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The Devil and John Foster “Chip” Berlet

Well, gee whizzers, I opened up a hornet’s nest with a simple little question. Is “Sean McBride” in actuality John Foster “Chip” Berlet? I have been attacked, called names, etc but there has been scant attention paid to the facts I put forward.

The title above is reference to a biography of John Foster Dulles by Yalie Bonesman Townsend Hoopes, which in itself was a tribute to Yalie Wolf’s Head member Stephen Vincent Benét’s The Devil and Daniel Webster. The story of a man that sells his soul to the devil for seven years of prosperity and then is saved at his trial by the oratory of his famous lawyer. Daniel Webster was born in New Hampshire but is most indentified with Massassachusetts, and since both Sean and John seem to reside in Massachusetts it seemed fitting. Benét’s updated version of Faust was also the basis for the movie All That Money Can Buy, which also seem apropos.

Now, I don’t know, nor have I been told who Sean is. All I know is that “Sean McBride” is a nomé de guerre of someone who says that because he fears for his personal safety he posts anonymously on the Internet about his personal take on current affairs.

I became aware of “Sean” as a poster on a list that I run, cia-drugs@yahoogroups.com. He started posting on September 20, 1991 nine days after the Octopus’ 9-11-01 attack. Sean, soon became an irritant on the list, leading attacks against Mike Ruppert and others. Always trying to steer the conversation into the argument that 9-11 and other conspiracies were a product of the MOSSAD and allies. In Sean’s discourse the CFR are good guys, Skull & Bones is nothing, etc. Now, I don’t agree with Mr. Ruppert on everything, but Sean’s attacks generated headlines “Sean please stop attacking people.”

I invite the reader to go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cia-drugs_archives/?yguid=172812 and check it out for yourself. CIA-Drugs had 400+ members at the time of 9/11 and had as regular posters many researchers who had been deconstructing government lies for many years, members included Mike Ruppert, Daniel Hopsicker, David Guyatt, Duncan Roads, David Goldman, Brian Downing Quig, Preston Peet, Steve Hager, Richard Odom, Jim Rarey, Mark Urban, Dan Russell, Nessie, Austin Kelly, Bob who posted “turn on your vcrs” Tue Sep 11, 2001 at 7:42 a.m., myself and others. Soon the board was turn into disarray by dissension. I am acused of being obessed and "one of those disoriented people you meet in the street now and then, and take care not to make eye contact with," by "Sean McBride" because I care to look at some of the causes of that disension. The trioof "Sean McBride, "Webfairy" and Dick Eastman have caused great harm to understanding 9-11-01 attack and murders..

As time as gone by various things have come together to shape some questions about actions observed.

Here are some interesting numbers in an excel data list. What this is, is the rec'd date and time from an fourteen day period of both direct and email list email headers from all received emails from Berlet and "McBride." Notice the waves of operational unity.

John Foster "Chip" Berlet received $175,000 from the Ford Foundation in 2002 to study social movements, etc and has been in the "buisness" for years.

Also, here is an interesting story about Mr. Berlet.

an excerpt:
p105
The Decoy or the Duck
Michael Ratner, Margaret Ratner, Chip Berlet and Dr. Ann Mari Buitrago saw it coming from the beginning. The only problem was that for the longest time they couldn't tell which direction it was coming from.

The Ratners worked at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a public interest group of liberal and left-wing lawyers based in lower Manhattan. For them, as well as for Berlet, a political researcher who had been involved in cases involving the FBI and the Chicago Red Squad, and Buitrago, one of the country's foremost experts in the use of the Freedom of Information Act, the election of Ronald Reagan began to raise alarms as early as the winter of 1980. They were concerned not only about the candidate's rhetoric but about the composition of his transition team and the Heritage Foundation recommendations for strengthening the nation's domestic intelligence apparatus.

In general, however, those early signs were dismissed, if not ignored, as left-wing paranoia. The leadership of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, declared that civil liberties and government surveillance would not be significant issues in the 1980s. Instead, it argued, the emphasis of the Reagan Administration would be almost exclusively economic-and the battles of the coming years would involve issues of economic justice and the rights of the poor rather than issues of free speech and civil liberties. In fact, Morton Halperin, of the ACLU, accused attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights of raising a specter of alarmism without giving the administration an opportunity to prove that it was not bent on subverting the intelligence and law enforcement communities to do its political bidding.

But while the Ratners, Berlet and Buitrago were concerned about what they saw as the coming crackdown on political freedom, it was not the FBI that first caught their attention, but a new Senate committee-the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism (SST - which was created by the incoming Republican majority in Congress to focus public attention on the threat of international terrorism and the peril of domestic subversion.

Created as a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the SST was staffed by Senators Orrin Hatch of Utah and John East of North Carolina, and headed by Alabama Senator Jeremiah Denton, a member of the Moral Majority who spent seven years as a prisoner of war in a Vietnamese prison camp. Along with Senator Jesse Helms, East, Hatch and Denton believed that the greatest threat to the United States was the danger of "creeping communism." And, to that end, the committee set j out to expose the danger of internal subversion.

The Terrorism Cover
In his opening address at the first meeting of the subcommittee in 1981, Denton declared: "The subcommittee plans to investigate certain organizations which, within the United States, engage in, or have engaged in acts of terrorism, including bombings, acts of sabotage, aircraft hijacking, armed assaults and homicides."'

But the political implications of Denton's proclamation came clear in short order when staffers in Hatch's office leaked the fact that the SST planned to investigate, among others, three left-liberal institutions that had never been associated with terrorism or violence of any sort. According to those early leaks, the SST would take on the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-liberal think tank in Washington which provided substantial input to Congressional deliberations on a range of domestic and foreign policies; the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), a left-wing research institute in New York which conducted a number of studies critical of U.S. economic and diplomatic policies in Latin America; and Mother Jones, a left-liberal magazine which featured investigative reports on corporate excesses, environmental abuse and social injustices.

In the spring of 1981, concerned by the emergence of SST, Margaret Ratner drafted a letter of opposition to the subcommittee which read:

"In the 1950s, the country was convulsed by a series of political acts which made a mockery of the concept of democracy. Hundreds and thousands of people saw their lives and livelihoods destroyed as the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee engaged in their nightmarish witchhunts for dissidents...These committees were determined to ruin all who opposed their interpretation of 'Americanism'. .. History has since repudiated that tragic period...[Today, however] we are alarmed by the establishment of the new Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism. This new subcommittee has wrapped itself in a thoroughly vague mandate: it will investigate 'terrorist activities' and matters relating to 'national security.' Yet, who is to define those terms? Is opposition to the committee itself a 'threat to national security? 'Will those who maintain their constitutional rights of free speech and assembly be deprived of their human rights as they were at other times in this nation's history? Committee member John East has remarked that 'the biggest threat to civil liberties today is terrorism.' But we assert that the committee, itself, poses the biggest threat to our civil liberties."

Noting that such committees have traditionally operated more by holding public hearings and generating publicity for their causes than through actual legislative initiatives, Ratner accused the Administration of planning to use the SST to "rally support for the concept of a terrorist threat and to act as a propaganda machine to generate fear." The public success of the committee would subsequently be used, she wrote: "to allow us to support regimes such as the one in El Salvador; to grant the FBI and the CIA the extra support required if they are to carry out more illegal and repressive operations... to control dissent...and, finally, to curtail civil liberties."

At the same time that the attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights were warning activists about the new Denton committee, Berlet, who had worked with the National Lawyers Guild and who had written extensively on the FBI abuses of the 1960s, was becoming increasingly concerned at what he saw as a new climate of red-baiting not only of political groups but also of left-wing and liberal journalists.

In an article in Alternative Media, Berlet noted that the SST and other elements close to the Reagan White House were taking aim at such outlets as Pacifica Radio, CovertAction Information Bulletin and Mother Jones. "Charges that the media is part of the Soviet plan for world conquest have escaped the confines of conservative living rooms and are now ringing in the halls of Congress...Publications on the Right are calling for investigations into how alternative media groups are part of a KGB disinformation campaign," Berlet wrote, noting that the Heritage report identified even mainstream journalists "who may engage in subversive activities without being fully aware of the extent, purposes or control of their activities."

p108
No More Witch Hunts
In June 1981, Berlet, the Ratners and other activists organized simultaneous conferences around the theme of "No More Witch Hunts" in 19 cities, including Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, St. Louis and Washington. In New York "No More Witch Hunts" took the form of a street fair on West 8th Street, in which participants were exposed to a frightening array of surveillance technology-high-tech bugging devices, infra-red night-vision telescopes, and wigs, fake mustaches and make-up kits used by undercover infiltrators.

In Chicago, the conference attracted more than 1,000 people and featured an address by Mayor Harold Washington. The event was endorsed by nearly 90 organizations-including the Illinois branch of the ACLU, the American Friends Service Committee, the Gray Panthers, the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Chicago, the Mobilization for Survival, the United Auto Workers and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Whether by coincidence or design, the names of the majority of those sponsoring organizations were discovered, seven years later, to have been entered into the FBI's terrorism files in the course of the Bureau's investigation of CISPES and the octopus-like spread of the Bureau's probe into a vast array of domestic groups dedicated to reducing the risks of nuclear war, to protecting the environment, to advocating for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised, and to criticizing the policies of the Reagan Administration in Latin and Central America.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/FBI/Active_Decoy_Explosion_BDF.html