I love It’s a Wonderful Life because it teaches us that family, friendship, and virtue are the true definitions of wealth.

In 1947, however, the FBI considered this anti-cosumerist message as subversive Communist propaganda (read original FBI memo).

According to Professor John Noakes of Franklin and Marshall College, the FBI thought Life smeared American values such as wealth and free enterprise while glorifying anti-American values such as the triumph of the common man.

The FBI specifically detested the way Mr. Potter was portrayed:

The casting of Lionel Barrymore as a “scrooge-type” resulted in the loathsome Mr. Potter becoming the most hated person in the film. According to the official FBI report, “this was a common trick used by the communists.” (more…)

Congressional report criticizes FBI on lingering questions

WASHINGTON — The FBI failed to fully investigate information suggesting other suspects may have helped Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, allowing questions to linger more than a decade after the deadly attack, a congressional inquiry concludes.

The House International Relations investigative subcommittee will release the findings of its two-year-review as early as Wednesday, declaring there is no conclusive evidence of a foreign connection to the attack but that far too many questions remain.

The subcommittee’s report will conclude there is no doubt McVeigh and Nichols were the main perpetrators, and it discloses for the first time that Nichols confirmed to House investigators he participated in the robbery of an Arkansas gun dealer that provided the proceeds for the attack. (more…)

If I had an hour, I would talk to you about how the 9/11 Report failed to reconcile Dick Cheney’s conflicting accounts, which cannot all be true, of what he did on the morning of 9/11 in the bunker beneath the White House. But that story takes two whole chapters of my forthcoming book, The Road to 9/11. So instead I will expand on what I spoke about a month ago in Berkeley, concerning Ali Mohamed, Washington’s double agent inside al-Qaeda, and also a chief 9/11 plotter.(1) I want to add important new material tonight. Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian, was a close ally of Osama bin Laden. As he later confessed in court, he also aided the terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, a co-founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and by then an aide to bin Laden, when he visited America to raise money.(2) It is now generally admitted that Ali Mohamed worked for the FBI, the CIA, and U.S. Special Forces.

Patrick Fitzgerald, who testified to the 9/11 Commission about Ali Mohamed, knew him well. In 1994 he had named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in the New York landmarks case, yet allowed him to remain free. This was because, as Fitzgerald knew, Ali Mohamed was an FBI informant, from at least 1993 and maybe 1989.(3) Thus, from 1994 “until his arrest in 1998 [by which time the 9/11 plot was well under way], Mohamed shuttled between California, Afghanistan, Kenya, Somalia and at least a dozen other countries.”(4)

What I first wrote in 2004, and again in 9/11 and American Empire, has to my knowledge has not yet been in the US press: it is that in 1993 Ali Mohamed had been detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada, (when he inquired at an airport after an incoming al Qaeda terrorist who turned out to be carrying two forged Saudi passports). Mohamed immediately told the RCMP to make a phone call to the FBI in the United States, and the call secured his release.(5) This release enabled Ali to go on to Kenya, take pictures of the U.S.. Embassy, and deliver them to bin Laden for the Embassy bombing plot. (more…)

The final pages of an FBI surveillance report on John Lennon have been released after a lengthy legal battle.

The documents contain new details about Lennon’s ties to left-wing and anti-war groups in London in the early 1970s.

Historian Jon Wiener told the LA Times they showed Lennon rebuffed UK leftists who asked him to fund a bookshop.

Mr Weiner worked for 25 years to obtain the papers despite the FBI claiming they could compromise another country’s security services. (more…)

Some kept visiting schools for 3 years after FBI caught them on tape

A Midtown strip mall that should have housed the best of the best served as Corruption Central in Tucson.

Two military recruiting stations sit side-by-side there, one run by the Army, the other by the Marines. Between them, a total of seven recruiters were on the take, secretly accepting bribes to transport cocaine, even as most spent their days visiting local high schools.

They had help from several more recruiters at an Army National Guard office, where one recruiter was said to be selling cocaine from the trunk of his recruiting vehicle.

Together, these dozen or so recruiters formed the nucleus of one of the FBI’s biggest public corruption cases, the sting known as Operation Lively Green, which unfolded in Southern Arizona from 2002-2004 and was made public last year. (more…)

It should come as no surprise that cellphone calls may be tapped by law enforcement.

But authorities also can use cellphones to eavesdrop on suspects, even when the devices are off.

The FBI converted the Nextel cellphones of two alleged New York mobsters into “roving bugs,” microphones that relayed conversations when the phones seemed to be inactive, according to recent court documents.

Authorities won’t reveal how they did this. But a countersurveillance expert said Nextel, Motorola Razr and Samsung 900 series cellphones can be reprogrammed over the air, using methods meant for delivering upgrades and maintenance. It’s called “flashing the firmware,” said James Atkinson, a consultant for the Granite Island Group in Massachusetts. (more…)

Note: The following report was published before it was announced today that Senator Johnson had suffered a stroke.

A cadre of U.S. lawmakers fired off a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales pleading for new information on the five-years-and-running investigation into the 2001 anthrax scare that shocked South Dakota when then-Sen. Tom Daschle’s office was caught up in the attacks.

The bipartisan letter, signed by 33 members of Congress this week, extends an effort by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., to persuade the FBI to release an update on the case.

“In one of the most important terrorism investigations ever undertaken by the FBI, it is unbelievable to me that members of Congress, some who were targets of the anthrax attacks, haven’t been briefed for years,” Grassley said.

The FBI, citing concern about information in the unsolved case being leaked to the public, has refused lawmakers’ requests. (more…)

CHICAGO — A Muslim convert who talked about his desire to wage jihad against civilians was charged Friday in a plot to set off hand grenades at a shopping mall at the height of the Christmas rush, authorities said.

Investigators said Derrick Shareef, 22, an American citizen from Rockford, was acting alone and never actually obtained any grenades. He was arrested Wednesday when he met with an undercover agent in a parking lot to trade a set of stereo speakers for four hand grenades and a gun, authorities said.

“He fixed on a day of December 22nd on Friday … because it was the Friday before Christmas and thought that would be the highest concentration of shoppers that he could kill and injure,” said Robert Grant, the agent in charge of the Chicago FBI office.

Authorities said Shareef had been under investigation since September, when he told an acquaintance that “he wanted to commit acts of violent jihad against targets in the United States as well as commit other crimes.”

Yeah, that sounds plausible… (more…)

A man who wanted to carry out a “violent jihad” was arrested after he agreed to obtain hand grenades from a government informant to try to blow up a shopping mall, the FBI said on Friday.

The announcement said Derrick Shareef, 22, of Rockford, Illinois, was under surveillance the entire time and did not pose a threat to public safety.

The FBI-led Chicago Joint Terrorism Task Force said Shareef was charged with one count of attempting to damage or destroy a building by fire or explosion and one count of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. The FBI did not say if he was a U.S. citizen.

Bush’s poll numbers hit new record lows and out come the terrorism frame-ups… (more…)

WASHINGTON — Senators frustrated by scant details on the Bush administration’s domestic eavesdropping program on Wednesday rapped FBI Director Robert Mueller for refusing to show how it has curbed terrorist activity in the United States.

Mueller said he was unable to talk about the warrantless spying program because it is classified.

“What assurances can you provide that the program is worthwhile?” asked Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa. “Have arrests been made? Have terror cells been broken?”

The FBI has briefed congressional intelligence committees on the controversial program, but Mueller said he did not have permission to share that information with other lawmakers — including the judiciary panels that oversee the bureau. (more…)

Flatulence brought 99 passengers on an American Airlines flight to an unscheduled visit to Nashville early Monday morning.

American Flight 1053, from Washington Reagan National Airport and bound for Dallas/Fort Worth, made an emergency landing here after passengers reported smelling struck matches, said Lynne Lowrance, a spokeswoman for the Nashville International Airport Authority.

The plane landed safely. The FBI, Transportation Safety Administration and airport authority responded to the emergency, Lowrance said.

The passengers and five crew members were brought off the plane, together with all the luggage, to go through security checks again. Bomb-sniffing dogs found spent matches. (more…)

The FBI has been dragged into the investigation of Alexander Litvinenko’s death after details emerged that he had planned to make tens of thousands of pounds blackmailing senior Russian spies and business figures.
The Observer has obtained remarkable testimony from a Russian academic, Julia Svetlichnaja, who met Litvinenko earlier this year and received more than 100 emails from him. In a series of interviews, she reveals that the former Russian secret agent had documents from the FSB, the Russian agency formerly known as the KGB. He had asked Svetlichnaja, who is based in London, to enter into a business deal with him and ‘make money’.

Litvinenko also handed a series of pictures of himself to Svetlichnaja that are published by The Observer today. One shows him with murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another serving as an army officer in an elite Russian army unit two decades ago and the third draped in the Union flag celebrating getting his British passport just before he was poisoned. (more…)

Update: The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a “roving bug,” and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

Nextel cell phones owned by two alleged mobsters, John Ardito and his attorney Peter Peluso, were used by the FBI to listen in on nearby conversations. The FBI views Ardito as one of the most powerful men in the Genovese family, a major part of the national Mafia.The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the “roving bug” was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect’s cell phone. (more…)