Nixon Fixation Pushes Professor to Listen to All Tapes. Richard Nixon is always on Luke Nichter’s mind, so much so that the history professor was chatting about the 37th president’s European policies while his wife was giving birth. Nichter has spent the last decade listening to almost 3,000 hours of secretly recorded White House tapes of Nixon being Nixon, unvarnished. He has come to know Nixon’s views and locution so well that he finds himself subconsciously finishing the 37th president’s sentences. The result of his obsession is a new book, “The Nixon Tapes,” published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to coincide with the 40th anniversary today of the president’s resignation from office. It is a 768-page tome of transcripts of recordings made in 1971 and 1972.
Nichter is one of a handful of researchers who have listened to almost all the tapes that have been released by the National Archives. Avoiding Watergate Nichter and Brinkley plan to address the Watergate cover-up and associated criminal activity in a second volume of transcripts. New Field. When Wikileaks “Scoops” NARA on Their Own Publicly Available Documents, It’s Time for Agencies to Fully Embrace Effectively Digitizing All-Things FOIA. On Monday, Wikileaks “released” the “Kissinger Cables,” (also called the Public Library of US Diplomacy or PlusD) a fascinating collection of 1.7 million U.S. diplomatic correspondences from the mid-1970s.
The cables are easily sifted through thanks to the sleek, high-powered search function Wikileaks built for their “release,” making the collection all the more appealing to document hounds. As a result, documents that would likely have fallen through the cracks if not for the interest generated by all-things Wikileaks are receiving much deserved attention and are producing some very important revelations. The only problem is, Wikileaks didn’t “release” the cables. They were released electronically by the National Archives and Records Administration in 2006. A side-by-side image of the NARA and Wikileaks search functions. Like this: Like Loading... Cold War History Research Center. Shooting down the Star Wars myth. Osama bin Laden documents captured during raid. Poland risks Russia's wrath with Soviet nuclear attack map | World news. Poland's new rightwing government yesterday risked a damaging confrontation with Russia when it published a Warsaw Pact map showing detailed plans for Soviet nuclear strikes against western Europe.
Poland threw open the doors of its military archives to show how most of Europe would have been laid to waste in a nuclear conflagration between east and west. Dating from 1979, when presidents Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev were discussing detente, the map showed how Warsaw Pact forces would have responded to an attack by the Nato alliance. A series of red mushroom clouds over western Europe show that Soviet nuclear weapons strikes would have been launched at Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium if Nato had struck first. Red clouds are drawn over the then German capital, Bonn, and other key German cities such as the financial centre of Frankfurt, Cologne, Stuttgart, Munich and the strategically important northern port of Hamburg.
SisleyEgliseMoret. The SOLO File: Declassified Documents Detail 'The FBI's Most Valued Secret Agents of the Cold War' Tim Weiner on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, April 9, 2012. Washington, D.C., April 10, 2012 – The "FBI's most valued secret agents of the Cold War," brothers Morris and Jack Childs, together codenamed SOLO, reported back to J. Edgar Hoover starting in 1958 about face-to-face meetings with top Soviet and Chinese Communist leaders including Mao and Khrushchev, while couriering Soviet funds for the American Communist Party, according to newly declassified FBI files cited in the new book by Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012).
For more on Enemies, see last night's broadcast of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, featuring Tim Weiner, and the reviews by The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. FBI Director J, Edgar Hoover's most valued secret agent was a naturalized citizen of Russian/Ukrainian/Jewish origins named Morris Childs. Researchers have been requesting these documents for years, and with good reason. . – William Burr. Declassified State Department Cables On Al Qaeda-Linked Cell in California | INTELWIRE.com | Terrorism news and analysis, investigative reports and exclusive documents | By J.M. Berger, author of Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go To War In The Name Of Islam, Al.
State Department cables obtained by INTELWIRE describe Ayman Al Zawahiri's trip to California in 1995 and the activities of an Al Qaeda-linked terrorist cell in Northern California. The general outline of the cell's activities has been previously reported in newspapers and in Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam. The documents, obtained from the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act, detail the trial of a group of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operatives captured in Egypt and Albania, with the latter being deported to Egypt. Because of this, the trial became known as the "Returnees from Albania" case.
One of those tried in the case was Khaled Abu El Dahab, a naturalized U.S. citizen who lived in California with the notorious Al Qaeda infiltrator Ali Mohamed. Dahab was arrested in Egypt. Click here to read the full documents According to the cables: What's a Louis-Philippe commode? - By Daniel Engber. California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham resigned on Monday and pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion, and accepting millions of dollars in bribes.
Included in his haul of illegal gifts was an 1850 Louis-Philippe commode purchased from an antique store—along with another 19th-century commode—for $7,200. What's a Louis-Philippe commode? A pretty nice chest of drawers. In English, a "commode" can refer either to a toilet—more precisely, one with a removable chamber pot—or a kind of bureau. The word comes from French, where the adjective "commode" means "convenient" or "agreeable," and the noun refers to a piece of furniture with drawers. French furniture styles are categorized by political epoch. Louis-Philippe ruled France with the support of the bourgeoisie. The plain design and relative ubiquity of Louis-Philippe commodes make them far less valuable than those of earlier periods. Got a question about today's news?
A Look Back at the Soviet Army. “The Soviet Army is the best prepared force in the world to conduct both offensive and defensive NBC [nuclear, biological and chemical] operations,” according to a 1984 U.S. Army manual (large pdf) that is newly available online. The three-part manual, based on Soviet military literature and other open sources, provides a dauntingly detailed account of almost every aspect of Soviet military structure and operations. So, for example: “The Soviets recognize three basic types of smoke screens: blinding, camouflaging, and decoy. Each type is classified as being frontal, oblique, or flank in nature, depending on the placement of the screen.” Perhaps of equal or greater importance, the manual implicitly documents the U.S.
Army’s perception of the Soviet military late in the Cold War. “In the Soviet view, the correlation of forces has been shifting in favor of the socialist camp since the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Behind the Censorship of Operation Dark Heart. By censoring Anthony Shaffer’s new book “Operation Dark Heart” even though uncensored review copies are already available in the public domain, the Department of Defense has produced a genuinely unique product: a revealing snapshot of the way that the Obama Administration classifies national security information in 2010.
With both versions before them (excerpts), readers can see for themselves exactly what the Pentagon classifiers wanted to withhold, and can judge for themselves whether the secrecy they tried to impose can be justified on valid national security grounds. In the majority of instances, the results of such an inspection seem disappointing, if not very surprising, and they tend to confirm the most skeptical view of the operation of the classification system.
The most commonly repeated “redaction” in Operation Dark Heart is the author’s cover name, “Christopher Stryker,” that he used while serving in Afghanistan. Many other redactions are extremely tenuous. Clinton PDDs and PRDs. I somehow missed the fact that the Clinton Library has posted online six declassified Presidential Decision Directives (PDD) and two Presidential Review Directives, most of which involve nuclear weapons, ballistic missile defense and space policy. PDD-17: U.S. Policy on Ballistic Missile Defenses and the Future of the ABM Treaty PDD-23: US Policy on Foreign Access to Remote Sensing Space Capabilities PDD-25: U.S. Policy on Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations PDD-30: U.S. PDD-39: U.S . PDD-47: Nuclear Scientific and Technical Cooperation with Russia Related to Stockpile Safety and Security and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) Monitoring and Verification PRD-13: Multilateral Peacekeeping Operations PRD-31: U.S.
Two of the PDDs were were unknown (17, 47) , while others were not previously available in full-text (23, 25. and 30) There are interesting posts to be written about many of these documents, but allow me to just do some housekeeping on the missile defense docs. The Middle East 1916-2001 : A Documentary Recor. Index of /lawweb/avalon. NS-Archiv : Dokumente zum Nationalsozialismus. Declassified/Released Document Collections. Keystone Pipeline Project Ronald Reagan’s June 12, 1987 Speech at the Brandenburg Gate Korean Air Flight 858 February 15, 2006 draft memorandum by Counselor of the Department Philip Zelikow Re: The McCain Amendment and U.S.
Obligations under Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture Frequently Requested Contracts Rwandan Declassification Collection Colombian Declassification Collection Venezuelan Declassification Collection The Segovia (Antioquia) Massacre, 1988 Death of Danilo Anderson 2006 Mexican Presidential Election Department of State FOIA Logs (2005-2010) Alleged CIA, “Ghost,” or “Secret” Detainees Collection Argentina Declassification Collection - Includes newly released information Niger/Iraq Uranium Story and Joe Wilson 1973-1976 Telegrams Transferred to NARA State Department Collections Argentina Declassification Press Releases/Statements • 08/20/2002 State Department Press Release Chile Declassification Press Releases/Statements Other Agency Chile Declassification Documents.
The National Security Archive. The Nuclear Vault: U.S. Nuclear Detection and Counterterrorism, Washington, D.C., January 23, 2009 - When the 9/11 hijackers crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. nuclear bomb squad was out of the country on its first foreign deployment since 1998, at a British air base in the Cotswolds, according to the new book Defusing Armageddon and key primary sources posted today in the National Security Archive's Nuclear Vault by Archive senior fellow Jeffrey T. Richelson. The after-action report from that deployment, "DOE EXERCISE 03-01 JACKAL CAVE," notes the early termination of the exercise because of the terrorist attacks, but finds some useful "strengths and weaknesses" including the need to "[i]ssue secure international cell phones to control members and team leaders. " According to the book, the exercise involved more than 500 personnel, 62 aircraft, 420 short tons of cargo, and the CIA as well as a special operations force that would seize a mock nuclear device that the squad would disable.
By Jeffrey T. Richelson. The Nuclear Vault: The Iranian Nuclear Program, 1974-1978. Washington, D.C., January 13, 2009 - During the 1970s the Shah of Iran argued, like current Iranian leaders today, for a nuclear energy capability on the basis of national "rights," while the Ford and Carter administrations worried about nuclear weapons possibilities, according to newly declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive for the first time. Uranium enrichment capability is now the major point of controversy between Tehran and the world community, while during the 1970s Washington's greatest concern was that Iran sought a capability to produce plutonium, but in both instances the implication was that a nuclear weapons option might not be far away.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution derailed the agreement, but the approach that the Ford and Carter administrations took shows significant continuity with contemporary U.S. and world policy, which holds that Iran must not use its technological capabilities to produce nuclear weapons. Read the Documents 1a: U.S. More Audio of Nixon-Kissinger Tapes. During his tenure as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Dr. Henry A. Kissinger directed his staff to prepare transcripts of his telephone conversations, or telcons, with presidents Nixon and Ford, government officials, foreign leaders and ambassadors, backchannel contacts, journalists, friends, and others. According to the official finding aid published online by the National Archives and Records Administration, “Initially, secretaries listened in on calls using a ‘dead key’ extension on the phone system and prepared summaries of conversations.
This practice was later refined and resulted in verbatim transcripts transcribed from secretarial shorthand notes. While most of the conversations were recorded by secretaries listening in on ‘dead keys,’ many conversations were recorded mechanically with tapes that were immediately transcribed and then destroyed.”[2] The telcons are a unique and nearly verbatim record of diplomacy.[3] 1. 4. B. 1. 2. Richard A. Luke A.
UNREDACTED - Firefox. On Morning of 9/11 Rumsfeld Warned of Ballistic Missiles, Not Terrorism. Rumsfeld inspects a ground based interceptor missile at Fort Greeley, Alaska. On the morning of 11 September 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with Republican lawmakers to make his case as to why they had to fully support President Bush’s Missile Defense Program in the upcoming defense budget. According to recently declassified talking points from the breakfast meeting, Rumsfeld argued that the Republican congressmen must act to “defend ourselves, our friends and allies against the real and growing threat of ballistic missiles.”
One of Rumsfeld’s arguments bemoaned that: “The United States spent approximately $11 billion last year on counter-terrorism efforts, nearly twice last year’s missile defense research costs.” As the meeting was coming to a close, Rumsfeld recalled that “someone walked in and handed [me] a note that said that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.” The 2003 response to the snowflake listed eleven house members whom Rumsfeld met with. Like this: Moldovian MiGs for Sale! Get ‘Em While Their Hot! A Yugoslav MiG-29 Interested in buying a nuclear-capable Soviet MiG-29 bomber from a former Soviet republic at a bargain basement price? Well if so, have I got the hot doc for you! It’s a secret 22 September 1997 State Department Cable sent from the American Embassy in Moldova to the Office of the Secretary of State. It informed the Secretary that the Embassy that Moldovan officials were shopping 27 MiGs, and suggested that the US snap them up before another (rouge?)
State did. It reminds me a bit of the fictional Lord or War (Nick Cage’s character is based upon Oleg Orlov) and the contemporaneous “Merchant of Death,” Viktor Bout. Document Hounds, note the REFTEL... we've already MDRed it. The memo states that a US citizen, Michael R. The Ambassador wisely pointed out to the businessman Spak that “the broker’s commission would either increase the price paid by the USG [US government], reduce the proceeds received by the Moldovan Government, or both.” Like this: Like Loading... “Anti-Duvalier Haitians might seek revenge, even after 20 years.” President Obama embraces openness on day one. The Reagan Files. History Matters Home Page - Firefox. Cold War International History Project. The National Archives of the United Kingdom.
The nuclear information project. Excerpts: Letter to Stalin on Katyn. Updates now at news.intelwire.com | INTELFILES Terrorism Blog | J.M. Berger | Investigative reporting on terrorism, research, Freedom of Information Act, War on Terror, television production, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Ali Mohamed, Al Qaeda, World Trade Cent. Previously Classified Documents On Srebrenica Massacre And More | INTELWIRE.com | Terrorism news and analysis, investigative reports and exclusive documents | Edited by J.M. Berger, Al Qaeda terrorism expert, documentary maker, author, special subjects in. The FOIA Project | Freeing information through public accountability. Cryptome.