Danny Sheehan
6 Stars on Substance, Revolutionary Illumination, February 20, 2014This is a book for smart people who care about the Constitution, the Republic, and America the Beautiful — the America of good people with big hearts and strong souls who do the best they can while trapped amidst a complex of corrupt systems that now include most labor unions, most non-profits, and most religions — all the safety nets are gone. It is not an easy read but it could be the most important book you could read right now, as we prepare for the 2014-2020 civil war between the 99% and the 1%. For a sense of where I see Danny Sheehan in modern US history, see my review of Arsonist: The Most Dangerous Man in America. Danny Sheehan's is to the second American revolution as James Otis was to the Founding Fathers. The 1% and their political bi-opoly (the best of the servant class in the eyes of the 1%) are the target for a massive apolitical cross-cultural uprising rooted in natural law, social justice, and common sense.
The book cannot be fully appreciated without first understanding that the author has been a major player in every fundamental Constitutional case having to do with public agency — the sovereignty of the public versus the assumption by the “government” that it has inherent powers once reserved for kings, and that the citizens “donate” (abdicate) their powers once they “elect” said government. I highly recommend Wikipedia's biography on Daniel Sheehan (attorney). This — or the timeline below — is what should have opened the book in the first place. I take the trouble to do this because the value of this book lies with the next generation, the generation now in college and graduate school (or unemployed and unOccupied), not in the generation that rose with Danny and failed to beat down New York money, Texas energy, and the Nazi hydra combined with elite embrace of drugs, money laundering, and pedophilia, among other high crimes against the Republic.
Major Case Timeline
In re Pappas (First Amendment)
Eisenstadt v. Baird (reproductive freedom)
1970 JD from Harvard Law School, Joined Cahill Gordon
Branzburg v. Hayes
U.S. v. Caldwell
Attica inmates, Committee of Observers
State v. Byrd (Black Panthers false accused of bombing conspiracy)
New York Times Co. v. U.S. (First Amendment, Pentagon Papers)
1972 McGovern campaign, helped strike down voter registration laws
Rockefeller Commission (Police Department corruption, Frank Serpico testimony)
Joined F. Lee Bailey
Defended F. Lee Bailey
Watergate (leading to Nixon's impeachment & resignation)
1973 Entered Harvard Divinity School focusing on Comparative Social Ethics
1974 Leave of absence to help ACLU
Associated Student Body v. University of Wyoming (First Amendment, Last Tango in Paris)
In re Slaughterhouse Five (First Amendment)
Morton v. Mancari (validated preferential hiring of Native Americans)
1973 Wound Knee (all vindicated)
1974-1975 Returned to Divinity School
Potter Box model for ethical decision-making
Began synthesis on how world views make facts irrelevant in political discourse
1975 Became Chief Counsel for Jesuits USA
Daniel and Philip Berrigan
Dick Gergory
Benjamin Spock
David Abernathy (Southern Christian Leadership Conference)
1977 Karen Silkwood (included CIA and Keen smuggling of nuclear materials to Israel)
1979 Founded Christic Institute (rooted in Teilhard de Chardin)
Three Mile Island
Greensboro Massacre (KKK)
American Sanctuary Movement (Catholic sanctuary of Salvadoran refugees)
1986 Aviragan v. Hull (Iran-Contra) exposed CIA's “enterprise” for global unconstitutioinal activities
Christic Institute shut down by combination of corrupt executive, corrupt judiciary, and corrupt legislature
1990 Elected to lead Romero Institute
Col James A Sabow USMC murder by Mariines for CIA at El Toro
1994 John E. Mack defense of academic freedom (extraterrestrial encounters by humans)
United States Library of Congress investigation into extraterrestrials (and probably to the Catholic Church also)
1999 Director New Paradigm Project State of the World Forum (Mikhail Gorbechev)
2001 Disclosure Project (those with direct knowledge of UFOs)
Developed talk on Philosophical and Theological Implications of the Human Discovery of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
2005 Lakota People's Law Project (rescuew of 3,000 children seized)
And now to the book itself.
The personal history is both necessary and revealing and truly provides context for the entire book. It took me a full reading to appreciate the page 3 statement that this is the story of a generation, the JFK generation fighting the national security state mentality of the WWII generation (good people) that allowed its government to be hijacked by bad people. I totally share with the author the view that the assassination of JFK closed the door on the socio-economic and ideo-cultural reforms being advanced in the 1960's.
SIDENOTE: I have reviewed most of the books on JFK and where I differ with Danny is in not blaming the excathedra CIA “enterprise” for the assassination it carried out, but rather the combination of Texas energy, New York money, and Italian crime that came together to snuff out the greatest leader of the conscious world. George Bush Senior was in Dallas, working for the “enterprise,” and I earnestly pray that he and Howard Hunt will one day appear before a Truth & Reconciliation Commission. See among others:
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters
Someone Would Have Talked
Dark Legacy
Two elements of the personal introduction I find riveting. First is his account of how he discovered first hand the corruption of the average US Senator, and the second his his quote, on page 60, of Henry Kissinger telling his Harvard class that the US is “authorized to lie, cheat, steal, and kill to gain access to the strategic raw materials that below to other nations…” Kissinger never changed — years later, while in the White House, it is now known that he said, to general laughter, “the illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
The author accomplished more by the time he was 30 than most do in a lifetime. I note with interest that his first encounter with illegal wiretapping by the US Government against US citizens occured when he was 26 years old.
Page 151 gets to the heart of the matter: “emergency does not create power.” The executive cannot be allowed to claim inherent powers (Congress, not the executive, is “the government” in a Republic), citizen rights are not “donated” or abdicated once an election takes place, and the elite cannot violate the laws of the land. Which is of course what we have today with a national security state that uses secrecy to commit treason on a daily basis.
Among the many reasons this book is a 6 star book (in my top 10% — see all my reviews across 98 categories at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog) is perhaps the greatest possible accomplishment of all: a lawyer representing justice with intelligence and integrity. I am fascinated by the constant presence in this book of social justice and the author's long-running reflections on utilitarianism versus intuitionism, and his appreciation for the importance of Reverend Witherspoon of Princeton University in shaping the morals of the Founding Fathers such that natural law and the rights of man served as the foundation for the US Constitution.
It was during the Silkwood case that the author learned that there was a “private” national intelligence network, the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU), and that federal signals intelligence and wiretapping capabilities were routinely deployed, illegally, in support of private enterprise (e.g. the private nuclear industry sneaking nuclear capabilities to Israel with CIA cover). I concur with the author's conclusion that nuclear power should not be in private hands, and would add to that my view that neither intelligence nor the military should be staffed with contractors burdended with massive conflicts of interest and lack of accountability even more severe than the present lack of accountability that the US national security “enterprise” enjoys.
I am stunned to learn that the foundation for DHS and FEMA's venturing into domestic concentration camps and hundreds if not thousands of rail cars pre-equipped with shackles (these are my current facts, not the author's) can be found in Ronald Reagan's tenure, at which time illegal immigrants were deliberately conflated with “terrorists” and substantial funding and planning earmarked for being able to round up 5,000 or more, overnight, if needed.
I learn that aircraft running drugs into the USA for the US Government have special call signs that place them off limits to interception. Talk about impeachable crimes at the highest levels!
The author's account of Iran Contra is focused mostly on Carl Jenkins and a few others. As it happens I was in El Salvador in 1979-1980 and on the Central American Task Force (CATF) with Alan Fiers in 1986, and am one of the fortunate innocents who was not indicted — I was working on the legal side of CATF throughout. So I am fascinated with all of this, and I have to disagree with the author when he names Ted Shackley as the head of the “enterprise.” Ted — I met him once — was a civil servant, not a rogue elephant. What he did he did thinking he was serving a higher master with authorization directly from the White House. At least that is how I see it. My three reviews below offer more perspective, along with the fourth book that I have avoided reading but have in the line-up.
Spymaster: My Life in the CIA
BLOND GHOST
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World
For my insider perspective search for < Search: Seven CIAs [Steele on the Record] >.
It is in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra case that the author comes of age. I am impressed by a direct account from the author of how Senator John Kerry got bought off his investigation with a promise of the Vice Presidential nomination in 2000 (in other words, the Republican or heavy side of the two party criminal enterprise made a deal with the Democratic or light side of the two party criminal enterprise so that both could avoid making it clear to the average US citizen that the government was in enemy hands)
QUOTE (485): “The lesson was clear: accountability declines as the magnitude of their crime and the power of those charged increase.”
The Iran-Contra investigations that were suppressed from public revelation also disclosed the existence of the Nazi hydra that collaborates with out of control elements of the CIA and I believe also the FBI and DEA, to run drugs into the USA to create off-budget wealth. See among other books I have reviewed:
The Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of a Century
To understand the the Nazi subversion of the US military in partnership with the evangelicals, look for this online report from one of my counterintelligence colleagues:
QUOTE (497) Joseph Burkholder Smith, CIA: “I hope that your generation can stop these bastards. Because ours never did.”
QUOTE (511) Ross Perot: “You know, Dan, as long as these guys are in operation, no man can truly call himself president.”
PRECISELY. That is why I ran briefly for President, creating We the People Reform Coalition, one possible combination of alliances and ideas that can displace the two-party tyranny and reinstitute the rule of law in the USA.
The author treats the Catholic Church with kid gloves, only once venturing into the Knights of Malta and the long-standing secret relations among the Catholic elite, the US national security state, and certain other parties. I'm fine with that. Apart from observing that only the Quakers, Seventh Day Adventists, and Muslims do not represent a religious counterintelligence threat in the USA, I would, as a lapsed Colombian Jesuit altar boy who nce knew the mass in Latin, be glad to leverage the secret societies of the Catholic Church against the other secret societies, as we begin what will be the most important chapter of modern American history, the battle for the soul of the Republic.
Two more quotes that represent the SIX-STAR value of this book:
QUOTE (562-563): “Walsh pointed out that the unlawful, unethical, and unconstitutional conduct undertaken by CIA operatives and other covert operations agencies in our executive branch in the name of ‘anticommunism' between 1947-1977 (uncovered by congressional investigators in the aftermath of the Watergate burglary) had been repeated by the men who had created and operated the off-the-shelf enterprise–but this time they had committed their acts in the name of ‘antiterrorism.'”
QUOTE (563): “Walsh essentially warned that these covert operations, and the zealots who ran them, constituted a clear and present danger to the constitutional order of our democracy.”
The other reason this is a SIX-STAR book is because of its deeply ethical nature (not an attribute often asssociated with lawyers trained and employed in the USA). The author is still hung up on the left-right political axis, but he makes a very important point when he calls out the progressives and the left in general for failing to draw the line.
QUOTE (593): Twenty two years after the end of the Cold War, the leadership of the American liberal community still has not deigned to identify such as set of ethical principles. Instead, they have virtually abandoned the field now that the threat of communism has disappeared.”
The author goes on to fail John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama in relation to the above.
I deeply respect Danny Sheehan — he is the epitome of what a US citizen should be. Today he is still a relatively young man, I believe he has another 20-30 years of fight left in him. One can learn more about him at danielpsheehan.com and about his larger work at romeroinstitute.org.
America is about to enter into a civil war rooted in the public abdication of its responsibility to be informed engaged citizens. We cannot blame the rats that we allow to over-run the ship of state. We must take ourselves in hand. This book is not only the summatiion of the first half of Danny Sheehan's life. It is the window into why and how he and others, including myself, will fight the second half of the battle for the soul of the Republic.
Semper Fidelis,
Robert David STEELE Vivas
INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability (2012)
PS Amazon allows me ten links. With a certain sense of humor, I refer the reader to all my six star reviews at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligene Blog but here is the last link: a good Catholic spy who did what he was told to do, very very well, and now does this for Wall Street. I would trust him to clean up CIA if and when we have an honest government what *wants* an honest CIA.
Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story
ADMIN NOTE: This book was tough going — even eye-glazing. I have never, in the thousands of books I have read, seen a starker contrast between prodigal son brilliance and Nobel level performance being presented, and the worst possible least useful presentation format. The table of contents is devoid of information. 4 parts, 31 chapters titled (I do not make this stuff up) Chapter One through Chapter Thirty One. I strongly recommend that the author find a new publisher and immediately restructure the book into coherent segments associated with a timeline that begins the book, photographs, glossary, snap-shots of each key case including lessons learned and future issues unresolved, snap-shots of key people, and a new epilogue that connects the quarter century of path-finding by the author to the quarter century of civil war in the USA that is now beginning, courtesy of 9/11 (allowed to happen), Department of Homeland Security, FEMA-Halliburton concentration camps and railway cars with shackles, urban blimps, drones, and street corner camaras, and the two-party tyranny (executive, legislative, and judiciary) that no longer represents We the People in any manner. [My views on the alternative to be fought for can be found online at We the People Reform Coaltion.]
