Paul Henry Abram, author of Trona, Bloody Trona.
In 2014 Abram gave his testimony to the Hammarskjold Commission and the UN investigators tasked with following up on its evidence. On the show, he told us the full story, including how he came to work for the NSA, the kind of work he did, and what exactly he heard that fateful night: radio transmissions explicitly indicating that U.S. ground troops took down the plane. Paul eventually left the Air Force in 1963 and began to study law, which he practiced until his retirement in 2004. His memoir Trona, Bloody Trona covers his involvement in "labor's bloodiest struggle since the Embarcadero Strike of 1934".
Following our interview with Abram, SOTT editor Brent joined us for the first installment in a new feature: the Police State Roundup, with the latest stories of police brutality, murder and corruption. We ended the show with a discussion of the infamous 28 pages from the Joint Inquiry into 9/11 report, and what's going on beneath the surface regarding Saudi Arabia's alleged role in 9/11 and their recent rejection of the plan to freeze oil production.
Brought to you by the SOTT Radio Network and SOTT, your one-stop source for independent, unbiased, alternative news and commentary on world events, the Truth Perspective and Behind the Headlines broadcast every Sunday at 12 pm Eastern.
Running Time: 01:59:44
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Here's the transcript of the show:
Harrison: Hi everyone. Welcome back to The Truth Perspective. In the studio today we have Carolyn McCallum.
Carolyn: Hello.
Harrison: Shane Lachance.
Shane: Hi everybody.
Harrison: And myself, Harrison Koehli. Today on the show we're joined by Paul Henry Abram. A bit about Paul - after high school he joined the US Air Force and then after learning Russian he was sent to Greece as a spy for the NSA. After the air force he studied law, which he practiced in California and Oregon until 2004. He's the author of the book Trona, Bloody Trona: A Revolution in Microcosm. Paul contacted us after the show we ran a few weeks ago with Henning Melber on the life and death of Dag Hammarskjöld and in that show we mentioned some of the new evidence that has come to light suggesting that Hammarskjöld's plane crash wasn't an accident but we didn't go into detail on a lot of that evidence. Paul was stationed in Greece in September 1961. That was when Hammarskjöld was killed. In 2014 he spoke with the Hammarskjöld Commission about his experiences there and in 2015 his testimony was used in the UN report of the independent panel of experts presented to the UN General Assembly.
So today we're going to talk to Paul about his experiences. Paul, thank you for being with us today.
Paul: Oh my pleasure.
Harrison: Just to start out with a little bit of background, you worked for the NSA. You were in the air force. Can you tell us a bit about how you got there?
Paul: Well how I got there was I was graduating from high school and my dad brought me a Reader's Digest article and said "Hey, read this!" and it was about the new blue collar worker and what he was trying to do was dissuade me from going to college because he couldn't afford it. I couldn't afford it. I had already enlisted and was enrolled in UCLA and had been accepted and I was going to go to UCLA and become an engineer. This was the year of Sputnik. I graduated in '58 so naturally everybody wanted to be an electrical engineer and then work on the space program. My dad said "No, read this!" So I read it and really what it recommended was that you join the service. My dad was trying to get rid of me.
So I did. I went ahead and cancelled everything at UCLA and I joined the air force. The first thing the air force does is test you and in high school I had Jesuit high schooling. I had had four years of Latin and three years of Greek, both ancient and so instead of my high aptitude in engineering, the air force decided that my aptitude which was off the charts was in language. So they said "For the good of the service you're not going to get to be an engineer" and they sent me off to the Monterey army language school to learn Russian. I excelled. I graduated first in my class out of about 700 and some people.
When you do that, you get to pick your station. The top three graduates from the army language school, having learned Russian, get to choose their assignments and I chose the island of Crete. I was sent to the island of Crete and unbeknownst to me - I didn't know I was going to be - but when I got there I was told I'm now working for NSA. The station on Crete is called the Iraklion Air Station and it's an NSA listening post. That's how I got there.
Shane: So were you prepared at all when they said you're going to be working for the NSA? Was there any inclination at all that that was where you'd be headed?
Paul: Well there was some. There was rumour because I had been sent to radio school on top of it. There were three of us that got sent after we left the language school, graduated with our original degrees, we went to radio schools and we learned an awful lot about radio communications, distances and how to operate the radios. So when we got to Crete and realized that it was nothing but a listening post, it consisted entirely of an underground bunker, huge, the size of a football field with nothing but stations of guys copying Morse code and little rooms for the language people. We had our own separate rooms recording radio interceptions. So yeah, it was obvious that we were going to be spying on people, intercepting telephone calls.
We have to laugh now - not then - then we thought it was horrific, but now we have to laugh at all the commentary and whatnot that's going on with Snowden and everybody else about "Oh my god! Hillary Clinton says that the NSA is monitoring Americans' telephone calls!" Well nobody seems to remember that in 1952 Harry Truman, through proclamation created the NSA and the NSA is really called SIGINT and SIGINT stands for signals intelligence. There are three types of SIGINT. There's COMINT, communications intelligence, RADINT, radar intelligence and EINT, electronics intelligence.
Well I was assigned naturally as a Russian linguist to COMINT communications intelligence and the mandate in 1952 that Truman gave SIGINT to be called NSA, was to monitor telephone calls. So the first thing that we began doing when I got to the island of Crete, I was assigned Washington, DC, Philadelphia, I forget what other American cities. But then I monitored all telephone calls to London, Moscow, Paris, Brussels, you name it. So we've been monitoring your phone calls guys, since 1952.
Carolyn: Oh lord!
Shane: Were these high profile people that you were listening to?
Paul: No! No they were all phone calls, all phone calls in suits of high priority people.
Carolyn: So the NSA apparently had the prerogative of pulling anybody they thought would be useful out of the regular services? Is that how you ended up there?
Paul: Yes. Something you need to know is the NSA, unlike any other agency, is assigned to the Department of Defence. They did that for a reason, because they knew they wanted to have millions of so-called agents, millions! Nobody knows how many people are in NSA. Why? Because they're assigned to the Department of Defence and that means they can pull people out of the armed forces any time they want. I was in the air force. I'm certain I was never counted as an NSA agent. I was counted as an air force airman. So they literally have millions. They don't have hundreds of thousands. They have millions because any time they need somebody in any part of the world, that's why there are troops all around the world. They just pull troops out and the NSA hides them.
Harrison: So you graduated high school in '58.
Paul: Right.
Harrison: When did you actually start doing your work in Crete?
Paul: I got to Crete in December of 1959 I believe.
Harrison: Okay. So you were working there in December '59. So almost two years bringing you up to September 1961.
Paul: Right. I left there in December '61 so I was there for the shoot down in September '61.
Shane: So they pulled you out shortly after that.
Paul: Well I did two years.
Harrison: So is there anything interesting that happened in that first year-and-a-half? Was it just kind of routine stuff? Just tell the story of leading up to that night on September 17 and 18 of 1961.
Paul: The boring stuff was monitoring all the phone calls, literally. Naturally we would try and NSA would feed us what they wanted monitored. "There's this big wig that's going to be in New York, and blah, blah, blah. The US ambassador from Russia is going to be getting back to his colleagues on the trade commission in Moscow so we need to monitor that." But most of it was "You guys have control. You monitor every frequency there is." They gave us gigantic page after page of frequencies that radio telephones operate on out of places like New York and Los Angeles and we would record everything, the volumes of calls and hours and hours. And every now and then we'd hear something that sounded like "Oh, NSA might want to hear about this." So we'd mark that. We sent everything to them, good or bad. Now and then we'd mark something that we thought was worthwhile.
Carolyn: So you monitored the calls about "Bring a quart of milk and a loaf of bread home" too?
Paul: Yes. I'm going to admit to something. I erased one. We recorded a kid talking to his mother and the mother had gotten the doctors to write a letter to his space commander to get him home for their 50th wedding anniversary and it was faked. It was saying that the father was dying. I erased that one.
Harrison: Good job.
Paul: We sent everything. Yeah, buying a quart of milk went to the NSA.
Shane: So how did it go from the phone calls to listening to the communications in the Congo? That's quite a distance away.
Paul: It's all the same. It's all the same. The communications with Congo are still radio telephone. There's something I have to clarify real quick if you don't mind.
Harrison: Absolutely.
Paul: You've read I'm sure about the other guy. I'm the guy on Crete. There's another guy on Cyprus. Southall?
Carolyn: Right.
Paul: Well Southall is just nonsense. Southall's complete and total nonsense. You cannot intercept radio transmissions from aircraft 3,000 miles away, radio transmissions. We know this today for godsakes. Forty, 50 years later we still can't do it. We know that. Look at the southeast Asian planes that disappeared and we all learned - I knew it already but you guys learned I hope that these planes would fly for so many hours and they'd get switched over to another ground station because they were going to lose the signal, right?
Signals at that time, given that aircraft, meaning Hammarskjöld's aircraft and meaning the so-called Belgian aircraft that shot it down that Southall claims, had VHF radio communications installed in them and their range was 200 miles. So his story is absolute nonsense.
Shane: And the distinction between his testimony, which is that he was saying that it was another plane that hit Hammarskjöld's plane is that you were saying it was ground fire. Is that correct?
Paul: Much more important than that, it was a Belgian airplane and it was the United States ground forces. That's the difference and that's why his story is absolute nonsense. Number one, it was impossible for him to receive the interceptions. Number two, if you read his story, he retracted his story and said "You know, now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I heard that or if I heard a recording of that." He says that. And he also says that in NSA his handler told him to be at the radio station that night, the night that he was off-duty because "something interesting was going to happen". Let me tell you what happened. Would you like my version of what happened?
Harrison: Sure, let's get into it.
Paul: Okay. If you know the politics, the enemies of the Congo, the enemies of Hammarskjöld were the US, Great Britain and Belgium. Why? Because they owned all the mining rights, all the mining interests, mostly copper. America had all the munitions, billions in munitions going to all the warring factions throughout the Congo. Belgium was the fall guy. There are two reasons. I'm going to tell you this. One, Southall could not have intercepted the Belgian plane. Period. Two, he apparently was given a tape which somebody claims to have recorded a Belgian plane. And three, NSA told him to be there, he's going to witness something important that night and four, the Hammarskjöld Commission, the General Assembly's investigative panel has made demands on the United States air force, the Department of Defence and NSA in both America and the equivalents in Great Britain because they all have the same tapes, both for Southall and for myself.
Now dig. I say the US did it. Southall says Belgium did it. Who else would the US and UK blame than their only other competitor, Belgium? So they blame Belgium in a scenario that is impossible. It could not have intercepted his plane. And yet they came out to the request of the UN when they demanded the tapes. Well they won't give them the tapes but they did confirm that Southall was in the air force, was stationed there at the time and could have heard what he heard. When it comes to me who, ironically blames the United States, they say "We're not going to comply with your request because it violates our national security." Now come on! Where are we?
Shane: So were you aware of Southall's statements to the Commission when you contacted them to make your statements?
Paul: I was never aware of the existence of Southall period. And doesn't that strike you as strange, that the NSA would not tell us that there was another operator supposedly doing the exact same thing that we were doing on Crete? Because if they had told us that we could have triangulated, if you know what that means. We could have triangulated, Southall and I could have cooperated, we could have exactly pinpointed every single thing that happened down there, where the communications came from, most importantly. We could have pinpointed where my communication came from that said "The plane's approaching. It's well lit and damn we shot him down." From the ground. From the ground.
So they kept us secret. They go to Southall in the morning and tell him "Hey, be at the base tonight. Something interesting is going to happen" and they feed us ground frequencies. They also fed us all of the frequencies for the airports along Hammarskjöld's route which as I recall was Leopoldville to Elizabethville to Ndola and I guess the NSA just never figured some idiot like me would be stupid enough to go ahead and monitor the ground forces. We all knew at the base that you can't monitor the aircraft, so let's go ahead and see what we can find on the ground and we did. We found the ground forces that shot down the plane.
Harrison: I want to make a few comments on some of the things you've talked about so far and some of the things in the UN panel report and also in Susan Williams' book. One observation that I had when reading Susan's book - because she includes pretty much anything she could find, all the little tidbits, all the supposed leaks up until the time the book was written which was 2011. So she quotes a lot of Belgian mercenaries or alleged Belgian mercenaries and hearsay testimony from other people and the take-home message I get from that is that there are all these seeming spooks, these spies and mercenaries, all giving contradictory accounts.
So you've got one Belgian mercenary who claims to have shot down the plane, another that claims to have gone to the crash site and shot him, another pilot who claims that he was in a plane and he was trying to divert Hammarskjöld's plane to a different location to avoid meeting with Tshombe. The conclusion that I draw from that is that all of these stories that are coming either from hearsay or from these mercenaries who are giving their own accounts is that they're all contradictory. They all can't be true and either one of them is true or none of them are true.
Then when we look at Southall and yours, I made the same observation that you did when I was reading about Southall's account because he says first of all, like you mentioned, he got there and he heard the transmission and then he said "It could have been a recording". And he also said he couldn't remember if he had actually heard it or if maybe it was written down.
Shane: And then maybe it was in English or maybe it was in French.
Paul: He couldn't remember if it was in French or in English.
Harrison: And then if I'm remembering correctly, in the UN panel report - I'll have to look this over - but I'm pretty sure they couldn't get in contact with him to talk with him because he said that he was ill. So they weren't actually able to depose him or get a valid testimony from him. All that we have is what he told media and Susan Williams. So I thought that was kind of suspicious too. It just screams to me like a lot of these leaks were put out there as disinformation. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Paul: That's exactly my thoughts. To me it's all solidified by the claim that his NSA handler went to Southall and said "Hey, be there tonight. Something interesting is going to happen." And the interesting thing that happened was that they fed him a tape recording of a Belgian plane shooting down Hammarskjöld's plane in order to blame it all on Belgium. Now, they don't know that simultaneously I'm recording the ground forces that say "We just shot him down" because they don't know I'm there basically.
Carolyn: But wouldn't Southall who presumably had more or less the same training as you, know that picking up an air transmission wasn't possible?
Paul: I don't know that. I don't what training he had. I don't know that he was a radio intercept operator trained as I was.
Carolyn: Oh, okay.
Paul: We were trained in amplitude modification and frequency modification and modulation and we were shown what happens to signals. I don't know what kind of training he had.
Carolyn: Okay. I just wanted to clarify that.
Paul: Because the fact that he was asked to be out there that night kind of put the thought in my mind "Well what did he do out there?" He wasn't that necessary. He was saying he'd gone out there he might hear something and that he thinks he might have heard it on tape recording and probably at that point he was hearing a tape recording. Let me put it this way. If it was me and I had been there and put my earphones on and plugged in and heard the transmission, I would have been very skeptical. But when NSA hands me a tape recording and says "This is a tape recording of a Belgian plane. Listen to what he says" and I listen to a tape recording, I'm much more inclined to believe that because I don't know where it was recorded from. It could have been recorded less than 200 miles from the aircraft. See what I'm saying? And that might have been why they fed him the tape recording instead of giving him the frequency he was supposed to monitor and not been able to monitor because he was too far away.
Harrison: So in other words, it's totally possible that Southall is telling the truth about what he experienced but it was a psyop on him and whoever else was in the NSA base. It could be that this was actually recorded somewhere else and he listened to it or heard it but that it just wasn't genuine.
Paul: That's actually my belief.
Harrison: Okay.
Paul: I believe he believed what he said.
Harrison: I've got one question for you on the radio thing because in the UN panel report they got an expert, this guy named Hammerberg to ask about the radio frequencies, so they basically corroborated what you just said. I'll read a little bit. He stated in this regard that "the radio equipment onboard the Katangese Fouga Magester was limited to the very high frequency VHF systems only which due to the propagation properties of such frequencies, are limited to line-of-sight ranges approximately 140 kilometres between the ground station and aircraft flying at 5,000 feet."
Paul: That's what I learned.
Harrison: This is the part they add:
Receiving such transmissions in Cyprus or Greece would thus have required an intermediate receiving and relay station in order to first receive and then retransmit a recording or transcript of such communications to Ndola to the distant listening stations. If the communications were on high frequency on the other hand, it would be possible without the relay" blah, blah, blah.So what do you think about the idea that it would have been possible with a relay station because further on they go and they say that there were American Dakotas sitting in the air field in Ndola with their engines running and that these could have been used as relay stations.
Paul: Did you follow all the planes that have disappeared in the last year or two?
Harrison: Yeah.
Paul: Yeah. A relay station goes like this. It would be on the recording. "Well, we've reached our limit here now. Good night SO4. Good night aircraft." And then "Hi, I'm SO5. I'm picking you up aircraft. Hi aircraft." You see what I'm saying? The relay station isn't an automatic piece of equipment.
Harrison: Yeah.
Paul: It's someone receiving and then retransmitting and that would appear on the tape.
Harrison: So it's possible in theory but not very probably, not very likely that it actually occurred.
Paul: I don't think there's any chance that it occurs.
Harrison: Okay. What did you actually hear that night? You're in the station. It's night. You're flipping back and forth between frequencies. What did you actually hear?
Paul: Yeah, I had four frequencies up at the time, just searching for a couple that the NSA had given us and then a couple that I had found by listening to those. Do you understand what I'm saying? NSA gives me Ndola's airport frequency, and HF frequency so when they're communicating with ground people, when they communicate with someone then I find who they're communicating with. I get that, so now I'm hearing both sides of the conversation. Well in doing that, the second one that I've picked up that I found is now talking to somebody else. So I can then very easily find that frequency as well. So I'm monitoring about four frequencies at once that I picked up from the initial NSA frequencies. What's being said is just a lot of talk and excitement about Hammarskjöld's plane is coming in. "The plane! The plane!" Anyway, the plane is coming in.
Well I knew we had what we call our ditty boppers, that's our Morse code guys actually tracking the plane, our EINT and our code guys. So they know exactly where the plane is. And so we know what they're talking about when they say things like "The plane's overhead". Morse code gives us numbers, graphs, like GPS that says "Yup! Coincides." You're hearing ground communicating to the plane and the plane they're communicating to is based on our reception of the plane's Morse code and EINTs, it's Hammarskjöld's plane. So we're following the whole course. This started the day before. So that night we're getting down to one of the last things that I heard - and we knew these were ground forces. They had already identified themselves as being right outside the Ndola airport. The main thing that I heard, that was recorded was "We see the plane. The plane is well lit. It's overhead and descending." And then on another frequency a different accent that I could not identify "The Americans just shot down the UN plane." Now that's what I heard.
And then all hell broke loose. There was nothing but chatter on the four stations I'm listening to so I switched around. I switched around. I couldn't find anything in English or Russian and everything was just a lot of chatter in languages I don't know.
Harrison: So after this I believe you told your superiors and other people at the station?
Paul: Sure.
Harrison: I'm guessing you didn't hear anything back. Did you guys discuss this afterwards?
Paul: Absolutely. Immediately. The protocol is that we immediately take that tape off the reel, package it up, go down to the communications room and tell them and get them to write out on the log a brief description of what we heard and why it's important and the log gets faxed. We had fax at that time. It gets faxed and it gets labeled YY, the outgoing message characterization is YY. YY means "Wake John F. Kennedy". That's what it means. YY means "wake the President". So we sent that out and then we package the tape and get it out on the courier stack that's going out with the next plane and copies are also made because copies went to Fort Mead, Maryland NSA, they went to GCHQ, London. That's general headquarters.
Shane: Is it likely that Kennedy heard what you listened to?
Paul: I don't know that. Somebody might have just given him a quick record. I don't know that he'd listen to the tape. But it also went off to where I then went after I left Crete. It went off to my headquarters. I was still in the air force. It went off to the United States Air Force security service headquarters in Kelly Air Force Base, Texas.
Carolyn: So there's a few copies of this thing floating around.
Paul: It's all over the place and there'll be analysis of it. Every place they go people analyze them and I know that the NSA is able to tell us who was on those frequencies. They might even be able to tell you the operator that said "The Americans just shot down the UN plane". They have the frequencies. They gave them that.
Shane: In your statements to the panel you mentioned that you believed you were listening to the activities of American ground forces. Was it an accident or how did you determine that you were listening to Americans?
Paul: Some of the language used. I was 6930 at the RGM. My unit on the ground was the 69-30th radio group mobile and I heard those types of designations from the ground forces. "I'm the 34-702 rifle unit", the designations I was hearing and the call signs and things when guys would log on and log off. When you're doing communications, you're always saying your call word and the way you sign out - Arabics always sign out with "howell" which is "over". Americans always sign out with "over". So if you hear "over", it's an American. "How do you read me?" Your first communication, always you send out your signal and then you say "How do you read me?" and someone'll come back and say "I read you 5-by-5." Well that means it's perfect. No problems or "I read you 4 by 2" - it's not too good.
So things like that led us to believe it was American plus just sometimes this other accent. So sometimes a real American accent. You're taught those things and that's why I say the voice that said "The Americans just shot down the UN plane", I don't recognize the accent. It was not Australian. It was not British. It was not Russian.
Harrison: Maybe South African.
Paul: It was not French. It easily could have been South African, of many types.
Harrison: Now after this happened were you debriefed? Did anyone tell you not to say anything? How did that play out?
Paul: No. You have to understand there were three linguists on the island and we did three shifts so there was only one of us present at any time. We switched around. Sometimes I had to monitor an Arabic post and I don't speak a word of Arabic. Sometimes the Arabic would have to monitor my post, doesn't speak a word of Russian. We had one Russian linguist superior who was civilian and he was NSA and in my opinion he didn't speak a word of English. Anything I told him, he'd ask me what was said. I'd tell him what was said. He'd always agree that that's what was said. I can give you a quick example if we have time, a very funny one.
Harrison: Sure.
Paul: A very funny one. This time I did wake up John Kennedy because I got word back from John Kennedy. We were given an assignment by NSA to verify/confirm the revolution that had taken place inside the Soviet Union or if a revolution had taken place. This was in the '60s. The reason was that the entire Soviet Union had gone blackout. There was no communications whatsoever of any type going out of the Soviet Union. So we were to look for anything we could find that might indicate that. I was monitoring radio telephone from New York to either I think Leopoldville or Elizabethville in the Congo and I heard this very boring conversation about a bunch of things, crated things. I was told to stay with it because the guy was supposed to be a high ministry official with the Soviet Union. So I hear him say "What does the new developing African bloc - that's the new developing African nations, the African bloc - think of the Soviet revolution?"
Well wow! With something like that you just immediately press the YY button and you get down to communications and you send the fax off and you alert the world. We had been on high alert. We had never held guns while I was on the island of Crete and for the last three or four days we had to take shifts carrying guns around the perimeter of the base to guard it. So this guy was confirmation that it was valid, that there was a revolution within the Soviet Union. God only knows who was going to take over and what was going to happen.
Well within an hour-and-a-half the base commander got back directly from the White House we got back an analysis "Thank you very much for your report but the actual transmission is "What do the developing African bloc think of the Soviet trade resolution?"
Carolyn: Resolution.
Paul: Trade resolution.
Carolyn: Oh no!
Paul: Come on, revolution/resolution!
Carolyn: We had something going here.
Paul: They're pretty close. Revolutia and Resolutia. So anyway I got laughed at a lot.
Shane: That's funny.
Paul: We had guys being re-stationed from Anchorage, Alaska that would look for me. They would come and check me out. "I've got to talk to you. You woke us up. We had to walk perimeter in the snow for a few days."
Harrison: But after the Hammarskjöld crash there was no debriefing.
Paul: Oh, I'm sorry. That's how hang loose it was. There was no debriefing. Like I said, who was to debrief me? The only guy there that would even admit to being a Russian supervisor just really didn't know Russian so he'd come to me and said "This is what it said." By now it was all transcribed. He said "This is what it said?" and I'd say "Yeah. Do you want to hear it?" "No, I'll take your word for it." And there was only me and him and then the other two guys, the other two Russians were on different shifts so they weren't there. But naturally I discussed it with them, but there was no debriefing of any kind.
Harrison: So in the years after or more recently did you ever try to contact the guys that were there with you, to corroborate your story with the UN or are they around still?
Paul: To answer your question, no I didn't because number one, I don't remember their names. They were on different shifts. I remember one guy's name was Fred and I tried for a while and wracked my brain. I can't come up with any name other than Fred. I don't know where to look. I have photographs and some of the guys are in some of the photographs. They might be found through that, but no I never did.
If you read my book, you'll see that it's basically an afterthought. After I left the service, I left the service and I read the bullshit that came out about it and I figured well what can I do about it and then immediately after I was out of the service, within a month, I was in law school. So I didn't have any time to think about this stuff. Then it wasn't until the strike situation in 1970 - this happened in '61 so nine years later in '70 I talked about it. I laid out what happened. It was for a reason. It was to convince these guys as to why they should trust me as to why I really was upset with our government.
And then in about 2010 I started writing the book.
Shane: In your book you talk a little bit about monitoring the communications with the bush pilots and a little earlier you were talking about the American interests in the Congo. They were making huge amounts of money with ammunitions sales. Could you talk about what you heard about what the pilots were doing?
Paul: Yeah. First I want to clarify how I heard them because now I'm claiming to hear radio transmissions more than 3,000 miles away, right?
Shane: Yeah.
Paul: Does that contradict everything I said? No. Bush pilots carried onboard their tiny aircraft, little Cessnas, little single engine, single seat planes, they carried on their planes Tuckers "ten-four good buddy", CBs.
Carolyn: CB radios.
Paul: They carried double band radios so we were able to monitor them. And they had to have long distance, long range. They couldn't communicate effectively on their VHF installed equipment because they would only go about 200 miles and they're selling to the entire Congo and all of South Africa. They had their business go out as far as they could.
So yeah, number one, the way we monitored those planes is they were confirmed that they were carrying onboard CB radios. Number two, we actually heard planes take off, say, from Leopoldville and made contact with the place they were going to land, they would file a flight plan so we knew where they were going and they would make contact with where they were going and they would confirm the price. And everyone was listening to them. So they would say "$40,000 for this four boxes of automatic weapons and munitions" and immediately somebody else would come in "50!" Then somebody else would come in with 60 and "can we get a 65?" So then whoever the highest bidder was would get word of where to land and they'd go meet them and sell to the highest bidder.
Shane: So it was basically an auction in flight with them carrying the actual munitions and guns and ammo and whoever wanted...
Paul: That's exactly what was going on. That's why really when you were talking about mercenaries, don't forget mercenaries are in it for the money and they'll say anything. So yeah, we actually witnessed that. They would take off bound for one airport and they would land in another one for a higher price. And that's part of what got Hammarskjöld killed. There was no doubt in our mind that that's part of what got him killed, because he was going to end all the munitions. "There's no need for them. We're going to have peace folks."
Carolyn: Bad for business.
Shane: Yeah, that's just what I was going to say. So the context of what was happening in the Congo was this conflict and the Americans were trying to arm all sides, like they typically do in nations, create this chaos and Hammarskjöld was trying to end that and was very close to reaching that peace agreement. It was supposed to happen I believe, the following morning when Tshombe was ready to agree.
Paul: He was going to - I'd seen him calling for the peace agreement. I was there. You weren't and you have it down exactly. That's exactly how it was. In addition to Belgian, UK and US fighting over the minerals.
Carolyn: Weren't they concerned about the industries being nationalized and that would put them all out where they'd have to pay market price if Congo was allowed to control its own resources. So there were multiple factors at work here.
Paul: That's exactly right. And that's why I have this theory so strong in my mind that that's why, not Southall, who believed what he was hearing, but the NSA blamed Belgium. "Let's get them out of the way while we're at it. Three of us are going to have less to divvy up."
Harrison: When we interviewed Henning Melber about this he pointed out that just last year in late 2015 there was the UN General Assembly resolution. I can't remember what the exact terms of it were, but I believe it was to reopen the investigation or something like that and three of the countries that signed on to the resolution were Belgium, France and Russia and the only two that refused to sign on were the UK and the US.
Paul: Well of course.
Harrison: Yeah.
Paul: Belgium was on the side to get their name cleared. "No, our plane did not shoot him down." I have a gentleman whose father was onboard the plane and was killed who feeds me a lot of what's going on in Sweden and Belgium and whatnot and maybe you know already, but I couldn't believe at the time, the interest in deciding what the hell happened, in Europe. The interest in Europe is phenomenal. They really loved that man. They really loved him. Now of course they're getting old and they want to know soon before they're all gone.
Harrison: Paul, you said you started writing your book in 2010. Was that when you kind of decided that you would tell this story? And how did you end up getting in contact with the Hammarskjöld Commission?
Paul: Well in 2010 I began writing the book about this strike. Honestly I don't think I had any inkling of putting in the Hammarskjöld bit or them sending us out on ferret flights to kill us or that the US navy murdered US navy pilots. I don't think those were all things in my mind that I might even have decided later on to write complete books on. So I began writing in 2010 but I didn't finish the book until 2013 and I don't think it was until late 2012 that I started writing the chapter and including the Hammarskjöld and the other two things, the reason being that the more I wrote and the more I researched and the more I went back and talked to people, the more I realized that they really were some - very few - of my clients, the older, the oldest - the only one I mention in the book is Pappy Denman and he was old by my standards then. He was in his 60s. I was in my 30s.
He was one of the few that had a lot of doubt about why I was there, how I could be so gung-ho for the union, how I could be so anti-everything you could call authority, which included our government, other governments, most governments, at the age of 30. He couldn't understand it. So that led him to distrust me and that led him to try to breed distrust in others and I couldn't allow that to happen. So one day I sat them all down and I told them these stories and that's the first time that they were told in real time, and then like I said, the more I researched it and plotted out the book, it came to me that "You know, that was important. I need to put that in there because some are going to say Denman really hated you. Denman didn't trust you as far as he could throw you." So I had to give some reason as to why they suddenly began to and why they saw why they should trust a 30-year-old disliking authority.
I don't know if I answered your question or not. I didn't write anything about Hammarskjöld and others until probably at least 2013, not long before the book was published.
Harrison: Okay. And then in about a year the Hammarskjöld Commission got together to do their investigation and release their report.
Paul: Unbeknownst to me.
Harrison: Unbeknownst to you. Okay. So you actually got in contact with them after the report was finished. Did you find out about them or did they find out about you?
Paul: I found out about them through Alan Cowell. Do you know about Allan?
Harrison: No.
Paul: Alan Cowell is a reporter for the New York Times in London. A good friend of mine who also is an author, saw Alan Cowell's report. He subscribes, for whatever reasons, to the London Times and he sent me Cowell's report and Cowell's report mentioned the first report and that they're getting ready, thinking about, reopening and doing another whole investigation. So it's Cowell that I contacted and then Cowell put me in touch with the UN.
Harrison: I haven't heard it yet but what's this story about the late night phone call that you got from the UN?
Paul: Oh well that just lets me know that what I'm doing has some meaning and that they are taking it seriously. The attorney general for the General Assembly has been staying in touch with me. She's the one that first called me and asked if the UN could interview me and she set it up. She's stayed in touch ever since. Well I don't know why because it was midnight back in her office and it was after 9:00 here. I was already getting ready for bed and she calls and says "Hi. I hope we're not bothering you but I just wanted to keep you informed because I know you haven't heard from us in a long time. I want you to know that we have continued to send off requests, now sounding more like demands, to the NSA, the United States Air Force and the US Department of Defence and their counterparts in the UK and we're still getting the same responses. We're still getting 'Go away'."
As to Southall, they'd already confirmed everything. Yes, yes, he's good. But as to me, I truly expected they would deny my existence but they didn't. Instead, they have repeatedly sent the same message. "We refuse to honour your request because it would violate national security." Now this is a request as to "Was Paul Abram in the air force at this time? Was he stationed at this time at this place? Was he on the island of Crete? Did he have radio communications? Was he a Russian linguist?"
Those are all the things they asked about Southall and they confirmed. These were things they've asked about me and they continue to say "We're not going to respond based on national security". So she just called to tell me "That's what's happening Paul and I want to tell you that what we've done is we've given all three agencies until January." I don't know what date. I was too tired to ask a date so I don't know if she means January 1st or what. I haven't gotten back to her. But she said "We've given them until January. If they don't respond, if they don't provide us with the tapes, if they don't provide us with documents, then we're going to go ahead and we're going to reach conclusions based on the information we have. We'll write a report."
The report they wrote, you've read.
Harrison: Yes.
Paul: Their report had no conclusion so "It's just that we want to get together. We're going to finalize the report by absolutely reaching conclusions and NSA be damned." So that's where it stands. That's why at least with me it's building and building because I've got only about another month to see if they're going to say anything, if they're going to actually base some of their opinions on my testimony.
Harrison: One of the things that Henning Melber brought up when we had our discussion with him was this National Geographic program. We talked a bit about it. You were flown to Ottawa to film for that program. Is that correct?
Paul: Yes.
Harrison: Can you tell us a bit about that?
Paul: Well I forget how they got in touch with me. I really do but a guy named Marco Aviolio was the main guy. He contacted me and just asked me would I let him interview me a bit. So he interviewed me a bit and then he said "Yeah, I definitely want to talk to you in person. We do a series called 'Mayday' and Mayday concentrates on planes where there's no explanation for disappearances, either the craft was shot down or whatever. It concentrates on unexplained accidents of aircraft and we consider Hammarskjöld's plane of that type and we would like to know if you'd come up to Ottawa and let us interview you as part of that program." So I said "Hell yeah!"
So they flew me up to Ottawa, put me in a nice hotel. They came to the hotel with a whole crew and they brought other witnesses as well. I got introduced to one of them. I got to speak with him because he finished just before I started and he was the last living first responder to the crash site. He's one of the ones that saw things that are in the Williams' book about what some of the mercenaries said. He said the same things. He said Hammarskjöld had a bullet in his head. He said a few things. I think he's the one who said that Hammarskjöld's body was outside the plane.
At any rate, they interviewed me for a good hour plus on TV and that's it. They flew me back home and told me that it would be showing - this was last October I believe. I know it was 20 degrees below zero up there so it was around October or November or January even, and they told me it should show as things go normally, around March or April. Well it's now April and so I just wrote to Marco yesterday and I haven't heard back from him yet. The one thing that bothers me is I understood that Murdoch has purchased National Geographic.
Carolyn: That is something to be concerned over.
Paul: Yeah. And I'm thinking "Well it may not be a show he wants shown".
Harrison: I haven't seen the program but I think from our conversation with Henning Melber it was aired already. I'm pretty sure it's the same program unless National Geographic did two on it, but he said that it was basically a whitewash and that they ended the show with the basic conclusion that "We don't know what happened and it was probably pilot error". He was really disappointed with National Geographic for ignoring all the new evidence but I guess I'm going to have to see it. They talked with you and for them to then go ahead with the program without drawing the correct conclusions is just...
Shane: We need to know too. Hammarskjöld's testimony was...
Paul: Did he say I'm on the program?
Harrison: No, he didn't say. We didn't get into too much detail about it so that's going to be a project for me. I'm going to try to get hold of that and see if it's available anywhere to see because I don't have the details. All I know is that he said - how did he put it? Something like "They didn't take into account any of the new evidence that has been around since Susan Williams' book."
Paul: Oh wow!!
Carolyn: You may have ended up on the cutting room floor.
Paul: Yeah, yeah. For sure. Well I started worrying about that as soon as I heard "Murdoch". Now you're explaining to me also why Marco hasn't gotten back to me in the last couple of months.
Carolyn: Yeah. He's hiding.
Paul: Oh wow! I'm disappointed.
Harrison: Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
Paul: Really!
Harrison: But like we said on the show, National Geographic, like you said, Murdoch's involved and I think that's just one of those programs and institutions, really and magazines that you can't really trust anymore for really good investigative journalism or getting to the bottom of the story.
Paul: Isn't that sad given that for years they were.
Harrison: Yeah.
Paul: Well, if you find something out could you let me know?
Harrison: Absolutely. I'll let you know what I find and try to get that to you. I think we might end it there Paul.
Paul: I'm talked out.
Harrison: You're talked out? Alright. Well thanks so much for being on the show. Thanks for getting in touch with us and I hope we can get this to as many listeners as possible. Do you have any final words?
Paul: Yeah, you can buy my book at https://www.paulhenryabram.com/.
Harrison: Alright.
Shane: And the book's title is Trona, Bloody Trona: A Revolution in Microcosm.
Paul: Trona, Bloody Trona.
Shane: That's primarily on your work in the Mojave desert in the 1970s working with unions in the bloody labour dispute.
Paul: That's right, the strike. I don't know if you remember Mike Gavin. Mike Gavin was a famous anchor, I think on NBC in the '70s and he came out and he was going to do a little 30 second spot and he ended up spending four or five days and called his wife who was a student at UCLA and said "Get up here and forget your classes! You're going to learn more up here in one day than you're going to learn in a year at UCLA law school." She came up and she stayed for a while and then we started getting hundreds of students coming up and joined the strike. It's really a heavy thing. My point was Mike Gavin termed it labour's bloodiest struggle since the Embarcadero strike of 1934 and that was pretty heavy.
Harrison: Alright, thanks so much Paul.
Shane: We really appreciate you coming on and giving us all the juicy details.
Carolyn: Absolutely!
Paul: I appreciate the interest, believe me.
Harrison: Thanks so much again Paul.
Paul: Thank you all.
Harrison: Okay, take care.
Paul: I'm really pleased getting turned on to your station and your website and all. I didn't know of The Truth Perspective.
Harrison: Yeah, we're glad you found us.
Paul: I'm a follower now.
Harrison: Great.
Carolyn: Tell your friends.
Paul: Good-bye everyone.
Harrison: Alright! That was Paul Henry Abram. We just want to thank him again for being on the show. For that last little bit I actually did a Google search and while I haven't watched the National Geographic Mayday program I did find out that it looks like at least part of Paul's interview was included. So we'll just have to watch it to find out how much was included and what they said about it. It looks like the show is available on the National Geographic channel on YouTube. So if listeners want, check it out if you're able and find out what they did to it. I'll check it out and see what's said about it.
We did a little studio change up so we have in the studio now SOTT editors Corey Schink.
Corey: Hello everybody.
Harrison: And Elan Martin.
Elan: Hi. And Carolyn McCallum.
Harrison: Yeah, she's still here.
Carolyn: Thank you.
Harrison: Shane's gone. So we're going to try something new today. As you can tell we're broadcasting on Sunday. This is our new format so we're going to be sharing hosts and changing it up a bit with Joe and Niall and doing Truth Perspectives and Behind the Headlines, depending on what topic we're doing for each week. So listen in. It's going to be just as good, probably better than it was before.
Carolyn: Always.
Harrison: But today we're going to have a new segment. We have SOTT editor Brent on the line. We're going to try and do segments. This is about cops and stuff. We're going to do a little intro and then we're going to get Brent on the air, so let's try this out. [Intro] Brent can you hear me?
Brent: Yeah. Can you hear me?
Harrison: Yeah, we can hear you just fine.
Brent: That was quite the intro.
Harrison: Yeah, pretty intense, huh?
Brent: It was good. I liked it. So basically I'm going to call this segment the Police State Roundup. It's a collection of stories about police abuses of power and I'll try to keep it to as many recent incidents as possible. But since it's the first one I might reference some stuff that goes back a year or two.
So the first thing I wanted to talk about was a story that came out just this past week. Cops in Clark County, Washington invaded the home of a family on a tip they got, a phone call from Kentucky. It looks like it was some sort of inter-familial dispute. For over an hour these police stalked and harassed this family. The father's name was Ilya Petrenko. He caught the whole thing on video. It starts about 15 minutes or so before they invade the house and in the video both Ilya and his wife can be seen talking to police, telling them everything's fine, there's no reason for them to be there, they can leave. The cops refuse to leave. Eventually they break into the house, assault both Ilya and his wife. They take the phone and delete the video, unaware that the video was thankfully uploaded to a cloud so we have the video. But they didn't have a warrant. They didn't have any probable cause.
It's a really extreme case of police abuse, especially now with these laws coming into force. They're designed to be anti-domestic violence laws so that police don't necessarily need probable cause to enter a house if they think there's some sort of domestic violence going on. What it looks like is that they used that sort of justification here to attack this family. They kidnapped their children. There were at least two kids and they're now in child protective services. It was a really terrifying example of police abuse of power.
Corey: Just commenting on that domestic violence tidbit you were talking about there, I remember reading on SOTT that the police are 15 times more likely to be domestic abusers themselves, which just goes to show you what happens when you have these types of people given the right to just break into a house and assault a family like this.
Brent: Yeah totally. One thing that was interesting was that the unidentified caller from Kentucky suggested that both of Ilya's wife Stephanie's hands were broken during this domestic assault that supposedly occurred when in the video we can see clearly that her hands are fine. She's holding a decent-sized child and she's okay and she repeats several times she's okay, that she wants them to leave. They keep trying to isolate her, to get her alone and she refuses because she's afraid because the cops outside have guns drawn. It's very common. You hear stories about police committing acts of domestic abuse.
And that's just one example. I have read so many things just recently preparing for this segment. Just this past week teenagers were attacked in Baltimore right outside of their house for refusing police the right to enter. There were three kids living together with a mom in a house in Baltimore. One kid got locked out and so he was knocking on the door trying to get in and out. Apparently the police received a call about suspicious comings and goings to this house and so they showed up and they wanted to search. They didn't have a warrant. The kids clearly know their rights. I think the mom of one of the children was actually a retired officer and she refuses to let them in. Once this cop's backup arrives the backup comes right out of the car, walks right up to one of the kids who's in the doorway, grabs him, pulls him out of the house, throws him on the ground and they arrest him, for what, I'm not really sure.
Then I've seen another video of a cop verbally threatening a small child for smiling. Somebody took a little video as this cop comes on a bus. He walks back on the bus and he basically says "Keep smiling. Keep smiling. I show you what I'm going to do to you. Keep smiling." It was just unreal!
There's another video of cops jumping on a 16-year-old at an Earth Day celebration, a gang of about five cops, hold down and beat this guy. The story there was a fight had broken out somewhere near him and one of the cops grabbed him and tried to move him back and he didn't like the fact that he was being touched and he addressed the officer and asked why he was grabbing him and that started a physical altercation.
Also in the news recently Peter Liang, who was the trigger finger behind the death of Akai Gurley in New York City, was convicted of manslaughter by a jury of his peers and the judge in the case reduced the charges and now he will not be serving any prison time but he is sentenced to community probation and 800 hours of community service.
Carolyn: Does he still have his job?
Brent: I don't know. I doubt it.
Corey: That's the one guy you don't want.
Carolyn: Got that at least.
Brent: Yeah. This case of Peter Liang is a very high profile case but it highlights something that I'm seeing very consistently. When officers are convicted or charged with something they get a very reduced sentence, very light handed, Officer Daniel Harmon Wright shot and killed Patricia Cook in Culpepper, Virginia on February 9, 2012. He was convicted but he only served three years for voluntary manslaughter, malicious shooting into a vehicle and felony with a firearm. Patricia Cook was a Sunday School teacher. She was in the parking lot of an elementary school and she was trying to leave. The police officer got a call about a suspicious vehicle, was trying to get her out of the car. She refused. She rolled the window up and started to drive away and I guess that infuriated the officer to the point where he felt the need to fire upon her. So he was convicted.
Darren Tomlinson is a police officer in the UK. He was convicted of raping a girl under 13 years old, sexual assault on a child and he committed some sort of sexual act with a dog. He recorded all of these things on his cell phone video which is how they got him. He was given 11 years.
Then we have a Plano, Texas police officer who was arrested twice in a three week period for indecency with a child and possession of child pornography. He was arrested on December 23, 2014 and charged. He posted bail and then on the 8th of January he was arrested again, charged with possession of child pornography. Even though he demonstrated that he was a repeat offender, he was granted bail and released again on bail.
So it's a consistent pattern of police officers who, just because they're police officers, get this very light-handed treatment by the justice system. I have so many more examples.
There was an officer in charge of a rape case in Oklahoma and he stalked the victim and harassed her to the point where he got caught. Very often with these police what I'm seeing is that there's a lot of sex crimes. They seem to really abuse their authority and use it so that they can commit and get away with all these weird sex crimes.
There was this guy officer Christopher Warren who was accused several times of sex-related crimes but each time there was some sort of technical reason that allowed him to get away without being charged. Finally he was convicted of raping a five-year-old girl with a pencil and there was a mistrial because one of the jurors apparently read a newspaper article related to the story and admitted to it. The second trial ended up finding him not guilty on the basis that this girl was coached into the story. Whether or not that is true, clearly there was enough evidence to convict him the first time around and given his history which the jurors were not allowed to be privy to, it's questionable. So I see all these kinds of really disturbing sex crimes committed by officers.
The same is true when officers commit vehicular homicide, when they hit somebody. Not too long ago there was a 10-year-old boy in Franklin Township, New Jersey who was hit by a cop and killed and no charges were filed. He felt very guilty, I'm sure but it there were no charges against him.
Detroit police were on a high speed chase. They hit and killed two children and continued the chase and three more kids were injured, some of them were critically injured. I think they ended up recovering but two out of the five ended up dying and I don't think there were any consequences for that.
So we just see again and again that cops are able to commit these horrendous crimes, whether it's hit and run, sexual abuse, physical assault, domestic violence, and they get a slap on the wrist. If you or I or anyone else who's not a police officer, were to commit the same crime, we'd be locked up for god knows how long.
Elan: I think just this last week Brent there was a story about some police officers in New Orleans who were actually convicted of killing several innocent people in New Orleans during the 2005 Katrina hurricane disaster.
Brent: Oh yeah, I remember that one.
Elan: These were people who were just trying to get to safety. They were unarmed. These several police officers drew fire on them. I don't know if all of them were killed. I think there were eight of them who were at least injured and a few killed. They were convicted. The police officers admitted to their crimes and only recently a judge came out and said that he was going to reduce their sentences, including time served because the original judgment was abominable or words to that effect. If you remember all those events during Katrina, all of these poor people who had nowhere to go and were actually being corralled and stymied from getting to safety by the National Guard, by the police, were corralled and desperate.
So it just seems to be that there's this larger mentality ever since 2001 9/11 where all of this police violence is a reflection of what the US has been doing around the world. It seems part and parcel of the same thing.
Corey: Right. They say it's like the rise of the warrior cop but that's not a warrior. That's a sadist, a sadistic butcher. It's insane.
Carolyn: Plus the ongoing militarization. It's like the more toys you get the more you want to use them.
Brent: Yeah, it's pretty disturbing. I've been keeping this database ever since I decided to start doing this segment and the breadth of the crimes goes from 5 year old victims to 100 year olds. People of all ages are suspect, all races. It does tend to affect African Americans, Latinos with a higher percentage than it does white members of the population, but it does happen to white people. It happens to middle-aged white people pretty frequently and it's really disturbing.
There's a story from Chicago back in March about an 82-year-old grandmother who was hospitalized after the police raided the wrong house. Eventually the guy whose house was supposed to be raided saw what was happening next door. He was familiar with the woman. He came right over and told the police that they had the wrong house, basically "Leave the woman alone. You're here for me not her." The outcome of that was that she was hospitalized but she was okay. She was an 82-year-old woman. They paid for the damage to her house but maintained that they had the right address even when it was shown clearly that they did not.
There's also this really disturbing trend of police killing dogs. This is something else that's come up as I've been collecting these stories. Just recently there was a really weird event where a cop and his family went to a shelter in Texas. Let me just pull up the link. What happened was the cop wanted to check out a couple of dogs in a pen and so without approval from the staff this officer let three dogs into a play area. Usually the staff comes out later and says they don't let more than one or two out at a time. But three of these dogs began to fight with each other and the officer didn't know what to do so he picked up a 2x4 and proceeded to beat the living crap out of all of them. Two of the three dogs died from the injuries that they sustained and this cop was allowed to adopt a fourth dog and go home with him that same day!
Corey: Oh my god!
Carolyn: You've got to be kidding!
Brent: No kidding. This was in Montgomery County, Texas.
Corey: So he killed three dogs in the shelter and then just took one with him to go?
Brent: Well he let three of them out and then they started fighting and instead of being able to separate them like a normal person, he attacked them with a 2x4. The resulting injuries killed two of the three. One of them survived and he was allowed to go home with a fourth dog.
Corey: Unbelievable.
Brent: Right now they are pondering whether there's some sort of charges they want to file.
Harrison: I've been reading these stories for what seems like years now, about the attacks on dogs. I haven't seen any kind of what you might call a whistleblower to say what's really going on yet. I wonder if there's something like that out there because when you look at what looks like an official policy to shoot on sight or shoot to kill people, that's pretty much out in the open. There are videos of police attending these conferences put on by these ex-military mercenary guys who teach police officers that you've got to shoot to kill.
I watched this one mini-documentary or investigative journalism report on this and they got a camera into one of these conferences and the guy who's speaking is giving some statistics. I don't remember them so I'm going to kind of make them up generally, but he said something like "Okay, for this police department last year, you guys shot your weapons 130 times and you killed something like 60 of the targets. Now what does that say? Well it means that you missed 45% of the time" or something like that. He was basically saying that when you shoot you have to shoot to kill and if you don't kill them then you've failed as a cop because you need to kill them. That's the only way to protect yourself and make sure you're safe.
So I'm pretty sure this is official policy in all these police departments, that they do shoot to kill. That's how they're trained. That's what they're told to do, so it makes me think that there must be some kind of policy of when you see a dog, to shoot to kill that dog because it could pose a threat and you want to protect yourself at all costs. I don't know.
Brent: Yeah, it's a joke. I read another story about a five pound Chihuahua that was loose on a family's property and somebody called the cops about a loose dog. They approached the dog and tried to capture it by hand. The dog snapped at one of the officers. They proceeded to tase and then shoot the dog and we're talking about a five pound Chihuahua. This isn't a threat. And yet they still killed it and the family was obviously distraught. There were a husband, wife and three boys and they couldn't understand why the police had to kill their dog.
There was another one in New York City, in the Bronx. A police officer arrived at an apartment building on a domestic violence call and as he was going out a woman had her door open and her pit bull got out. Pit bulls tend to be the scariest of dogs I guess. But as he was approaching the officer the woman was yelling "He's friendly. He's friendly." There's video of this because there's a video camera in the apartment building and you can see the dog clearly just walk up to the officer very calmly, wagging his tail. The officer backs up, draws his gun and shoots a couple of round into him and that dog died. It's just unbelievable.
I was at a neighbour's house party one evening and somebody had called the police because the attendees at the party had gotten a little too loud and the police came. My neighbour at the time had a pit bull and I answered the door when the cops arrived thinking it was more guests. I opened the door and Lady, who was the pit bull just ran out to greet and once I saw it was the police I just grabbed her by her hind quarters and reeled her right back into the house and close the door behind me. When I looked, I saw that the cop had drawn his gun. He was prepared to shoot a couple of rounds into her. It was just unbelievable!
There was a study done by the Chicago Tribune of just the Chicago police. According to the Tribune, the CPD there shot 90 dogs per year between 2008 and 2913, and that's just in Chicago!
Carolyn: Are you seeing any rise of organizations and people banding together to do anything about this, to protest?
Brent: There are lots of groups on Facebook. If you google the phrase 'cop shoots dog' you get so many hits and if you look on Facebook there are groups for each of these dogs, 'justice for Abala' and 'justice for Lucy. It blew my mind when I was scrolling through it, just how many of these pages there are. They have a couple of thousand likes for each one.
Carolyn: Okay, but I mean more in the sense of getting a grip on the whole phenomenon, people included. It's kind of disturbing. People also rally behind individual human deaths too, but what's the state of organization for tackling this problem in general?
Brent: As far as I can tell there's nothing for dogs specifically. There are a couple of groups that have banded together. There's a group called Cop Watch and another one called Cop Block and they have websites. They're usually dot-orgs. You can google them. They make a habit of recording police. Their whole thing is "pull out your cell phone and take a video". In most states in the union you can safely record the police without any sort of fear of reprisal as long as you're out of their way. You can't be up in their grill, but if you're across the street shooting video, you're protected legally. In New York specifically there are laws on the books. So I would tell people check the laws in your state. Make sure that you know what your rights are.
But if you want to help, any time you see police doing their thing, just pull out your phone and start taking a video. There are several websites where you can upload that video and share it.
Carolyn: Isn't there an app too where you can sign onto the app and even if your phone's about to get confiscated if you've got the film you can hit the app and it'll upload it and even if they grab your phone it's already gone out?
Brent: There are. The ACLU put one out recently, I'll see if I can find the name. But they have different versions available. There's a couple of these different filming the police apps. So you can get that and also Live Leak has an app that lets you live stream whatever's happening and I think you can save a copy of it to the cloud. I'm pretty sure iPhones have an option where you can save videos to the cloud as I said in the beginning. That was how this one guy has his video retained. The cops will take your phone and they will delete videos. There's even a lawsuit I read not too long ago about a killing and the police took the phone with the only video of the incident and they deleted the video and now there's a lawsuit against them for doing it. I can't find the link right now.
Carolyn: Something like destruction of personal property or something like that?
Brent: Yeah. They threaten people all the time. "If you don't give up the video you'll be arrested." So it's very important for individuals to know their rights especially on a state-by-state basis. Like I said, New York and I think California have laws on the books to protect individuals. Colorado actually has a law which means that individual cops can suffer financial reprisals if they take and delete video from an individual. There was a story not too long ago about a $15,000 fine that was inflicted upon a police officer after he took someone's phone and deleted the video.
So it's important to know your rights and if you see something, say something. Get online. Network with these different websites. Like I said, CopBlock is one. CopWatch is another. I get a lot of stories from the FreeThoughtProject.org. They do a very good job of cataloguing police abuse of power stories. Also CounterCurrentNews does a lot of it. Sometimes there's an overlap.
I've also been noticing a lot on RT lately. They seem to be covering these stories more and more. There's one I have up on my web browser right now about an officer who executed a litter of feral kittens in the back yard of someone's house in front of some children. He was cleared of any wrongdoing. The officer was defended by his department. This is another pattern that we see consistently. Generally before all the evidence has come out or both sides have had the opportunity to tell their stories, they call it the thin blue line. This line comes down where the establishment, the department, will protect their own, even when the judgment of the officer involved is clearly in question. This guy was responding to a litter of feral kittens that was in a wood pile behind a house in North Ridgeville, Ohio, June 10, 2013. The residents thought that they were going to come and take the cats to a shelter or something and he said that "the shelters were full and that these cats would be going to kitty heaven".
The mother who had called the police felt terrible. Her children were traumatized. They were all watching through an upper level window as this cop pulled out his gun and just proceeded to execute this litter of kittens in front of four children between the ages of five months and seven years. They were shocked and crying and screaming. The officer in charge, the police chief, Mike Freeman, cleared the officer of any wrongdoing and concluded the actions were appropriate. He said "After visiting the scene and talking with the responding officer and re-interviewing the complainant I have decided his actions were appropriate. I have decided not to impose any disciplinary measures for this incident."
It was just unbelievable. You have a litter of feral kittens. You could scoop them up and if they have to be euthanized so be it but you don't have to pull out your gun and unload rounds into them in someone's back yard while children are watching!
Elan: Well it just seems that that seems to be the rule rather than the exception for these cops to behave in a hair-trigger manner, quite literally, in so many instances. I just wanted to add, I thought your story about being at the party and being proactive about the dog is instructive because for every law that's on the books that would seek to punish a police officer for behaving so terribly, it seems like there are another hundred cases of them getting away with whatever it is they're doing.
So even knowing our rights, we really have to be very careful not to provoke a police officer into behaving aggressively because you just don't know how they're likely to respond to a given situation these days.
Brent: Definitely. One thing that my dad always told me - my dad's father, my grandfather, was a police officer. He was always very clear. Be very respectful with them. Don't get agitated. And this is stuff that legally we shouldn't be required to do. It's the officer who should be the bigger person. They should be trained in dealing with people, especially people who are upset, and they should be trained in how to de-escalate a situation as opposed to escalate. And again and again we see police escalating the situation from something that may just be an argument.
I saw this video of these three African American teens in Baltimore and they were shouting at the police officer, arguing "No, you can't come in. You don't have a right. You don't have a warrant." And that's enough to set one of them off and they will grab you and physically assault you. They'll throw you to the ground, but just to be aware of that and just "yes sir/no sir" them, they tend to be a little bit more reasonable.
But again it's kind of a tragedy that we, as citizens, have to be the ones who control ourselves, to take a deep breath to calm ourselves because if you get into an argument with an officer you could end up getting shot or killed! You just don't know.
Harrison: So in other words, avoid cops like the plague and if you can't avoid them and if you've got a dog around and they come to your place, then quickly scoop up your dog, put them somewhere where they won't be found.
Corey: And your kittens.
Brent: Yeah, know who's coming to your door. I think it comes down to something Lobaczewski said in Political Ponerology. He describes this sort of effect in a pathocracy and you could argue that the government of the United States today is run by pathological individuals. He says "In a pathocracy all leadership positions down to village head man and community cooperative managers, not to mention directors of police units and special service police personnel, must be filled by individuals with corresponding psychological deviations." So basically he's suggesting that even the police and people that run the police, the police chiefs are likely to be psychologically deviant when you have this deviance on high. So we as citizens have to be aware of that and have to find ways to circumnavigate, work around them to protect ourselves and our loved ones.
Harrison: Great. Well Brent, do you have any other stories or is that it for today?
Brent: I have so many stories. I could go on for hours and hours but I think that gives a good snapshot. I think real quick there was another example of something we should worry about - the fact that when there are lawsuits against the police and people win these lawsuits for police brutality or wrongful charges, whatever it may be, taxpayers end up paying out these individuals. So while the police may commit these atrocious, horrible crimes that everyone agrees are wrong, the money doesn't come from the officer or even the budget for the police department. It gives them no incentive to rein themselves in.
Just recently there was a $4.9 million lawsuit against the city of Chicago after a kid was beaten, tasered and dragged from a cell and died in police custody. So that $4.9 million for something that was clearly wrong, came from the taxpayers. And that's money out of our pockets!
Why should we be paying when these officers commit these horrible crimes?!? It just doesn't make any sense. There's some movement to change the laws so that when stuff like this happens that it comes out of the police pensioners fund so at least it would give them some sort of incentive to rein themselves in. That's a good point for me to end on. There's a lot to talk about but I can talk about it some other time.
Harrison: Yeah, you'll be coming on every week so we have more to look forward to - well to hearing your voice but not necessarily hearing what you have to say because it's pretty sick stuff. Thanks for your segment Brent.
Brent: No problem. Any time. Thanks for the show guys. I appreciate it. I really enjoyed the interview too. That was interesting information I'd never heard before.
Harrison: Yeah, we were too, especially to get an idea of what the NSA was like 50 or 60 years ago.
Brent: Yeah, same song, different tune.
Harrison: Thanks Brent. Take care.
Brent: Alright, bye-bye.
Harrison: So I think we're just going to talk about one more story before we call it a night or a day, depending on where you are, maybe morning. Did you have a story you wanted to bring up Elan?
Elan: In recent weeks we've been hearing quite a lot about the 28 pages of information concerning Saudi Arabia's possible financing in 9/11.
Carolyn: Yes. This is the famous Document 17.
Elan: Yes. As the story progresses, it just keeps getting more and more interesting. Of course one of the questions we've been asking is "Why now?" These are the 28 pages that were pretty much kept under lock and key by Congress or whoever was in charge of these pages, I believe.
Harrison: Well it wasn't Congress that was responsible for their redaction I don't believe because Congress actually did the investigation. This was in 2002 and the report came out. This was the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Matters relating to 9/11. So they wrote this 800 page report which was then used by the 9/11 Commission and in these 800 pages there are hundreds of redactions throughout the main report. So those in themselves probably amount to at least 28 pages and then the entire last chapter, which dealt with foreign aid/foreign funding for the attacks was completely redacted. So every word of the 28 pages was redacted. So this was for the official release. So the 9/11 Commission got to read the full report, unredacted, but the public hasn't been able to read those classified sections for 14 years.
So there's been this move going on for years now to have these 28 pages released and Senator Bob Graham has been one of the guys really pushing for it. It's just made the news again in the past couple of weeks, like you were saying Elan.
Carolyn: It's a very convenient time for international politics, as far as the US is going.
Harrison: Because...
Carolyn: Because...
Elan: Well it just seems that it has nothing to do with wanting to get the truth out, per se. It is politically motivated, as you were saying Carolyn. It seems to be shaping up to be a tool in the manipulative toolbox of the US in order to bring Saudi Arabia under heel concerning its tentative decision to cut production of oil. Now of course the context of this is that in 2014 in reaction to Russia asserting its place in supporting the nouveau Russians in countering the coup in Ukraine. This of course upset US interests quite a bit. I mean, the nerve of Russia to come out and support these people against a regime that was entirely racist, genocidal, killing many innocent people!
Carolyn: And the pet project of the US.
Elan: Yes. Clearly a US coup. And Russia drew the line. It's a story that we've talked about many times here before on The Truth Perspective. And on top of that they helped Crimea assert its democratic decision to join the Russian Federation which is also a key geostrategic point in that part of the world for Russia and for the US that has been attempting to encircle Russia with NATO powers.
So that's the backdrop of this full hybrid war that the US so often accuses Russia of trying to perpetrate against the western world when it's in fact the US that's been doing this. Again, it's something we've talked about a lot here. So what do they do? In cahoots with Saudi Arabia, the US conspires to raise the production of oil in order to get the prices of oil really at the "bottom of the barrel" so to say, just to hurt the Russian economy. There were some results in that area.
Harrison: Well the results, some of which were first of all Russia has been hurting economically, not necessarily to the extent the Americans would like, but it is there but also for the Saudis, because the Saudis aren't winning anything by doing this either. They haven't been making money.
Carolyn: Their treasury is bleeding.
Harrison: Yeah. I read a report, an analysis at the time that this was going on that even suggested that perhaps it's possible the Saudis weren't even onboard with this deal, to up production and that it had something to do with the US shale gas industry because there are no official minutes of meetings where you can see that Saudi Arabia totally got onboard with this. That's what everyone's saying. It's probable but it's also possible that this was against Saudi Arabia's wishes at the same time. Whether they went along with it or not - they could have been coerced into doing it - but since then the Saudi economy has been at the bottom of the barrel, like you said, no pun intended, and they're hurting.
So what happens is that a lot of these oil rich countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia got together recently and they were planning a production freeze which would raise prices and everyone would benefit. But of course there was the issue of Iran, so now that a lot of its sanctions have been officially lifted, at least on paper, they have been upping their production and so right away Iran said "Well we're not going to go along with this" or "We're pushing for 40 million barrels a day" or something like that.
So there was a summit a week or two ago where they all got together to agree on this. If you read the reports leading up to it, pretty much every country involved was onboard, at least publically. They were going to go along with it. Iran was the only one that had conditions. "We've been under sanctions for so long we need the money." So it seemed like perhaps there would be an exception for them or maybe they'd let them produce up to a certain level, negotiate the level, and that's what this conference was for - to negotiate and come up with a beneficial situation for everyone involved.
What happens? The Saudis come and pretty much throw a hissy fit and say "We're not going it!"
Carolyn: Just before they were supposed to sign the thing apparently one of the princes - sorry I don't have his name - purportedly got a call at 3:00 a.m. the morning that they were all supposed to all get together and have their final ceremony, everybody signs it and they all go home and everybody's going to make some money. He walked in and said "Sorry. We can't do it. We can't do it." So you wonder what this phone call was. It just logically might flow from this idea that "You do this and then we're going to hang you out to dry on 9/11 and you will be a pariah state as far the west is concerned." The Saudi countered back saying "If you lean on us then we'll sell $750 billion worth of US Treasuries" which would be a very devastating blow to the US economy because all that money would come back and hyperinflation and everything.
So there's this move and counter move and threats in the background and so far the US seems to have the upper hand in terms of leaning on Saudi Arabia. So what's in those papers? It seems to be pretty damning and they've haven't released all of it, just tidbits here and there.
The other use that this little set of documents seems to have is that if they've made an example of Saudi Arabia - and Harrison you wrote in your article that there was a mention by Mr. Graham about governments being involved, plural and that would be Pakistan, Turkey, Israel and the US. So this is a nice big 2x4 to hold over their heads.
Harrison: Yeah, and that's all part of the mystery because the title of the chapter, which isn't classified, implies more than one country. It wasn't Graham. I can't remember who it was, another guy who's part of this movement, a senator or congressman who's read it, said governments-plural and was very specific about that. But we don't know officially at all what governments are mentioned in these 28 pages. So in my article the point I was trying to make is that there are several governments that have been implicated but we don't know which ones are actually mentioned in this report.
Carolyn: Right.
Harrison: What we do know is that if we look at the joint inquiry and the 9/11 Commission, we know that they were given evidence and testimony from numerous people or had access to FBI records and local police investigations, that would point to Turkish/Israeli/Pakistani involvement. So whether any of these reports are included in the 28 pages, we don't know because they are classified and no one who has read them can talk about them. So I think that one of the reasons that they're going with the Saudi angle is that in the joint inquiry report there are several mentions of the Saudi connection that weren't classified. And this has all been public knowledge since at least 2002, maybe even before that, 2001 with media reports and this is the very obvious Saudi connections of what seems to be official support from very high-ranking Saudi individuals and charities and rich people, to some of the alleged hijackers in the states. They were providing them with money and housing and English lessons and flight school training. There are even connections to some Bin Laden family members who conveniently flew the coop on September 20th.
So there are all these connections. Who knows how many of them are in there and who knows how much of this latest media blitz has been a big bluff or a big threat. So you mentioned the Saudi threat to sell this $750 billion worth of treasury bond?
Carolyn: Yes, US Treasuries.
Harrison: So that actually happened in response to this lawsuit that's going on in the states, some of the 9/11 family members are trying to get a law passed which would allow them to sue the Saudi government and that would mean that if they were successful the US courts could freeze any foreign assets of the Saudis. The response makes sense because they could conceivably go to court and have these assets frozen. So if that's going to happen, they're naturally going to get their assets out of the United States so that that wouldn't happen.
We could talk about that lawsuit too because on the one hand it could be a good thing because it would open up the precedent for other nations bringing the US to trial for their involvement in terrorism in other countries, but on the other hand it's kind of like many laws, it has so many possibilities. It could be used for nefarious purposes. This could easily be used to cripple innocent nations by saying that they support terrorism when they didn't. So it's not a black and white issue with this lawsuit.
So the Saudis make this kind of counter-threat which is pretty reasonable, just given how nations operate. Then after that threat, in the news Bob Graham comes out again and says "We're releasing the pages." He said explicitly that these were going to be de-classified. Since then I haven't seen any news related to that. So after he said "These pages are going to be declassified" that's when this meeting happened in Doha where the Saudis said "We're not going to be part of this deal". It's all very suggestive that this whole threat to release the 28 pages is directly against Saudi Arabia to say "Don't get any ideas about going off the plan here, of stopping doing what we tell you to do. If you do, we're going to hang you out to dry." It looks like if that's the case, the Saudis got onboard and said "Okay and after the talks we're fine not making any money" which is ridiculous. It's a totally self-defeating choice which makes you think that they were coerced into doing it, threatened.
Elan: All of this just speaks to the US's absolute commitment to subvert, destabilize and even destroy Russia at any cost. The US and Saudi Arabia have been in bed together and in a love fest of making money off of oil, controlling the supply of oil, the pricing of oil, supporting and building up proxy terrorist forces to destroy Syria and god knows what else. They have been in cahoots in Yemen for the past year or two. These are two countries that have been working side-by-side very closely politically and economically for many years. The Bush family are intimate friends of the Saudi royal family. The Bush family has worked closely with the Bin Laden family in building projects in the Middle East for many years.
So for this to be occurring right now, this is a major rift. It's suggestive of a lot of desperate instability on the part of the US to be risking so much and risking bringing hell on itself. It just speaks to how crazy and how unstable the situation here in the US is.
Just to add one more point about that, it really looks as though, for a while there anyway, the possibility existed that Saudi Arabia's cooler heads might prevail in the sense of wanting to establish greater ties with Russia, Iran possibly and China and seeing the writing on the wall. So like you said Harrison, "Get with the program. You're not going to be allowed to change your strategy according to our dictates." That seems to be the order of the day. Who knows what we'll see in the next few weeks? It might be that Saudi Arabia did come under heel with this threat of exposure.
Corey: Yeah, I think that speaks a lot to the US's loss of its place as the world hegemon because as a hegemon you have the leadership potential in all the different spheres - economically, militarily and politically so then everyone follows your lead. The US has pretty much forced people to follow their lead by the barrel of a gun and through financial warfare for the past 50 or 60 years. But right now obviously the fact that Russia is now assuming that role is drawing the Saudis into their orbit and many other nations too are coming into their orbit. So right now you're really seeing the desperation on the part of this pathological cabal as it loses all of its relevance for everyone, even their own puppets.
Carolyn: Yeah, the fact that the puppets are sort of scanning and watching for a weakness where they can slip the leash so-to-speak. That was a pretty gutsy move on Saudi Arabia's part, not that I'm condoning them but every country does have a sense of self-preservation and they're obviously alive to the fact that their current alliance is not going to do them much good for much longer.
Elan: I think it was Pepe Escobar who said that ultimately bucking the US's control, Saudi Arabia just doesn't have the balls to do it. They get a lot of their arms from the US, a lot of their logistical support in crushing the Yemeni revolt. They're both allied in going after Iran, which is Saudi Arabia's geopolitical adversary in the Middle East. Not that I feel sorry for Saudi Arabia, but they're in a bit of a pinch right now. They've spent many billions of their dollars propping up these ISIS and Daesh and Al-Qaeda forces in Syria. They've got a very expensive war going on against Yemen and because of the price drop in oil, they've been not getting the revenue that they're used to. How many palaces and yachts have they been deprived of as a result of this drop in resources?
Harrison: Think of the Saudi princes!
Carolyn: Well not only that but they have one of the most extensive - I don't want to call it a welfare state but basically pretty much no Saudi citizen has to work but with their revenues dropping so precipitously they're talking about fees and cuts to subsidies and they could have a very ugly domestic situation developing in the near future on top of everything else.
Elan: If they hear their head choppers and executioners...
Carolyn: Have to take a pay cut.
Elan: Yeah.
Harrison: A few fewer gold-plated Ferraris. It's a tragedy really. It looks like we're at the end of the show today unless anyone has some final comments on these crazy Saudis. It looks like Corey's out of commission. He's laughing too hard.
Carolyn: Well, it's going to be an interesting rest of April.
Harrison: Yeah. And we'll follow the news and we'll bring it to you when we know what's going on. Thanks to everyone. Thanks again to Paul Abram for filling us in on his pretty remarkable experiences and his great stories. He had some great ones in there that made us laugh. And thanks to Brent for the first of many cop roundups. It's going to be good. So thanks everyone and we'll be back next week with another show.
Corey: See y'all soon.
All: Good-byes.
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