Asteroid Apophis: Dealing with Earth's Future Troublemaker

BOULDER, Colorado - The potential for a newly discovered asteroid smacking into the Earth in 2036 cannot be discounted. NASA has sketched out a response strategy in the outside possibility that the space rock becomes a true threat.


NASA's action plan was the result of prodding by a group of astronauts, scientists and other technical specialists uneasy about the current lack of action to protect the Earth from the impact of near Earth objects (NEOs).

The object was found last year through the efforts of NASA's Spaceguard Survey. In 1998 NASA formally initiated the Spaceguard Survey by adopting the objective of finding 90 percent of the near Earth asteroids larger than 3,280 feet (one kilometer) diameter within the next decade - before the end of 2008.

Asteroid 99942 Apophis - first labeled as 2004 MN4 -- is estimated to be roughly 1,000 feet (320 meters) in diameter. Were it to strike Earth, it would not set off global havoc but would generate significant local or regional damage, experts say.

Worrisome to asteroid watchers is the exceptionally close flyby of Earth by Apophis on April 13, 2029. So close in fact, the space rock will be naked-eye visible as it darts by. And what can't be ruled out at this time is that Apophis may pass through a gravitational "keyhole" - a spot that alters the asteroid's trajectory as it zips by our planet and might put it on the bee-line lane for banging into Earth seven years later.

Issue of critical importance

Concern over asteroid Apophis and the ability to precisely chart its trajectory -- and take steps if needed to deflect the object -- were fervently voiced by the B612 Foundation, chaired by Russell Schweickart, a former Apollo astronaut.

The group requested that NASA carry out an analysis that included the possibility of placing an active radio transponder on the object. Doing so at a fairly early date would yield the requisite orbital accuracy of the asteroid as it sped through space.

In a June 6 letter to NASA Administrator, Michael Griffin, Schweickart on behalf of the B612 Foundation called for support in "resolving an issue of critical importance" - namely whether a scientific mission should be launched to asteroid Apophis in the near term.

Such a probe, if dispatched, Schweickart stated, would provide knowledge of the asteroid's orbit in time to initiate a deflection mission in the unlikely event one should be required. The position of the B612 Foundation was that the mission should be staged, pointing out that NASA's NEO program personnel apparently did not concur with that view. A spacecraft mission to Apophis would augment tracking of the object from the ground, the letter to Griffin explained, and also carry out a number of scientific duties too.

NASA response

NASA provided a formal response to the B612 Foundation's June communique via an October 12 letter from Mary Cleave, Associate Administrator for Science Mission Directorate.

That NASA reply came with an appended detailed analysis by Steven Chesley of NASA'S NEO Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The study by Chesley dug into Apophis' orbit, under varying conditions, and contained other items pertaining to the space agency's findings about the Apophis matter.

"The key conclusion to be taken from this analysis," Cleave explained in the letter, "is that aggressive (i.e., more expensive) action can reasonably be delayed until after the 2013 observing opportunity. For Apophis, the 16 years available after 2013 are sufficient to recognize and respond to any hazard that still exists after that time."

Cleave noted in the letter that while Apophis "is an object whose motion we will continue to monitor closely in the coming years, we conclude a space mission to this object based solely on any perceived collision hazard is not warranted at this time."

Not ruled out by Cleave, however, is the prospect of Discovery-class, low-cost missions sent to Apophis, "based on purely scientific arguments," she said.

"Indeed, the asteroid's orbit is particularly attractive for spacecraft rendezvous, and the extraordinary close encounter in April 2029 provides a unique opportunity to investigate a number of scientific NEO issues," Cleave explained in the letter.

Pinpointing the object's whereabouts

While Schweickart said that the NASA response to the B612 Foundation's concern is a step forward, there are other issues still to be resolved.

One matter involves radar tracking of Apophis.

On one hand, radar plays a crucial role in being able to rationally determine the future likelihood of a NEO impact and potentially in planning for a deflection mission when required.

Yet the availability of NEO radar tracking, and the budgets to support this work in the future is highly uncertain, even precarious, Schweickart and the B612 Foundation emphasize. Radar hits of Apophis at each opportunity through 2021 are important to keep watch of the object's whereabouts.

"Tracking these asteroids once you know they exist and pinning down their orbits is really not science," Schweickart told SPACE.com. "This is public safety. It's disaster preparedness."

Begging time and bumming bucks

When Apophis swings by Earth, Schweickart said the asteroid will likely change its orbit. Also, its spin characteristics may be altered. Due to Earth's gravity tugging on the object, "asteroid quakes" could reshape Apophis, he said.

Moreover, still far from resolution is a "who's in charge" proclamation about troublemaking NEOs, Schweickart said.

"It would be great if we had NASA doing this as a regular process. Unfortunately, the mindset that's essentially required by their budget is to think about discovery, not to think about the potential need for deflection," Schweickart added. "Until your mindset is oriented that way, you're going to miss things."

Until an agency is identified that is responsible for all of this, Schweickart cautioned, everybody is "begging time and bumming bucks" from some other program. "This whole thing is sort of in a precarious position until somebody gets around to assigning agency responsibility," he said.

Japan's Hayabusa Asteroid

Regarding the skill required to deposit a transponder on Apophis, Schweickart saluted Japan's Hayabusa asteroid sample-return mission, now in progress.

That craft is scheduled to make two landings on its target asteroid - Itokawa -- later this month. The mission is geared to haul back samples of the object to Earth.

Scientists at Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) are working day-by-day issues in readying the probe for contact with the asteroid, including release of a mini-robot onto Itokawa that will move about and survey its rocky surroundings. ISAS is a research arm of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

"It's an impressive mission," Schweickart said, sure to yield operational experience and lessons learned on how best to execute duties on asteroid Apophis.

Global preparedness

The ruin stemming from asteroid Apophis colliding with Earth would potentially be very great.

Indeed, the consequences, Schweickart suggested, would dwarf those seen as a result of the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004, hurricanes Katrina and Rita in September of this year, and the Pakistan earthquake last month.

In regards to global preparedness in handling these unusually devastating events of late, "it's basically out of sight...out of mind," Schweickart said. "That's the real challenge for society. The things that you don't know about are one thing. But the things that you do know about, and don't do something about...those are the ones that are really tough."

Refine the impact probability

Fully concurring with NASA's response is Alan Harris, a senior research scientist and asteroid expert for the Space Science Institute headquartered here.

Harris noted, as has been underscored by the B612 Foundation, that if Apophis is indeed on an impact trajectory, then ground-based radar observations will not be able to refine the impact probability to greater than 20 percent. "That is, we would still not know better than one-chance-in-five whether the impact would really occur or not," he told SPACE.com.

"We really would need a transponder to improve tracking enough to firmly establish that an impact would occur," Harris said.

What has been overlooked, or at best under-emphasized, Harris added, is a point raised in the NASA response. Ground-only tracking has a 99.8 percent chance of eliminating any chance at all of an impact. Thus, there is only one-chance-in-500 that ground-based tracking will fail to resolve the issue in favor of no impact. "For this reason I think the NASA conclusion is entirely sensible," he said.

Wait and see strategy

Harris said that there are Apophis observing opportunities every 6-8 years, with each one having about a 90 percent chance of eliminating any possible impact. At each of these "shoulder" times, he said, one can re-evaluate the "wait and see" strategy if the impact possibility does not go away.

"Certainly it seems appropriate to play the 'wait and see' game until after the 2013 observing opportunity," Harris stated. None of this diminishes the opening that Apophis presents for purely scientific investigations, which could incidentally contribute to the NEO hazard issue, he said.

Harris said that he would not recommend a "deep impact" type of scientific mission, "lest we have the misfortune to deflect it into a keyhole, but other than that, Apophis is a very attractive mission target."

A coming of age

Asteroid Apophis, and the discussions it has sparked are welcomed, observed David Morrison, a space scientist and asteroid specialist at NASA's Ames Research Center, situated in Silicon Valley, California.

"I am pleased that this dialog is taking place," Morrison said. "This is the first time that serious possibilities for dealing with a real but low-probability future impact have been discussed in a technically professional way, rather than receiving the 'Hollywood treatment'".

Morrison said that he considers it remarkable that the Spaceguard Survey has reached the
level of maturity where such an asteroid could not only be found, but its orbit understood well enough to deal with "keyholes" and other subtleties. "Apophis represents for me a symbol of the coming of age of Spaceguard and of asteroid impact studies in general," he said.


The possibility of Apophis hitting Earth on April 13, 2036 is real, Morrison said, even if the probabilities now seem to be very small. "These probabilities represent uncertainties in our knowledge of the orbit, not a failure of the science."

But whether the asteroid will strike Earth or not, Morrison concluded, the challenge is to resolve which case is correct. "With more observations over a longer time span, we will be able to tie this down."

Russia to charge 10 over Politkovskaya murder

The group suspected of killing the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was led by an ethnic Chechen organised crime boss, Russian authorities said today.

Yuri Chaika, the prosecutor general, also told a press conference that the killers included serving government officers.

"The group was headed by a leader of a Moscow criminal group of Chechen origin," Mr Chaika said. "We have evidence that this group took part in the killing of [the US journalist] Paul Klebnikov ... Unfortunately, this group included retired and acting interior ministry and FSB (Federal Security Service) officers."

Article continues
Mr Klebnikov edited the Russian edition of the financial magazine Forbes. The 41-year-old was shot dead in July 2004 near his office in Moscow.

Earlier, prosecutors said they had arrested 10 people and would soon charge them in connection with the killing of Politkovskaya.

"We have made serious progress in the Politkovskaya murder investigation," the prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika, was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency as saying.

"Ten people have been arrested in connection with this case and literally, in the very near future, they will be charged with carrying out this grave crime," he said.

The prosecutor told Vladimir Putin about the arrests during a meeting at the president's dacha just outside Moscow.

Politkovskaya's murder in October last year drew widespread international condemnation and prompted concern about press freedoms and the treatment of government opponents in Russia. She was a particularly fierce critic of human rights abuses in the Chechnya war.

Her last incomplete article, published last October, contained allegations of torture by pro-Russian Chechen security forces. Her newspaper, Noveya Gazeta, carried eyewitness accounts and photos of people with injuries said to have been sustained under torture.

Politkovskaya's colleagues from Noveya Gazeta cautiously welcomed the 10 arrests. Vyacheslav Izmailov, a friend and columnist on the paper, said few details of the arrests had been made public.

But he confirmed that the trail appeared to lead to Chechnya. "It's a very complicated case because it involves both those who ordered the murder and those who carried it out. There are Chechens (among those arrested). But not only Chechens," he told the Guardian.

Asked whether those arrested had definitely carried out her killing last October, he replied: "I don't know."

Dmitry Muratov, Noveya Gazeta's editor in chief, said the paper had been satisfied with the level of cooperation from Russian authorities since the murder last year. Asked about the arrests, he said: "I think this is serious. But I can't say more at the moment."

The suspects were arrested between August 15 and 23, he said. "There is no more information we can give at the moment, other to say that people have been arrested and that they include people from different nationalities. Right now they are under active investigation."

Mr Putin has said everything possible would be done to find and punish the killers of Politkovskaya, who was 48 when she was shot dead in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment.

For the first time, Britons' personal debt exceeds Britain's GDP

Britons have racked up so much debt on loans and credit cards that the total borrowed now exceeds the entire value of the economy, new research shows today. The financial consultant Grant Thornton is forecasting that gross domestic product (GDP) will hit £1.33 trillion this year, less than the £1.35trn which was outstanding on mortgages, credit cards and personal loans in June.

The symbolic overtaking is the first time that the country's 60 million people owe more to the banks than the value of everything made by every office and factory in the country. It prompted a warning that personal borrowing was so out of control that many more people would be pushed over the "financial edge". The runaway housing market is the biggest reason why consumer debt has spiralled, totalling £1.131trn. Debt on personal loans and credit cards totals £214bn. Overall, individuals owe the staggering sum of £1,344,721,000,000.


In the United States, the sudden failure of the poor to repay home loans in recent months has sparked a "sub-prime" crisis that has spooked the financial markets and wiped billions of pounds off share prices.

Buster - The Rare White Bengali Tiger

See more at:

Blackwater : Shadow Army

IS THE FINAL SOLUTION JUST ABOUT TO REAR IT'S UGLY HEAD AGAIN?

Not one for conjecture - I will try and summarise the important bits from the information I have collated from the last 3 posts and other information I have included in previous posts in this blog...


THE ORIGINS OF THE CIA
Helms went on to work closely with General Reinhard Gehlen, the notorious Nazi spymaster who was hired by US intelligence to set up an organization within the CIA. The Gehlen Org recruited thousands of Nazi agents to run covert operations in Eastern Europe after the war. Gehlen is, of course, not mentioned in any of recent news reports on Helms. Neither is the fact that the OSS (the US agency that preceded the CIA) had a lot in common with the SS. To both, the biggest evil in the word was summed up in one word, communism. And to both, the elimination of communists, labour activists and other undesirable elements that got in the way of corporatism was their chief preoccupation.


George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography -
by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin

Chapter 16- CIA DIRECTORR

In late 1975, as a result in particular of his role in Watergate, Bush's confirmation as CIA Director was not automatic. And though the debate at his confirmation was superficial, some senators, including in particular the late Frank Church of Idaho, made some observations about the dangers inherent in the Bush nomination that have turned out in retrospect to be useful.




PRESCOTT BUSH (G Bsh Jnrs. Grandfather)

was the main Wall Street connection for German companies and the varied U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen, who had been an early financial backer of the Nazi party until 1938, but who by 1939 had fled Germany and was bitterly denouncing Hitler. Business transactions for profit with Nazi Germany were not illegal when Hitler declared war on the United States (December 11, 1941), but, six days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Trading With the Enemy Act after it had been made public that U.S. companies were doing business with the declared enemy of the United States. On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City. President Franklin Roosevelt's Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news, cited only the Union Banking Corporation (UBC) connections with Von Thyssen. Fox News has reported that recently declassified material "The 4,000 Union Banking shares owned by the Dutch bank were registered in the names of the seven U.S. directors, according a document signed by Homer Jones, chief of the division of investigation and research of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, a World War II-era agency that no longer exists"[2].

* E. Roland Harriman--3991 shares (managed and under voting control of Prescott Bush)
* Cornelis Lievense--4 shares (He was the New York banker of the German Nazi Party)
* Harold D. Pennington--1 share (Employed by Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman)
* Ray Morris--1 share (a business partner of the Bush and Harriman families)
* Prescott S. Bush--1 share (director of UBC, which was co-founded and sponsored by his father-in-law George Walker; senior managing partner for E. Roland Harriman and Averell Harriman)
* H.J. Kouwenhoven--1 share (organized UBC for Von Thyssen, managed UBC in Nazi occupied Netherlands)
* Johann G. Groeninger--1 share (German Industrial Executive, a not unimportant member of the Nazi party)

The Harriman business interests seized under the act in October and November 1942 included:

* Union Banking Corporation (UBC) (for Thyssen and Brown Brothers Harriman). The President of UBC at that time was George Herbert Walker, Prescott Bush's father-in-law. He is the grandfather and great-grandfather of the former and current Presidents Bush.
* Holland-American Trading Corporation (with Harriman)
* the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation (with Harriman)
* Silesian-American Corporation (this company was partially owned by a German entity; during the war the Germans tried to take full control of Silesian-American. In response to that, the American government seized German owned minority shares in the company, leaving the U.S. partners to carry on the business.)

The assets were held by the government for the duration of the war, then returned afterward. UBC was dissolved in 1951. Prescott Bush was on the board of directors of UBC and held one share in the company. For it, he was reimbursed $1,500,000. These assets were later used to launch Bush family investments in the Texas energy industry.

Toby Rogers has claimed that Bush's connections to Silesian businesses (with Thyssen and Flick) make him complicit with the mining operations in Poland which used slave labor out of Auschwitz, where the Auschwitz concentration camp was later constructed.

The New York Herald-Tribune referred to the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, as "Hitler's Angel" and mentioned Bush as an employee of the investment banking firm Thyssen used in the USA. The underlying importance is Hitler's known ideology; intelligent business partners like Bush and Thyssen and Harriman clearly knew who they were doing business with and were willing to do so. Some records in the National Archives, including the Harriman papers, document the continued relationship of Brown Brothers Harriman with Thyssen and some of his German investments up until his 1951 death.[4] Investigator John Loftus has said, "As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averell Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany." Two former slave laborers from Poland have filed suit in London against the government of the United States and the heirs of Prescott Bush in the amount of $40 billion. A class-action lawsuit filed in the U.S. in 2001 was dismissed based on the principle of state sovereignty.[5]

(For more information on the Bush family and the arms industry, see Samuel P. Bush.)


IRAN's NUCLEAR MISSILES (the ones it hasnt got?)

# The Jerusalem Post reported on April 9, 1998 that Iran had purchased four tactical nuclear weapons from Russian smugglers for $25 million in the early 1990s, that the weapons had been obtained from Kazakhstan in 1991, and that Argentine technicians were helping to activate the weapon.

* It quoted what it claimed was an Iranian report, dated December 26, 1991, of a meeting between Brigadier General Rahim Safavi, the Deputy Commander of the Revolutionary Guards and Reza Amrohalli, then head of the Iranian atomic energy organization.
* It also quoted a second document -- dated January 2, 1992 --- saying the Iranians were awaiting the arrival of Russian technicians to show them how to disarm the protection systems that would otherwise inactivate the weapons if anyone attempted to use them.
* The documents implied the weapons were flawed by did not indicate whether Iran had succeeded in activating them.
* The US intelligence community denied any evidence that such a transfer had taken place.



After Iraq, Bush Will Attack His Real Target - IRAN

EW YORK -- President George Bush wrapped himself in the American flag and won a major victory last week as U.S. voters gave control of both houses of Congress to the Republican party. In mid-term elections, the party in power almost always fares badly, but this year an electorate, gripped by fear of terrorism, and whipped into war fever by high-voltage propaganda, voted Republican. Thank you Osama and Saddam.


But for all the propaganda about wicked Saddam, Iraq is not the main objective for the small but powerful coterie of Pentagon hardliners driving the Bush administration's national security policy. Nor is it for their intellectual and emotional peers in Israel's right-wing Likud party. The real target of the coming war is Iran, which Israel views as its principal and most dangerous enemy. Iraq merely serves as a pretext to whip America into a war frenzy and to justify insertion of large numbers of U.S. troops into Mesopotamia.

The Final Solution

The Final Solution to the Jewish Question (German: Die Endlösung der Judenfrage) refers to the German Nazis' plan to engage in systematic genocide against the European Jewish population during World War II. The term was coined by Adolf Eichmann, a top Nazi official who supervised the genocidal campaign and was captured, tried and executed by Israeli authorities in 1961–1962. The implementation of the Final Solution resulted in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust. The expression reflects the belief that the Jewish European population itself posed a "question" and a problem.

Mass killings of over 1 million Jews occurred before the plans of the Final Solution were fully implemented in 1942, but it was only with the decision to eradicate the entire Jewish population that the extermination camps were built and industrialized mass slaughter of Jews began in earnest. This decision to systematically kill the Jews of Europe was made by the time of, or at the Wannsee conference, which took place in Berlin, in the Wannsee Villa on January 20, 1942. During the conference, there was a discussion held by a group of German Nazi officials to decide on the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". The records and minutes of this meeting were found intact by the Allies at the end of the war and served as valuable evidence during the Nuremberg Trials. By spring of 1942, Operation Reinhard began the systematic extermination of the Jews, although hundreds of thousands already had been killed by death squads and in mass pogroms. In Heinrich Himmler's speech at the Posen Conference of October 6, 1943, Himmler, for the first time, clearly elucidated to all assembled leaders of the Reich, in frank and brutal terms, what the "Final Solution" actually referred to.
Contents

Bundesnachrichtendienst

The Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service, BND) is the foreign intelligence agency of the German government, under the control of the Chancellor's Office. Its headquarters are in Pullach near Munich, and Berlin (planned to be centralised in Berlin by 2011). The BND has 300 locations in Germany and foreign countries. In 2005, the BND employed around 6,050 people, 10% of them Bundeswehr soldiers; those are officially employed by the "Amt für Militärkunde" (Office for Military Sciences), which is just a camouflage name. The annual budget of the BND exceeds € 430,000,000.

The BND acts as an early warning system to alert the German government to threats to German interests from overseas. It depends heavily on wiretapping and electronic surveillance of international communications. It collects and evaluates information on a variety of areas such as international terrorism, WMD proliferation and illegal transfer of technology, organized crime, weapons and drug trafficking, money laundering, illegal migration and information warfare. As Germany’s only overseas intelligence service, the BND gathers both military and civil intelligence.

The domestic secret service counterparts of the BND are the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, BfV) and 16 counterparts at the federal state level (Landesämter für Verfassungsschutz or State Offices for the Protection of the Constitution); there is also a separate military intelligence organisation, the Militärischer Abschirmdienst (lit. military screening service, MAD).




Reinhard Gehlen, the founder and president of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, and legendary cold war spymaster


History



The predecessor of the BND is the German eastern military intelligence agency, Abteilung Fremde Heere Ost in the General Staff, led by Wehrmacht General Reinhard Gehlen. Its main purpose was to collect information on the Soviet Union. In 1946 Gehlen set up an intelligence agency informally known as the Gehlen Org on behalf of US forces as the axe of the Gladio secret stay-behind structure, and recruited many of his former co-workers. Many also were recruited from the former Sicherheitsdienst, SS and Gestapo. On 1 April 1956 the Bundesnachrichtendienst was created from the Gehlen Org, and was transferred to the German government. Reinhard Gehlen remained President of the BND until 1968.

During the Cold War, as many as 90% of the BND's informants in East Germany were double agents run by the Stasi.[1]

In 2005 a public scandal erupted (dubbed the Journalistenskandal, Journalists scandal) over revelations that the BND had in the mid 1990s placed under surveillance a number of German journalists, in an attempt to discover the source of information leaks from the BND.

Yet another scandal came to light in early 2006, when it was revealed that agents of the BND allegedly supplied targeting information to U.S. forces to facilitate the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The BND assures that it only conveyed so-called non-targets, locations that must not be attacked.

The former is one where the BND has (partially) admitted to using journalists to spy on fellow journalists. This supposedly was done, to protect the security and authenticity (i.e. the truth) of the BND's investigations. It was quickly decided to set up a parlamentary investigation committee ("Parlamentarischer Untersuchungsausschuss"), to investigate the allegations. The affair quickly became heated, if the allegations are substantiated, it would be tantamount to a violation of freedom of speech which is protected under the German constitution.

[edit] Structure

The Bundesnachrichtendienst is divided into 8 branches, with different operational intelligence tasks.

1. Operative Aufklärung / Human Intelligence
2. Technische Aufklärung / Signals Intelligence
3. Auswertung / Analysis
4. Steuerung und zentrale Dienstleistung / Administration
5. Organisierte Kriminalität & Internationaler Terrorismus / Organized Crime & International Terrorism
6. Technische Unterstützung / Technical Support
7. Schule des BND / BND School
8. Sicherheit / Security & Defense

How The CIA put Saddam Hussein In Power

Regime Change: How the CIA put Saddam's Party in Power
From Richard Sanders, 24 October 2002

Source: Andrew and Patrick Cockburn,
excerpt from Out of the Ashes, The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, 2000.
Cited by Tim Buckley

With the death of former CIA director Richard Helms, the corporate media is offering a rare glimpse into the CIA's use of political assassinations. Unfortunately, however, the coverage is highly-sanitized. It covers up much more than it reveals.

Contrary to what the corporate media suggests, assassination is not a clean, surgical method of removing very specific political enemies. It is only one small element in a larger cluster of crimes used by the CIA in executing a regime change.

The reality is that the CIA's use of assassination to exterminate political leaders has historically been closely linked to many other political crimes that are, arguably, even worse.

For example, when planning, coordinating, arming, training and financing repressive military coups, as the CIA has done so many times, their henchmen are wont to carry out mass arrests, mass torture and mass murder. It's a nasty business. As Kissinger once said about the CIA's betrayal of Iraqi Kurds, covert action should not be confused with missionary work.

Although 32 of the 98 recent stories on Richard Helms (found using a google media search) mention the term assassination, not one of these articles mentions any of the following terms that are equally relevant to CIA operations: torture, murder, arrest.

Only 4 of the 98 recent stories on Helms mention the term coup. In one case, the article uses the term to praise Helms, saying he scored a journalistic coup when he interviewed Adolph Hitler in 1935. Richard Helms' contact with Nazis didn't end there (and probably didn't begin there either). Helms went on to work closely with General Reinhard Gehlen, the notorious Nazi spymaster who was hired by US intelligence to set up an organization within the CIA. The Gehlen Org recruited thousands of Nazi agents to run covert operations in Eastern Europe after the war. Gehlen is, of course, not mentioned in any of recent news reports on Helms. Neither is the fact that the OSS (the US agency that preceded the CIA) had a lot in common with the SS. To both, the biggest evil in the word was summed up in one word, communism. And to both, the elimination of communists, labour activists and other undesirable elements that got in the way of corporatism was their chief preoccupation.

Political assassination is a valuable weapon in the covert operative's toolbox. But it is only one tool among many. A successful right-wing covert action not only removes the enemy's head, it replaces the body politic.

The CIA has been organizing regime change for 50 years. They have removed many governments that are unfriendly to US corporate interests and replaced them with regimes that are more likely to work closely and slavishly to carry out the economic and geopolitical desires of the US corporate elite.

But the CIA's crimes don't end when a right-wing coup has succeeded. The CIA then has to keep its repressive despots in power in order to ensure that they can put into place and then maintain a variety of unjust economic systems and structures. This is done with arms sales (and outright gifts of surplus weapons), glowing diplomatic support, intelligence support (sic) and massive economic investment (i.e., pillaging as much profit as possible by exploiting the natural resources that drew them in there in the first place, and handing out some of the spoils to a loyal local elite).

When the corporate media describe the CIA's use of political assassination as if it exists in isolation from mass imprisonment, torture and murder, they cover up the horror, pain and suffering experienced by thousands of ordinary people in countries where CIA-backed blood baths have taken place. They neglect to reveal that when the CIA carries out its high-profile assassination efforts, they also carry out murders of thousands of lesser-known political figures.

It's standard procedure with many coups that thousands of grassroots activists and organizers get rounded up, tortured and killed. Such waves of mass violence make today's serial sniper in Washington look like a Boy Scout. The CIA has used such goons to eliminate its opponents and as a scare tactic to ensure that other citizens, who might otherwise have protested the regime change, decide instead to lay very low in order to stay alive.

An apt example of a real CIA assassination campaign was the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Tens of thousands of people where specifically targetted, tracked down and assassinated, many by snipers. Although Helms held the post of Director of the CIA during the height of this mass serial assassination program, none of the 98 recent stories on Helms, found with the google search engine, even mention Phoenix. Reliable estimates on the total number of people killed by the US in South East Asia during the Vietnam war range from three to five million people. But, of course, there is no mention of Helms culpability in any recent corporate media articles. they say it is taboo to speak ill of the dead, but what they don't say is that it is even more taboo to speak ill of the CIA, or breath word that CIA directors are criminals for overseeing the deliberate murder of millions of innocent civilians.

During Helms' tenure as director of the CIA under President Johnson, he also oversaw the secret war against Laos. But, it was no secret for the people of Laos. Over two million tons of bombs were dropped on this small country. The word Laos is not mentioned in any of the 98 recent corporate media articles found by google in a search for Richard Helms. Tio much of the world, it's still a secret war.

Another very good example of a CIA-organized regime change was a coup in 1963 that employed political assassination, mass imprisonment, torture and murder. This was the military coup that first brought Saddam Hussein's beloved Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq. At the time, Richard Helms was Director for Plans at the CIA. That is the top CIA position responsible for covert actions, like organizing coups. Helms served in that capacity until 1966, when he was made Director.

In the quotations collected below, the name of the leader who was assassinated is spelled variously as Qasim, Qassim and Kassem. But, however you spell his name, when he took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958, he certainly got recognized in Washington. He carried out such anti-American and anti-corporatist policies as starting the process of nationalizing foreign oil companies in Iraq, withdrawing Iraq from the US-initiated right-wing Baghdad Pact (which included another military-run, US-puppet state, i.e., Pakistan) and decriminalizing the Iraqi Communist Party. Despite these actions, and more likely because of them, he was Iraq's most popular leader. He had to go!

In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully assassinate Qasim and Saddam's Ba'ath Party came to power for the first time. Saddam returned from exile in Egypt and took up the key post as head of Iraq's secret service. The CIA then provided the new pliant, Iraqi regime with the names of thousands of communists, and other leftist activists and organizers. Thousands of these supporters of Qasim and his policies were soon dead in a rampage of mass murder carried out by the CIA's close friends in Iraq.

Iraq is once again a target of US regime change. Despite that, precious little is being said by the corporate media about how the CIA aided and abetted political assassination, regime change and mass murder, all in the name of putting Saddam's Ba'ath power into power for the first time in Iraq.

One thing is for sure, the US will find it much harder to remove the Ba'ath Party from power in Iraq than they did putting them in power back in 1963. If more people knew about this diabolical history, they just might not be so inclined to trust the US in its current efforts to execute regime change in Iraq.

Here then are some quotations that I've gathered on this fascinating early history of CIA involvement in the vicious history of regime change in Iraq:

In early 1963, Saddam had more important things to worry about than his outstanding bill at the Andiana Cafe. On February 8, a military coup in Baghdad, in which the Baath Party played a leading role, overthrew Qassim. Support for the conspirators was limited. In the first hours of fighting, they had only nine tanks under their control. The Baath Party had just 850 active members. But Qassim ignored warnings about the impending coup. What tipped the balance against him was the involvement of the United States. He had taken Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1961, he threatened to occupy Kuwait and nationalized part of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), the foreign oil consortium that exploited Iraq's oil. In retrospect, it was the ClAs favorite coup. We really had the ts crossed on what was happening, James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the Middle East, told us. We regarded it as a great victory. Iraqi participants later confirmed American involvement. We came to power on a CIA train, admitted Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Baath Party secretary general who was about to institute an unprecedented reign of terror. CIA assistance reportedly included coordination of the coup plotters from the agency's station inside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad as well as a clandestine radio station in Kuwait and solicitation of advice from around the Middle East on who on the left should be eliminated once the coup was successful. To the end, Qassim retained his popularity in the streets of Baghdad. After his execution, his sup- porters refused to believe he was dead until the coup leaders showed pictures of his bullet-riddled body on TV and in the newspapers.

Source: Alfred Mendes,
Excerpt from Blood for Oil, Spectr@zine.


The Ba'athist coup, resulted in the return to Iraq of young fellow-Ba'athist Saddam Hussein, who had fled to Egypt after his earlier abortive attempt to assassinate Qasim. Saddam was immediately assigned to head the Al-Jihaz al-Khas, the clandestine Ba'athist Intelligence organisation. As such, he was soon involved in the killing of some 5,000 communists. Saddam's rise to power had, ironically, begun on the back of a CIA-engineered coup!

Source: From Practical History,
London, May 2000.


1963: Qasim's government is overthrown in a coup bringing the Arab nationalist Ba'ath party to power. They favour the joining together of Iraq, Egypt and Syria in one Arab nation. In the same year, the Ba'ath also come to power in Syria, although the Syrian and Iraqi parties subsequently split.

The Ba'ath strengthen links with the U.S. During the coup, demonstrators are mown down by tanks, initiating a period of ruthless persecution. Up to 10,000 people are imprisoned, many are tortured. The CIA supply intelligence to the Ba'athists on communists and radicals to be rounded up. In addition to the 149 officially executed, about 5,000 are killed in the terror, many buried alive in mass graves. The new government continues the war on the Kurds, bombarding them with tanks, artillery and from the air, and bulldozing villages.

Source: Muslimedia:
August 16-31, 1997


Iraqis have always suspected that the 1963 military coup that set Saddam Husain on the road to absolute power had been masterminded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). New evidence just published reveals that the agency not only engineered the putsch but also supplied the list of people to be eliminated once power was secured--a monstrous stratagem that led to the decimation of Iraq's professional class.

The overthrow of president Abdul Karim Kassim on February 8, 1963 was not, of course, the first intervention in the region by the agency, but it was the bloodiest--far bloodier than the coup it orchestrated in 1953 to restore the shah of Iran to power. Just how gory, and how deep the CIA's involvement in it, is demonstrated in a new book by Said Aburish, a writer on Arab political affairs.

The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (1997), sets out the details not only of how the CIA closely controlled the planning stages but also how it played a central role in the subsequent purge of suspected leftists after the coup.

The author reckons that 5,000 were killed, giving the names of 600 of them--including many doctors, lawyers, teachers and professors who formed Iraq's educated elite. The massacre was carried out on the basis of death lists provided by the CIA.

The lists were compiled in CIA stations throughout the Middle East with the assistance of Iraqi exiles like Saddam, who was based in Egypt. An Egyptian intelligence officer, who obtained a good deal of his information from Saddam, helped the Cairo CIA station draw up its list. According to Aburish, however, the American agent who produced the longest list was William McHale, who operated under the cover of a news correspondent for the Beirut bureau of Time magazine.

The butchery began as soon as the lists reached Baghdad. No-one was spared. Even pregnant women and elderly men were killed. Some were tortured in front of their children. According to the author, Saddam who 'had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo to join the victors, was personally involved in the torture of leftists in the separate detention centres for fellaheen [peasants] and the Muthaqafeen or educated classes.'

King Hussain of Jordan, who maintained close links with the CIA, says the death lists were relayed by radio to Baghdad from Kuwait, the foreign base for the Iraqi coup. According to him, a secret radio broadcast was made from Kuwait on the day of the coup, February 8, 'that relayed to those carrying out the coup the names and addresses of communists there, so they could be seized and executed.'

The CIA's royal collaborator also gives an insight into how closely the Ba'athist party and American intelligence operators worked together during the planning stages. 'Many meetings were held between the Ba'ath party and American intelligence--the most critical ones in Kuwait,' he says.

At the time the Ba'ath party was a small nationalist movement with only 850 members. But the CIA decided to use it because of its close relations with the army. One of its members tried to assassinate Kassim as early as 1959. Saddam, then 22, was wounded in the leg, later fleeing the country.

According to Aburish, the Ba'ath party leaders--in return for CIA support--agreed to 'undertake a cleansing programme to get rid of the communists and their leftist allies.' Hani Fkaiki, a Ba'ath party leader, says that the party's contact man who orchestrated the coup was William Lakeland, the US assistant military attache in Baghdad.

One of the coup leaders, colonel Saleh Mahdi Ammash, former Iraqi assistant military attache in Washington, was in fact arrested for being in touch with Lakeland in Baghdad. His arrest caused the conspirators to move earlier than they had planned.

Aburish's book shows that the Ba'ath leaders did not deny plotting with the CIA ro overthrow Kassim. When Syrian Ba'ath party officials demanded to know why they were in cahoots with the US agency, the Iraqis tried to justify it in terms of ideology comparing their collusion to 'Lenin arriving in a German train to carry out his revolution.' Ali Saleh, the minister of interior of the regime which had replaced Kassim, said: 'We came to power on a CIA train.'

It should not come as a surprise that the Americans were so eager to overthrow Kassim or so willing to cause such a blood bath to achieve their objective. At the height of the cold war, they were causing similar mayhem in Latin America and Indo-China overthrowing any leaders that dared show the slighest degree of independence.

Kassim was a prime target for US aggression and arrogance. After taking power in 1958, he took Iraq out of the Baghdad Pact, the US-backed anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East, and in 1961 he dared nationalise part of the concession of the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum company and resurrected a long-standing Iraqi claim to Kuwait ( the regime which succeeded him immediately dropped the claim to Kuwait).

But the cold war does not by itself explain Uncle Sam's propensity to violence. When president George Bush bombed Iraq to smithereens, killing thousands of civilians, the cold war was over. Clinton cannot cite the cold war for insisting that the brutal regime of sanctions imposed on the country should stay.

In fact the brutal, blood-stained nature of Uncle Sam goes back all the way to the so-called 'Founding Fathers,' who made no attempt to conceal it. As long ago as 1818, John Quincy Adams hailed the 'salutary efficacy' of terror in dealing with 'mingled hordes of lawless Indians and negroes.' He was defending Andrew Jackson's frenzied operations in Florida which virtually wiped out the indigenous population and left the Spanish province under US control. Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues were not above professing to be impressed by the wisdom of his words.

Source: Kryss Katsiavriades and Talaat Qureshi,
The Acts of the Democracies: 1960 to 1964


Kassem had helped found the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in an attempt to curtail Western control of Arab oil. He had been planning to nationalise the Iraq Petroleum Company in which the USA had an interest. Iraq had also disapproved when Kuwait had been given independence by the UK with a pro-west emir (king) and oil concessions to Western companies. A few days before the coup, the French newspaper La Monde had reported that Kassem had been warned by the USA government to change his country's economic policies or face sanctions. British government papers later declassified would indicate that the coup was backed by the USA and UK. The new government promises not to nationalise American oil interests and renounces its claim to Kuwait. The USA recognises and praises the new government.

Source: Gareth Smyth,
In the Middle East, the CIA has hurt its friends and helped its own enemies.


A history of twists and turns, with the CIA often as a blunt axe, have made it very difficult for the United States to be seen as a reliable, or even honest, presence in the Middle East. The resentment is not confined to Arabs. Nine years ago, Massoud Barzani, who has rarely ever traveled away from Kurdistan, agreed to visit Washington with a deputation of the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC). Massoud, used to the traditional baggy trousers and cummerbund, looked uncomfortable in an Armani suit at receptions, but the INC was keen to create the right impression with senators and opinion-formers. Nonetheless, Massoud refused an invitation to visit Henry Kissinger.

Despite all the compromises of Kurdish politics, Massoud had never forgiven the former secretary of state for engineering the 1975 Algiers agreement between Iraq and Iran, when the two sides suddenly settled long-standing differences and felt free to deal with their internal problems, including the Kurds. Algiers came just two years after Massoud went to Washington to meet Richard Helms, the CIA director, and Al Haig, the White House chief of staff a meeting that led to both CIA and Israeli advisers moving into northern Iraq to help the Kurds. Algiers left the Kurds high and dry, ending a generation of Kurdish revolt led by Massoud's father, Mulla Mustafa, whose broken heart sent him into exile and an early death. Even if those in Washington forgot quickly, Massoud did not.

The relationship between the CIA and Saddam Hussein is a long one. In 1963, the Americans plotted with the Ba'ath against Abdel Karim Kassem, a man who, in the words of the writer Said Aburish, retains more of the affection of the Iraqi people than any leader this century. The CIA supplied lists for the Ba'ath to kill leftists and communists, and Washington flew arms to Kirkuk to use against the Kurds.

In Aburish's biography of the Iraqi leader, the author quotes many anti-Saddam Iraqis including Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the INC on CIA cooperation with the second Ba'ath coup in 1968. Later, in the 1980s, the United States and Britain helped arm Saddam in his confrontation with Iran only to turn against him over the 1990 Kuwait crisis. When in 1991 the Iraqi people rose against Saddam, the United States was fearful that change would put its majority Shi'ites and thus Iran in power, and US forces stood by as the Republican Guard crushed the rebellion. The CIA then worked on sponsoring a coup in Baghdad, a strategy that crumbled in 1996 when Iraqi intelligence infiltrated a conspiracy led by the ex-Ba'athist Iyad Alawi. Having rounded up hundreds of officers, the mukhabarat sent a message to the CIA team in Amman: We have arrested all your people. You might as well pack up and go home.

The CIA's half-hearted support for the INC also ended in 1996, when Saddam exploited Kurdish in-fighting to crush an INC presence in the Kurdish-controlled zone in the north. As Iraqi tanks moved in, the CIA fled and left the INC people to their fate. Washington washed its hands of the affair, and Chalabi noted that CIA officials are not known for their veracity.

Source: Ruth Wilson,
American Policy in Iraq


In 1963, Saddam Hussein worked with the CIA to carry out the coup by the Baath party, which eventually brought him to power in Iraq. The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite by Said K. Aburish, which was reviewed recently in Counterpunch (The CIA: Lest We Forget, CounterPunch. Sept.16-30 1997, p.2), describes how the CIA, Saddam and other members of the Baath party collaborated to bring about the coup, murdering perhaps 5,000 people in the process. The United States went on to help Saddam win the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. According to Noam Chomsky, There were no passionate calls for a military strike after Saddam's gassing of Kurds at Halabja in March, 1988; on the contrary, the US and U.K. extended their strong support for the mass murderer, then, also 'our kind of guy' (Iraq and the UN Sanctions, The Economist, Nov.19 1994, p.47)

Source: Stephen R. Shalom
Middle East Time Line (revised, 12 Dec. 2001)


1963: U.S. supports coup by Iraqi Ba'ath party (soon to be headed by Saddam Hussein) and reportedly gives them names of communists to murder, which they do with vigor.

Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, New York: Harperperennial. 1999, p. 74; Edith and E. F. Penrose, Iraq: International Relations and National Development, Boulder: Westview, 1978, p. 288; Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978, pp. 985-86

Source: Thomas Powers,
The Man Who Kept The Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, 1979, pp. 160-164.

It is astonishing how many tough-minded men in American government have been convinced by the regular spiel that the CIA has a deeprooted antipathy to proposals for political murder. A witness to still another episode of the sort was Armin Meyer, a career diplomat with a long history in the Near East going back to the Office of War Information, a kind of offshoot of the OSS, during World War II. In July 1958, when the government of Iraq was overthrown in a coup notable for its violence, Meyer was deputy director of the State Department's Office of Near Eastern Affairs. The following year he was promoted to director and as such was called in whenever the CIA contemplated covert operations in Iraq. The new ruler of the country was an army general named Abdul Karim Kassem, who had murdered his predecessors as well as a number of foreigners who happened to be in Baghdad at the time of his coup. On top of that, he immediately restored diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, later lifted a ban on the Iraqi Communist party while suppressing pro-Western parties, and in many other ways invited the hostility of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. On one occasion during Armin Meyer's tenure as director of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs, he attended a meeting in Allen Dulles's office at the CIA to discuss how the United States might remove Kassem. Meyer had attended many such meetings; they were a routine of government; but this one stuck in his mind.

During the meeting one of those present suggested that Kassem was the problem, and maybe the best way to get rid of him was to get rid of him. Wait a minute, Dulles said. An awful silence followed. Dulles was a man of great personal authority, and his words on this occasion had a cold and deliberate emphasis which Meyer never forgot. Dulles wanted one thing to be understood: it is not in the American character to assassinate opponents; murder was not to be discussed in his office, now or ever again; he did not ever want to hear another such suggestion by a servant of the United States government; that is not the way Americans do things.

Dulles was so clear on this point, and spoke with such evident passion and conviction, that Meyer simply could not understand how Dulles ever could have been party to an assassination plot no matter who gave the orders. Meyer knew what was in the Church Committee's reports, but he simply did not believe it, there must be some error, it was beyond Meyer's capacity to conceive that he could have been mistaken on this point, Dulles had left no room for doubt: he would not be a party to assassination.

The regular spiel

...

The message to McNamara, and to us, ought to be loud and clear: assassination was too sensitive a matter to be discussed in official meetings or to be recorded in official memos and minutes. What those high officials who received the regular spiel failed to comprehend was the degree of secrecy which surrounded any matter as explosive as assassination. Armin Meyer, for example, was convinced by Dulles's version of the regular spiel that he would never be a party to assassination. He knew what was in the Church Committee's Assassination Report roughly knew, that is; he had not actually read itbut he couldn't square what he'd heard with what he thought he knew. If he had read the report, the whole report, and most particularly the long footnote on page 181, he would have known that Dulles's solemn disapproval was in truth nothing more than the regular spiel. In February 1960, while the government was trying to decide what to do about General Kassem, the chief of the DDP's Near East Division proposed that Kassem be incapacitated with a poisoned handkerchief prepared by the DDP's Technical Services Division. In April the proposal was supported by the DDP's Chief of Operations, Richard Helms, who endorsed Kassem's incapacitation as highly desirable. Meyer would further have known that Bisseil did not act in such matters without Dulles's approval, and that Bissell was convinced he could hardly have made this point any clearer to the Church Committee that Dulles would not have proceeded without an order from the only man with the authority to okay an attempt on a foreign leader's life. In this instance the handkerchief was duly dispatched to Kassem, but whether or not it ever reached him, it certainly did not kill him. His own countrymen did that on February 8, 1963, by executing him before a firing squad on live television in Baghdad.

What Livingston Merchant, Armin Meyer, Robert McNamara, and others failed to understand was that official meetings in the office of the Director of the CIA, or of the Secretary of State, or of the Special Group, were hardly the place to discuss something that was really secret. From the CIA's point of view the Secretary of State's office was about as secure as the floor of Congress with a full press gallery. It you were going to plan an assassination in the Secretary of State's office, or record the discussion in the minutes, you might as well send a press release to the New York Times. Eisenhower and Kennedy went after two enemies in particular in the years between 1959 and 1963 Lumumba in the Congo and Castro in Cuba but when they gave the job to the CIA they expected secrecy, and that is what they got.

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