Former employees say AT&T has secret room used by government to monitor web

From Richard Grove

4 stories including: Former employees say AT&T has secret room used by government to monitor web.

STORY 1

In a pivotal network operations center in metropolitan St. Louis, AT&T has maintained a secret, highly secured room since 2002 where government work is being conducted, according to two former AT&T workers once employed at the center.

In interviews with Salon, the..
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/FFormer_employees_say_ATT_has_secret_0621.
html

According to two former employees, AT&T has maintained a secret room in St.
Louis, MO, which is used by the government to monitor internet traffic,
SALON is reporting today. The employees told Salon that their supervisors
told them the room was being used by “a government agency.”

I heard that if you include the name of products like “Viagra” in your emails, the NSA trolls treat it as spam!

STORY 2

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8ID1MH81.htm?sub=apn_news_down
&chan=db

STORY 3

“America would become the world’s single biggest oil source, exceeding
Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves of 261 billion barrels.”

http://freshpolitics.us/blog/2006/05/17/americas-least-publicized-oil-supply
/

STORY 4

Cached URL as website was down:

http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:AWIwg5fFkj8J:lrb.veriovps.co.uk/v25/n22/j
ohn04_.html+gold+warriors&hl=en&gl=uk&ct=clnk&cd=2

The Looting of Asia
Chalmers Johnson

Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold by Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave · Verso, 332 pp, £17.00

It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a
longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers - and, in the case of the Japanese, as prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4 per cent chance of not surviving the war; the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30 per cent.

The real differences between the two nations, however, developed in the years and decades after 1945. Survivors and relatives of victims of the Holocaust have worked for almost six decades to win
compensation from German corporations for slave labour and to regain possession of works of art stolen from their homes and offices. Litigation continues against Swiss banks that hid much of the Nazi loot. As recently as July 2001, the Austrian Government began to disburse some $300 million out of an endowment of almost $500 million to more than 100,000 former slave labourers. The German Government has long recognised that, in order to re-establish relations of mutual respect with the countries it pillaged, serious gestures towards restitution are necessary. It has so far paid more than $45 billion in compensation and reparations. Japan, on the other hand, has given its victims a mere $3 billion, while giving its own nationals around $400 billion in compensation for war losses.

One reason for these differences is that victims of the Nazis have
been politically influential in the US and Britain, forcing their
Governments to put pressure on Germany, whereas Japan’s victims live
in countries that for most of the postwar period were torn by
revolution, anticolonial movements and civil wars. This has begun to
change with the rise of Sino-American activists. The success of Iris
Chang’s The Rape of Nanking (1997), a book the Japanese establishment
did everything in its power to impugn, heralded the emergence of this
group.

More significant, however, are differences in US Government policies
towards the two countries. From the moment of Germany’s defeat, the
United States was active in apprehending war criminals, denazifying
German society, and collecting and protecting archives of the Nazi
regime, all of which have by now been declassified. By contrast, from
the moment of Japan’s defeat, the US Government sought to exonerate
the Emperor and his relatives from any responsibility for the war. By
1948, it was seeking to restore the wartime ruling class to positions
of power (Japan’s wartime minister of munitions, Nobusuke Kishi, for
example, was prime minister from 1957 to 1960). The US keeps many of
its archives concerned with postwar Japan highly classified, in
violation of its own laws.

Most important, John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s special envoy
to Japan charged with ending the occupation, wrote the peace treaty of
1951 in such a way that most former POWs and civilian victims of Japan
are prevented from obtaining any form of compensation from either the
Japanese Government or private Japanese corporations who profited from
their slave labour. He did so in perfect secrecy and forced the other
Allies to accept his draft (except for China and Russia, which did not
sign). Article 14(b) of the treaty, signed at San Francisco on 8
September 1951, specifies: ‘Except as otherwise provided in the
present Treaty, the Allied Powers waive all reparations claims of the
Allied Powers, other claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals
arising out of any actions taken by Japan and its nationals in the
course of the prosecution of the war, and claims of the Allied Powers
for direct military costs of occupation.’ As recently as 25 September
2001, three former American Ambassadors to Japan - Thomas Foley, a
former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Michael Armacost, the
president of the Brookings Institution, and Walter Mondale, Carter’s
Vice-President - wrote a joint letter to the Washington Post
denouncing Congress for its willingness even to think about helping
former American slave labourers get around the treaty.

Why do these attitudes protecting and excusing Japan persist? Why has
the US pursued such divergent policies towards postwar Germany and
Japan? Why was the peace treaty written in the way it was? Many
reasons have been offered over the years, including that Japan was too
poor to pay, that these policies were necessary to keep postwar Japan
from ‘going Communist’, and that the Emperor and Japanese people had
been misled into war by a cabal of insane militarists, all of whom the
occupation had eliminated from positions of responsibility. The
explanation offered in the Seagraves’ book is considerably more
sinister. It concerns what the United States did with Japan’s loot
once it discovered how much of it there was, the form it took, and how
little influence its original owners had.

Almost as soon as the war was over, American forces began to discover
stupendous caches of Japanese war treasure. General MacArthur, in
charge of the occupation, reported finding ‘great hoards of gold,
silver, precious stones, foreign postage stamps, engraving plates and
. . currency not legal in Japan’. His officials arrested the
underworld boss Yoshio Kodama, who had worked in China during the war,
selling opium and supervising the collection and shipment to Japan of
industrial metals such as tungsten, titanium and platinum. Japan was
by far the largest opium producer in Asia throughout the first half of
the 20th century, initially in its colony of Korea and then in
Manchuria, which it seized in 1931. Kodama supplied heroin and liquor
to occupied China in return for gold coins, jewellery and objets
d’art, which the Japanese melted down into ingots.

Kodama returned to Japan after the surrender immensely rich. Before
going to prison he transferred part of his booty to the conservative
politicians Ichiro Hatoyama and Ichiro Kono, who used the proceeds to
finance the newly created Liberal Party, precursor of the party that
has ruled Japan almost uninterruptedly since 1949. When Kodama was
released from prison, also in 1949, he went to work for the CIA and
later became the chief agent in Japan for the Lockheed Aircraft
Company, bribing and blackmailing politicians to buy the Lockheed
F-104 fighter and the L-1011 airbus. With his stolen wealth,
underworld ties and history as a supporter of militarism, Kodama
became one of the godfathers of pro-American single-party rule in
Japan.

He was not alone in his war-profiteering. One of the Seagraves’ more
controversial contentions is that the looting of Asia took place under
the supervision of the Imperial household. This contradicts the
American fiction that the Emperor was a pacifist and a mere figurehead
observer of the war. The Seagraves convincingly argue that after
Japan’s full-scale invasion of China on 7 July 1937, Emperor Hirohito
appointed one of his brothers, Prince Chichibu, to head a secret
organisation called kin no yuri (’Golden Lily’) whose function was to
ensure that contraband was properly accounted for and not diverted by
military officers or other insiders, such as Kodama, for their own
enrichment. Putting an Imperial prince in charge was a guarantee that
everyone, even the most senior commanders, would follow orders and
that the Emperor personally would become immensely rich.

The Emperor also posted Prince Tsuneyoshi Takeda, a first cousin, to
the staff of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria and later as his personal
liaison officer to the Saigon headquarters of General Count Hisaichi
Terauchi, to supervise looting and ensure that the proceeds were
shipped to Japan in areas under Terauchi’s control. Although assigned
to Saigon, Takeda worked almost exclusively in the Philippines as
second in command to Chichibu. Hirohito named Prince Yasuhiko Asaka,
his uncle, to be deputy commander of the Central China Area Army, in
which capacity he commanded the final assault on Nanking, the Chinese
capital, between 2 December and 6 December 1937, and allegedly gave
the order to ‘kill all captives’. The Japanese removed some 6000
tonnes of gold from Chiang Kai-shek’s treasury and the homes and
offices of the leaders of Nationalist China. All three princes were
graduates of the military academy and all three survived the war;
Chichibu died in 1953 of tuberculosis but the other two lived to a
very ripe old age.

With the Japanese capture in the winter and spring of 1941-42 of all
of South-East Asia, including the Philippines and Indonesia, the work
of Golden Lily increased many times over. In addition to the monetary
assets of the Dutch, British, French and Americans in their respective
colonies, Golden Lily operatives absconded with as much of the wealth
of the overseas Chinese populations as they could find, tore gilt from
Buddhist temples, stole solid gold Buddhas from Burma, sold opium to
the local populations and collected gemstones from anyone who had any.
The gold was melted down into ingots at a big Japanese-run smelter in
Ipoh, Malaya and marked with its degree of purity and weight. Chichibu
and his staff inventoried all this plunder and put it aboard boats,
usually disguised as hospital ships, bound for Japan. There was no
overland route to Korea, the closest point on the mainland to Japan,
until very briefly in late 1944.

A lot of gold and gems were lost as a result of American submarine
warfare; and by early 1943, it was no longer possible for the Japanese
to break through the Allied blockade of the main islands except by
submarine. Chichibu therefore shifted his headquarters from Singapore
to Manila and ordered all the shipments to head for Philippine ports.
He and his staff reasoned that the war would end with a negotiated
settlement, and they believed (or imagined) that the Americans could
be persuaded to transfer the Philippines to Japan in return for an end
to the war. From 1942, Chichibu supervised the building of 175
‘Imperial’ storage sites to hide the treasure until after the war was
over. Slave labourers and POWs dug tunnels and caves and then were
invariably buried alive, often along with Japanese officers and
soldiers, when the sites were sealed to keep their locations secret.
Each cache was booby-trapped, and the few extant Golden Lily maps are
elaborately encoded to hide exact location, depth, air vents (if any)
and types of booby trap (e.g. large aerial bombs, sand traps, poison
gases). In Manila itself, Golden Lily constructed treasure caverns in
the dungeon of the old Spanish Fort Santiago, within the former
American military headquarters (Fort McKinley, now Fort Bonifacio),
and under the cathedral, all places the Japanese rightly assumed the
Americans would not bomb. As the war came to an end, Chichibu and
Takeda escaped back to Japan by submarine.

Soon after the liberation of the Philippines, American special agents
began to discover a few of the hidden gold repositories. The key
figure was a Filipino American born in Luzon in either 1901 or 1907
named Severino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana (and several other aliases),
who in the mid-1940s worked for MacArthur’s chief intelligence
officer, General Willoughby. As a commando behind the lines in the
Philippines he had once witnessed the unloading of heavy boxes from a
Japanese ship, their being placed in a tunnel, and the entrance being
dynamited shut. He had already suspected what was going on. After the
war, Santa Romana was joined in Manila by Captain Edward Lansdale of
the OSS, the CIA’s predecessor. Lansdale later became one of America’s
most notorious Cold Warriors, manipulating governments and armies in
the Philippines and French Indo-China. He retired as a major-general
in the Air Force.

Together, Santa Romana and Lansdale tortured the driver of General
Tomoyuki Yamashita, Japan’s last commander in the Philippines, forcing
him to divulge the places where he had driven Yamashita in the last
months of the war. Using hand-picked troops from the US Army’s Corps
of Engineers, these two opened about a dozen Golden Lily sites in the
high valleys north of Manila. They were astonished to find stacks of
gold ingots higher than their heads and reported this to their
superiors. Lansdale was sent to Tokyo to brief MacArthur and
Willoughby, and they, in turn, ordered Lansdale to Washington to
report to Truman’s national security aide, Clark Clifford. As a
result, Robert Anderson, on the staff of the Secretary of War, Henry
Stimson, returned to Tokyo with Lansdale and, according to the
Seagraves, then flew secretly with MacArthur to the Philippines, where
they personally inspected several caverns. They concluded that what
had been found in Luzon, combined with the caches the Occupation had
uncovered in Japan, amounted to several billion dollars’ worth of war
booty.

Back in Washington, it was decided at the highest levels, presumably
by Truman, to keep these discoveries secret and to funnel the money
into various off-the-books slush funds to finance the clandestine
activities of the CIA. One reason, it has been alleged, was to
maintain the price of gold and the system of fixed currency exchange
rates based on gold, which had been decided at Bretton Woods in 1944.
Just like the South African diamond cartel, Washington’s plotters
feared what would happen if this much ‘new’ gold was suddenly injected
into world markets. They also realised that exposure of the Imperial
household’s role in the looting of Asia would destroy their by now
carefully constructed cover story of the Emperor as a peaceful marine
biologist. Washington concluded that even though Japan, or at least
the Emperor, had ample funds to pay compensation to Allied POWs,
because of the other deceptions, the peace treaty would have to be
written in such a way that Japan’s wealth would remain secret. The
treaty therefore gave up all claims for compensation on behalf of
American POWs. To keep the Santa Romana-Lansdale recoveries secret,
MacArthur also decided to get rid of Yamashita, who had accompanied
Chichibu on many site closings. After a hastily put-together court
martial for war crimes, Yamashita was hanged on 23 February 1946.

On orders from Washington, Lansdale supervised the recovery of several
Golden Lily vaults, inventoried the bullion, and had it trucked to
warehouses at the US Naval base at Subic Bay or the Air Force base at
Clark Field. According to the Seagraves, two members of Stimson’s
staff, together with financial experts from the newly formed CIA,
instructed Santa Romana in how to deposit the gold in 176 reliable
banks in 42 different countries. These deposits were made in his own
name or in one of his numerous aliases in order to keep the identity
of the true owners secret. Once the gold was in their vaults, the
banks would issue certificates that are even more negotiable than
money, being backed by gold itself. With this seemingly inexhaustible
source of cash, the CIA set up slush funds to influence politics in
Japan, Greece, Italy, Britain and many other places around the world.
For example, money from what was called the ‘M-Fund’ (named after
Major-General William Marquat of MacArthur’s staff) was secretly
employed to pay for Japan’s initial rearmament after the outbreak of
the Korean War, since the Japanese Diet itself refused to appropriate
money for the purpose. The various uses to which these funds were put
over the years, among them helping to finance the Nicaraguan
counter-revolutionaries in their attacks on the elected government in
Managua (the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan Presidency), would
require another volume. Suffice it to say that virtually everyone
known to have been involved with the secret CIA slush funds derived
from Yamashita’s gold has had their career ruined.

Santa Romana died in 1974, leaving several wills, including a final
holographic testament, naming Tarciana Rodriguez, a Filipina who was
the official treasurer of his various companies, and Luz Rambano, his
common-law wife, as his main heirs. They set out to recover the gold
since, after all, it was in his name in various banks and they had
custody of all the account books, secret code names, amounts, records
of interest paid, and other official documents proving its existence.
Using the famous San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli as her
representative, Rambano actually filed a suit against John Reed, then
CEO of Citibank in New York and today president of the New York Stock
Exchange, charging him with ‘wrongful conversion’: that is, selling
$20 billion of Santa Romana’s gold and converting the proceeds to his
own use. The Seagraves vividly describe the extraordinary meetings
that took place between Rambano and Reed, with phalanxes of lawyers on
both sides, in Citibank’s boardroom in New York. Reed apparently
ordered the gold moved to Cititrust in the Bahamas.

Santa Romana and Lansdale by no means discovered all the Golden Lily
sites. Over the years, a cottage industry developed of treasure
hunters digging holes in obscure places in Luzon, often claiming they
were looking for the remains of family or lovers. A regular feature of
life in the village of Bambang, in the Cagayan Valley, Nueva Viscaya
province - one of the places where Takeda was most active - is the
appearance of elderly Japanese ‘tourists’ bearing not the usual bag of
golf clubs but sophisticated metal detectors. This area of the
Philippines is one where guerrillas of the New People’s Army are
active, and it has no major tourist attractions. Many local Filipinos
have gone into business as professional ‘pointers’, telling gullible
visitors, for a fee, where to search, before skipping town.

Twenty years after Santa Romana stopped searching in 1947, a secondary
- and quite violent - hunt for gold began, carried out by Ferdinand
Marcos. Marcos recovered at least $14 billion in gold - $6 billion
from the sunken Japanese cruiser Nachi in Manila Bay, and $8 billion
from the tunnel known as ‘Teresa 2′, 38 miles south of Manila in Rizal
province. During 2001, Philippine politics were rocked when the former
solicitor-general Francisco Chavez alleged that Irene Marcos-Araneta,
Marcos’s youngest daughter, maintained an account worth $13.2 billion
in Switzerland. Its existence apparently came to light when she tried
to move it from the Union Bank of Switzerland to Deutsche Bank in
Düsseldorf. Marcos, who personally supervised the opening of at least
six sites and routinely used his thugs to steal any treasure that
local peasants happened to find, died in exile in Honolulu in 1989. In
1998, the Supreme Court of Hawaii affirmed a judgment against his
estate for the astonishing sum of $1.4 billion in favour of a Filipino
who retrieved a solid gold Buddha and then had it stolen from him by
Marcos, who also had him tortured for protesting.

The key to Marcos’s discoveries was the services of one Robert Curtis,
a Nevada chemist, metallurgist and mining engineer, whom Marcos hired
to resmelt his gold, to bring it up to current international
requirements for purity so that it could be marketed internationally.
Curtis proved to be the only person who could decipher the few Golden
Lily maps that survived, in the possession of Takeda’s former valet, a
Filipino youth from Bambang. The Seagraves describe very thoroughly
Curtis’s activities, including his narrow escape from death on the
orders of Marcos’s henchman General Ver, after he struck gold at
Teresa 2.

The Seagraves’ narrative is comprehensive, but they are not fully
reliable as historians. They have a tendency to overreach,
exaggerating the roles of Japanese gangsters and ex-military American
bit-players when the bankers, politicians and CIA operatives are scary
enough. They know the Philippines well, but are unreliable on Japan
and do not read Japanese. The book is full of errors that could easily
be corrected by a second-year student of the language - the ship they
repeatedly call the Huzi is accurately romanised Fuji; the important
Japan Sea port is Maizuru, not Maisaru; tairiki is not a Japanese
word: they mean tairiku ronin (a ‘Continental adventurer’ or a ‘China
carpetbagger’); and their mysterious Lord Ichivara is an absurdity -
no one was ever called ‘Lord’ in postwar Japan and Ichivara is an
impossible name (it is surely Ishihara).

The authors seem to sense that they might have a credibility problem,
and have therefore taken the unusual step of making available two CDs
containing more than 900 megabytes of documents, maps and photographs
assembled in the course of their research. The CDs can be ordered from
their website (www.bowstring.net). These are invaluable, particularly
in what they reveal of the US Government’s vicious sting operation
against a former American deputy Attorney General, Norbert Schlei.
Schlei represented about sixty Japanese people on whom the Japanese
Government had unloaded huge promissory notes in an attempt to hide
the M-Fund after the former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka was convicted
of bribery. The Government persisted in calling these notes forgeries
(thus engaging in another form of illegal conversion) and Schlei’s
career was ruined. Gold Warriors is easily the best guide available to
the scandal of ‘Yamashita’s gold’, and the authors play fair with
their readers by supplying them with massive amounts of their raw
research materials.

The Seagraves end their ‘authors’ note’ with these words: ‘As a
precaution, should anything odd happen, we have arranged for this book
and all its documentation to be put up on the Internet at a number of
sites. If we are murdered, readers will have no difficulty figuring
out who “they” are.’ Unfortunately, the list of potential killers from
this book alone would include at least several thousand generals,
spies, bankers, politicians, lawyers, treasure hunters and thieves
from half a dozen countries. So I wish the Seagraves a long life.
Meanwhile, a substantial portion of the treasure stolen by the
Japanese from East Asian countries remains buried in the Philippines.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire.