Category: True Crime

Baseless

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The Book of the Week is “Baseless, My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act” by Nicholson Baker, published in 2020.

From the 1940’s through the 1960’s, the CIA funded, and was supposed to supervise certain big-name American universities’ and the U.S. military services’ secret research; this, in biochemistry, pathology, mycology, entomology, etc. for the purpose of developing weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons would cause deaths of famine from crop failure or from fatal diseases, or spur regime changes. Government officials lost control of the experimenters’ spending and activities. The “researchers” were accountable to no one.

Pursuant to their actions, the researchers generated documents that they desired remain classified forever, or else redacted in large portions thereof, so as to become incomprehensible or prevent their readers from connecting the dots, because such secrecy allows them (to this day!) to hide their unethical, even evil behavior and shameful harm to society.

This book’s author repeatedly asked for said documents under the United States’ federal law called the “Freedom of Information Act” (or FOIA); he did hours and hours of reading to detect the truth about the wrongs committed by American officials. Those officials’ excuse for their coverups (during the Cold War– it was anti-Communist measures) is always “It’s a matter of national security.” The government keeps on violating FOIA by taking years (instead of weeks or months) to fulfill the author’s numerous requests.

Despite the government’s stonewalling, American society is changing in ways that offset the harm done by the lack of information on the government’s past evil actions; among them:

  • muckraking gadflies such as the author (who globally disseminate information on the shameful behavior of society’s leaders);
  • the increasing number of females (who are displacing alpha males in the shrinking “old boy network” and generally do not behave like alpha males) who are taking top leadership positions in America’s institutions;
  • propagandizing of celebrities, such as Bill Maher, (who, a number of years back, joked that “If your kid’s not learning in school, don’t blame the teacher– fire the parent!” which has perhaps influenced recent legal cases in which failures of parents have been perceived as a major factor in their kids’ shooting people– involving “parental responsibility statutes”);
  • the quantum leap in knowledge-sharing made quick and easy by the Internet (in spite of disinformation), through countless international, multi-media human-interest stories and videos that are raising awareness of the importance of voting and other actions Americans can take to help maintain their democracy;
  • the fact that the Internet has fostered a grass-roots communications revolution by allowing ordinary Americans to express themselves in a decentralized global network at the speed of light, absent the filtering of past societal influencers such as journalists, politicians and celebrities;
  • the fact that the body of knowledge of power-abusing American presidents in the past half-century has been amply globally publicized so as to significantly lessen the impact of their historical revisionists– and that Americans’ learning curve on them has run its course;
  • the COVID lockdown of 2020, which forced all different stakeholders to deal with education and childcare issues, and showed how the wisdom of life-experience has been imparted from the older generation to the younger one.

The author pointed out that every president to hold office since the 1930’s has committed evil of one kind or another– funding terrorists or authorizing the use of unethical practices in creating weapons of mass destruction (which were actually seldom used, and of course, were a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money) to supposedly keep America’s enemies at bay.

The author listed a number of online primary sources of governmental misdeeds and James-Bond wannabe activities; among them (in no particular order):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Classified_documents

Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/CIADocuments/CIA-001/)

Brill (https://brill.com/display/db/cwio?language=en) — charges a fee for its services

MuckRock (https://www.muckrock.com/)

The Black Vault (https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/)

governmentattic.org

And, he listed the physical libraries that contain the said Swiss-cheese, needle-in-a-haystack, “smoking gun” information: the National Security Archive at George Washington University and the CREST database in the FOIA Reading Room at the CIA.

One of many specific studies the author mentioned, involved 1940’s germ-warfare experiments that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of hogs and fowl, and the subsequent early 1950’s actual use of bacteria in North Korea and East Germany. On civilians.

Other evil scientists sought to learn whose buildings burned longer– Japan’s or Germany’s, in the early 1950’s, as the U.S. was then firebombing both North and South Korea. Interestingly, each territory’s building materials differed, and so burned at different rates.

Read the book to learn a lot more about the research– how men were promoted to the highest military or government positions and hailed as heroes for the info they gathered on how to do grievous harm to other human beings; the unexpected, mysterious deaths of certain of them; and everything you ever wanted to know about their plausibly deniable, willfully ignorant, fear-mongering propaganda campaigns (which was their true ulterior motive in the midst of all that distracting sociopathic “science”; it was thought that rattling the enemy psychologically more than physically, did more harm).

Tangled Vines

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The Book of the Week is “Tangled Vines, Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California” by Frances Dinklespiel, published in 2015. The moral of this book’s main story is “Lawsuits followed and winemakers like Viader made mental notes never to be cavalier about the disposition of fire-damaged wine.”

According to the author, as of 2013, Americans drank the largest quantity of wine, 13% of all the wine of all the countries in the world.

In October 2005, a majorly evil crime was committed at the Wines Central warehouse on Mare Island in Vallejo. An assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern district of California– an expert in wine fraud and arson, and an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives assessed the damage and investigated the site. The latter used an acceleration-detection canine, also called an arson dog.

The perpetrator committed: mail fraud (for shipping wine across state lines under a false name), interstate transfer of stolen property (because it wasn’t his wine to sell), arson, and tax evasion.

Fire destroyed millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of wine (stored in the warehouse) of mostly mom-and-pop wineries. As is usual in such instances, insurance claims of winemakers whose wine was covered, were denied, because the insurers contended that the wine was “in transit.”

In the single-digit 2000’s, Bill Koch of Koch family fame, didn’t spare a dime in finding out how he had become the victim of wine fraud. He employed investigators in various fields: ex-FBI agents, ex-Sotheby’s workers, a glass historian, and experts in cork and adhesives and labels. He sued the auction house and original seller of the wine.

Read the book to learn about the kinds of people who are passionate about making and selling wine, how they became victims of one especially bad actor, and a few other incidents in the life of the California wine industry.

Character & Characters / Retail Gangster

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The first Book of the Week is “Character & Characters, the Spirit of Alaska Airlines” by Robert J. Serling, published in 2008.

Alaska Airlines (AKA) came into existence in the mid-1940’s with the buyout of Star Air Service. It faced stiff competition from Northwest Airlines, and Pan American– which was already monster-sized from: its contract with the federal government to deliver the U.S. mails, and exchanging many political favors.

Mostly, AKA transported passengers between the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. In early 1949, it completed a dangerous mission, flying about 140 Jews from Yemen to the airport in Tel Aviv, while an Arab bomb could have hit the plane anytime.

In the 1950’s, top executive Charlie Willis had such passion for and loyalty and dedication to AKA, that he borrowed $100,000 using his personal house as collateral, in order to restore the pilot-pension-fund shortfall, to keep his employer from going out of business. Beginning at the dawn of the 1960’s, he enabled his second-in-command-executive to engage in deficit spending. They broke the bank to do promotional gimmicks.

In the back of its model CONVAIR 880, AKA installed a stand-up beer bar, even though it replaced eight passenger seats. AKA generated goodwill by throwing parties it couldn’t afford for industry players, such as its own employees and trade associations. In the late 1960’s, it bought hotels and a ski resort. AKA was one of the very first airlines to provide in-flight movies and music. So it hovered near bankruptcy, repeatedly unable to meet its employee payroll. For years.

Commercial airlines, initially transporting wealthy passengers, employed stewardesses in sexy uniforms– with no or minimal training, and offered alcoholic beverages included with the airfare. With evolution came the organization of labor– of pilots, flight crews and ground crews. Alaska’s bush pilots who had gotten in on aviation’s ground floor, had become disenchanted with the changing times. Bob Ellis sold his tiny airline in Alaska because he was no longer having fun, was emotionally exhausted from the government’s imposition of regulations, and didn’t understand the need for union labor. He had treated his employees well.

The Civil Aeronautics Board, one of the government’s regulatory bodies, was soon to stop subsidizing the (small, financially struggling) regional airlines (including AKA) in Alaska. The consolidation of the industry in the 1960’s meant no more floatplanes, biplanes, and single-engine monoplanes. These were replaced with DC-3’s and other faster, technologically superior aircraft.

Competing airlines were growing in size, complexity, and needed economies-of-scale and scope. Bosses couldn’t afford to pay for their employees’ expensive personal problems as though they were in a small business anymore. There was backlash by the workers against this vanishing era. They no longer felt like a family.

In summer 1970, AKA’s Willis (rumored to be an alcoholic) was able to get a new air route: to the U.S.S.R. Ironically, AKA had to lease a Pan Am 707 in order to do it. Willis became a drinking buddy to his Aeroflot counterparts. The passengers, who flew to Siberia, consisted mostly of Native Americans from Alaska visiting family, missionaries, and businessmen. They were treated to flatware made of gold, caviar in their Caesar salads, wine, and Russian samovars. The flight attendants dressed in Cossacks’ attire, with bear fur hats. Unsurprisingly, the flights proved insufficiently profitable over the course of three years.

AKA suffered less disastrous financial losses when the oil industry in Alaska kicked into high gear, in the late 1960’s. Oil-pipeline construction around Prudhoe Bay in the North Slope area became all the rage. From the Seattle-Tacoma airport, the airline’s Hercules’ C-130 planes transferred cargo, including hazardous materials that could accidentally cause a lot of wrongful deaths and property damage: 25,000 pounds of dynamite, heating and fuel oil and big, heavy drilling rigs for ground vehicles, and heaters.

In the early 1970’s, many pipeline workers liked hunting, but they got drunk before they flew home. AKA allowed rifles on their planes, so they hired the equivalent of bouncers who served as ground-crew screeners, and had a locked-up special gun-rack section in the front of the plane.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional details on Alaska Airlines’ role in the development of aviation, people, power struggles, technologies, and the tenor of its times up until the book’s writing.

The second Book of the Week is “Retail Gangster, the Insane, Real-Life Story of CRAZY EDDIE” by Gary Weiss, published in 2020.

Currently fading from Americans’ memory, is “Crazy Eddie.” Launched in the mid-1970’s, it was a retail chain of electronics stores in the northeastern United States. The company became known for a spokesman who flooded all kinds of advertising media with emotionally-charged screaming, that Crazy Eddie’s prices were insane. The repetitive repetition of this singular message worked. Eddie projected an image of success that fed on itself.

However, from the start, the store’s top executive– Eddie Antar– committed financial crimes. He had selfish, greedy intent, unlike the aforementioned Alaska Airlines executives, who were merely big spenders out of unbridled optimism and honest ineptitude.

Starting in 1984 when the company sold shares to the public, Eddie and his key employees (mostly his relatives) engaged in securities fraud. They had ongoing, frantic bursts of activity in which they: “…stuffed cash in the ceiling, stole store sales-taxes, [plus, they falsified inventory records] and defrauded insurance companies without a second thought. They did not expect to be caught, and if the Antars had any doubt on that score, they had only to look to City Hall for inspiration.” New York City’s government had committed exactly the same kinds of accounting fraud for years and years, beginning in the 1960’s. As the behavioral-economics cliche goes, “The fish rots from the head down.”

By 1987, Crazy Eddie had 2,250 workers in 32 locations from Philadelphia to New England. Read the book to learn a slew of details on the fates of Eddie, his families, and his businesses.

Sandworm

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The Book of the Week is “Sandworm, A New Era of Cyberwar and the hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers” by Andy Greenberg, published in 2019. In this eye-opening volume, the author provided the backstory (out of chronological order, in a confusing, cherry-picked way) on how and why Russia has become the world’s biggest disrupter of society yet again through a new method. “Sandworm” refers to the Russian hackers who perpetrated cyberattacks. The author implied that knocking out power grids was one new way to destabilize target nations. But this is NOT a new idea.

Anyway, as is well known, in recent decades, for various reasons, Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, ordered his military to attack Estonia (in 1999 and later), Georgia in 2008 (yes, Soviet Georgia– not the American state), and Ukraine. These offensives were accomplished not just on the ground, but also through technology. Ukraine’s election process and electric power were both seriously damaged through the Internet.

In the United States, various federal agencies fight for the power to set policy on the country’s cybersecurity: FBI, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security; plus the U.S. military, North American Electric Reliability Corporation, and SANS Institute.

During the George W. Bush administration, America and Israel started a secret project to develop virulent malware that could wreak cyberwar on their enemies, but whose main purpose was to stop Iran from making nuclear weapons.

During the Obama administration, a young, bright Air Force officer was hired to build a cyber-security department from the ground up, within the NSA. However, he got disgusted with the abusive hierarchy of the American military, as new recruits’ talent was wasted because the status quo dictated that they pay their dues.

Meanwhile, after years of work, investigators found evidence that the Russians were to blame for penetrating America’s technology infrastructure in 2016. Even conservative radio-show host Rush Limbaugh jumped on the bandwagon, saying, “It was an acrylic [sic] keyboard!” [He meant Cyrillic].

In 2017, Britain’s National Health Service was disabled via malicious software code that demanded a small amount of bitcoins as ransom. Other entities hit included a German railway, a Russian bank , colleges in China, police departments in India, and malware called “NotPetya” that did a number on Ukrainian civilians who were really inconvenienced in living their everyday lives.

In sum, it’s deju vu all over again in terms of a Cold War arms race involving Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and the U.S. This time, though, the weapon is technology and the threats are made by numerous worldwide terrorist cells who can hack a target’s infrastructure and its political system (like with online voting in Arizona and Illinois) whenever their territory’s leader commands them to do so. Another difference is that the kinds of cyberattacks seen thus far are akin to one aspect of Nazism: sowing social unrest (rather than killing people; not that the Nazis didn’t also do that) to bring a nation down. Damage done by psychological harassment from foul play via the Internet is economically incalculable and extremely difficult to regulate because it is international.

As is well known, through the twentieth century into the new millennium, information sources evolved from newspapers, magazines, books, and radio, to television, cable television, and then the Internet. Currently, Google and social media can serve as news aggregators, but more often, they are for-profit propaganda tools, just like all the aforementioned media. Most Americans think of movies as entertainment rather than as a source of news or education, but in the Postwar Era, they have also become for-profit propaganda tools.

But take heart, America! There is at least one area of optimism that will help this country’s democracy continue:

Compared to now, there was as much as or even more social unrest in this country in 1968. Before and after, the nation suffered through two dictatorial presidents in a row— LBJ and Nixon– who were recruiting all men of military age; many against their will, to fight in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in a war that was extremely expensive in so many ways. They sowed social unrest among their own people. America has not had two such presidents in a row since.

Even so, LBJ was kind of schizophrenic because he helped pass major civil-rights legislation. However, his ego wouldn’t let him order a stop to the war. Nixon went all-out on lies and deception, wreaking vicious political vengeance on his perceived enemies because he didn’t think he’d ever get punished. As journalist P.J. O’Rourke commented, beginning in the mid-1960’s, the Baby Boomers threw “a decade-long temper tantrum.” But now, their generation is wise to political shenanigans of decades past.

In 1972, voter apathy was so severe that Nixon was reelected in a landslide. Nowadays, voter turnout is at an all-time high. This is cause for celebration. Americans are starting to understand why voting is so important: it shows they believe in the democratic process (regardless of for whom they vote). A significant number of voters are required in order for democracy to work. When a dictatorial leader senses the people aren’t paying attention to what he’s doing, he will take advantage of that to acquire more power. He’s more likely to do the people’s will when he sees their anger is close to reaching critical mass.

On that note, read the book to learn much more about the author’s alarmist take on the global cybersecurity situation.

The Vortex

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The Book of the Week is “The Vortex, A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation” by Scott Carney and Jason Miklian, published in 2022. This multi-faceted story involved a massive number of deaths due to (cue the dramatic music): the Great Bhola cyclone (what would be called a hurricane in the Western Hemisphere), a cholera epidemic, dictatorial political shenanigans, atrocities and genocide; plus heroic international aid workers who were horribly hindered in their disaster-relief efforts. Sorry, no romantic subplot– this wasn’t a movie; all of this actually happened within the space of about three years. But at the end, there was the founding of a new nation, called Bangladesh.

Even decades after geographic separation of various religious and ethnic groups into: A) India, and B) a sovereignty of two discrete land masses (East and West) that comprised newly formed Pakistan in 1947– hostility still reigned. In Pakistan, anger and resentment simmered between the Muslim Punjabis in West Pakistan who spoke Urdu, and the Hindu Bengalis in East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh), who spoke their own language.

In the mid-1960’s, general Ayub (“Yahya”) Khan, who became Pakistan’s leader in 1969 [For more information, see this blog’s post, “The Rape of Bangla Desh”], ordered Pakistan’s military to attack India. The United States imposed economic sanctions on both Pakistan and India for childishly fighting. Pakistan allied with China. India allied with the then-USSR.

In August 1969, American president Richard Nixon tapped Yahya to be the contact to introduce him to China’s leader Mao Tse Tung. In exchange, Yahya wanted to purchase arms for Pakistan. Nixon violated the then-arms embargo against Pakistan to sell it armored personnel carriers and B-57 bombers.

In 1970, there occurred a quantum leap in hurricane-forecasting technology what with a new satellite called ITOS 1 that gathered real-time data on the Northern Hemisphere for the National Hurricane Center. Nevertheless, because they had no clue a storm was coming (the new forecasting technology had yet to reach Central Asia), almost all local residents drowned when the Great Bhola cyclone hit the delta near Manpura island in November 1970. A month later, fifty million Pakistanis were voting for the first time in their lives.

A few months later, American weapons were killing the Bengali people. Nixon was supporting Yahya. The latter’s military leader whipped up a Nazi-level frenzy of hatred against the Hindus, massacring them with .50 caliber machine guns and destroying– via American M-24 Chaffee tanks, jeeps and F-86 jets– key communication, political, educational and law enforcement structures in the city of Dacca in East Pakistan.

Unsurprisingly, all of the above was accompanied by a boatload of radio propaganda put out by Yahya’s side. But later, radio broadcasts helped the Bengalis. Anyway, Nixon aided and abetted Yahya in various additional ways to achieve his own political aims. Refugees fled to India, and where, counterintuitively, military camps trained Bengalis (technically Pakistanis) to resist the Pakistan Army. Indians had always been sworn enemies of Pakistanis. Still, it was in India’s best interest to see the Bengalis win the war and break up Pakistan.

There have occurred countless historical tapestries such as the aforementioned in which a complex bunch of circumstances resulted in millions of deaths; one thing led to another. The authors argued that the especially severe cyclone played a major role in giving scheming politicians an excuse to abuse their power even more. They asserted that more severe storms are occurring due to the earth’s changing atmosphere, and such natural disasters in turn trigger a series of events that increase global conflicts.

BUT, arguably, global conflicts have waxed and waned throughout history, regardless of natural disasters. There are four major causes of global conflicts (that are present in different combinations):

  • fighting over limited (and /or exploited) resources;
  • tribal hatreds;
  • religious hatreds; and
  • territorial disputes.

Present-day events (!) have shown that humanity is making slow, slow, slow progress towards a total net amount of good versus evil on earth– even with all the advances in early-warning systems for disasters and the striving for more widespread humanitarian activities. Cases in point: once-Communist countries have changed for the better in certain ways in the last thirty years, and there is less colonialism in the world than there used to be.

Unfortunately, advances in technology and charitable aid still trigger profiteering and political exploitation with their attendant propaganda. Alpha males with hubris syndrome with their greed and power-hunger still rule most of the world. Bottom line: human nature doesn’t change, but globally, human beings overall, are evolving.

Anyway, read the book to learn many more story-details, involving: how Nixon (and his evil sidekick Kissinger) came extremely close to instigating a nuclear war against the USSR in the Bay of Bengal; the fates of various political and military leaders; and the hapless common people of Pakistan, and the aid workers who passionately tried to help them.