His love of model trains was what led Newsweek to him, and nine other fascinating facts about the currency creator
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Bitcoin’s creator revealed! 10 interesting facts about the mysterious mastermind
Showing posts with label Mysterious. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mysterious. Show all posts
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Bitcoin’s creator revealed! 10 interesting facts about the mysterious mastermind
Bitcoin’s creator revealed! 10 interesting facts about the mysterious mastermind
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Mysterious UFO Lights Spotted Over Okinawa
By Bruce
At approximately 9:00pm on 23 January, reports started coming into the Okinawa Times about a strange array of lights over their capital city Naha. Japan’s Self Defense Force and astronomical experts are without answer, yet witness accounts and videos claim a dozen or so bright orange lights appearing to hang and shift around in the sky could be see in the area.
The Japan Air Self Defense Force said that all their training exercises had finished at 7:20pm on that day and they never run exercises at such an hour as this phenomenon was said to occur.
Witnesses from the areas around Naha claimed to see “very bright lights moving in a curve, so I think it wasn’t an airplane,” and “10 lights moving until they gathered together and disappeared.”
Takeshi Miyaji, Director of Ishigaki Island Observatory felt that the phenomenon was “not astronomical,” observing that these lights appeared to hang in the air. Typical meteorites would streak across the sky at great speeds before burning out. However, eye-witness reports claim that these particular lights seemed to float around for about 15 minutes before disappearing.
Judging by the video, those lights kind of seem like flares they way they first appear high and then look as if they are gently descending before fading out. Then again, if that were the case, you’d also think that residents of Okinawa and especially those working for the Okinawa Times would be no strangers to such routine testing.
As with any mystery video of this nature, it’s all up to the viewer to decide.
http://www.okinawatimes.co.jp/article.php?id=61305
http://en.rocketnews24.com/2014/01/26/multiple-witness-reports-of-myster…
Source: Montalvo Report
GuerillaMediaNetwork.comPost id = does not exist.
Mysterious UFO Lights Spotted Over Okinawa
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Watch Temples" Mysterious, Animated "Mesmerise" Video
Watch Temples" Mysterious, Animated "Mesmerise" Video
http://www.spin.com/sites/all/files/styles/style620_413/public/140121-temples-mesmerise-video.jpg
On February 11, rising psych-rock outfit Temples will drop their debut album, Sun Structures. In advance of the upcoming full-length, which is one of 50 Albums You Gotta Hear in 2014, the English foursome have shared a music video for sun-streaked single “Mesmerise…
SPIN – SPIN Mix
Read more about Watch Temples" Mysterious, Animated "Mesmerise" Video and other interesting subjects concerning Commentary at TheDailyNewsReport.com
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Mysterious Hooded Men & Occult Circles Appear Globally
Answer to the mystery could also inform us as to what’s behind the ‘Google Barges’
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
October 31, 2013
Who are these mysterious hooded men that have been showing up at soccer games in Europe wearing occult-style symbolic robes?
The answer could also serve to inform us about what’s behind the secretive ‘Google Barges’ being built on the east and west coast of America.
Facebook @ https://www.facebook.com/paul.j.watson.71
FOLLOW Paul Joseph Watson @ https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.
This article was posted: Thursday, October 31, 2013 at 10:54 am
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Mysterious Hooded Men & Occult Circles Appear Globally
Mysterious Hooded Men & Occult Circles Appear Globally
Answer to the mystery could also inform us as to what’s behind the ‘Google Barges’
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
October 31, 2013
Who are these mysterious hooded men that have been showing up at soccer games in Europe wearing occult-style symbolic robes?
The answer could also serve to inform us about what’s behind the secretive ‘Google Barges’ being built on the east and west coast of America.
Facebook @ https://www.facebook.com/paul.j.watson.71
FOLLOW Paul Joseph Watson @ https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.
This article was posted: Thursday, October 31, 2013 at 10:43 am
Mysterious Hooded Men & Occult Circles Appear Globally
Mysterious Hooded Men & Occult Circles Appear Globally
Answer to the mystery could also inform us as to what’s behind the ‘Google Barges’
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
October 31, 2013
Who are these mysterious hooded men that have been showing up at soccer games in Europe wearing occult-style symbolic robes?
The answer could also serve to inform us about what’s behind the secretive ‘Google Barges’ being built on the east and west coast of America.
Facebook @ https://www.facebook.com/paul.j.watson.71
FOLLOW Paul Joseph Watson @ https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.
This article was posted: Thursday, October 31, 2013 at 10:54 am
Print this page.
Mysterious Hooded Men & Occult Circles Appear Globally
Monday, October 14, 2013
Bush and the JFK Hit, Part 5: The Mysterious Mr. de Mohrenschildt
By Russ Baker on Oct 14, 2013
George de Mohrenschildt
What possible connection could there have been between George H.W. Bush and the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Or between the C.I.A. and the assassination? Or between Bush and the C.I.A.? For some people, apparently, making such connections was as dangerous as letting one live wire touch another. Here, in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination in November, is the fifth part of a ten-part series of excerpts from WhoWhatWhy editor Russ Baker’s bestseller, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years. The story is a real-life thriller.
Note: Although these excerpts do not contain footnotes, the book itself is heavily footnoted and exhaustively sourced. (The excerpts in Part 5 come from Chapter 5 of the book, and the titles and subtitles have been changed for this publication.)
For Part 1, please go here; Part 2, here; Part 3, here; Part 4, here.
“Must have angered a lot of people”
In 1976, more than a decade after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a letter arrived at the CIA, addressed to its director, the Hon. George Bush. The letter was from a desperate-sounding man in Dallas, who spoke regretfully of having been indiscreet in talking about Lee Harvey Oswald and begged Poppy for help:
Maybe you will be able to bring a solution into the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes; our phone bugged; and we are being followed everywhere. Either FBI is involved in this or they do not want to accept my complaints. We are driven to insanity by this situation . . . tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H. Oswald and must have angered a lot of people . . . Could you do something to remove this net around us? This will be my last request for help and I will not annoy you anymore.
The writer signed himself “G. de Mohrenschildt.”
“The Scream” by Edvard Munch
The CIA staff assumed the letter writer to be a crank. Just to be sure, however, they asked their boss: Did he by any chance know a man named de Mohrenschildt?Bush responded by memo, seemingly self-typed:
I do know this man DeMohrenschildt. I first men [sic] him in the early 40’3 [sic]. He was an uncle to my Andover roommate. Later he surfaced in Dallas (50’s maybe) . . . Then he surfaced when Oswald shot to prominence. He knew Oswald before the assassination of Pres. Kennedy. I don’t recall his role in all this.
Not recall? Once again, Poppy Bush was having memory problems. And not about trivial matters. George de Mohrenschildt was not just the uncle of a roommate, but a longtime personal associate. Yet Poppy could not recall – or more precisely, claimed not to recall – the nature of de Mohrenschildt’s relationship with the man believed to have assassinated the thirty-fifth president.
This would have been an unusual lapse on anyone’s part. But for the head of an American spy agency to exhibit such a blasé attitude, in such an important matter, was over the edge. At that very moment, several federal investigations were looking into CIA abuses – including the agency’s role in assassinations of foreign leaders. These investigations were heading toward what would become a reopened inquiry into Kennedy’s death. Could it be that the lapse was not casual, and the acknowledgment of a distant relationship was a way to forestall inquiry into a closer one?
Writing back to his old friend, Poppy assured the Mohrenschildt that his fears were entirely unfounded. Yet half a year later, de Mohrenschildt was dead. The cause was officially determined to be suicide with a shotgun. Investigators combing through de Mohrenschildt’s effects came upon his tattered address book, largely full of entries made in the 1950’s. Among them, though apparently eliciting no further inquiries on the part of the police, was an old entry for the current CIA director, with the Midland address where he had lived in the early days of Zapata:
BUSH, GEORGE H. W. (POPPY), 1412 W. OHIO ALSO ZAPATA PETROLEUM MIDLAND.
De Mohrenschildt and the Oswalds
When Poppy told his staff that his old friend de Mohrenschildt “knew Oswald,” that was an understatement. From 1962 through the spring of 1963, de Mohrenschildt was by far the principal influence on Oswald, the older man who guided every step of his life. De Mohrenschildt had helped Oswald find jobs and apartments, had taken him to meetings and social gatherings, and generally had assisted with the most minute aspects of life for Lee Oswald, his Russian wife, Marina, and their baby.
Lee Harvey Oswald, 1961
Marina Oswald
De Mohrenschildt’s relationship with Oswald has tantalized and perplexed investigators and researchers for decades. In 1964, de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne testified to the Warren Commission, which spent more time with them than any other witness – possibly excepting Oswald’s widow, Marina. The Commission, though, focused on George de Mohrenschildt as a colorful, if eccentric, character, steering away every time de Mohrenschildt recounted yet another name from a staggering list of influential friends and associates. In the end, the commission simply concluded in its final report that these must all be coincidences and nothing more. The de Mohrenschildts, the Commission said, apparently had nothing to do with the assassination.
George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt
Even the Warren Commission counsel who questioned George de Mohrenschildt appeared to acknowledge that the Russian émigré was what might euphemistically be called an “international businessman.” For most of his adult life, de Mohrenschildt had traveled the world ostensibly seeking business opportunities involving a variety of natural resources – some, such as oil and uranium, of great strategic value. The timing of his overseas ventures was remarkable. Invariably, when he was passing through town, a covert or even overt operation appeared to be unfolding – an invasion, a coup, that sort of thing. For example, in 1961, as exiled Cubans and their CIA support team prepared for the Bay of Pigs invasion in Guatemala, George de Mohrenschildt and his wife passed through Guatemala City on what they told friends was a month-long walking tour of the Central American isthmus. On another occasion, the de Mohrenschildts appeared in Mexico on oil business just as a Soviet leader arrived on a similar mission – and even happened to meet the Communist official. In a third instance, they landed in Haiti shortly before an unsuccessful coup against its president that had U.S. fingerprints on it.
A Russian-born society figure was a friend both of the family of President Kennedy and his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. A series of strange coincidences providing the only known link between the two families before Oswald fired the shot killing Mr. Kennedy in Dallas a year ago was described in testimony before The Warren Commission by George S. de Mohrenschildt.
He was actually much more intriguing – and mystifying. As Norman Mailer noted in his book Oswald’s Tale, de Mohrenschildt possessed “an eclecticism that made him delight in presenting himself as right-wing, left-wing, a moralist, an aristocrat, a nihilist, a snob, an atheist, a Republican, a Kennedy lover, a desegregationist, an intimate of oil tycoons, a bohemian, and a socialite, plus a quondam Nazi apologist, once a year.”
A Name Never Dropped
During all these examinations, and notwithstanding de Mohrenschildt’s offhand recitation of scores of friends and colleagues, obscure and recognizable, he scrupulously never mentioned that he knew Poppy Bush. Nor did investigators uncover the fact that in the spring of 1963, immediately after his final communication with Oswald, de Mohrenschildt had traveled to New York and Washington for meetings with CIA and military intelligence officials. He even had met with a top aide to Vice President Johnson. And the commission certainly did not learn that one meeting in New York included Thomas Devine, then Bush’s business colleague in Zapata Offshore, who was doing double duty for the CIA.
Had the Warren Commission’s investigators comprehensively explored the matter, they would have found a phenomenal and baroque backstory that contextualizes de Mohrenschildt within the extended petroleum-intelligence orbit in which the Bushes operated.
Getting America Into World War I
The de Mohrenschildts were major players in the global oil business since the beginning of the twentieth century, and their paths crossed with the Rockefellers and other key pillars of the petroleum establishment. George de Mohrenschildt’s uncle and father ran the Swedish Nobel Brothers Oil Company’s operations in Baku, in Russian Azerbaijan on the southwestern coast of the Caspian Sea. This was no small matter. In the early days of the twentieth century, the region held roughly half of the world’s known oil supply. By the start of World War I, every major oil interest in the world, including the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil, was scrambling for a piece of Baku’s treasure or intriguing to suppress its competitive potential. (Today, ninety years later, they are at it again.)
In 1915, the czar’s government dispatched a second uncle of George de Mohrenschildt, the handsome young diplomat Ferdinand von Mohrenschildt, to Washington to plead for American intervention in the war – an intervention that might rescue the czarist forces then being crushed by the invading German army. President Woodrow Wilson had been reelected partly on the basis of having kept America out of the war. But as with all leaders, he was surrounded by men with their own agendas. A relatively close-knit group embodying the nexus of private capital and intelligence-gathering inhabited the highest levels of the Wilson administration. Secretary of State Robert Lansing was the uncle of a diplomat-spy by the name of Allen Dulles. Wilson’s closest adviser, “Colonel” Edward House, was a Texan and an ally of the ancestors of James A. Baker III, who would become Poppy Bush’s top lieutenant. Czarist Russia then owed fifty million dollars to a Rockefeller-headed syndicate. Keeping an eye on such matters was the U.S. ambassador to Russia, a close friend of George Herbert Walker’s from St. Louis.
Allen Dulles during WW I
Once the United States did enter the war, Prescott Bush’s father, Samuel Bush, was put in charge of small arms production. The Percy Rockefeller-headed Remington Arms Company got the lion’s share of the U.S. contracts. It sold millions of dollars worth of rifles to czarist forces, while it also profited handsomely from deals with the Germans.
In 1917, Ferdinand von Mohrenschildt’s mission to bring America into the world war was successful on a number of levels. Newspaper clippings of the time show him to be an instant hit on the Newport, Rhode Island, millionaires’ circuit. He was often in the company of Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, of the family then befriending Prescott Bush and about to hire Prescott’s future father-in-law, George Herbert Walker. Not long after that, Ferdinand married the step-granddaughter of President Woodrow Wilson.
Prescott Bush
Prescott Bush, Dorothy Walker Bush
In quick succession, the United States entered World War I, and the newlywed Ferdinand unexpectedly died. The von Mohrenschildt family fled Russia along with the rest of the aristocracy. Emanuel Nobel sold half of the Baku holdings to Standard Oil of New Jersey, with John D. Rockefeller Jr. personally authorizing the payment of $ 11.5 million. Over the next couple of decades, members of the defeated White Russian movement, which opposed the Bolsheviks and fought the Red Army from the 1917 October Revolution until 1923, would find shelter in the United States, a country that shared the anti-Communist movement’s ideological sentiments.
What the von Mohrenschildts escaped.
Bush and de Mohrenschildt Families: Deeply Intertwined
In 1920, Ferdinand’s nephew Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, the older brother of George, arrived in the United States and entered Yale University. His admission was likely smoothed by the connections of the Harriman family, which soon persuaded the Bolshevik Russian government to allow them to reactivate the Baku oilfields. At that point, the Harriman operation was being directed by the brilliant international moneyman George Herbert Walker, the grandfather of Poppy Bush.
Baku Oil Rigs by Konstantin Bogaevsky
The Soviets had expropriated the assets of the Russian ruling class, not least the oil fields. Though ultimately willing to cooperate with some Western companies, the Communists had created an army of angry White Russian opponents, who vowed to exact revenge and regain their holdings. This group, trading on an American fascination with titles, was soon ensconced in (and often intermarried with) the East Coast establishment. The New York newspapers of the day were full of reports of dinners and teas hosted by Prince This and Count That at the top of Manhattan hotels.
Dimitri von Mohrenschildt plunged into this milieu. After graduating from Yale, he was offered a position teaching the young scions of the new oil aristocracy at the exclusive Loomis School near Hartford, Connecticut, where John D. Rockefeller III was a student (and his brother Winthrop soon would be). There, Dimitri became friendly with Roland and Winifred “Betty” Cartwright Holhan Hooker, who were prominent local citizens. Roland Hooker was enormously well connected; his father had been the mayor of Hartford, his family members were close friends of the Bouviers (Jackie Kennedy’s father’s family), and his sister was married to Prince Melikov, a former officer in the Imperial Russian Army.
While Dimitri von Mohrenschildt clearly enjoyed the high-society glamour, in reality his life was heading underground. Dimitri’s lengthy covert resumé would include serving in the Office of Strategic Services wartime spy agency and later cofounding Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. In 1941, Dimitri also founded a magazine, the Russian Review, and later became a professor at Dartmouth.
When the Hooker marriage unraveled, Dimitri began seeing Betty Hooker. In the summer of 1936, immigration records show that Dimitri traveled to Europe, followed a week later by Betty Hooker with her young daughter and adolescent son.
Betty’s son, Edward Gordon Hooker, entered prep school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. There, he shared a small cottage with George H. W. “Poppy” Bush. Bush and Hooker became inseparable. They worked together on Pot Pourri, the student yearbook, whose photos show a handsome young Poppy Bush and an even more handsome Hooker. The friendship would continue in 1942, when both Bush and Hooker, barely eighteen, enlisted in the Navy and served as pilots in the Pacific. Afterward, they would be together at Yale. When Hooker married, Poppy Bush served as an usher. The relationship between Bush and Hooker lasted for three decades, until 1967, when Hooker died of an apparent heart attack. He was just forty-three. Six years after Hooker’s death, Poppy Bush would serve as surrogate father, giving away Hooker’s daughter at her wedding to Ames Braga, scion of a Castro-expropriated Cuban sugar dynasty.
Another Careful Disconnect
The relationship couldn’t have been much closer. Yet Bush never mentions Hooker in his memoirs or published recollections, even though he finds room for scores of more marginal figures. Certainly his family was aware of Hooker.
Poppy’s prep school living arrangements would have mattered to Prescott Bush. The Bush clan is famously gregarious, and like many wealthy families, it puts great stock in the establishment of social networks that translate into influence and advantage. Prescott took a strong interest in meeting his children’s friends and the friends’ parents, as expressed in family correspondence and memoirs. Moreover, as a prominent Connecticut family with deep colonial roots, the Hookers would have had great appeal for Prescott Bush, an up-and-coming Connecticut resident with political aspirations and a great interest in the genealogy of America’s upper classes.
In 1937, Betty Hooker and Dimitri von Mohrenschildt married. By then, Dimitri had been hired by Henry Luce as a stringer for Time magazine. Prescott would likely have been keen to know his son’s roommate’s stepfather – this intriguing Russian anti-Communist aristocrat, with a background in the oil business and a degree from Yale, working for Prescott’s Skull and Bones friend Luce.
Meanwhile, Dimitri’s younger brother, George, had been living with their family in exile in Poland, where he finished high school and then joined a military academy and the cavalry. In May 1938, George arrived from Europe and moved in with his brother and new sister-in-law in their Park Avenue apartment. Young George de Mohrenschildt came to America armed with the doctoral dissertation that reflected the future trajectory of his life: “The Economic Influence of the United States on Latin America.” The oil south of the border was certainly of interest to Wall Street figures such as Prescott Bush and his colleagues, who were deeply involved in financing petroleum exploration in new areas.
From Émigré to Spy
The White Russian émigrés in the United States were motivated by both ideology and economics to serve as shock troops in the growing cold war conflict being managed by Prescott’s friends and associates. No one understood this better than Allen Dulles, the Wall Street lawyer, diplomat, and spy-master-in ascension. Even in the period between the two world wars, Dulles was already molding Russian émigrés into intelligence operatives. He moved back and forth between government service and Wall Street lawyering with the firm Sullivan and Cromwell, whose clients included United Fruit and Brown Brothers Harriman. The latter was at that time led by Averell and Roland Harriman and Prescott Bush.
W. Averell Harriman
Whether in government or out, Dulles’s interests and associates were largely the same. He seemed to enjoy the clandestine work more than the legal work. As Peter Grose notes in Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles, he worked during the 1940 presidential campaign to bring Russian, Polish, and Czechoslovak émigrés into the Republican camp. “Allen’s double life those first months after Pearl Harbor [in 1941] had specific purpose, of course,” Grose observes. “The mysterious émigrés he was cultivating in New York were potential assets for an intelligence network to penetrate Nazi Germany.”
Dimitri von Mohrenschildt was a star player in this game on a somewhat exalted level. He found sponsorship for a role as an academic and publisher specializing in anti-Bolshevik materials, and later became involved in more ambitious propaganda work with Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. Younger brother George was more willing to get his hands dirty. He took a job in the New York office of a French perfume company called Chevalier Garde, named for the Czar’s most elite troops, the Imperial Horse Guards. His bosses were powerful czarist Russian émigrés, well connected at the highest levels of Manhattan society, who worked during World War II in army intelligence and the OSS. One of them, Prince Serge Obolensky, had escaped Soviet Russia after a year of hiding and became a much-married New York society figure whose wives included Alice Astor. His brother-in-law Vincent Astor was secretly asked by FDR in 1940 to set up civilian espionage offices in Manhattan at Rockefeller Center. Astor was soon joined in this effort by Allen Dulles.
Prince Serge Obolensky and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, 1975
The next stop for George de Mohrenschildt was a home furnishings company. His boss there was a high-ranking French intelligence official, and together they monitored and blocked attempts by the Axis war machine to procure badly needed petroleum supplies in the Americas. Young de Mohrenschildt then traveled to the southwest, where he exhibited still more impressive connections. Ostensibly there to work on oil derricks, he landed a meeting with the chairman of the board of Humble Oil, the Texas subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, predecessor to Exxon.
Prince Serge Obolensky, circa 1943
The jobs kept becoming more interesting. By the midforties, de Mohrenschildt was working in Venezuela for Pantepec Oil, the firm of William F. Buckley’s family. Pantepec later had abundant connections with the newly created CIA and was deeply involved in foreign intrigue for decades. The Buckley boys, like the Bushes, had been in Skull and Bones, and Bill Buckley, whose conservative intellectual magazine National Review was often politically helpful to Poppy Bush, would in later years admit to a stint working for the CIA himself.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
George de Mohrenschildt’s foreign trips – and some of his domestic wanderings as well – drew the interest of various American law enforcement agencies. These incidents appear to have been deliberate provocations, such as his working on “sketches” outside a U.S. Coast Guard station. In many of these cases de Mohrenschildt would be briefly questioned or investigated, the result of which was a dossier not unlike that of Lee Harvey Oswald’s. These files were full of declared doubts about his loyalties and speculation at various times that he might be a Russian, Japanese, French, or German spy. A classic opportunist, he might have been any or all of these. But he also could have simply been an American spy who was creating a cover story.
Next: Part 6. The Cold War Comes to Dallas
GRAPHICS: IMAGE: THE SCREAM IMAGE: Oswald IMAGE: Marina Oswald IMAGE: George and wife IMAGE: Allen Dulles IMAGE: Prescott Bush IMAGE: Prescott and wife IMAGE: Lenin Sweeps IMAGE: painting of oil rigs W. Averell Harriman IMAGE: Prince Serge IMAGE: Serge alone IMAGE: Buckley
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Bush and the JFK Hit, Part 5: The Mysterious Mr. de Mohrenschildt
Saturday, August 24, 2013
‘Back to the 19th century’: Mysterious techno breakdown hits Gitmo 9/11 tribunal
Published time: August 24, 2013 10:18
Defense lawyers for Guantanamo detainees asked the judge in the military tribunal on Friday to suspend pretrial hearings as mysterious computer glitches are just the latest technological setbacks to complicate the legal proceedings.
Defense lawyers for Guantanamo detainees asked the military tribunal judge to suspend pretrial hearings as mysterious computer glitches have made their job a ‘hot mess’ forcing some of them to draft motions with pen and paper.
“We’re basically put back in the 19th century,” Army Major Jason Wright, who represents the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, said on Friday, as quoted by Reuters. “It takes about five to 10 times what it would normally take to do defense functions.”
Defense lawyers for five Guantanamo detainees said email correspondences they sent were never received, investigative records that took years to compile had disappeared and external monitors were unable to access their internet searches. Even the prosecuting and defense teams had been given access to each other’s files.
The technical problems had started earlier in the year but by April they had become so severe that the chief defense counsel, Air Force Colonel Karen Mayberry, ordered defense lawyers not to use their Pentagon computers for any confidential casework.
The situation became so dire that when Pentagon officials wished to convey messages to legal advisors in other cities, they had to place the sensitive data onto external drives, head to Starbucks and file them via Wi-Fi using their personal computers and personal email accounts, Wright revealed.
Defense attorney James Harrington, who represents Yemeni prisoner Ramzi bin al Shibh, said he had been forced to draft motions with pen and paper.
Another defense attorney for Mohammed, David Nevin, commented: “In this day and age you cannot practice law this way.”
He said the chief of staff for the Pentagon official overseeing the military tribunals issued her judgment during a conference call on Thursday, declaring: “This is a hot mess.”
Pentagon technical personnel have said it would take “up to 111 days” to fix the glitches once a contract was signed and money allocated, and that it was doubtful the work could be finished before the start of 2014.
The judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, said he would give the matter further consideration at a pretrial hearing scheduled to start on Sept. 16 and decide then whether to cancel hearings scheduled for October, November, December and January.
“I understand the serious nature of being able to communicate as a defense counsel,” the judge said.
This is not the first time that the maximum-security tribunal has suffered from ‘ghosts in the machinery.’
Judge Pohl in January convened an emergency meeting after it was discovered that some outside source was cutting the audio feed when particular subjects in the trial were being discussed.
The judge stated he was not happy with this interference and added that he would like some clarification on “who turns that light on or off.”
“It’s a ‘whoa moment’ for the court,” Human Rights Watch observer Laura Pitter said in January, as quoted by the Miami Herald. “Even the judge doesn’t know that someone else has control over the censorship button?”
The five defendants are accused of training and funding the hijackers who allegedly crashed four commercial jets into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people.
The Obama administration has backed down on its promise to close Gitmo and give the detainees civil trials on US territory in the face of extreme Republican pressure.
‘Back to the 19th century’: Mysterious techno breakdown hits Gitmo 9/11 tribunal
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Billionaire prepares to unveil mysterious project, revolutionary ‘fifth mode’ of transportation
Nick Allen
London Telegraph
August 11, 2013
It is called “The Hyperloop” and, according to the designer, it will be a revolutionary “fifth mode” of transport, eclipsing trains, planes, boats and automobiles.
The “cross between Concorde, a rail gun and an air hockey table” will deliver passengers between US cities faster than the speed of sound.
The history of transport is replete with dreamers who have concocted such schemes for getting people from A to B in previously unimagined haste. And many of them have remained just that, impractical ideas on a drawing board that will never see the light of day.
But the latest mysterious project, which has had the technology world buzzing for months, has one crucial difference. Its backer is a Silicon Valley wunderkind with a proven track record of turning science fiction into reality.
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- Herod orders top UN scientists to investigate mysterious infant slaughter in Judaea
This article was posted: Sunday, August 11, 2013 at 5:34 am
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Billionaire prepares to unveil mysterious project, revolutionary ‘fifth mode’ of transportation
Saturday, August 3, 2013
The Secret Alleged Sex Scandal Behind The Mysterious Arrest Of A Utah Sheriff"s Deputy
For the last three weeks, news outlets in Utah have been reporting on a mysterious criminal case involving a sheriff’s deputy, his wife, and his father, who is the local fire chief in Moab, UT. However, the exact circumstances of the alleged crime have remained unknown to the general public, even after the Utah attorney general took over the case due to potential conflicts of interest stemming from the family’s extensive ties to the local government in their hometown.
Now, police records obtained by TPM, reveal for the first time that this case allegedly began with a love triangle involving a father and son that ultimately ended in a booze-fueled night of rage and murderous threats.
The son, Timothy “TJ” Brewer, was initially charged with attempted homicide, aggravated assault, two counts of domestic violence in front a child, assault on a police officer, intoxication, and disorderly conduct. After an investigation by the sheriff of another county, the Utah attorney general last week reduced the charges against Brewer to two misdemeanors: assault and assault against a peace officer. Those charges remain pending.
The story began on the evening of July 11 and spilled over into the early morning hours of July 12. Brewer, a deputy with the sheriff’s department in Grand County, Utah, and his wife, Logan, invited his father to their home for drinks. The elder Brewer, Wesley “Corky” Brewer, was the fire chief in Moab and director of emergency management for Grand County. TJ was one of several law enforcement officers in the extended Brewer family, which includes multiple police officers and local sheriff’s deputies.
TJ would later tell officers that after dinner, which he cooked, his wife went upstairs to put one of their children to bed. Soon afterward, he realized he was alone in the house “when the kid she put to bed came down stairs,” according to police reports.
“He went up to check on where his wife was,” one officer recounted in the reports. “He stated that when he opened the door to his son’s room, he saw his wife on top of his dad” having sex.
The sight of his father having sex with his wife allegedly sent TJ into a rage. He “beat the fuck” out of his dad, he later told police. Logan, TJ’s wife, told police later that night that TJ had hit her and “pistol whipped” his father with one of multiple guns he kept in his home. She also allegedly said all three of them had been drinking. The officer’s account of his interview with Logan does not specifically address the claim that she and Corky were having sex. Corky’s injuries prevented him from speaking to officers that night, the records show.
Somehow, after the alleged confrontation in the bedroom at TJ’s home, all three participants managed to leave the residence. Logan went to her parents’ house. In his incident report, Moab Police Officer Shaun Hansen said Corky, the father, returned to his own home where he was “apparently looking for a firearm.”
“His wife, Cindy Brewer, denied him access to a firearm,” Hansen wrote in his report. “Corky then grabbed a butcher knife and stabbed himself two times, puncturing a lung and slicing his liver.”
Corky was initially taken to Moab Regional Hospital. According to the police, when TJ learned his father was hospitalized, he headed to the hospital to kill him.
What ensued was a dramatic confrontation in the hospital parking lot. TJ was initially confronted by his uncle, Curt Brewer, who is also a sheriff’s deputy. When police arrived at the hospital, they found TJ fighting with Curt outside the hospital. TJ was not wearing a shirt or shoes, was screaming, and in the words of one officer, “had the odor of an alcoholic beverage on his breath as he spoke.”
“He stated several times that he wanted to kill his dad, that he wanted his gun to ‘finish the job,’” one officer wrote in his report.
Officers continued to try to subdue TJ, who remained belligerent.
“TJ made numerous remarks to each officer and deputy that arrived, about all of us being stupid, dumb asses, and at one point stated we needed to call someone with a brain to come and talk with him,” the officer wrote.
TJ was taken into custody without further incident, but for the next three weeks the dramatic serious of confrontations, including the public standoff in the hospital parking lot, remained unreported.
Part of the reason so little information about the case has been revealed is the variety of agencies that are involved due to the ties TJ and his family have throughout Moab and Grand County. Due to the risk of potential conflicts of interest, local officials made the decision to hand the case over to the sheriff in Utah County rather than the department in Grand County where TJ was a deputy. For the same reason, the Utah Attorney General is prosecuting the case rather than the local district attorney.
After his arrest in the early hours of July 12, TJ was held in the San Juan County Jail. He was initially facing charges of attempted homicide, aggravated assault, two counts of domestic violence in front a child, assault on a police officer, intoxication, and disorderly conduct. These charges were reduced after the investigation by the Utah County Sheriff’s Office. TJ is currently charged with two class A misdemeanors; assault and assault against a peace officer.
When TPM initially began looking into the case on July 18, both the Moab City Police Department, which arrested Brewer, and the Grand County Sheriff’s Department told us they had no records to release because other agencies were handling the case. After we filed a request under the Utah Government Records Access and Management Act, known as GRAMA, with the Moab County Police Department for TJ’s arrest report and other related records, we received an email July 30 informing us that, after speaking with the Utah Attorney General’s office, Moab Police Chief Mike Navarre was “able to close the report” on Brewer and would release it.
TJ was released on bail July 15. He has been prohibited from drinking alcohol and from contacting Corky or his wife. Visitation with his children must be supervised. TJ resigned from the Grand County Sheriff’s Department and is next due in court August 6. He did not answer phone calls TPM made to his residence in Moab.
Corky, who was later airlifted to a Colorado hospital for treatment and has reportedly since been released, also did not answer a phone call made to his residence. An administrative assistant answered when TPM called Corky’s number at the fire department, where he had been chief since 1989.
“He has actually resigned and has taken retirement,” the assistant said.
Read the full police case file below (reader discretion is advised):
Hunter Walker Hunter Walker is a national affairs reporter for TPM. He came to the site in 2013 from the New York Observer. He has also written for New York Magazine, Gawker, the Village Voice, Forbes, The Daily, and Deadspin. He can be reached at hunter(at)talkingpointsmemo.com
The Secret Alleged Sex Scandal Behind The Mysterious Arrest Of A Utah Sheriff"s Deputy
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