September 2000 from FromTheWilderness Website
Only the legends of Excalibur, the sword of invincible power, and the Holy Grail, the chalice from which Christ took his wine at the Last Supper begin to approach the mysterious aura that have evolved in the world of secret intelligence around a computer software program named Promis.
Created in the 1970s by former National Security Agency (NSA) programmer and engineer Bill Hamilton, now President of Washington, D.C.'s Inslaw Corporation, PROMIS (Prosecutor's Management Information System) crossed a threshold in the evolution of computer programming.
Working from either huge mainframe computer systems or smaller networks powered by the progenitors of today's PCs, PROMIS, from its first "test drive" a quarter century ago, was able to do one thing that no other program had ever been able to do.
It was able to simultaneously read and
integrate any number of different computer programs or data bases
simultaneously, regardless of the language in which the original
programs had been written or the operating system or platforms on
which that data base was then currently installed.
But given the fact that the government of Canada has just spent millions of dollars investigating whether or not a special version of Promis, equipped with a so-called "back door" has compromised its national security, one must concede that perhaps the myths surrounding Promis and what has happened to it need to be re-evaluated.
PROMIS - CIA's Secret Spying Software from YouTube Website
Myths, by definition, cannot be solved, but facts can be understood and integrated.
Only a very few people realize how big
the Promis story really is.
And one must also include the previous findings of Congressional oversight committees and no less than six obvious dead bodies ranging from investigative journalist Danny Casolaro in 1991, to a government employee named Alan Standorf, to British Publisher and lifelong Israeli agent Robert Maxwell also in 1991, to retired Army CID investigator Bill McCoy in 1997, to a father and son named Abernathy in a small northern California town named Hercules.
The fact that commercial versions of Promis are now available for sale directly from Inslaw belies the fact that some major papers and news organizations instantly and laughably use the epithet conspiracy theorist to stigmatize anyone who discusses it.
Fear may be the major obstacle or ingredient in the myth surrounding modified and "enhanced" versions of Promis that keeps researchers from fully pursuing leads rising in its wake.
I was validated in this theory on September 23rd in a conversation with FTW (From The Wilderness) Contributing Editor Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D.
Scott, a Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and noted author. Peter, upon hearing of the details of my involvement, frankly told me that Promis frightened him. Casolaro, who was found dead in a West Virginia motel room in 1991, had Scott's name (Scott is also a Canadian) in a list of people to contact about his Promis findings.
He never got that far.
This was certainly the case with my friend Bill McCoy, a legendary retired Army CID investigator who was also the principal investigator for Hamilton in his quest to recover what may be hundreds of millions in lost royalties and to reunite him with the evolved progeny of his brain child.
Those progeny now have names
like SMART (Self Managing Artificial Reasoning Technology) and TECH.
I will never forget hearing of McCoy's death and his immediate
cremation and then trying to reconcile that with the number of times
he had told me, while sitting in his Fairfax Virginia home, that he
wanted to be buried next to his beloved wife in spite of the fact
that he was a Taoist.
I also came across the same theme, almost
verbatim, in a research paper that I discovered while following
leads from other sources.
He has, from his prison cell in Walpole
Massachusetts, been a central if little known figure in the Promis
case for many years, like a monk mysteriously possessed of
information that no one else could obtain. If the story is ever
fully told his role may be even more significant than anyone has
ever supposed.
Tyree described an actual physical point in space, further out than ever thought possible and now used by US satellites.
This distance is made possible by Promis progeny so evolved that they make the original software look primitive. The social research, which included pioneering mathematical work - apparently facilitating the creation of artificial intelligence - postulated that a similar remote hypothetical position would eliminate randomness from all human activity.
Everything would be
visible in terms of measurable and predictable patterns - the
ultimate big picture. Just one of the key web sites where I found
this information is located at
http //web.syr.edu/~bvmarten/socialnet.html.
While we do not claim to be worthy of pulling Excalibur from the stone we do hope to be divorced enough from egotistical motivations and dreams of Pulitzers or glory to avoid being led into the trap that has befallen so many seeking the Holy Grail. FTW believes that the Promis story will only be solved by a group of people working together selflessly for a greater good. Maybe there is legend here after all.
Put simply, from the vantage point of a child actor in
1970s Burger King commercials, "It's too big to eat!"
But Promis is not a virus.
It has to be installed as a program on the computer systems that you want to penetrate. Being as uniquely powerful as it is this is usually not a problem. Once its power and advantages are demonstrated, most corporations, banks or nations are eager to be a part of the "exclusive" club that has it.
And, as is becoming increasingly confirmed by sources connected to this story, especially in the worldwide banking system, not having Promis - by whatever name it is offered - can exclude you from participating in the ever more complex world of money transfers and money laundering.
As an example, look at any of the symbols on the back of your ATM
card. Picture your bank refusing to accept the software that made it
possible to transfer funds from LA to St. Louis, or from St. Louis
to Rome.
In the Promis story it often shrinks to
two. It really is a small world.
After a series of demonstrations showing how well Promis could integrate the computers of dozens of US attorneys offices around the country, the Department of Justice (DoJ) ordered an application of the software under a tightly controlled and limited license.
From there, however, Meese, along with cronies D. Lowell Jensen (also no stranger to FTW's pages) and Earl Brian allegedly engaged in a conspiracy to steal the software, modify it to include a "trap door" that would allow those who knew of it to access the program in other computers, and then sell it overseas to foreign intelligence agencies.
Hamilton began to smell a rat when agencies
from other countries, like Canada, started asking him for support
services in French when he had never made sales to Canada.
As voluminously described by Inslaw attorney, the
late Elliot Richardson, the Israeli Mossad under the direction of
Rafi Eitan, allegedly modified the software yet again and sold it
throughout the Middle East. It was Eitan, the legendary Mossad
captor of Adolph Eichmann, according to Hamilton, who had
masqueraded as an Israeli prosecutor to enter Inslaw's DC offices
years earlier and obtain a first hand demonstration of what the
Promis could do.
It was Maxwell, capable of traveling the world and with enormous marketing resources, who
became the sales agent for Promis and then sold it to, among others,
the Canadian government. Maxwell drowned mysteriously in late 1991,
not long after investigative reporter Danny Casolaro was "suicided"
in West Virginia. Maxwell may not have been the only one to send Promis north.
And, as was later revealed from a number of directions, this initial tampering with the software was far from the only game in town.
Both the CIA,
through GE Aerospace in Herndon Virginia (GAO Contract #82F624620),
the FBI and elements of the NSA were tinkering with Promis, not just
to modify it with a trap door, but to enhance it with artificial
intelligence or AI. It's worth it to note that GE Aerospace was
subsequently purchased by Martin-Marietta which then merged to
become Lockheed-Martin the largest defense and aerospace contractor
in the world. This will become important later on.
As we'll see shortly, Promis came to life years before the election of Ronald Reagan.
It was also, according to Bill Tyree, an essential element
in the espionage conducted by Jonathan Pollard against not only the
US government but the Washington embassies of many nations targeted
by Israel's Mossad.
Even now questions linger as to what the Canadians were really after. But there is absolutely no question that while surreptitiously in the U.S. the Mounties spent more time with author and investigative reporter Cheri Seymour than with anyone else.
And
for good reason.
Anyone seeking to understand the Promis story must include this book as a part of their overall
research.
That investigation later connected to politicians like Tony Coelho and major corporations like MCA and eventually led to a shadowy scientist named Michael Riconosciuto.
Familiar names like Ted
Gunderson and relatively unknown names like Robert Booth Nichols
weave throughout this detailed epic that takes us to the Cabazon
Indian Reservation in the California Desert and into the deepest
recesses of the 1980s Reagan/Bush security apparatus.
In affidavits Riconosciuto claimed that one of the tasks he performed at the Cabazon reservation was to install a back door in the version of Promis that was sold to Canada. In August of this year the RCMP investigators told both Seymour and me that they had traveled to the reservation several times and had confirmed many details of Seymour's research. They had also interviewed Riconosciuto on more than one occasion.
As with everyone else I have ever met who has spoken with him, both the Mounties and Seymour kept a reserved distance from him and always,
By using treaties between the U.S. Government and Native American peoples that recognize Native American reservations as sovereign nations, the CIA has long and frequently avoided statutory prohibitions against operating inside the United States.
The financial rewards for tribal nations have been significant and the extra security afforded by tribal police in remote areas has been a real blessing for covert operatives.
The Last Circle describes in detail how Promis software was modified by Riconosciuto to allegedly include the back door "eavesdropping" capability but also enhanced with one form of AI and subsequently applied to the development of new weapons systems including "ethnospecific" biowarfare compounds capable of attacking specific races.
Riconosciuto, now serving time in a Federal prison in Pennsylvania has a cell a very short distance from fellow espionage inmates Edwin Wilson and Jonathan Pollard.
While his tale is critical to understanding what has happened to Promis, the fact remains that Riconosciuto has been out of the loop and in legal trouble for eight years. He has been in a maximum security prison for at least six. What was surprising was that in 1998 he contacted homicide detective Sue Todd in Hercules and told her that the murder of a father and son, execution style, was connected to the Promis story.
One connection was obvious.
Hercules
is a "company town" connected to a weapons manufacturer described in
Seymour's book that also connects to the Cabazon Indian Reservation.
It was during that time that I was a semi-regular visitor at the Fairfax, Virginia home of Bill McCoy, a loveable sixty-something giant, always adorned with a beret who complained ruthlessly about what had happened to the United States since "The Damned Yankee Army" had taken over.
Writers were "scribblers." People who thought they knew something about covert operations without ever having seen one were "spooky-groupies." "Mac," as we called him, had his investigative fingers in almost everything but he was most involved with Promis.
McCoy was a retired Chief Warrant Officer from the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division. He had broken some of the biggest cases in Army history. It was Mac who first introduced me to both Bill Tyree and to Bill Hamilton in 1994.
I recall scratching my head as I would be sitting at Mac's dinner table when a call would come in from Hamilton asking if there was any new information from Tyree.
Sometimes however, Tyree and Hamilton communicated directly.
To this day the identity of the
Sergeant Major remains a mystery and the puzzle piece most pursued
by the RCMP when they visited me in August, 2000.
FTW (From The Wilderness) has, within the
last month, received information indicating that piracy of Microsoft
products at the GE Aerospace Herndon facility were likely tied to
larger objectives, possibly the total compromise of any Windows
based product. It is not by chance that most of the military and all
of the intelligence agencies in the U.S. now operate on Macintosh
systems.
Asked about Mike Riconosciuto for this story Tyree would say only that,
Those
documents, as later described to me by RCMP Investigator Sean McDade,
proved to be "Awesome and right on the money."
Nowhere was this connection more clearly exposed than in understanding the relationship between three classmates from the U.S. Naval Academy:
The Tyree diagrams laid out in detail how Promis, after improvement with AI, had allegedly been mated with the software of Jackson Stephens' firm Systematics. In the late seventies and early eighties, Systematics handled some 60-70% of all electronic banking transactions in the U.S.
The goal, according to the diagrams which laid out (subsequently verified) relationships between Stephens, Worthen Bank, the Lippo Group and the drug/intelligence bank BCCI was to penetrate every banking system in the world.
This "cabal" could then use Promis both to predict and to influence the movement of financial markets worldwide.
Stephens, truly bipartisan in his approach to profits, has been a lifelong supporter of George Bush and he was, at the same time, the source of the $3 million loan that rescued a faltering Clinton Campaign in early 1992.
There is a great
photograph of Stephens with a younger George "W" Bush in the
excellent BCCI history,
False Profits.
Tyree recently told FTW that just before his death, he had given McCoy information on "Elbit" flash memory chips, allegedly designed at Kir Yat-Gat south of Tel Aviv. The unique feature of the Elbit chips was that they worked on ambient electricity in a computer. In other words, they worked when the computer was turned off.
When combined with another newly developed chip, the "Petrie," which was capable of storing up to six months worth of key strokes, it was now possible to burst transmit all of a computer's activity in the middle of the night to a nearby receiver - say in a passing truck or even a low flying SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) satellite.
According to Tyree this was the
methodology used by Jonathan Pollard and the Israeli Mossad to
compromise many foreign embassies in Washington.
The house had been sanitized and repainted and, aside
from the Zen garden in the back yard, there was no trace that McCoy
had ever lived there.
A feisty, innovative thinker she has seen raging success as a Managing Director of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon Read and she has been "nuked" into near poverty after devising software strategies seeking to optimize financial data and returns for the US taxpayer.
While acting as a HUD (United States Department of Housing and Urban Development) consultant in 1996, selling defaulted HUD Mortgages into the private market through her own investment bank, Hamilton Securities (no relation), she achieved unheard of taxpayer returns of around 90 cents on the dollar.
In doing so she ran afoul of an
entrenched Washington financial power structure feeding uncompetitively at the HUD trough.
Suddenly, in
August 1996, DoJ and HUD Inspector's General investigations started
that seized her computers and resulted in a four-year blatantly
illegal campaign to crush everything she stood for. No charges were
ever brought, Fitts, her money and her data are still viciously
separated.
The Harvard Endowment is not really a benevolent university fund but an aggressive investment predator with $19 billion in assets, some from HUD subsidized housing. Harvard also has a number of other investments in high tech defense operations and had a big hand in investing George W Bush's lackluster firm Harken Energy.
"W" has a Harvard MBA. Fitts' chief nemesis at Harvard, Herbert "Pug" Winokur, head of Capricorn Investments, and member of the board of the Harvard Endowment is also a PhD mathematician from Harvard where the mathematical breakthroughs that gave rise to Artificial Intelligence using block-modeling research were discovered.
In the 60s Winokur had done social science research
for the Department of Defense on causes of inner city unrest in the
wake of the 1967 Detroit riots.
According to a Harvard website,
Things grew more suspicious as Fitts' research disclosed that Winokur, through Capricorn Investments, had a decisive role in the 1980s management of the intelligence/government outsourcing mega-firm DynCorp, of Reston, VA. Winokur served as DynCorp CEO from 1989 to 1997.
DynCorp handles everything for Uncle Sam from aircraft maintenance, to sheep-dipping of combat troops into private assault forces in Colombia, to the financial management of HUD records, to the maintenance of computer security at government facilities. One of DynCorp's most interesting contracts is with the DoJ for the financial management of assets seized in the drug war.
DynCorp also counts among its shareholders former CIA Director James Woolsey.
Pug Winokur made
DynCorp what it
is today and he still sits on the board.
Where did all that money go? $59 billion in an
election year is a staggering amount of money. Why is no one
screaming? HUD's explanation is that it was loading a new accounting
system that did not work and then did not bother to balance its
checkbook for over a year.
One other surprise was to come out of Fitts' investigations that had months earlier led her to conclude that she was up against Promis-related interests. On the very day that DoJ and HUD shut her down she was discussing software development with a Canadian firm that is at the heart of the Canadian space program, Geomatics.
The
term Geomatics applies to a related group of sciences
- all involving satellite imagery - used to develop geographic
information systems, global positioning systems and remote sensing
from space that can actually determine the locations of natural
resources such as oil, precious metals and other commodities.
Geomatics technology,
launched aboard Canadian satellites via US, European or Japanese
boosters can help developing or industrialized nations inventory and
manage all of their natural resources. There are also several
Geomatics related companies in the U.S. including one not far from
the Johnson Space center in Houston.
An AI enhanced, Promis-based program would then be the perfect
set up to make billions of dollars in profits by watching and
manipulating the world's political climate to trade in, let's say
Tungsten futures. Such a worldwide database would be even more
valuable if there were, for example, a sudden surge in the price of
gold or platinum.
They had already consumed most of the FTW web
site and were well familiar with my writings. I had let them know,
through Cheri, that I did have information on Promis from Bill Tyree
and that I would be happy to share it. Before getting into details
we all went out for lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant.
It happened to me once.
All of us understood two things about that arrangement and we discussed them openly.
The chief concern of the Mounties, clearly, was to ascertain whether or not their version of Promis was one that was compromised.
McDade also described in detail how he knew that supposedly secure RCMP communications equipment had been compromised by the NSA.
The Mounties acknowledged regular meetings
with Cheri Seymour but evinced none of the interest she said that
they had previously shown in the Mossad. With me their single-minded
focus was Bill Tyree and where and how he obtained his information.
That information was obviously being shared with the Mounties and that implied the blessings of the FBI. In short, a domestic law enforcement officer was sharing information with agents of a foreign government. In some cases that could provoke espionage charges but in this case it was apparently sanctioned.
The Hercules murder victims had no apparent connection to Promis software in any way except for the fact that Riconosciuto had possessed knowledge about the murders which he had provided to Todd from prison.
The Hercules
Armament Corporation, featured in
The Last Circle, was an obvious
link. I also noted that the father in Todd's case had been a
computer engineer with passions for both geological research and
hypnosis and no other visible connections to the Promis story.
I also provided documents showing that Stephens' financial
firm Alltel, heir to Systematics, was moving heavily into the
mortgage market. As the Mounties repeatedly pressed for information
on the identity of the Sergeant Major I referred them to Tyree
directly through his attorney Ray Kohlman and to Tyree's closest
friend, the daughter of CIA bagman and paymaster Albert Carone, Dee
Ferdinand. [For more on Carone visit the FTW web site].
According to Tyree and other sources, after an Indian reservation, the safest place in the world that no one will ever break into is a nuclear waste dump. This also applies to containers in transit between countries. The radioactive warning label guarantees unmolested movement of virtually anything.
Promis
software is apparently no exception.
A retired NYPD Detective, also a made-member of the Genovese crime family, Carone spent his entire working career as a CIA operative. (FTW has special reports on both Bill Tyree and Al Carone available from the web site or at the end of this newsletter).
For more than 25 years before his mysterious death in 1990, Al Carone served as a bagman and liaison between George Bush, CIA Director Bill Casey, Oliver North, Richard Nixon and many other prominent figures including Robert Vesco, Manuel Noriega and Ferdinand Marcos.
The Carone-Tyree connection,
covered in detail in the Sept. 1998 issue (Vol. I, No.7) goes back
to operations in the mid 1970s when Tyree, serving with the Special
Forces, engaged in CIA directed missions for which Carone was the
paymaster.
In 1996, Carone's daughter, Dee Ferdinand, discovered that Tyree and Carone had known each other and that Tyree could prove instrumental in helping to restore Carone's lost fortune. Ferdinand filed suit in U.S. District Court this spring seeking to recover pensions, insurance policies and benefits in a case which has no known connection to Promis.
I have
known Ferdinand and her family for more than seven years. Never once
has she mentioned a connection between her father and Promis
although she was well familiar with the case from Tyree and
conversations with Bill Hamilton. I had referred the Mounties to her
because of my belief that she could possibly help identify Tyree's
source, the Sergeant Major.
Paragraph 6 of that document (prepared for another case) stated,
Dee Ferdinand called me immediately. The letter had nothing to do with her suit. It mentioned Canada. Canada was not even mentioned in her suit.
McDade didn't grasp the concept at first. He was a straight-ahead street cop. But I had been through something similar when serving as the press spokesman for the Perot Presidential campaign in 1992.
I explained it to Sean,
A week later McDade told me that the dates were indeed significant -
very significant. That's all he would say.
Aside from the then recent Russian invasion of Afghanistan, a saga in which the Canadian government played a minor role, the largest drama on the world scene was the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in January 1979, the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran later that year. The Canadian government and the CIA worked very closely in Iran, the Canadian Embassy even housing some CIA personnel who had escaped the crowds of students.
But that
kind of assistance is not something to hide. Another explanation was
needed to explain shock waves in Ottawa.
Promis is able to do this because funds can be transferred out of accounts without a trace.
Remember the trap door?
The rule of thumb here is that crooks, especially CIA sponsored crooks, don't usually go to the cops when somebody steals their stolen money. From my personal experience in the era, and direct exposure to two members of the Iranian Royal family, both before and after the overthrow, I am acutely aware that the Shah, then perhaps the richest man in the world, was actually targeted by the CIA. His downfall was no accident.
Once worth more than $20 billion, the Shah ended his life
a refugee in Egypt. Many of his billions disappeared and the family
was very upset about it.
Where'd all that money go?
The cat was out of the bag. Various figures known to have direct connections to Riconosciuto had been virtually dogging the Mounties' every move as they traveled in the US. One even contacted me just days after the Mounties left LA.
It was a story that could not be kept under wraps forever. Most of the Star story was accurate. It was going to be difficult for the RCMP to move quietly now.
A Reuters story the same day closed with the following paragraphs,
That was Geomatics, at the heart of Canada's space program, Canada's flagship space technology. I checked the Star story. There had been no mention of high tech or space related issues.
What did Reuters know?
In mid September, after receiving confidential source documents related to the case telling me that one version of Promis, modified in Canada was handled through the Canadian firm I.P. Sharp, I got an answer.
A quick search on the web revealed that Sharp, a well
documented component of the case, had been bought by a Reuters
company in the early 90s. Hamilton later told me that he had heard
that Reuters possibly had the Promis software. That would explain
how they knew about the aerospace connection.
Their business was keeping secrets, not
revealing them. The Mounties had made waves.
Over the course of the next half an hour Tyree, obviously reading from detailed and copious notes, named individuals and companies dealing with Promis software and its progeny. The tape was specific down to naming specific engineers in military and private corporations doing Promis research.
Tyree described specific Congressional committees that had been infiltrated with "enhanced" Promis.
Tyree described how Promis
progeny, having inspired four new computer languages had made
possible the positioning of satellites so far out in space that they
were untouchable. At the same time the progeny had improved video
quality to the point where the same satellite could focus on a
single human hair. The ultimate big picture.
Names like Sandia, Cal-Tech, Micron, Tech University of Graz, Oded Leventer and Massimo Grimaldi rolled from his lips as he tore through the pages of notes. Data, such as satellite reconnaissance, could also now be downloaded from a satellite directly into a human brain. The evolution of the artificial intelligence had progressed to a point where animal behavior and thought were being decoded. Mechanical humans were being tested.
Animals were being controlled by computer.
He was laughing as he facetiously described what was coming as some sort of bizarre payback for the War of 1812.
Then, placing the evolutions of Promis in context with the Canadian story Tyree asked a question as to why one would really now need to go to all the trouble of monitoring all of a foreign country's intelligence operations.
He described how Canada had been provided with modified Promis software which Canada then modified, or thought they had modified, again to eliminate the trap door.
That software turned loose in the financial and scientific communities then became Canada's means of believing that they were securing the trap door information from the entities to whom they provided their versions of Promis. But, unknown, to the Canadians the Elbit chips in the systems bypassed the trap doors and permitted the transmission of data when everyone thought the computers were turned off and secure.
Tyree did not explain how the chips physically got into the Canadian computers.
Tyree affirmed.
The Labor Government of
Whitlam had been suddenly unseated after making nationalistic noise
and questioning the role of US intelligence agencies in Australian
affairs.
Tyree jumped in,
He continued,
After describing in some detail how the financial powers-that-be had gutted American manufacturing productivity through globalization he described a strategy intended to halt any move by the Euro to overshadow the dollar or even compete with it.
It was pure economic hostage taking and Canada would be the object lesson. Then, chillingly, he described something familiar to any military strategist.
The penetration and looting of HUD (United States Department of Housing and Urban Development) was the test bed, the proving ground, the "White Sands" of the Promis economic Atom bomb. Once the CIA and the economic powers-that-be had proven that, over a period of years, they could infiltrate and loot $59 billion dollars from HUD, they knew that they could do it anywhere.
Said Tyree,
It took several days to reach Sean McDade who had been on vacation. I played the Tyree tape for him over an open phone line into RCMP headquarters. He asked me to make a physical copy right away and send it to him.
After he had had time to listen to it he cautioned me against sending it anywhere else. I told him that as long as his investigation was active that I would do nothing more than make the standard copies I make of any sensitive documents as a precaution. I could tell that the tape had rattled him.
Though I had known from the start that the large and energetic Mountie, whom I believed to be a dedicated an honest man, would never be allowed to ride his case out to the end, I still had hopes.
But in my heart I knew that Tyree was right. In all the years he had been feeding me information I had never known him to be wrong and, apparently, neither had Bill Hamilton. I did not send a copy of the tape to Hamilton because I knew how difficult and potentially dangerous McDade's job was going to be now that the press had exposed him.
Having been a cop in
dangerous political, CIA infested waters I knew what it was like to
not know who you could trust.
That was as shocking a statement as it was absurd.
Hamilton was as emphatic as I was that McDade had said that RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) had Promis.
So was Cheri Seymour. I offered a fleeting hope
that the Mounties were playing a game, saying that they had
terminated the investigation to shake some of the incessant probing
that had been taking place around McDade's every move.
Even though she was convincing I had the feeling that she was playing back a rehearsed script. I told her that I was not satisfied with the statements that there was no Promis in the RCMP. I recalled our lunchtime conversation of August 3rd.
She agreed with me that the RCMP mission was to determine whether or not RCMP Promis was a stolen or compromised version. She knew that they had it. So did I.
I e-mailed McDade one last time saying that I was going to write it like I remembered it.
He never got back to me.
Though I didn't tell him at the time I knew that he had obtained that information from Bill Tyree.
And Bill Tyree and his provider, the Sergeant Major, are two people
that Bill Hamilton and I both have learned to respect.
In an address the night before, less than 48 hours after the termination of the RCMP investigation, Derek Burney, current President of CAE, a Canadian firm manufacturing flight simulators, criticized the U.S. aerospace industry for being overly-protectionist under the guise of national security.
In addressing the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada, according to large stories that appeared in CP (Canadian Press) and Toronto's Globe and Mail, Burney was characterized as sounding unusually tough in his criticism of American policy that was freezing Canadian firms out of aerospace contracts.
Both stories were ambivalent in that they alternately
made Burney sound critical of the U.S. while championing Canadian
interests and at the same time weak as he noted that Mexico stood
poised under NAFTA to replace Canada as the U.S.'s number one
trading partner.
Then it closed it's story on Burney's speech, advocating a compromise agreement between the US and Canada, by saying that Burney's position,
A close examination of Burney's remarks, published in the INDG bulletin revealed something more like an obsequious surrender rather than a mere sellout.
While there were a few tough-talking paragraphs that saved Canadian face, the essence of the speech was that Burney believed that American defense firms, the largest of which is Lockheed-Martin, were poised to transfer the bulk of their contracts to companies in Mexico.
Citing Canada's dependence upon access to
American avionics and "databases," Burney painted a picture that
seemingly left Canada over a barrel. Without access to American
technology the Canadian aerospace industry could not function.
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