For almost a decade I have been tracking Jack Abramoff and the Culture of Corruption and since I became uid 9214, I’ve written about that work here on Daily Kos.
Recently, I came across a major link between Jack Abramoff and the modern Conservative movement that I had over looked.
I have known for a very long time that Jack Abramoff functioned as a Bag-man for the VRWC. I knew his roots went deep—back to the late 1970s, and that much of his work has always been crafted and executed in the shadows. I knew he played a part in the Iran-Contra Affair (working in the basement of the WH with Ollie North) and that he was a lobbyist for the Apartheid era South African Secret Police. I knew he was a dedicated movement conservative who wanted to establish One-Party Rule in the USA. I knew that he almost succeeded.
Hiding in plain sight was that fact that—for the last three decades—Jack Abramoff was also involve in a Domestic Spying program privately run and financed by his fellow co-conspirators on the Right.
Interesting!
And then I found out that puppets were involved.
To the jump...
Eight years ago, activists were preparing to protest the Republican Convention in Philadelphia. It was a different time. Before a stolen election, 9-11 and all that followed. Back then, the big focus was Globalization and the multiple failures of neo-liberalism, "free-trade", and unchecked corporate power. Those issues are all still problems, but they’ve been buried under the filth and failures of the Bush Era. Sometime, I look back and think "we should have such problems...", but I digress.
In 1999 there was a major protest at the WTO meeting in Seattle and by the summer of 2000 it was clear that there would be protests at both Conventions.
It was also clear that there would be puppets—large puppets.
This was the plan for Philadelphia and 2000 RNC Convention. A puppeteer involved in the protest described just what type of puppets they planned to deploy:
The warehouse had a massive garage door through which we had driven an eighteen-wheeler for the creation of a float dubbed Corpzilla, the Corporate Monster [snip]
There were ten-foot tall skeletons, 138 strong, bearing the names of everyone Texas Governor George W. Bush had executed thus far in his five years in office (a number which continues to climb, rapidly). There were cockroaches — "Cockroaches," read a wheat-pasted poster that made its way all over Philadelphia's open air wall space, "are not dirty, but exist only to clean up after messes. The Government hates cockroaches because they remind them how dirty they are." There were mice — mice scare elephants, such as the GOP elephant, thereby justifying the mice's mantra: "Mice Are Nice!" Peanuts — the food of the elephant — thus bearing the names of corporate campaign contributors, such as, "United and U.S. Airways on the verge of merging... Donors to both parties... $2,000,000." And so much more.
This massive deployment of papier-mâché, chicken wire and banners seemed to alarm the Pennsylvania State Police. On August 1, 2000 the warehouse in West Philly where the puppets were being created and stored was raided by the police. Spontaneous demonstration sprang up around town in response to the raid. By nightfall more than 400 people had been arrested. Many of those folks were arrested at the puppet warehouse, one of them had this account:
At 2:05 PM, Tuesday, August 1st, over 180 police officers and three helicopters lay siege to a warehouse on 41st and Haverford on Philadelphia's west side. When we looked through a mail slot to survey the situation, the police sprayed mace at us. They tried to barge in through a hole in the roof and, failing that, videotaped, tape recorded, and spit at us through a skylight. All 75 of us inside the warehouse were detained for over two hours before any search warrant showed up. We would become known as the "Haverford 70."
And why? What sort of crime had we committed that was so heinous as to qualify for such an egregious show of force?
We were making puppets. They were the props that would bear our messages of protest to the Republican National Convention (RNC).
Now, here is where it gets interesting.
According to published reports at the time and the months that followed it seems that the entire Great Philly Puppet Raid of 2000 was instigated and based on rumors delivered to the Pennsylvania State Police by a little-known and well financed Right-wing Institute that grew out of the John Birch Society.
Long after the First Amendment Rights of the protestors had been denied, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on September 10, 2000 that Rumors Had Troopers Seeing Reds During The GOP Convention:
In state police affidavits justifying a raid on a West Philadelphia warehouse used by convention protesters, troopers alleged that communists were behind the demonstrations.
"Funds allegedly originate with Communist and leftist parties and from sympathetic trade unions," the state police declared in the affidavits. "Other funds reportedly come from the former Soviet-allied World Federation of Trade Unions." [snip]
Known as "the puppet warehouse," police called it a center of illegal activity; activists said it was a workshop in which they made more than 100 puppets and a large satirical float, "Corpzilla." [snip]
Without elaboration, the affidavits stated that the allegations of communist funding had come from the little-known Maldon Institute. [snip]
Lewis [a state police spokesman ] said that state police and other police departments "routinely receive information from the Maldon Institute at no cost, via e-mail. The department did not solicit this information."
Asked whether state police had attended Maldon Institute conferences, Lewis responded: "State police personnel have had contact in the U.S. with representatives of the institute."
According to public records, the institute is funded, at least in part, by Scaife, the Pittsburgh political philanthropist best known for his financial support of several private investigations of President Clinton in recent years. [snip]
In an interview last week, Chip Berlet, who studies conservative and far-right groups, said a key figure within the 15-year-old institute has been John H. Rees, a British-born contributor to the John Birch Society and publisher of a newsletter devoted to intelligence-gathering and distributed to police.
In the 1970s, Rees published the Information Digest, which gave details gathered after he infiltrated left-leaning groups under a false name, the Baltimore Sun reported in 1988.
Just this year, Rees, as director of the Maldon Institute, helped organize an invitation-only conference in New York City on terrorism that drew FBI agents and police, according to conference sponsors.
If the FBI in 2000 was working with the Maldon Institute to organize a conference on fighting terrorism, it is not surprising that 9-11 happened. These guys are tinfoil wearing right-wing paranoids. And the FBI has known that they are unreliable. The founder of the Maldon Institute was peddling information to the Feds since the 1960s. And since then, his work has been revealed in a number of civil law suits. One of these cases produced a 1968 FBI memo on the reliability of John Rees and the Information he peddles:
"Rees is an unscrupulous unethical individual and an opportunist who operates with a self-serving interest. Information from him cannot be considered reliable..."
And yet, the word of John Rees was enough to arrest more than 400 people gathered to exercise their right of free speech. Time and time again, his word has been used to justify domestic spying and his Maldon Institute has been used by politicians, corporations and law enforcement entities that want their domestic spying to stay under the radar.
John Rees is a player in the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Jack Abramoff was their bag-man and Rees is their spymaster. And it should surprise no one that Abramoff and Rees work together. In fact, their close relationship goes back decades.
When the police raided the Puppet Warehouse in 2000, Jack Abramoff was working with John Rees and the Maldon Institute. In 1999, Jack Abramoff became the Secretary / Teasurer of Rees’ operation and he held that position until his scandal landed on the front page of the Washington Post in early 2004.
Their relationship gives a clue as to how the various RW gadflies like Grover Norquist were funded. In 1999, Jack and Tom DeLay’s former Chief of Staff, Ed Buckham, discussed where to move funding from Richard Mellon Scaife. Here is the email:
You can be sure that many similar emails are buried in the 742,000 pages of documents gathered and suppressed by John McCain during his Abramoff investigation cover-up (more details on the McCain/Abramoff Cover-up can be found in this Diary).
In his new book, "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule", Thomas Frank adds more details about the early relationship between Jack Abramoff and John Rees. When Jack first came to DC, it was Rees who was singing his praises in the pages of Conservative Digest, the movement publication founded by Richard Viguerie in 1975. Wrecking Crew will come out on August 5 and this is a book that you should have on pre-order. I thought I knew a lot about Abramoff and these guys, but Frank may know more and he understands why they do what they do. These are crooks with an ideological justification for their crimes—and that makes them the worst kind of crook.
Rees came of age when COINTELPRO was still a "secret" program and wrecking havoc on the land. As a John Bircher, Rees would infiltrate liberal groups and pass along the "findings" to law enforcement agencies. He would also include his research in the pages of the various right-wing publications he wrote for and edited. As COINTELPRO was exposed, Rees took his work private. An October 26, 2000 profile in the Philadelphia Inquirer (not online) provided some details (emphasis added):
For four decades, Rees, 74, onetime Washington editor for the John Birch Society, has tracked protest and dissent - from antiwar demonstrators in the 1960s to today's anti-globalization movement.
He feeds his research to a special audience - law-enforcement agencies- publishing his findings in a series of obscure periodicals. His alliances in the past with police in Washington, New York state, and Los Angeles have left behind a trail of outrage.
Sometimes, Rees has infiltrated groups himself, using a false name on occasion. He also says he has many sources.
"We have stringers," Rees said [snip]
One of his earliest publications was the mimeographed Information Digest. Rees gathered some of its material by posing as a leftist himself. Among other things, it contained lists of license plates of cars at a Black Panther rally.
His activity went largely unnoticed until a scandal broke in New York state as legislators learned that state police had kept files with information on a million citizens. A legislative committee conducted an inquiry.
"What was reported by Information Digest was casually used to create dossiers on a wide spectrum of Americans whose only crime was to dissent," the committee's 1976 report found.
"Information Digest was the string that held together a network of hidden informants whose information was recorded by police departments throughout the nation without the individual involved knowing of the process and without independent checking by the police as to the validity and source of this derogatory information."
The Maldon Institute still publishes Information Digest and we can be certain that their work is still being sent to law enforcement agencies as well as to Republican campaigns and the noise machines of the RW. We can be certain that the work of the Maldon Institute is still being developed in the shadows and that it is still influencing policy makers and law enforcement. I would guess that current issues of Maldon Institute publications are reporting on the "dangers" of the Netroots and how we are funded by communists. It is silly and yet, a real danger to our liberties. We need to expose and fight these RW spies for hire.
Almost thirty years ago, Rees helped to form the Western Goals Foundation with conservative icon Congressman Larry McDonald. This "privatized" the domestic spying restricted in the aftermath of the Church Hearings. Rees ran a network of spies infiltrating groups on the left and spinning their findings to law enforcement and conservative networks to feed their paranoia. Abramoff’s College Republicans, YAFers (Young Americans for Freedom) and other conservative youth groups would supply Rees with spies and information.
In 1983 the operation was exposed in Los Angeles, The 2004 ACLU Report on Surveillance (PDF) provides a quick synopsis of the case:
The Western Goals Foundation. In Los Angeles, thousands of files on activists of all kinds were ordered destroyed in the wake of the revelations of domestic spying in the 1970s. But in 1983 these raw intelligence files were discovered hidden away in the garage of an LAPD detective, who had been sharing them with the Western Goals Foundation, a Cold War anti-communist group that used the files to build private dossiers on progressive political activists around the nation. Western Goals acted as a private "clearinghouse" of dossiers on political activists from police agencies in different states – collecting, disseminating and "laundering" the sources of that information. The group circulated information – much of it false and defamatory – about those activists not only to local police departments, but also to numerous federal police agencies including the Secret Service, the FBI, the State Department and the CIA.
The death of Larry McDonald combined with the exposure in LA spelled the end of the Western Goals Foundation as a viable domestic spying operation. No matter. Rees and company just renamed the operation and continued.
For a while they became the Mid-Atlantic Research Associates and continued where the Western Goals Foundation left off. Rees and company were involved in spying on groups opposed to the Reagan agenda of covert wars in Central America, South America and Africa. Their "research" would find its way into the rhetoric, myths and talking points of the conservative movement.
For example, the myth that the Nuclear Freeze Movement was a "Soviet plot" could be traced back to the writings and research of Rees and his wing-nut spies for hire. Not surprisingly, Reagan would cite Rees’ spin as he attack progressive movements of the day. And then there was the concerted effort to attack and destroy CISPES, (the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador).
By the mid-eighties—with funding by Richard Mellon Scaife—the spy network became a "think tank" with the non-descript name: The Maldon Institute. Ever since, they have been in on various efforts to infiltrate and smear progressive movement and anybody who would protest the effort to establish One-Party Rule in the United States or their corporate masters.
Rees and the Maldon Institute played a significant role in the Great Philly Puppet Raid, but they’ve also been active in many other cases. Some have been exposed. Most have stayed in the shadows.
For example, Rees and his spies had a hand in the recently disclosed decades of spying on the National Lawyers Guild.
And you can be certain that their research and rumors were a factor in the 1999 WTO Protests in Seattle. Gangs, Hooligans, and Anarchists—The Vanguard of Netwar in the Streets, a Rand Report (PDF) cited the work of the Maldon Institute’s December 1999 report, Battle in Seattle: Strategy and Tactics Behind the WTO Protests and the Maldon Institute is named in the documents collected by the Seattle City Clerk's Office during their WTO Accountability Review Committee examination of the police riot. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Rees and his gang moved their focus onto environmental groups, animal rights groups and—of course—unions. Anybody who had a complaint against Rees' corporate masters was a threat.
In the aftermath of 9-11, it was information from the Maldon Institute that banded some of these groups as terrorist threats. Martha Powers has long been one of the key people on Rees’s team and this was her speaker’s bio in a 2003 program for the 11th Annual Terrorism Trends & Forecasts Symposium:
Martha Powers. is a professional journalist, has been associated with The Maldon Institute in various roles since its formation in 1985. Today she heads this international risk analysis group as its president and chief executive officer. She is also managing editor of the bi-monthly publication The International Reports: Early Warning.
Initially, Ms. Powers specialized in reporting on political and economic issues in the developing world with emphasis on Africa and U.N. peacekeeping activities. She subsequently developed expertise in the fields of domestic and international terrorism and has been the author of numerous communications regarding the organization and activities of these groups.
Due to the spread of violent civil disorder across national borders caused by anti-globalization/IMF/World and organizations and their supporters, Ms. Powers helped establish a new Maldon section focused on the analysis of civil unrest, adverse action and violence perpetrated against corporations. This information is used to prevent or mitigate damage that can be caused by those groups.
The Maldon Institute specializes in putting a spin on their research. They specialize in fear mongering and over-statement. They send bulletins, reports and newsletters about emerging threats to local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. They infiltrate progressive groups and tie them to real, imagined and perceived threats in these missives. They present themselves as a credible source and law enforcement resources are deployed to counter these threats. And the next thing you know you have a police riot in Seattle or a raid on a puppet warehouse in Philly.
One can only imagine what they have in mind for this summer.
They spy with a pre-determined narrative in mind. They have collected a large database of questionable details on millions of Americans. They share their thinly connected findings with network of subscribers for their "reports". They can smear and spin with the protection of the shadows. It is not a surprise that John Rees and Jack Abramoff go way back. And it is not a surprise that they worked together. In fact, it makes perfect sense that Abramoff was on the Board of the Maldon Institute.
Abramoff was very concerned a decade ago with discrediting anti-sweatshop activists and anybody who called for corporate accountability. I’m certain that Jack’s sweatshop owning patrons were pleased with the work of the Maldon Institute as they "investigated" groups like Sweatshop Watch, UNITE and United Students Against Sweatshops. Abramoff’s 2000 billing invoices for the sweatshop protecting government of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands included these items (emphasis added):
March 2000
• Monitored anti-sweatshop movement activities and alerted Hill contact, of inaccuracies and misstatements in same.
April 2000
• Continued monitoring of anti sweatshop group activates, including campus and union Organizing activities.
May 2000
• Continued monitoring of anti sweatshop groups; meetings with public policy organization doing research on same.
There were more entries. And this is only a fragment of detail from one of Jack’s clients. I think I am on safe ground to identify the "public policy organization doing research" as the Maldon Institute. When Jack or his clients or his Party needed some domestic espionage, I am certain they contracted John Rees and his network of spies.
This is a doorway into a much larger scandal. I think that there are many case of domestic spying that have been laid at the feet of this or that law enforcement agencies, that mask the involvement of this network of partisan spies for hire.
In my home State of Maryland, a recent case stands out as a possible example. Recently, it was exposed that the Maryland State Police under former Governor Robert Ehrlich was infiltrating and spying on activists opposing the death penalty and other groups opposing the War in Iraq. The ACLU of Maryland sued and won the release of some State Police records of the spying (you can see a PDF of these documents here).
This case has signs of the Maldon Institute all over it. First, it completely fits their three decades old MO. Second, the Maldon Institute is located in Baltimore, Maryland and Rees, Abramoff and the gang would have been big supporters of Ehrlich. Investigating progressive groups with possible links to Mayor O’Malley in Baltimore would have been a no brainer for these guys. And Erhlich’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Edward Miller used to run Grassroots Interactive, one of Abramoff’s front companies before he joined Baby Bob’s staff (more details are here). I’ll bet that, like the Great Philly Puppet Raid, there is a tie between the Maldon Institute and this latest case of domestic spying. I wouldn’t be surprise to find them involved in many other recent stories as well.
Sure, on one hand, these Conservatives might get various government employees of law enforcement agencies at the local, state and federal level to spy of citizens through fear and rumor. It has already happened. But, on the other hand, if they are true to their grifter, anti-government, anti-civil society roots, they would want to "privatize" the spying function and reward their friends. It is what Conservatives do when they are in charge.
It is worth noting that we are fighting to take back our Country. It has been captured and held hostage by a gang of crooks dedicated to the enrichment of their corporate patrons and the destruction of our liberties. Jack Abramoff was their bagman. John Rees was their domestic spymaster and fearmonger for hire. There are many others who worked with these two. They all need to be exposed and defeated.
The task is big, but we have the power to do it. Yes we can!
If we want to stop domestic spying, we will have to expose these private groups like the Maldon Institute. Man, this web of corruption never ceases to amaze.
I thought you might want to know.
Cheers
