Pacifica Radio's Steve Brown (WBAI-NY Station Board) is a Mail-Order Fraud

Steve Brown is a prominent member of the Local Station Board (LSB) of WBAI 99.5FM in New York. He is currently running for reelection and is a leader of the Alliance for Community Elections (ACE), which has endorsed 8 other board candidates.

Steve Brown is also a multi-millionaire with a history of being one of the biggest direct mail marketers in the US. According to the Seattle Times, at one point Steve Brown claimed to be responsible for four percent of all the junk mail in the country. According to the New York Times, in 1986 alone he earned $500,000 in salary and up to $13 million in dividends.

Steve Brown's Direct Mail Career

The businesses Steve Brown owned engaged in questionable practices that caused the Attorneys General of seven states, including New York, to step in.

They "investigated, filed suit or forced the company to halt various business practices." (NYT) The Times notes that "The F.T.C. in 1986 issued a consent decree under which Raffoler [one of Brown's business names], without admitting guilt, paid a $150,000 penalty and agreed not to violate mail order rules."

In 1988, "Elizabeth Bradford, an assistant attorney general, said last summer in a complaint filed in State Supreme Court, "Having shown themselves incapable of making an honest sale or a consistently timely delivery, they should not be permitted to conduct any further mail order business in the state of New York." (NYT) According to Crain's, "In January [1992], DME [Direct Marketing Enterprises, another business name of Brown's] settled a five-year-old lawsuit with the New York state attorney general. DME, while admitting no guilt, agreed to changes in advertising, complaint resolution and its refund procedures. It also paid the state $175,000 in investigation costs."

For more detailed info:

A NY Times exposé on Steve Brown's mail-order business practices
Crain's New York Business on complaints against Steve Brown's company
The Seattle Times on Steve Brown's marketing to the gullible
UPI on Steve Brown's settlement with the NY State Attorney General
Crain's on a canceled IPO and a Post Office probe
Misc. articles about complaints and legal actions against Steve Brown's companies
Steve Brown's $7 million French chateau
A bibliography of articles referenced
WBAI LSB disassociates itself from public comments of Steve Brown
Video: Behind Steve Brown's Fabulous Wealth

Brown's company's plan to go public was scuttled -- in part because investors' confidence was shaken by a US Postal Service probe. "Investors apparently won't get their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy stock in Direct Marketing Enterprises Ltd., the Long Island mail-order company known for its low-priced, hyperbolically promoted merchandise." (Crain's)

Incidentally, Steve Brown also owns an 18th century French Chateau, called Chateau des Thons, on sale for $7 million, which had been disassembled in France and brought to the US and reconstructed in Long Island.

Steve Brown's Controversial Actions in the WBAI Community

At WBAI Steve Brown has been a member of a group that has opposed affirmative action in the governance of Pacifica, and has attacked and vilified progressive African American Program Director Bernard White. The attacks have been on a number of fronts. Brown has regularly exaggerated, distorted and even fabricated stories about the program director and has used e-mail for the last several years to spread the stories.

Steve Brown has issued clear, unequivocal calls to turn the station's main focus away from oppressed communities and in the direction of serving the white middle class -- the same kind of audience that NPR and Air America already serve. In 2003 on a public email list he wrote: "... There is not just 'one' WBAI audience -- but 'two.' The first of these audiences, we have always sought to attract -- it comprises the voiceless, the downtrodden, and the oppressed. But we must be careful not to indulge in an orgy of misguided nobility and political correctness by convincing ourselves that this should be our ONLY audience, or even our 'main' audience."

Steve Brown has relentlessly used racist and violent imagery to attack Black station staff. At one point after making unsubstantiated charges against Bernard White, Brown wrote: "If you were there, you should have been at her [Interim General Manager Indra Hardat's] side whacking Bernard with a baseball bat and then calling the police." At another point he wrote: "One witness describes coming to the station these days as like living in the South Bronx, where rival gangs are shooting at each other and all you can do is keep your head down to keep from getting beaten up, knifed, or shot." This is not only a patently and outrageously false depiction of the station, it is also designed to play on the racial fears of white people.

What Does This Mean for the WBAI Elections?

Steve Brown is the leader of ACE, the Alliance for Community Elections. ACE is the 2006 makeover of List-Prog, the 2004 slate in which he also played a leading role. List-Prog members discarded the name following widespread criticism of their role in pushing out Don Rojas, the General Manager of WBAI, attempts to remove Program Director Bernard White, and an attempt to remove Father Lawrence Lucas from the WBAI Local Station Board after he became hospitalized, saying he had "unexcused absences."

Steve Brown brings to WBAI the kind of tactics that made him a wealthy but legally embattled king of the direct mail business. And now WBAI is paying the price.

For an alternative to Steve Brown, visit the Justice & Unity website.

http://whoisstevebrown.info/

New poll shows broad public support for health-care reform, even as Obama’s approval ratings suffer

Story at the Moderate Voice.

Court: Feds Can Hide Alleged Spying on Gitmo Lawyers

By David Kravets
December 30, 2009

A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld the government’s refusal to admit or deny it has documents related to warrantless eavesdropping on Guantanamo Bay detainees and their lawyers.

In doing so, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals accepted a little-known defense called the Glomar doctrine. The doctrine, the court ruled, allows the National Security Agency to refuse to acknowledge to the lawyers suing under the Freedom of Information Act that there are any documents responsive to allegations their clients had been or are being targeted under the Terrorist Surveillance Program adopted following the 2001 terror attacks.

“Confirming or denying the mere existence of specific records in a general surveillance program would logically be both confirming or denying that the NSA was targeting a specific individual and confirming or denying that the NSA is conducting a general surveillance program,” (.pdf) the New York-based appellate court wrote Wednesday.

Typically, under Freedom of Information Act requests unrelated to national security, the government announces that it has documentation related to a request, and releases or withholds some or all of it. ...

More: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/gitmo-lawyer-eavesdropping/

Obama Staffer wants ‘Cognitive Infiltration’ of 9/11 Conspiracy Groups

Suggestion: Tax revenue would be better spent on the cognitive infiltration of Harvard University. The ranking Ivy League institution offers no course on the history of fascism and its corporate roots - because students would quickly come to realize that they live in a fascist state, that their basic beliefs about themselves and their country are cooked public relations concepts. The cognitive infiltration of Harvard is necessary to correct this perceptual imbalance and introduce lackluster academic minds like Prof. Sunstein's to actual reality, a place where fascism is inherently conspiratorial and not a "theory." Students exposed to the cognitive infiltration of reality at Harvard will recognize that Prof. Sunstein is an enabler of fascism whose counter-Constitutional proposals have underpinnings of intellectual quackery and state propaganda. - AC

By Daniel Tencer
Raw | January 13th, 2010

Cass Sunstein

In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama's appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated "cognitive infiltration" of groups that advocate "conspiracy theories" like the ones surrounding 9/11.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures," in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine" those groups.

As head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Sunstein is in charge of "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs," according to the White House Web site.

Sunstein's article, published in the Journal of Political Philosphy in 2008 and recently uncovered by blogger Marc Estrin, states that "our primary claim is that conspiracy theories typically stem not from irrationality or mental illness of any kind but from a 'crippled epistemology,' in the form of a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational sources."

By "crippled epistemology" Sunstein means that people who believe in conspiracy theories have a limited number of sources of information that they trust. [?]Therefore, Sunstein argued in the article, it would not work to simply refute the conspiracy theories in public -- the very sources that conspiracy theorists believe would have to be infiltrated.

Sunstein, whose article focuses largely on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, suggests that the government "enlist nongovernmental officials in the effort to rebut the theories. It might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts."

Download a PDF of the article here.

Sunstein argued that "government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories." He suggested that "government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action."

"We expect such tactics from undercover cops, or FBI," Estrin writes at the Rag Blog, expressing surprise that "a high-level presidential advisor" would support such a strategy.

Estrin notes that Sunstein advocates in his article for the infiltration of "extremist" groups so that it undermines the groups' confidence to the extent that "new recruits will be suspect and participants in the group’s virtual networks will doubt each other’s bona fides."

Sunstein has been the target of numerous "conspiracy theories" himself, mostly from the right wing political echo chamber, with conservative talking heads claiming he favors enacting "a second Bill of Rights" that would do away with the Second Amendment. Sunstein's recent book, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, was criticized by some on the right as "a blueprint for online censorship."

Sunstein "wants to hold blogs and web hosting services accountable for the remarks of commenters on websites while altering libel laws to make it easier to sue for spreading 'rumors,'" wrote Ed Lasky at American Thinker.

http://rawstory.com/2010/01/obama-staffer-infiltration-911-groups/

Sarah Palin, Polar Bears and Exxon Junk Science

Posted by kert_davies | Greenpeace | 10/01/2008

Guardian writer Ed Pilkington took a fresh swat at Governor Sarah Palin's use and defense of Exxon-funded junk science on polar bears in the State of Alaska's attempts to to kill the listing of the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act. ...

Much has been made of Palin's denial of global warming since she was nominated as the GOP Veep candidate, but no one has questioned her credibility for using 'research' that was funded by ExxonMobil, American Petroleum Institute and Charles Koch Foundation.

We are wondering if Gwen Ifill of PBS will ask Ms. Palin a pointed question tomorrow? or if Senator Biden has read the Guardian story?

Tom Kizza at the Anchorage Daily News has followed this story the best. ...

This classic ExxonSecrets map of the junk science authors from the Dyck, Soon, et al article shows once again the tentacles of the Denial Machine (see page 9 for acknowledgement of funding from Exxon and friends). Palin's goon squad cited the Dyck, Soon paper 6 times and even attached a copy of the article (pre-publication) to their 49 page submission to the Department of Interior.

All the background documents can be found on Greenpeace Investigations:

Exxon funded junk science
rebuttal by real polar bear scientists
Alaska's submissions to Department of Interior

No reporters have questioned Exxon or API about funding this research and no one has gotten the scientists themselves on the record as to how much money they got from Exxon and friends and the marching orders attached to that funding.

http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/exxonsecrets/2008/10/01/sarah_palin_polar_bears_and_exxon_junk_s

Scott Ritter Charged in Child-Sex Sting

Ex-UN weapons inspector in child-sex sting
Ritter had said earlier charges were meant to silence criticism of Iraq war
Mike Groll / AP via MSNBC
Police Affidavit

Scott Ritter talks to reporters at his home in Delmar, N.Y., on Thursday.

PHILADELPHIA - A longtime U.N. weapons inspector who blamed a 2001 sex-sting arrest on his criticism of the Iraq war has again been charged in an online child-sex case, and this time he was caught on camera.

Scott Ritter, 48, of Delmar, New York, engaged in a sexually graphic online chat with an undercover police officer posing as a 15-year-old girl nearly a year ago, police in northeastern Pennsylvania said. He then turned on a webcam and masturbated on camera, they charged.

Monroe County authorities traced the exchange to Ritter through a cell phone number he provided, and confirmed the match through photographs, according to a police affidavit. Charges were filed in November and the Pocono Record revealed Ritter's involvement on Thursday.

Ritter, an ex-Marine, declined to comment to reporters gathered Thursday at his home near Albany, New York.

"I told you guys I'm not going to say anything, so please just go away," he said after answering the door to the home, adorned with a welcome mat that reads "U.S. Marine Corps, The Ritters."

Ritter, born William Scott Ritter Jr., served as a UN weapons inspector from 1991 to 1998 before resigning. He soon became a harsh critic of the administration of President George H.W. Bush administration's push toward war with Iraq.

In 2003, he acknowledged in TV news appearances that he had faced online child-sex charges in 2001 in New York, but said they were designed to silence his war criticism. The charges were dismissed.

Ritter waived a Dec. 17 preliminary hearing and is free on $25,000 bail. He is due in court Feb. 23 for a status hearing, and would face trial March 9 barring any requests for continuance.

Defense lawyer Todd Henry did not immediately return a phone message from The Associated Press.

According to published interviews, Ritter has twin daughters who are about 16. He met his second wife, Marina, a translator, while assigned as a counterintelligence officer in the former Soviet Union. They moved to upstate New York about 10 years ago.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34864444/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/

The CIA Deliberately Misspells Terrorists' Names and Bypasses TSA to Let Terrorists Fly

The CIA Misspells Al Qaeda Terrorists Names and Bypasses TSA to Let Terrorists Fly – A DCBureau.org Exclusive
11 Jan 2010
DCBureau.org
Press Release

WASHINGTON - (Business Wire) One of the 9/11 hijackers appeared on the no-fly list with a deliberately misspelled name. The CIA supplied that name just like they did Umar Farouk Abulmutallab’s. DCBureau is publishing the page from the 2006 no-fly list with the misspelled 9/11 hijacker’s name.

Veteran investigative reporters Susan and Joseph Trento, who first obtained and exposed the flaws in the no-fly list in 2006, have completed a new investigation of the CIA’s role in airline security. It reveals that the CIA is bypassing other government agencies and following terrorists on airplanes without telling TSA or the airlines involved. It shows how terrorists and nuclear proliferators have been allowed to fly because the CIA has refused to add their correct names or aliases to the no-fly list.

Part I of their two-part investigation –“The No Fly List”– is posted on the DCBureau.org Web site. The two part investigation reveals:

The CIA deliberately misspells names and does not provide aliases of suspected terrorists and criminals who are being targeted for recruitment or have relationships with the agency when it passes names on to the National Counterterrorism Center to be integrated in the Terrorism Identity Datamart Environment (TIDE), Selectee, and no-fly lists.

Khalid al-Mihdhar was known to the CIA as one of two men who had attended a meeting of Al Qaeda officials in Malaysia before coming to the United States. That hijacker was also a Saudi Arabian intelligence agent with the General Intelligence Directorate, the Saudi agency that works closely with the CIA. Al-Mihdhar was on the no-fly list as “al-Midham.” Al-Mihdhar helped fly American Airline Flight 77 into the Pentagon on 9/11. Fourteen other 9/11 hijackers appeared on the list five years after they had supposedly died in the attacks. The report also discloses the CIA refused to share language software that would vastly ease problems in matching Arab names to other government agency lists.

DCBureau reveals that the CIA in 2006 deliberately allowed a flight school associate of the 9/11 hijackers to fly to New Zealand and lost track of him only to have New Zealand authorities learn that he had signed up for airline training.

DCBureau reports that Issa Abdullah (Cleven Holt) is not on the no-fly list even though he was a suspect in the Beirut Marine Barracks bombing and was suspected of planning attacks on US troops in Bosnia during a visit by President Clinton. Holt visited the United States last fall and had no trouble flying into the country.

All articles published by DCBureau.org can be reprinted for free with attribution by any outlet.

DCBureau.org
Joseph Trento, 202-466-4310
mobile: 202-255-2441

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/the-cia-misspells-al-qaeda,1114977.shtml

Oliver Stone Suggests Hitler is 'Easy Scapegoat'

" ... The director ... said his intention was to broaden minds, delving into the funding of the Nazi party and how American corporations were involved in it. ... "

Oliver Stone, the controversial film director, is facing another backlash after suggesting that Hitler was made an "easy scapegoat" by history.

By Nick Allen in Los Angeles
Telegraph | 10 Jan 2010

Stone ... has made a new documentary series which he says will place historical figures including Hitler and Stalin "in context".

The director claimed many people in America did not understand the connection between the First World War and the Second World War and said his intention was to broaden minds, delving into the funding of the Nazi party and how American corporations were involved in it.

Stone said he did not want to make an "easy" history programme and talked about trying to understand people he despises. His series will aim to uncover little reported facts that shaped the modern United States.

Professor Peter Kuznick, the lead writer on the series, said the programme would not portray Hitler in a more positive light, but would describe him as a historical phenomenon rather than "somebody who appeared out of nowhere".

Stone has courted controversy before, most notably in his film JFK which suggested a high level conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. He has also polarised opinion with controversial films about President George W Bush, and Fidel Castro, the former Cuban leader.

Stone said his latest series would show history from an internationalist, rather than an American, point of view. That included a "complete other story" about how Stalin had fought against the German war machine more than anyone.

The director said he fully expected to face a backlash from conservative pundits.

He said: "Obviously, Rush Limbaugh is not going to like this history and, as usual, we're going to get those kind of ignorant attacks." Stone, 63, who won Oscars for directing Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, also won a Purple Heart for his own military service in Vietnam.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/6962475/Oliver-Stone-suggests-Hitler-is-easy-scapegoat.html

Blood Politics: The Rise of White Nationalism

Flight 253: The Cover-Up (Re UnderpantsGate)

See: "UnderpantsGate: Big Oil, the CIA and the Attempted Bombing of Flight 253 as Justification for Military Operations in Yemen & Nigeria (w/Updates)"

NOW we'll get to the bottom of this ...

Ex-CIA official to lead inquiry into plane incident
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post | January 9, 2010

The Obama administration's top intelligence official has appointed a retired CIA analyst to head an internal investigation of the failures that led to the Dec. 25 attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner.

John E. McLaughlin, a former deputy CIA director, will lead a review of missteps by U.S. intelligence agencies and assess proposals for correcting weaknesses in a system that did not respond to warnings about terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, said Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair.

Blair said the review will also examine the events leading to the Nov. 5 shootings at Fort Hood, Tex. The assessments will produce "candid, constructive guidance to improve our future performance," he said.

McLaughlin, 67, was named deputy CIA director under George J. Tenet in 2000. McLaughlin briefly served as acting director of the spy agency after Tenet stepped down in 2004. McLaughlin retired later that year.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010803754.html

And WHO is John McLaughlin?

" ... With this appointment, President Barack Obama has assured that the culture of intelligence cover-up will continue. ... "

President Obama, the CIA and the Master of the Cover-Up
11 December 2010

by: Melvin A. Goodman

The Obama administration quietly announced Friday the appointment of John McLaughlin, former deputy CIA director, to head the internal investigation of the intelligence failures that led to the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Delta airliner headed for Detroit as well as the events leading to the shootings at Fort Hood in November.

With this appointment, President Barack Obama has assured that the culture of intelligence cover-up will continue. McLaughlin has participated in and sought to cover-up many of the CIA's most egregious failures and misdeeds of the past decade. When he left the CIA, he then served as the agency's chief apologist.

So, who is John McLaughlin? Most of official Washington and the mainstream media view McLaughlin as the mild-mannered, professorial CIA bureaucrat, who former CIA director George Tenet called the "smartest man he had ever met."

Few people understand, however, that McLaughlin played the most important role in making sure that the Bush administration received the intelligence that would be used and misused to justify the use of force against Iraq in 2003.

Washington insiders remember that it was CIA director Tenet who told President George W. Bush, "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk," in response to the president's demand for stronger intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to provide to the American people. Few people remember that it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the "slam-dunk" briefing to the president in January 2003.

McLaughlin was the "villain" behind the politicized intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the war. He perverted the intelligence process, ignored high-level briefings on the weakness of the intelligence on WMD and tried to silence David Kay, the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, when the weapons inspectors found no evidence of strategic weapons in Iraq.

When Kay returned to CIA headquarters from Baghdad, Tenet and McLaughlin made sure that Kay was given a tiny, windowless office at the end of a distant, deserted corridor undergoing construction. It had no secure phone or classified computer. Kay called it Siberia.

McLaughlin was also the villain behind the CIA's preparation of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in February 2003 that used phony intelligence to convince an international audience of the need for war. According to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Powell's chief of staff, Tenet and McLaughlin lied to the secretary of state about the sourcing of serious allegations dealing with Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain strategic weapons.

The most serious allegation came from an Iraqi con man known as "Curveball," who maintained that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories, a key charge in the phony intelligence to justify the Iraq war. German intelligence debriefed Curveball, and German intelligence officials warned the CIA that Curveball was unstable and that there was no validation for his claims. Tyler Drumheller, the chief of CIA's European Division, knew that Curveball was mentally unstable and a liar, and he urged McLaughlin to drop all references to the mobile biological labs from Powell's speech. McLaughlin ignored him, too.

Five weeks after the invasion of Iraq, Powell and McLaughlin shared a table at the White House correspondents' dinner, where McLaughlin, an amateur magician, agreed to perform a few magic tricks during a break in the action. The CIA deputy director conjured coins out of thin air and transformed a single dollar into a $100 bill;
everyone at the table laughed except for Powell, who seemed tense and out of sorts.
According to Bob Drogin, who wrote an authoritative book on Curveball, Powell stared at McLaughlin and requested another trick. "Let's see you find the WMD in Iraq," an unsmiling Powell demanded. McLaughlin looked surprised and his broad grin faded. "We will," he replied, "they're there and we'll find them."

In addition to being one of the ideological drivers for the CIA's policies of torture and abuse, secret prisons and extraordinary renditions, McLaughlin demonstrated early in his career that he was a company man willing to do what was necessary to advance his career. In the 1980s, when CIA Director William Casey and his Deputy Robert Gates were "cooking the books" on intelligence dealing with the Soviet Union, Central America and Southwest Asia, McLaughlin offered no dissent.

When the CIA did an internal investigation of one of the worst examples of politicization of intelligence, the case for Soviet complicity in the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in 1981, McLaughlin made sure there were no references to politicization in the final report and made every effort to hide Gates' role in preparing the Papal plot intelligence assessment. When Gates' nomination as CIA director was in trouble during the confirmation process in 1991, it was McLaughlin who stepped forward to defend his former boss from charges of politicization. ...

http://www.truthout.org/article/president-obama-cia-and-master-cover-up