Digital Memory:, What some of us were thinking after 9/11 Options

[painter]

Some people are extremely organized in the way they record and save data. I'm not one of them. However, I've been digging through some of my old files and have come up with a few things that date back to around 9/11. I thought it might be of interest to some to see what a few of us were thinking at or around the time.

To set the stage, here is the email we (those of us on the cia-drugs yahoo group email list) received from Michael Ruppert on 9/11:

Subject: Start Taking Notes

Now is the time that all of us need to be the best investigators that we can possibly be. I suggest that, in the earliest moments, some of us take responsibility for monitoring CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and MS-NBC to log reports as they come in. As with previous stories of lesser magnitude our strengths lay in keeping side by side evaluations and watching for discrepancies and alterations.

Effective response and evaluation will be based upon fact and careful analysis. These first minutes and hours are critical and we will never have them again. Please try to avoid speculation as you what will happen or who did what. We only waste the precious minutes that we have that will never be here again.

Whatever is going to happen is now beyond our control. It is already too late to change these immediate events. I have the same fears as all of you. I strongly suspect that martial law will be imposed fairly quickly.

Avoid speculation, please and become information vampires.

Prayers and peace to all.

Mike Ruppert www.copvcia.com

[painter]

On a lighter note:

CIA recruited cat to bug Russians
By Charlotte Edwardes
(Filed: 04/11/2001)

THE CIA tried to uncover the Kremlin's deepest secrets during the 1960s by turning cats into walking bugging devices, recently declassified documents show.

In one experiment during the Cold War a cat, dubbed Acoustic Kitty, was wired up for use as an eavesdropping platform. It was hoped that the animal - which was surgically altered to accommodate transmitting and control devices - could listen to secret conversations from window sills, park benches or dustbins.

Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer, told The Telegraph that Project Acoustic Kitty was a gruesome creation. He said: "They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that."

Mr Marchetti said that the first live trial was an expensive disaster. The technology is thought to have cost more than £10 million. He said: "They took it out to a park and put him out of the van, and a taxi comes and runs him over. There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead."

The document, which was one of 40 to be declassified from the CIA's closely guarded Science and Technology Directorate - where spying techniques are refined - is still partly censored. This implies that the CIA was embarrassed about disclosing all the details of Acoustic Kitty, which took five years to design.

Dr Richelson, who is the a senior fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington, said of the document: "I'm not sure for how long after the operation the cat would have survived even if it hadn't been run over."

The memo ends by congratulating the team who worked on the Acoustic Kitty project for its hard work. It says: "The work done on this problem over the years reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it . . . whose energy and imagination could be models for scientific pioneers."

By coincidence, in 1966, a British film called Spy With a Cold Nose featured a dog wired up to eavesdrop on the Russians. It was the same year as the Acoustic Kitty was tested.
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CIA's 'spy cat' goes splat

By James Morrison

04 November 2001

It should have been the perfect spy. But the CIA's attempt to use a surgically altered cat as a covert bugging device fell at the first hurdle – when it was run over by a taxi.

Nicknamed "Acoustic Kitty", the audacious scheme was one of a number of bizarre projects dreamt up by military scientists in the latter days of the Cold War, according to documents newly released by the US National Security Archive. A domestic cat was wired up with control and transmission equipment designed to turn it into a mobile "eavesdropper" capable of listening in on conversations by using its tail as an antenna.

In an account related in a new book by US intelligence historian Dr Jeffrey Richelson, a former CIA agent explains that the experiment was not an unqualified success.

Victor Marchetti, an ex-officer with the agency, recalls: "They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that.

"Finally, they're ready. They took it to a park and said, 'listen to those two guys. Don't listen to anyone else – not the birds, not cat or the dog – just those two guys!'

"Then they put him out of the van, and a taxi comes and runs him over!"

Marchetti's testimony is one of several relating to the failed experiment quoted in Dr Richelson's book, The Wizards of Langley: The CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology.

"Acoustic Kitty" was by no means the biggest failure in the annals of CIA espionage. Others chronicle the use of mind control drugs that led to the suicide of an Army scientist, and futile attempts to use poison pens and exploding seashells to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro.