The INSLAW Octopus: CIA Drugs, PROMIS of Mossad Robert Maxwell, Iran Contra and a Suicided Journalist Danny Casolaro

Justice Department records confirm PROMIS scandal’s ties to Israel

Recently released memos lend credence to theory the controversial software was given to spymaster Rafi Eitan
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/oct/12/promis-israel/

Air Cocaine: CIA Drugs, Oliver North and Death of Journalist Danny Casolaro

Whiteout
The CIA, Drugs and the Press
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/cockburn-white.html

Casolaro’s starting point for his investigation was a real criminal case — a wide-ranging Washington scandal involving allegations that the US Government had stolen software company Inslaw’s PROMIS program and added illegal back doors in order to spy on foreign governments.

Casolaro called his conspiracy ‘Octopus’ for a reason, as he followed the trail from PROMIS to reveal a much larger story, one that encompassed such seemingly disparate events as the October surprise, the collapse of bank BBCI and the illegal drugs and arms trade — all orchestrated by a secret cabal of global elites.
https://theunredacted.com/danny-casolaro-hunting-the-octopus/

The Enduring Octopus: What FOIA withholdings reveal about the PROMIS scandal Part 1

Government claims wiretaps, the CIA Act, and pending proceedings justify withholding documents on Danny Casolaro’s mysterious death
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/sep/06/doj-promis-part-1/

Air Cocaine: the Wild, True Story of Drug-Running, Arms Smuggling and Contras at a Backwoods Airstrip in the Clintons’ Arkansas
https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/04/air-cocaine-the-wild-true-story-of-drug-running-arms-smuggling-and-contras-at-a-small-airstrip-in-clintons-arkansas/

Big Media’s Contra-Cocaine Cover-up
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/09/big-medias-contra-cocaine-cover-up/

Iran Contra & the CIA Cocaine Conspiracy
https://youtu.be/tpmc1iTWEJU

Bill Hamilton, Inslaw & PROMIS

The INSLAW Octopus
Software piracy, conspiracy, cover-up, stonewalling, covert action: Just another decade at the Department of Justice
Who:
Bill Hamilton and his wife, Nancy Hamilton, start Inslaw to nurture PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information Systems).

Why #1:
The DOJ, aware that its case management system is in dire need of automation, funds Inslaw and PROMIS. After creating a public-domain version, Inslaw makes significant enhancements to PROMIS and, aware that the US market for legal automation is worth $3 billion, goes private in the early '80s.

Why #2:
Designed as case-management software for federal prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to combine disparate databases, and to track people by their involvement with the legal system. Hamilton and others now claim that the DOJ has modified PROMIS to monitor intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.

A House Judiciary Committee report released last September found evidence raising "serious concerns" that high officials at the Department of Justice executed a pre-meditated plan to destroy Inslaw and co-opt the rights to its PROMIS software. The committee's call for an independent counsel have fallen on deaf ears. One journalist, Danny Casolaro, died as he attempted to tell the story (see sidebar), and boxes of documents relating to the case have been destroyed, stolen, or conveniently "lost" by the Department of Justice.
The Background

Imagine you are in charge of the legal arm of the most powerful government on the face of the globe, but your internal information systems are mired in the archaic technology of the 1960s. There's a Department of Justice database, a CIA database, an Attorney's General database, an IRS database, and so on, but none of them can share information. That makes tracking multiple offenders pretty darn difficult, and building cases against them a long and bureaucratic task.
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Along comes a computer program that can integrate all these databases, and it turns out its development was originally funded by the government under a Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grant in the 1970s. That means the software is public domain ... free!

Edwin Meese was apparently quite taken with PROMIS. He told an April 1981 gathering of prosecutors that PROMIS was "one of the greatest opportunities for [law enforcement] success in the future." In March 1982, Inslaw won a $9.6 million contract from the Justice Department to install the public domain version of PROMIS in 20 US Attorney's offices as a pilot program.

But the real power of PROMIS, according to Hamilton, is that with a staggering 570,000 lines of computer code, PROMIS can integrate innumerable databases without requiring any reprogramming. In essence, PROMIS can turn blind data into information. And anyone in government will tell you that information, when wielded with finesse, begets power. Converted to use by intelligence agencies, as has been alleged in interviews by ex-CIA and Israeli Mossad agents, PROMIS can be a powerful tracking device capable of monitoring intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.

At the time of its inception, PROMIS was the most powerful program of its type. But a similar program, DALITE, was developed under another LEAA grant by D. Lowell Jensen, the Alameda County (Calif.) District Attorney. In the mid-1970s, the two programs vied for a lucrative Los Angeles County contract and Inslaw won out. (Early in his career, Ed Meese worked under Jensen at the Alameda County District Attorney's office. Jensen was later appointed to Meese's Justice Department during the Reagan presidency.)
https://www.wired.com/1993/01/inslaw/

Trump ushered in so much 80s nostalgia that Oliver North and hating Iran are back with a vengeance
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-ushered-so-much-80s-nostalgia-oliver-north-hating-iran-ncna872346

Oliver North and the Creation of Donald Trump
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/nra-president-oliver-north-and-the-creation-of-donald-trump.html

Sir Robert Maxwell’s FBI file is getting more classified by the minute

The media mogul and alleged spy’s increasingly redacted ties to the PROMIS scandal include tapping a government database on tapping government databases
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/jun/28/sir-robert-maxwells-fbi-PROMIS/

Perhaps the best illustration of how the connections between many of these players often meld together can be seen in Ronald Lauder: a Mega Group member, former member of the Reagan administration, long-time donor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s Likud Party, as well as a long-time friend of Donald Trump and Roy Cohn.
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2021/12/30/mega-group-maxwells-and-mossad-the-spy-story-at-the-heart-of-the-jeffrey-epstein-scandal/

Maxwell and the PROMIS Affair

Maxwell’s prominent roles in the PROMIS software scandal and the Iran-Contra affair during the 1980s were facilitated by his purchase of numerous Israeli companies, several of which were either fronts or “providers of services” for Israeli intelligence.
https://thealtworld.com/whitney_webb/meet-ghislaine-daddys-girl

PROMIS: ISRAELI BACKLASH IN THE U.S.?
In pursuing indications that the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was trying to graft an artificial intelligence capacity onto illegal copies of Promis software, Bill Hamilton, president of Inslaw which originally produced the software, conducted a Foia
https://www.intelligenceonline.com/threat-assessment/1994/07/06/promis-israeli-backlash-in-the-us,64809-EVE

https://ia903104.us.archive.org/11/items/6222557-FBI-Investigation-Maxwell-PROMIS-Sales/6222557-FBI-Investigation-Maxwell-PROMIS-Sales_text.pdf

We knew that Bush, as a former CIA director, had collaborated with Operation Condor, a network of state sponsored terrorists in Latin America. We knew that Condor operatives had struck in Washington assassinating leftist diplomat Orlando Letelier with a car bomb. It was the first foreign sponsored assassination in the nation’s capital, and it happened on Bush’s watch as CIA director.
https://www.deepstateblog.org/2018/12/07/beg-your-pardon-trump-reminds-me-a-lot-of-george-bush/

“The Octopus”: INSLAW PROMIS software scandal and those killed by its tentacles
Octopus PROMIS: The Conspiracy Against INSLAW Software, And The Murders To Cover Up A Scandal Bigger Than Watergate
https://themillenniumreport.com/2019/10/the-octopus-inslaw-promis-software-scandal-and-those-killed-by-its-tentacles/

FBI Spied On Trump With Former CIA Criminal
https://youtu.be/aXAz5WUG27Y

The Danny Casolaro Primer: 13 reasons to doubt the official narrative surrounding his death - With an incomplete investigation, uncooperative agencies, and numerous outright lies, the journalist’s
death remains a mystery
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/mar/15/danny-casolaro-primer/

Journalist Danny Casolaro swore to his friends that he'd stumbled upon something big -- a massive conspiracy at the heart of the US government, spanning the globe. His life, he believed, was in danger.

But what, exactly, is "The Octopus"?
https://www.stufftheydontwantyoutoknow.com/videos/danny-casolaro-and-octopus-video.htm

Pres. Clinton on Death of Vince Foster (1993)
https://youtu.be/nf9_a_q4AgA

The List of Clinton Associates Who Allegedly Died Mysteriously. Check It Out.
http://lasvegas.cbslocal.com/2016/08/10/the-list-of-clinton-associates-whove-died-mysteriously-check-it-out/

INSLAW Octopus
Asked why Israeli intelligence would have been so interested in Inslaw and PROMIS, Ben Menashe said, "PROMIS was a very big thing for us guys, a very, very big thing ... it was probably the most important issue of the '80s because it just changed the whole intelligence outlook. The whole form of intelligence collection changed. This whole thing changed it."

Oliver North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within U.S as part of a domestic emergency preparedness program, commissioned under Reagan's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to sources and published reports.
https://www.wired.com/1993/01/inslaw/

An Israeli Trojan Horse
“Israeli penetration of the entire US telecommunications system means that NSA’s warrantless wiretapping actually means Israeli warrantless wiretapping.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2008/09/27/an-israeli-trojan-horse/

9/11 Put Options and “Insider Trade”: Evidence for “Informed Trading” on the Attacks of September 11, 2001
https://www.globalresearch.ca/evidence-for-informed-trading-on-the-attacks-of-september-11-2001/5652934

Despite the fact that it had caused a major and continuing scandal, Israeli military censorship applied to all the details of the "Lavon Affair"
and, on the rare occasions it was mentioned in Israel in the years to follow it was called "Operation Susannah" or the "unfortunate business".
The attacks are still known in English by the Zionist narrative, the "Lavon Affair" with little recognition that this was a quite
straightforward terrorist campaign aimed at the US and the UK.

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Lavon_Affair

The Lavon Affair was a source of major controversy in Israel for years, ultimately even resulting in the resignation of David Ben-Gurio
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-reveals-controversial-lavon-affair-correspondence-62-years-later-1.5401166

Ex-Israeli Spy Claims Jeffrey Epstein Blackmailed Politicians For Israel's Mossad
https://youtu.be/TO_z7Fu_6D0

The U.S.’s Terrorism Double Standard
https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/20/the-u-s-s-terrorism-double-standard/

Former CIA director and now Secretary of State Mike Pompeo "I Was The CIA Director - We Lied, We Cheated, We Stole" (and sold drugs)
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-21/i-was-cia-director-we-lied-we-cheated-we-stole

Netanyahu: US easily manipulated "I know what America is," Netanyahu said.
"America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.
They won't get in the way."
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2010/07/201071834019513292.html

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar

Ties between Hitler's Nazis and American businessmen such as Henry Ford, Averell Harriman, and Senator Prescott Bush, the father of George HW Bush
http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/bush-grandpa-traded-with-enemy-for-3-years-before-assets-seized/article/424715

Ford and GM Scrutinized for Nazi Collaboration
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm

Tuskegee syphilis study, official name Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, American medical research project that earned notoriety for its unethical experimentation on African American patients in rural South.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Tuskegee-syphilis-study

Operation Mockingbird, CIA manipulated news for propaganda. Funded student and cultural organizations
and magazines as front organizations. After 1953, network was overseen by Allen Dulles, director of CIA.
By this time Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies CBS,
Time Magazine and Life Magazine, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, Washington Post,
Louisville Courier-Journal and Copley News Services.
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm
https://www.wanttoknow.info/mass_media/operation-mockingbird

Operation Northwoods - CIA planned fake terror attacks on citizens to create support for war.
A. Incidents to establish a credible attack:
(1) Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio.
(2) Land friendly Cubans in uniform "over-the-fence" to stage attack on base.
(3) Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.
(4) Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans).
(5) Blow up ammunition inside the base: start fires.
(6) Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage).
(7) Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base.
(8) Capture assault teams approaching from the sea or vicinity of Guantanamo City.
(9) Capture militia group which storms base.
(10) Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires – naphthalene.
(11) Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims.

"Remember the Maine" incident could be arranged: Blow up US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.
https://www.wanttoknow.info/010501operationnorthwoods

American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders (Feb. 28) is the tale of Danny Casolaro, a writer who was found dead in a Sheraton hotel bathtub on Aug. 10, 1991, in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Police swiftly dubbed this a suicide, since Casolaro had been alone, his wrists had been cut, and he’d left a farewell note. Those closest to the outgoing and loving man, however, thought otherwise. For one, Casolaro’s wrists had 12 separate slash wounds that were so deep, they’d severed the tendons. Moreover, there was blood all over the room, in places that made no sense if he’d simply been ending his life. Most suspicious of all, though, was the fact that just a few short weeks before his demise, Casolaro had told his brother Tony that if something happened to him, it wouldn’t be an accident.
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Casolaro’s death, and the theory that he’d been murdered, soon became local news, since he hadn’t been any old scribe. By 1991, Casolaro was knee-deep into reporting on a supposedly bombshell story about a multi-tentacled conspiracy that he referred to as “the Octopus” which involved software engineers, businessmen, drug dealers, gunrunners, organized crime, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and various individuals related to the Ronald Reagan White House. Casolaro had stumbled upon this while employed by Computer Age, a newsletter about the computer business, and it all began with INSLAW, a firm founded by Bill Hamilton that had created a revolutionary nationwide criminal-case tracking system for law enforcement agencies known as PROMIS. In the second year of a three-year contract, the Department of Justice abruptly stopped paying INSLAW for PROMIS, forcing the firm into bankruptcy. Heated lawsuits and telephone threats to Hamilton ensued, all of which were so over-the-top that it made Hamilton and those aligned with him (including former Attorney General Elliot Richardson) suspect that the DOJ was up to something “much dirtier than Watergate.”
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/uncovered-rogue-cia-conspiracy-then-094626576.html

Joseph Daniel Casolaro (June 16, 1947 – August 10, 1991) was an American freelance writer who came to public attention in 1991 when he was found dead in a bathtub in room 517 of the Sheraton Hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia, his wrists slashed 10–12 times
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Casolaro

The large accordion file with Casolaro’s notes and evidence was missing.
Medical concerns

Paramedics and medical professionals found problematic details in the "suicide". One pathologist who studied the autopsy noted the lack of hesitance marks and the savage, deep nature of the cuts to Casolaro’s wrists as been highly unusual. This was echoed by an attending paramedic who told investigators — “I’ve never seen such deep incisions on a suicide… I don't know how he didn't pass out from the pain after the first two slashes.” The toxicology report also came under scrutiny. Antidepressants were found in Casolaro’s blood, yet he had no history of depression and had never been prescribed the drugs.
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Danny_Casolaro

The PROMIS of Mossad -
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Chapter 10
August 25, 2000:
Spy computer `trap' probed. Rigged software claimed to hack intelligence files

http://www.thestar.com/thestar/back_issues/ED20000825/news/20000825NEW01_NA-SPY.html

August 28, 2000:
'Spy trap' probe now tied to U.S. and Britain. Murdered pair may have links to software plot (URLs may change from current to back issues)

http://thestar.com/editorial/updates/top/20000828NEW01b_NA-MOUNTIE28.html

Mounties debugged spy software in '94: Ex-agent. But U.S., Israel drained secrets for a decade before discovery

http://www.thestar.com/thestar/editorial/news/20000828NEW06_NA-SPY.html

For more on Michael Riconoscuito, the person whom The Star describes as "the American computer whiz who has publicly claimed he helped prepare Inslaw's Promis software for sale to Canada in 1983 and 1984,":

http://orlingrabbe.com/ricono.htm

See also the William Hamilton/INSLAW Case Archive at the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

http://www.eff.org/pub/Legal/Cases/INSLAW/

Rafi Eitan realized that neither Earl Brian nor his company had the resources to market Promis globally. That would require someone with superb international contacts, boundless energy, and proven negotiating skills. There was only one man Rafi Eitan knew who had those requirements: Robert Maxwell.

Maxwell needed little convincing and, in his usual ebullient manner when there was a deal to be profited from, said he had a computer company through which to sell Promis. Degem Computers Limited was based in Tel Aviv and was already playing a useful role in Mossad's activities. Maxwell had allowed Mossad operatives, posing as Degem employees, to use the company's suboffices in Central and South America. Now Maxwell saw an opportunity not only to make a healthy profit from marketing Promis through Degem, but to further establish his own importance to Mossad and ultimately Israel.

On recent visits to Israel he had begun to display disturbing traits. Maxwell told Admoni he should start employing psychics to read the minds of Mossad's enemies. He began to suggest targets for elimination. He wanted to meet kidons and inspect their training camps. All these requests were firmly but politely parried by the Mossad chief. But within Mossad, questions began to be asked about Maxwell. Was his behavior only that of a megalomaniac throwing about his weight? Or was it a precursor of something else? Could the time eventually come when, despite all he had done for Israel, Robert Maxwell became sufficiently mentally unstable and unpredictable to create a problem?

But there was no doubting Maxwell was a brilliant marketeer of Promis -- or, as far as Mossad was concerned, of the effectiveness of the system. The service had been the first to obtain the program and it had been a valuable tool in its campaign against the Intifada. Many of its leaders had left Jordan for safer hideouts in Europe after several had been assassinated in Jordan by kidons.

A spectacular success came when an Intifada commander who had moved to Rome called a Beirut number that Mossad's computers already had listed as the home of a known bomb maker. The Rome caller wanted to meet the bomb maker in Athens. Mossad used Promis to check all the travel offices in Rome and Beirut for the travel arrangements of both men. In Beirut, further checks revealed the bomber had ordered the local utility companies to suspend supplies to his home. A further search by Promis of the local PLO computers also showed the bomber had switched flights at the last moment. It did not save him. He was killed by a car bomb on the way to Beirut airport. Shortly afterward, in Rome, the Intifada commander was killed in a hit-and-run accident.

Meantime, Mossad was using Promis to read the secret intelligence of a number of services. In Guatemala, it uncovered the close ties between the country's security forces and drug traffickers and their outlets in the United States. Names were passed on to the DEA and FBI by Mossad.

In South Africa, a katsa in the Israeli embassy used Promis to track the country's banned revolutionary organization and their contacts with Middle Eastern groups. In Washington, Mossad specialists at the Israeli embassy used Promis to penetrate the communications of other diplomatic missions and U.S. government departments. The same was happening in London and other European capitals. The system had continued to yield valuable information for Mossad. By 1989, over $500 million worth of Promis programs had been sold to Britain, Australia, South Korea, and Canada. The figure would have been even bigger but for the CIA marketing its own version to intelligence agencies. In Britain, Promis was used by MI5 in Northern Ireland to track terrorists and the movements of political leaders like Gerry Adams.

Maxwell had also managed to sell the system to the Polish intelligence service, the UB. In return the Poles, according to Ben-Menashe, allowed Mossad to steal a Russian MiG-29. The operation was a reminder of the theft of the earlier version of the MiG from Iraq. A Polish general in charge of the UB office in Gdansk, in return for $1 million paid into a Citibank account in New York, had arranged for the aircraft to be written off as no longer airworthy, though the plane had only recently arrived from its Russian aircraft factory. The fighter was dismantled, placed in t crates marked "Agricultural Machinery," and flown to Tel Aviv. There the plane was reassembled and test-flown by the Israeli air force, enabling its pilots to counter the MiG-29s in service with Syria.
https://cryptome.org/promis-mossad.htm

Netflix Series on the Octopus Murders Continues Cover-up of Reporter’s Death and CIA Crimes
He Threatened to Expose
Following the CIA’s Playbook to a T
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/03/11/netflix-series-on-the-octopus-murders-continues-cover-up-of-reporters-death-and-cia-crimes-he-threatened-to-expose/

~ClassWar ~AntiWar ~ BDS ~ Covid1984 @hatethemachine