state secret's privilege. Then the court asked [us] to step out of the court...while the government argued its side. Can they do this? This is the United States of America. The guards escorted us out and they locked the doors. We don't know what [the FBI attorneys] told the judges. My attorneys could never know what they argued. As far as we know, they could have made the most outrageous lies. There was no one there to challenge them. We assume that they did because a few weeks later the court upheld the lower court's ruling.'
How much do we just don't know that happens around us? Plenty.
Oh, we can be skeptical. We need to be skeptical. Surely there are "nuts" out there who saw a spaceship flying around (well, ok, it was just an experimental aircraft they happened to see, but, they didn't know that). Surely there are "kooks" who have wild theories about, well, everything. So yes, we can be skeptical. Sure, we need to ask why, if the story is so big, so viable, the MSM doesn't touch it (let's just forget that the MSM was the one printing all of that intelligence about Iraq that was wrong while not printing all the skepticism that was correct). But we already know why; the media can legally lie to us:
Akre and Wilson sued the Fox station and on August 18, 2000, a Florida jury unanimously decided that Akre was wrongfully fired by Fox Television when she refused to broadcast (in the jury's words) "a false, distorted or slanted story" about the widespread use of BGH in dairy cows. They further maintained that she deserved protection under Florida's whistle blower law. Akre was awarded a $425,000 settlement. Inexplicably, however, the court decided that Steve Wilson, her partner in the case, was ruled not wronged by the same actions taken by FOX.
FOX appealed the case, and on February 14, 2003 the Florida Second District Court of Appeals unanimously overturned the settlement awarded to Akre. The Court held that Akre’s threat to report the station’s actions to the FCC did not deserve protection under Florida’s whistle blower statute, because Florida’s whistle blower law states that an employer must violate an adopted "law, rule, or regulation." In a stunningly narrow interpretation of FCC rules, the Florida Appeals court claimed that the FCC policy against falsification of the news does not rise to the level of a "law, rule, or regulation," it was simply a "policy." Therefore, it is up to the station whether or not it wants to report honestly.
During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. They argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves. Fox attorneys did not dispute Akre’s claim that they pressured her to broadcast a false story, they simply maintained that it was their right to do so. After the appeal verdict WTVT general manager Bob Linger commented, "It’s vindication for WTVT, and we’re very pleased... It’s the case we’ve been making for two years. She never had a legal claim."
Sure, we have to ask, if these people are so credible, why don't they don't get time on Chris Matthew's (of course, how many Democrats in Congress gets time with Chris Matthew's to bring out the truth?).
Yeah, we want to know where that evidence is, because we need evidence. Let's just forget that the person(s) who bring it to light will wind up in prison:
A civil servant and an MP's researcher have been found guilty of leaking a secret memo about talks between George Bush and Tony Blair.
David Keogh, 50, from Northampton, has been found guilty of two offences under the Official Secrets Act.
MP's researcher Leo O'Connor was found guilty of one Official Secrets offence.
The memo recorded Oval Office talks between Mr Bush and Mr Blair about Iraq in 2004, the Old Bailey was told. Sentencing was adjourned for reports.
It was claimed in court that publication of the document could have cost British lives.
So sure, let's all ask what people know we don't, demand their proof, and sit back while they go to prison, they get gagged by the government, as we watch while the MSM focuses on Paris Hilton or whatever white girl disappeared instead of that story, and while the shills continue to print what is false instead of what is true (how is it so many people still think Iraq was involved in 9/11?)... because that is what is required before we even begin to contemplate it. Yeah, we are a skeptical bunch!
So, what has happened you never knew? Who knows... the only answer you may get is that your neighbor dropped a fork in their kitchen and you never knew they did it - you might not believe it anyway unless they video taped it.
Because heaven knows, we don't want a person like David Broder writing:
Conspiracy theories flourish in politics, and most of them have no more basis than spring training hopes for the Chicago Cubs.
Whenever things turn dicey for Republicans, they complain about the "liberal media" sabotaging them. And when Democrats get in a jam, they take up Hillary Clinton's warnings about a "vast right-wing conspiracy."
For much of the past five years, dark suspicions have been voiced about the Bush White House undermining its critics, and Karl Rove has been fingered as the chief culprit in this supposed plot to suppress the opposition.
Now at least one count in that indictment has been substantially weakened -- the charge that Rove masterminded a conspiracy to discredit Iraq intelligence critic Joseph Wilson by "outing" his CIA-operative wife, Valerie Plame.
Or, you can go to LC Johnsons latest diary Letter to a Neighbor and read what someone who was in the know... well... knew.
ADDED: (oops) H/t to Spud1
Confessions of an economic hitman
We speak with John Perkins, a former respected member of the international banking community. In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man he describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies.
And how many people didn't want this published?
John Perkins goes on to write: "I was persuaded to stop writing that book. I started it four more times during the next twenty years. On each occasion, my decision to begin again was influenced by current world events: the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1980, the first Gulf War, Somalia, and the rise of Osama bin Laden. However, threats or bribes always convinced me to stop."
Thx Spud1