Global Warning: Medill School of Journalism's National Security Reporting Project

Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism has a National Security Reporting Project and is publishing an informative series of print, video, and interactive stories about climate change at a site called Global Warning.

The Global Warning series is based on what the CIA, Pentagon, National Academy of Sciences, and all our other scientific agencies are learning about climate change and about the threats these changes pose to America's national security. My favorite story is called "Our Man in the Greenhouse: Why the CIA is Spying on a Changing Climate." A very similar story was published by McClatchy (1-10-11), and they have a video interview that works.

Some of the documents Medill's student reporters used in reporting their stories can be found here. As the link notes, "[These documents] present an authoritative account of how U.S. officials and experts view climate change as a security issue."

View documents related to
U.S. policy
Climate science
Impacts on U.S. economy and population
Climate change impacts on international security
The intelligence community

FBI and Scotland Yard Execute Warrants in Ongoing Cyber Investigation

Search Warrants Executed in the United States and the U.K. as Part of an Ongoing Cyber Investigation

The FBI and Scotland Yard have been investigating cyber-attacks on companies and organizations who were targeted by "hacktivists" backing Julian Assange after his Wikileaks published classified U.S. State Department documents.The Guardian (1-28-11) reports on the January 27 arrests of five young British "hacktivists" who were arrested on suspicion of belonging to the pro-Wikileaks organization called Anonymous.

On January 20, Michael Riley, a journalist at Bloomberg News (1-20-11), reported that Wikileaks' Julian Assange, who is being guarded by the Norfolk Constabulary in the U.K., may have exploited music and photo-sharing networks to grab classified data. [See here.] Wikileaks claims to be a media organization, but the media does not have the right to steal data from other people's computers.

The FBI (1-27-11) reports:

FBI agents today executed more than 40 search warrants throughout the United States as part of an ongoing investigation into recent coordinated cyber attacks against major companies and organizations. Also today, the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Service [Scotland Yard--see press release below] executed additional search warrants and arrested five people for their alleged role in the attacks.

These distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) are facilitated by software tools designed to damage a computer network’s ability to function by flooding it with useless commands and information, thus denying service to legitimate users. A group calling itself “Anonymous” has claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying they conducted them in protest of the companies’ and organizations’ actions. The attacks were facilitated by the software tools the group makes available for free download on the Internet. The victims included major U.S. companies across several industries.

The FBI also is reminding the public that facilitating or conducting a DDoS attack is illegal, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, as well as exposing participants to significant civil liability.

The FBI is working closely with its international law enforcement partners and others to mitigate these threats. Authorities in the Netherlands, Germany, and France have also taken their own investigative and enforcement actions. The National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA) also is providing assistance. The NCFTA is a public-private partnership that works to identify, mitigate, and neutralize cyber crime. The NCFTA has advised that software from any untrustworthy source represents a potential threat and should be removed. Major Internet security (anti-virus) software providers have instituted updates so they will detect the so-called “Low Orbit Ion Canon” tools used in these attacks.

The U.K.'s Metropolitan Police Service (1-27-11) reports:

Five arrested under Computer Misuse Act
Detectives from the Metropolitan Police Service's Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) have arrested five people in connection with offences under the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

The five males aged, 15, 16, 19, 20 and 26, are being held after a series of coordinated arrests at residential addresses in the West Midlands, Northants, Herts, Surrey and London at 07:00hrs today (27 January).

The arrests are in relation to recent and ongoing 'distributed denial of service' attacks (DDoS) by an online group calling themselves 'Anonymous'.

They are part of an ongoing MPS investigation in to Anonymous which began last year following criminal allegations of DDoS attacks by the group against several companies.

This investigation is being carried out in conjunction with international law enforcement agencies in Europe and the US.

All five have been taken to local police stations where they remain in custody.

Russia Views Climate Change as a Threat to Its National Security

The personnel at a "science institute" run by "Bob," a mighty wizard who somehow manages to operate reconnaissance satellites and other classified sensors from his primary address (mailbox #209 in a Haymarket, Virginia parcel post store), may not share the CIA's perspective on climate change.

With the exception of our home-schooling, scientist-stalking Grand Inquisitor (AKA Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli) and our barking-mad, scientist-stalking, "ex-CIA case officer" Kent Clizbe, everybody in Northern Virginia knows that the CIA views climate change, not climate scientists, as a threat to America's national security.

It should be obvious, even to the most casual observer, provided that he is sane, that the CIA's Center on Climate Change and National Security is probably not dedicated to the pursuit of climate scientists. According to press reports, the director of the CIA's Center on Climate Change and National Security is Larry Kobayashi; and Director Kobayashi is tracking climate change, not climate scientists.

For people who are interested in filling their heads with something more than the conspiracy theories of lunatics who hound climate scientists, Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism has a National Security Reporting Project is publishing an informative series of articles and videos called Global Warning. This series is based on what the CIA, Pentagon, National Academy of Sciences, and all our other scientific agencies are learning about climate change and about the threats these changes pose to America's national security.

The personnel at a "science institute" run by "Bob," a mighty wizard who somehow manages to operate Secret Sam reconnaissance satellites and other classified sensors from his "primary" address (mailbox #209 in a Haymarket, Virginia parcel post store), may have a different perspective.

How do Russians view climate change? Views vary, (see also here) but in March 2010, Rossiiskaya Gazeta (3-19-10) interviewed Yury Averyanov, a member of Russia's Security Council, about climate change in Russia.

The interview was held on the eve of a the Security Council's meeting on the threats and challenges posed by climate change.

The Barents Observer summarized the Rossiiskaya Gazeta interview in an article titled "National Security Challenged by Arctic Climate Change" (3-23-10).

Former CIA analyst Paul Goble also summarized this interview in an article titled "Moscow Views Climate Change as a Security Threat, Mulls Creating ‘Climatic Assistance’ Program" (3-24-10), but the Google translation tool is also helpful for people who like to read Rossiiskaya Gazeta (3-19-10) for themselves.

Mr. Averyanov confirmed that climate change was happening. Asked if climate change was associated with a national security threat, Averyanov told
Rossiiskaya Gazeta (3-19-10):

Climate change could cause new interstate conflicts related to the exploration and production of energy, the use of marine transport routes and biological resources, drinking water and so on. The risk of conflicts related to water scarcity and food are particularly high in the south.

According to Averyanov,

Many cities, thousands of miles of pipelines, roads and railways are in permafrost regions. About 80 percent of BAM runs on permafrost. Its melting...calls for the revision of building codes with respect to a changing climate. A quarter of the homes built in Tiksi, Yakutsk, Vorkuta and other localities will be completely unfit for habitation...[i]n the next 10-15 years.

The Barents Observer (3-23-10) observes:

Mr. Averyanov also believes climate change in the Arctic could results in new inter-state conflicts following different countries’ search and exploration of energy resources, use of sea transport routes, bio-resources and more.

The circumpolar countries, and first of all the USA and its allies, are actively expanding their scientific, economical and military presence in the Arctic in order to get control over Arctic waters […] and seek to restrict Russia’s access to developing its Arctic deposits, Averyanov told the newspaper.

He also believes that the permafrost melting could significantly hamper the country’s abilities to use military equipment in the region.

The statements from the Security Council representative are outlined also in Russia National Security Strategy, which was adopted in spring last year. As BarentsObserver reported, the document outlines the shelf of the Barents Sea and other areas of the Arctic as regions of upcoming international competition for energy resources, and that competition and conflict over the hydrocarbon resources might eventually lead to the use of armed force and a disrupted power balance in Russian border areas.

Dynamic Duo Debunked: Why Aren't Kent Clizbe and Ken Cuccinelli Out Looking for the Fugitive from Justice "Bobby Thompson"?

[The fugitive "Bobby Thompson's" former lawyer] Helen MacMurray told ABC News that she has begun working with investigators to help them locate the man, who went by the name Bobby Thompson, but whose real identity remains a mystery. She believes he may have fled overseas to the Middle East or Eastern Europe.

"My understanding is that he had a lot of connections out of the country," she said. "He bragged about that."---(The Blotter, 12-23-10)

A blogger-moron who is angry that I defend climate scientists criticizes me for using a nom de plume on my little blog. He threatens that some "ex-CIA operative" named Kent Clizbe is going to unmask me (with the help of his CIA friends) and haul me into court for criticizing people who persecute our climate scientists.

In fact, real CIA officials aren't stalking climate scientists; instead, real CIA officials are giving climate scientists security clearances so that the scientists can exploit the data gathered by CIA reconnaissance systems to study climate change, which the CIA views as a threat to our national security.

Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism has a National Security Reporting Project and is publishing an informative series of articles and videos called Global Warning which are based on what the CIA, Pentagon, National Academy of Sciences, and all our other scientific agencies are learning about climate change and about the threats these changes pose to America's national security.

Acording to media reports, the Director of the CIA's Center on Climate Change and National Security is Larry Kobayashi. What a great name! Kobayashi! Remember the lawyer in that confusing thriller The Usual Suspects who said, "My name is Kobayashi. I work for Keyser Soze"? But I digress...

The farcial "ex-CIA operative" Kent Clizbe, who evidently aspires to be the Secret Sam sidekick for the Tea Party's Ken Doll (AKA Virginia's Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli), reportedly spams college professors and offers them a multi-million-dollar financial bounty if they will denounce the climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann for fraud. So far, no professors have denounced Dr. Mann, who is also constantly hounded and maligned by Virginia's equally-ludicrous, fossil-fueled, global warming denialist Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

Perhaps if intrepid Kent were a real CIA operative, he would locate the Florida fugitive who goes by the fake name "Bobby Thompson" and recover the millions "Thompson" stole from Americans who thought they were giving to Navy veterans.

The fugitive known as "Bobby Thompson" gave Virginia's Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli 55,000 dollars. Soon after, Virginia voted that military charities should not have to disclose information about themselves to the government. This new law benefits frauds like Thompson, who disguised his criminal theft and money-laundering operation as the "Navy Veterans' Charity."

Perhaps if intrepid Ken were a real Attorney General, he would locate the Florida fugitive who goes by the name "Bobby Thompson" and recover the millions "Thompson" stole from Americans who thought they were giving to Navy veterans.

For more information about the criminal with the fake name Bobby Thompson, read "Lawyer [Helen Mac Murray] Flips on Fugitive GOP Donor Who Allegedly Scammed Millions" (The Blotter, 12-23-10). See also my earlier post about Thompson's lawyer Helen Mac Murray for some context. Read all the stories about Bobby Thompson at the excellent St. Petersburg Times series "Under the Radar."

"The KGB Lawsuits" (1995) by Brian Crozier

[In Western countries, the Soviet KGB fostered] lawsuits, with the aim of immobilizing opponents and, in due course, ruining their reputations.---Brian Crozier, The KGB Lawsuits

Brian Crozier's The KGB Lawsuits (1995) describes Soviet-era "active measures." The back-cover of the book observes:

Active measures included disinformation (the deliberate spreading of false information), either to propagate opinions favourable to Soviet policies or to discredit hostile views and those expressing them. Forgeries played an important role, and so did the fostering of lawsuits, with the aim of immobilizing opponents and, in due course, ruining their reputations [my emphasis]. Those included in such activities in the West were not necessarily aware that they were being used. Such people were known in the intelligence world as "unconscious" or "unwitting" agents.

Did Wikileaks Exploit Music and Photo-Sharing Networks to Grab Classified Data?

“There is a difference between being given information that may have been obtained in violation of some agreement or law versus the media itself violating the law or an agreement in order to obtain information,” said Sandra Baron, the executive director of the Media Law Resource Center in New York. “The media is not allowed to steal.”---Bloomberg News (1-20-11)

Michael Riley, a journalist at Bloomberg News (1-20-11), is reporting that Wikileaks' Julian Assange, who is being guarded by the Norfolk Constabulary in the U.K., may have exploited music and photo-sharing networks to grab classified data. This article is very complicated, but the video Bloomberg includes with the article explains this complicated type of computer crime for an ordinary audience. The same story is carried by Business Week (1-20-11).

Bloomberg News (1-20-11) reports:

WikiLeaks, condemned by the U.S. government for posting secret data leaked by insiders, may have used music- and photo-sharing networks to obtain and publish classified documents, according to a computer security firm.

Tiversa Inc., a company based in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, has evidence that WikiLeaks, which has said it doesn’t know who provides it with information, may seek out secret data itself, using so-called “peer-to-peer” networks, Chief Executive Officer Robert Boback claimed. He said the government is examining evidence that Tiversa has turned over.

The company, which has done investigative searches on behalf of U.S. agencies including the FBI, said it discovered that computers in Sweden were trolling through hard drives accessed from popular peer-to-peer networks such as LimeWire and Kazaa. The same information obtained in those searches later appeared on WikiLeaks, Boback said. WikiLeaks bases its most important servers in Sweden.

“WikiLeaks is doing searches themselves on file-sharing networks,” Boback said in an interview, summing up his firm’s deductions from the search evidence it gathered. “It would be highly unlikely that someone else from Sweden is issuing those same types of searches resulting in that same type of information.”

...Tiversa declined to say who its client was when it noticed the Swedish downloads. Howard Schmidt, a former Tiversa adviser, is cybersecurity coordinator and special assistant to U.S. President Barack Obama.

Tiversa researchers said the data-mining operation in Sweden is both systematic and highly successful.

In a 60-minute period on Feb. 7, 2009, using so-called Internet protocol addresses that every computer, server or similar equipment has, Tiversa’s monitors detected four Swedish computers engaged in searching and downloading information on peer-to-peer networks...

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Warma in Seattle, who successfully prosecuted similar cases of unintended searching, said the systematic pillaging of computer contents through peer- to-peer networks could be pursued under federal anti-hacking statutes.

Even if not criminal, such conduct, if traced to WikiLeaks, would contradict its stated mission as a facilitator of leaked material by insiders, whose identities, Assange has said, the group takes measures not to know. The group provides an encrypted drop box on its website that it said prevents any tracing back to the source of documents.

Receptacle for Leaks

“If their information gathering doesn’t consist simply of being a receptacle for leaks but of this more aggressive effort to go out and cull this information, then you’re moving a clear step further from anything that resembles traditional journalistic practice,” said Mark Jurkowitz, the associate director for the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The evidence could also be used by congressional committees, which Boback said are pursuing a separate inquiry to undermine WikiLeaks’ claim that it’s a legitimate media organization with protections under the First Amendment.

“There is a difference between being given information that may have been obtained in violation of some agreement or law versus the media itself violating the law or an agreement in order to obtain information,” said Sandra Baron, the executive director of the Media Law Resource Center in New York. “The media is not allowed to steal.” [Read the full article.]

CIA's Center on Climate Change and National Security: Global Warming Is Spreading Disease

"In coming decades, more heat, humidity and rainfall could allow mosquitoes, ticks, and other parasites and carriers of tropical and subtropical diseases to spread to areas where they didn't exist previously, infecting populations that haven't built up resistance to them, intelligence and health officials say...

Officials at the CIA's Center on Climate Change and National Security, created in September 2009 to gather information on the threat from global warming, say countering the spread of disease is high on their agenda."---The Kansas City Star (1-10-11)

The Kansas City Star (1-10-11) has published a story about gobal warming written by Jessica Q. Chen, a student who is partipating in Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism's National Security Reporting Project.

In her story "Climate Change Reveals Disease as National Security Threat" (1-10-11), Ms. Chen reports:

One of the most worrisome national security threats of climate change is the spread of disease, among both people and animals, U.S. intelligence and health officials say.

But more than a decade after such concerns were first raised by U.S. intelligence agencies, significant gaps remain in the health surveillance and response network - not just in developing nations, but in the United States as well, according to those officials and a review of federal documents and reports.

And those gaps, they say, undermine the ability of the U.S. and world health officials to respond to disease outbreaks before they become national security threats.

"We're way behind the ball on this," said Josh Michaud, who has worked at the Defense Department's National Center for Medical Intelligence and its Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System. "It's a collective action problem."

Michaud said monitoring currently was done largely through publicly available medical information and mathematical modeling, but that's hardly enough to spot sudden disease trends quickly.

U.S. intelligence officials list the spread of disease as one of their top four climate change-related security concerns, along with food and water scarcity and the impact of extreme weather on transportation and communications systems. Outbreaks of disease can destabilize foreign countries, especially developing nations, overtax the U.S. military and undermine social cohesion and the economy at home.

In coming decades, more heat, humidity and rainfall could allow mosquitoes, ticks, and other parasites and carriers of tropical and subtropical diseases to spread to areas where they didn't exist previously, infecting populations that haven't built up resistance to them, intelligence and health officials say.

Malaria, cholera and other diseases are now being seen in parts of Asia and Africa where they weren't detected previously, something experts attribute to climate change. Dengue fever returned to the United States in 2009 after a 75-year absence - and might spread to 28 states, according to a Natural Resources Defense Council study. [Read the full text.]

"The Usual Suspects": Global Warming and Climate Change

"Environmental issues have long been recognized as key to understanding what might happen in unstable countries. In the 1990s, while spies studied such things as North Korean crop yields, attempting to anticipate where shortages could lead to instability, the CIA also shared a trove of classified environmental data with scientists through a program that became known as Medea.

'The whole group (of scientists) were patriots and this was an opportunity to help the country do something about the train wreck (we) saw coming' from climate change, said Robert Bindschadler, a glaciologist at NASA who received a security clearance when Medea started in 1992.

Cleared scientists also helped the CIA interpret environmental data and improve collection methods, former CIA Director John Deutch said in a 1996 speech."---McClatchy (1-10-11)

The Director of the CIA's Center on Climate Change and National Security recently gave a briefing at the Pew Charitable Trusts on the CIA's efforts to meet the national security challenges posed by global warming and climate change. The briefing was limited to the policy community and reporters.

Still, the public can learn about the views of the CIA's Director of the Center on Climate Change and National Security by reading an interview he gave journalism students Charles Mead and Annie Snider, who are researching global warming.

According to the CIA's Director on Climate Change and National Security, Pakistan's catastrophic floods are a harbinger of climate change.

In an article titled "Why the CIA Is Spying on a Changing Climate" (McClatchy, 1-10-11) the journalism students report:

"[Pakistan's torrential floods have] the exact same symptoms you would see for future climate change events, and we're expecting to see more of them," he said later, agreeing to talk only if his name were not revealed, for security reasons. "We wanted to know: What are the conditions that lead to a situation like the Pakistan flooding? What are the important things for water flows, food security … radicalization, disease" and displaced people?

As intelligence officials assess key components of state stability, they are realizing that the norms they had been operating with — such as predictable river flows and crop yields — are shifting. [Read the full text and watch the video interviews.]

Canada Free Press Website Retracts Falsehoods About Climate Modeler Dr. Andrew Weaver

"CFP [Canada Free Press]...wishes to dissociate itself from any suggestion that Dr. Weaver 'knows very little about climate science.' We entirely accept that he has a well-deserved international reputation as a climate scientist and that Dr. Ball’s attack on his credentials is unjustified."---"Apology to Dr. Andrew Weaver," Canada Free Press (1-20-11)

On January 13, 2011, a certain "John O'Sullivan" published a ridiculous article in the Canada Free Press about how an alleged ex-CIA case officer named Kent Clizbe was offering a multi-million-dollar bounty to scholars if they would denounce the famous climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann for fraud. So far, "former CIA case officer" Kent Clizbe has not recruited a single scientist. Perhaps this is because Kent Clizbe's risible emails to the scientists sound about as authentic as the spam people sometimes get from Nigeria, or perhaps Dr. Michael Mann's colleagues care more about ethics and truth than about money.

Probably, John O'Sullivan's dishonest and propagandistic article was intended to defame Dr. Michael Mann and to make patriotic Americans who trust the expertise of the CIA believe that global warming and climate change are a scientific hoax. In fact, it is a matter of public record that the CIA gives security clearances to many climate scientists so that our country will be prepared to deal with national security threats caused by global warming and climate change.

For more information about the CIA and climate change, see my recent posts about the CIA program MEDEA and the CIA's "Center on Climate Change and National Security." The Director of the CIA's Center on Climate Change has been identified in media reports as Larry Kobayashi.

Why did John O'Sullivan promote the obscure Kent Clizbe while failing to note the CIA's public statements on the national security implications of climate change? Why does John O'Sullivan present Kooky Kent Clizbe as a credible source instead of telling people what is right on the CIA's website and published in the major media?

Now it turns out that Tim Ball, an editor for The Canada Free Press, has been forced to apologize to Dr. Andrew Weaver, another climate scientist whom the CFP website has previously defamed.

DeSmogBlog.com (1-21-11) has published an article titled "CanadaFreePress Apologizes to Dr. Andrew Weaver":

The website Canada Free Press has issued a retraction and apology to University of Victoria climate modeller Dr. Andrew Weaver for the content of an article written by Dr. Tim Ball.

Ball, whose own unspectacular academic tenure ended with a fizzle in 1996, has found a second career pretending to be a world-renowned climatologist (he once wrote to then-Prime Minister Paul Martin that he was "one of the first climatology PhDs in the world" - a statement that is purest fiction). In addition to signing on as a "science advisor" to energy industry front groups such as the Friends of Science or the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, Ball has written and spoken extensively, seldom passing up the opportunity to libel real scientists. (Though, when the going gets tough, the dishonest get going.)

One of Ball's favourite targets has been Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria in Ball's B.C. hometown. On occasion, Ball has even had the nerve to show his face at UVic, only to run into an audience who was capable of fact-checking his claptrap on their laptops. Most recently, he gave a lecture in which he made the outrageous claim that climate models don't include water vapour or Milankovic cycles, only to have a student in the audience politely tell him he was wrong.

Now, clearly, Ball has staggered beyond the pale, saying a bunch of things that are so obviously, demonstrably and categorically false that Canada Free Press has done the right thing. As the CFP correction says:

"Contrary to what was stated in Dr. Ball’s article, Dr. Weaver: (1) never announced he will not participate in the next IPCC; (2) never said that the IPCC chairman should resign; (3) never called for the IPCC’s approach to science to be overhauled; and (4) did not begin withdrawing from the IPCC in January 2010.

"As a result of a nomination process that began in January, 2010, Dr. Weaver became a Lead Author for Chapter 12: “Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility” of the Working Group I contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC.” That work began in May, 2010. Dr. Ball’s article failed to mention these facts although they are publicly-available."

The line that may be most important for Weaver, however, is this:

"CFP also wishes to dissociate itself from any suggestion that Dr. Weaver 'knows very little about climate science.' We entirely accept that he has a well-deserved international reputation as a climate scientist and that Dr. Ball’s attack on his credentials is unjustified." [See the full article.]

MEDEA: Patriotic Climate Scientists With Security Clearances Help the CIA Interprete Environmental Data

"Environmental issues have long been recognized as key to understanding what might happen in unstable countries. In the 1990s, while spies studied such things as North Korean crop yields, attempting to anticipate where shortages could lead to instability, the CIA also shared a trove of classified environmental data with scientists through a program that became known as Medea.

'The whole group (of scientists) were patriots and this was an opportunity to help the country do something about the train wreck (we) saw coming' from climate change, said Robert Bindschadler, a glaciologist at NASA who received a security clearance when Medea started in 1992.

Cleared scientists also helped the CIA interpret environmental data and improve collection methods, former CIA Director John Deutch said in a 1996 speech."---McClatchy (1-10-11)

For more information about the CIA role in preparing America to meet the challenges of climate change, search "Center on Climate Change and National Security." The Pew Charitable Trusts recently identified the Director of the CIA Center on Climate Change and National Security as Larry Kobayashi.

Scientists with security clearances have always been in the forefront when it comes to protecting America's national security. Several news organizations are publishing an informative article titled "Why the CIA is Spying on a Changing Climate." The article published by McClatchy (1-10-11) even includes a video where current and former CIA officials, an Air Force general, and the head of the National Academy of Sciences comment on why climate change is a national security issue. The same article is also published by The Vancouver Sun (1-13-11), but without the video.

The authors of the article are Charles Mead and Annie Snider (McLatchy 1-10-11):

Mead and Snider are graduate students in Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. This story is part of Medill's National Security Reporting Project, which is overseen by Josh Meyer, a former national security writer for the Los Angeles Times who now teaches in Medill's Washington program, and Ellen Shearer, the director of Medill's Washington program.

Here is what the young journalists learned (McLatchy 1-10-11):

Last summer, as torrential rains flooded Pakistan, a veteran intelligence analyst watched closely from his desk at CIA headquarters just outside the capital.

For the analyst, who heads the CIA's year-old Center on Climate Change and National Security, the worst natural disaster in Pakistan's history was a warning.

"It has the exact same symptoms you would see for future climate change events, and we're expecting to see more of them," he said later, agreeing to talk only if his name were not revealed, for security reasons. "We wanted to know: What are the conditions that lead to a situation like the Pakistan flooding? What are the important things for water flows, food security … radicalization, disease" and displaced people?

As intelligence officials assess key components of state stability, they are realizing that the norms they had been operating with — such as predictable river flows and crop yields — are shifting.

Yet the U.S. government is ill-prepared to act on climate changes that are coming faster than anticipated and threaten to bring instability to places of U.S. national interest, interviews with several dozen current and former officials and outside experts and a review of two decades' worth of government reports indicate.

Climate projections lack crucial detail, they say, and information about how people react to changes — for instance, by migrating — is sparse. Military officials say they don't yet have the intelligence they need in order to prepare for what might come.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a 23-year veteran of the CIA who led the Department of Energy's intelligence unit from 2005 to 2008, said the intelligence community simply wasn't set up to deal with a problem such as climate change that wasn't about stealing secrets.

"I consider what the U.S. government is doing on climate change to be lip service," said Mowatt-Larssen, who is currently a fellow at Harvard University. "It's not serious."

Just getting to where the intelligence community is now, however, has been a challenge.

Back in the 1990s, the CIA opened an environmental center, swapped satellite imagery with Russia and cleared U.S. scientists to access classified information. But when the Bush administration took power, the center was absorbed by another office and work related to the climate was broadly neglected.

In 2007, a report by retired high-ranking military officers called attention to the national security implications of climate change, and the National Intelligence Council followed a year later with an assessment on the topic. But some Republicans attacked it as a diversion of resources.

And when CIA Director Leon Panetta stood up the climate change center in 2009, conservative lawmakers attempted to block its funding.

"The CIA's resources should be focused on monitoring terrorists in caves, not polar bears on icebergs," Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said at the time.

Now, with calls for belt tightening coming from every corner, leadership in Congress has made it clear that the intelligence budget, which soared to $80.1 billion last year, will have to be cut. And after sweeping victories by conservatives in the midterm elections, many political insiders think the community's climate change work will be in jeopardy.

Environmental issues have long been recognized as key to understanding what might happen in unstable countries. In the 1990s, while spies studied such things as North Korean crop yields, attempting to anticipate where shortages could lead to instability, the CIA also shared a trove of classified environmental data with scientists through a program that became known as Medea.

"The whole group (of scientists) were patriots and this was an opportunity to help the country do something about the train wreck (we) saw coming" from climate change, said Robert Bindschadler, a glaciologist at NASA who received a security clearance when Medea started in 1992.

Cleared scientists also helped the CIA interpret environmental data and improve collection methods, former CIA Director John Deutch said in a 1996 speech.

But the Republican-controlled Congress gradually trimmed these programs, and after President George W. Bush took office in 2001, top-level interest in environmental security programs disappeared. Intelligence officials working on them were reassigned.

Terry Flannery, who led the CIA's environmental security center until 2000, said he had to tread lightly in his final years running it.

"You had this odd thing where it became an interchange of science and politics," he said. "At times, it was just strange."

Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who led the CIA from 2006 to 2009, said issues such as energy and water made Bush's daily briefings, but climate change was not a part of the agenda.

"I didn't have a market for it when I was director," Hayden said in a recent interview. "It was all terrorism all the time, and when it wasn't, it was all Iran."

The Bush administration's open skepticism of global warming hurt the intelligence community's efforts to track its impact. A 2007 congressional oversight report found the administration "engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming."

Today, climate scientists say their research is hindered by a data gap resulting from inadequate funding during the Bush years. In 2005, the National Research Council said the nation's environmental satellite system was "at risk of collapse."

Even during the Bush administration, though, pockets of work moved forward.

In 2007, Department of Energy intelligence chief Mowatt-Larssen built an experimental program called Global Energy & Environment Strategic Ecosystem, or Global EESE. He tapped Carol Dumaine, a CIA foresight strategist known around the agency as a creative visionary, to lead the program.

"Our modern intelligence evolved for a different type of threat: monolithic, top-down, incrementally changing," Dumaine, who has since returned to the CIA, said in a recent interview. She, on the other hand, was "trying to grow a garden of intelligence genius."

The program brought together more than 200 of the brightest minds from around the world to explore the impact of issues such as abrupt climate change, energy infrastructure and environmental stresses in Afghanistan.

But after only two years, the program was shuttered. Former members say it was brought down by bureaucratic infighting, political pressure from Congress and the Bush White House, and concerns about including foreign nationals in the intelligence arena.

"The most important thing we lost is data. We lost the data that accompanies new ways of conducting intelligence and for getting it right with environmental problems," Mowatt-Larssen said.

In April 2007, a group of high-ranking retired military officers published a report that said projected changes to the climate posed a "serious threat to America's national security."

Within weeks, a handful of lawmakers from both parties were pushing to get climate change back on the intelligence community's agenda.
Chuck Hagel, then a Republican senator from Nebraska, drafted legislation that called climate change "a clear and present danger to the security of the United States" and would have required an intelligence report on it.

Although the provision went nowhere, the National Intelligence Council moved ahead on its own.

"The goal was to produce enough understanding of the effects, the way they played out, government capacity, to tee up for U.S. government agencies the kind of questions they better start asking now in order to be ready 20 years from now," said Thomas Fingar, who was the chairman of the NIC at the time and now teaches at Stanford University.

Three months after the assessment was completed, the NIC appointed retired Maj. Gen. Richard Engel as the director of its new climate change and state stability program.

Some lawmakers were so alarmed by the findings of the classified National Intelligence Assessment that they pushed for a resurrection of Clinton-era environmental intelligence programs.

In the months since the CIA's climate change center began operations, a team of about 15 analysts has inventoried the intelligence community's collection of environmental data, restarted the Medea program and begun developing tools that bring global climate forecasts down to the regional level.

But Pentagon officials say the information they need most doesn't yet exist.

"Right now there's a gap between, OK, we can have a weather forecast for what the weather's going to be in the next month, and then we have the climate forecast, which is 30 to 100 years out," said one Pentagon official, who spoke only after he was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media. "It really doesn't help the combatant commanders plan their operations."

The Defense Department has sponsored research on climate change and security, and last year pledged $7.5 million to study impacts in Africa, where security experts say terrorism and climate change could become twin challenges for weak governments.

For example, some projections point to Niger, which had a military coup last year, as highly vulnerable to climate change.

"Before I started looking at Niger, I wouldn't have necessarily put it as a place that we would be that concerned about," said Joshua Busby, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin conducting the Pentagon-funded research. "But they provide a significant percentage of the world's uranium supplies, and al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb is active there."

The CIA climate center recently brought in an Africa specialist, and its director just returned from a visit to the continent.

Senior intelligence officials say it will take a marriage of regional experts and climate change specialists to make vital connections such as these.

Last December, the center launched a website that gives other CIA analysts access to its work and the classified 2008 NIC assessment. The unit is now developing environmental warning software that combines regional climate projections with political and demographic information.

But whether this early work by the climate change center will be enough to produce needed culture change within the intelligence community remains to be seen.

"You have a lot of regional experts who haven't thought in those terms," said one senior intelligence official, who agreed to speak only if his name were not revealed, because of the sensitivity of the topic. "That's the difficult part."

Through the National Academy of Sciences, the CIA also is collaborating with outside experts who include leading climatologists, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey and former Vice President Al Gore's national security adviser, Leon Fuerth.

Ralph Cicerone, a veteran of the 1990s Medea group who's now the president of the National Academy of Sciences, leads the work. He said the group was trying to fill scientific holes that could become major problems for policymakers.

"If some future president calls up the secretary of state or the director of Central Intelligence, and says, 'Gee, I have this draft treaty on my desk, should I sign it? Can we verify it?' and one of them were to say to the president, 'Gee, we never thought of that,' that's not an acceptable answer," Cicerone said.

Intelligence officials also say more work is needed on low-probability, high-impact events. In 2003, a Pentagon-sponsored study concluded that if rapid glacial melt caused the ocean's major currents to shut down, there could be conflicts over resources, migration and significant geopolitical realignments.

"We get a lot of these shocks of one kind or the other, whether it's Katrina or the financial crisis," the senior intelligence official said. "We need to be prepared to think about how we would deal with that."

This summer, the CIA plans to host a climate war game looking at exactly these sorts of high-impact events. The CIA intends to build the scenarios with the help of security experts, scientists and insurance specialists, as well as Hollywood screenwriters who can conjure up the most unforeseeable and disastrous scenarios.

But politics makes such forward-thinking work risky. Intelligence analysis of climate change has been carefully designed to try to sidestep the topic's political controversy. The National Intelligence Council scrupulously avoided delving into the science of climate change, including whether it is man-made or cyclical, and the CIA climate center has been instructed to do the same.

But with many newly elected Republicans questioning the scientific grounding of climate change and politicians from both sides of the aisle looking for places to cut spending, many think this intelligence work could be removed from the agenda.

New House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, plans to disband the House of Representatives' three-year-old global warming committee, which has pressed the connection between climate change and national security and held a hearing where Fingar and Mowatt-Larssen testified.

"There's just no doubt that the support for focusing on (climate issues) in the intelligence community — even energy security — has completely diminished," said Eric Rosenbach, who served as Hagel's national security adviser. "They need a champion."

If a lack of political support causes this intelligence work to fall by the wayside once again, it probably will be the Pentagon that feels it most acutely. Not only is the military concerned with how a changing climate could increase conflict, but it is also the emergency responder to humanitarian crises worldwide.

"The Navy must understand where, when and how climate change will affect regions around the world," Rear Adm. David Titley, the Navy's oceanographer, said in November at the last climate change hearing of the House Science Committee's Energy and Environment Subcommittee in the previous session of Congress.

The effects of climate change are most evident in Arctic ice melt, where "new shipping routes have the potential to reshape the global transportation system," Titley told subcommittee Chairman Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash.

The hearing began with a lively debate on climate science, but by the time Titley testified, Baird was the only committee member left.

But for the lone lame-duck congressman, Titley delivered his testimony to two rows of empty chairs.

Sergei Karaganov: "The World Around Russia: 2017"

Permafrost Institute of the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk, Rusia

Kent Clizbe, a clueless goofball who boasts on the Internet that he is an ex-CIA caseworker, is emailing college professors and promising a multi-million-dollar bounty to professors who denounce the Nobel-winning climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann for scientific fraud. So far, ex-CIA caseworker Kent Clizbe has not managed to recruit a single scholar. Perhaps the college professors mistakenly believed that Clizbe's risible email originated in Nigeria.

Kooky Kent's promoters at a blog called The Canada Free Press evidently imagine that they can damage Dr. Mann's reputation by making gullible people think that since an ex-CIA agent is hot on the trail of Dr. Mann, that global warming must be a hoax.

In fact, as I have noted in previous posts, the CIA has been researching global warming for many years. America's reputable scientific organizations, the CIA, the Pentagon, and even the Vatican are concerned about how to meet the challenges of global warming. Luckily, we have great climate scientists like Dr. Michael Mann to help us understand climate change; we don't have to depend on the likes of Kooky Kent Clizbe.

Sometimes, the CIA and the Russian State Security (FSB) have even collaborated in research on global warming, according to the former DCI John Deutch.

According to Dr. Deutch (1996):

[T]he Intelligence Community has unique assets, including satellites, sensors, and remote sensing expertise that can contribute a wealth of information on the environment to the scientific community. We also have mechanisms in place to share that information with outside experts.

Kooky Kent Clizbe may have access to a butterfly net and the blogosphere, but he is not a climate scientist with a security clearance who has access to data collected by satellites, sensors, and remote sensing expertise.

In 2007, the Russian scholar Sergei Karaganov edited a collection of articles that addressed the issue of climate change in Russia. The study was prepared at the request of the Russian State Security (FSB).

Russia expert Paul Goble, who has worked for the CIA and other government agencies, has posted an interesting article about Karaganov's study. Goble's article, which is titled "Global Warming Threatens Russian Oil Exports, FSB Study Warns" (6-20-07), reports:

A new study, prepared at the request of the Russian security agencies, concludes that global warming is likely to make it impossible for Moscow to continue to export oil and gas at current rates and thus over the next decade or more will undermine the foundations of Russia’s economic recovery and international standing.

Entitled “The World Around Russia: 2017” and edited by Sergei Karaganov, one of Moscow’s most influential political commentators, this study includes articles by scholars from the Academy of Sciences as well as other experts on climate change, economics, and other issues (http://news.mail.ru/society/1330715/).

Its conclusions are stark: Russia, the newly published book argues, faces a variety of threats from global warming, ranging from the possible influx of immigrants from countries becoming too hot to the loss of access to its oil and gas fields as a result of the melting of the permafrost in many petroleum-rich regions of the Russian north.

And its authors suggest, neither Moscow nor the international community has the ability to prevent this from happening over the next generation or more, even if one or both were to take all the steps that Russian and Western environmental experts now advocate. [See the full text.]

Justice for Anna Mae Aquash: The AIM Myth Busters Report from the Trial of John Graham

Canadian Indians Debbie Maloney (left) and her sister Denise Maloney (right) are the daughters of Anna Mae Aquash, who was executed on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975 by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

The Maloney sisters are talking to reporters on 12-10-10 after the Canadian Indian John Graham was found guilty in 7th Circuit Court in Rapid City, SD, of felony murder involving a kidnapping in connection with the 1975 murder of their mother Anna Mae.

Debbie is a Constable with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and has been active in the Annie Mae Justice Fund. Her sister Denise is the executive director of the Indigenous Women for Justice. Denise believes her mother was executed by AIM members who thought she knew too much about the murders and other criminal activities perpetrated by the American Indian Movement.
When Anna Mae Aquash was executed by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), in December 1975, her young daughters (above) were left motherless.

Below, the AIM Mythbusters give their eyewitness account of the trial of John Graham for the murder of Anna Mae Aquash. For more information about AIM's reign of terror, read News from Indian Country and American Indian Mafia by Joe and John Trimbach. Joe Trimbach is a former Agent in Charge of the Minneapolis FBI.

The AIM Myth Busters focus considerable attention on one of the witnesses, Candy Hamilton:

View From the Inside: The Anna Mae Aquash Trial or Candy, Anyone? (12-30-10)

Earlier this month, the unraveling continued in the Pennington County Courthouse concerning the AIM-led cabal that condemned Anna Mae Pictou Aquash to death in 1975. Before he seated the jury, Judge Jack Delaney opened with the words, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin this trial. It will proceed in this manner.” The judge spelled out how he expected us, the spectators and the families, to behave, and the strict prohibition against the mere possession of an electronic device. So much for the cell phone; I would have to run to the car if I needed it, then rush back so I wouldn’t lose my seat. For the third time since 2004, I had a close-up view of justice in this long overdue murder case, of feeling the emotional ups and downs, and of hearing guilty people lie in the continuing saga of conspiracy on display.

After 35 years, the man accused of actually pulling the trigger of the gun placed to the back of Anna Mae’s head was sitting a few feet away from me, on the other side of the courtroom railing. Defendant John Boy Graham appeared confident that his lawyer, John Murphy, would lay the ground work for a successful defense. In his opening statement, Murphy told the jury that there was “no evidence linking my client to the crime.” But over the course of the seven-day trial, the jury would hear plenty of evidence linking his client to the crime. Really, all the prosecution had to do was let the jury hear about Anna Mae’s final hours, and how John Boy, in the wee hours of December 12, 1975, allegedly shot Anna Mae in the head before pushing her over a 30-foot cliff near Wanblee, South Dakota. Graham faced two counts of aiding and abetting the murder; one as the result of kidnapping Anna Mae and the other as an accessory to pre-meditated murder.

Much of the testimony was rehash from the Arlo Looking Cloud trial of February 2004 and Richard Marshall’s trial of April, 2010. In fact, both men took the stand. It appeared Arlo told the truth and Richard committed perjury, presumably on the advice of counsel, about the murder weapon Marshall says he did not provide. Arlo testified that he was standing a few feet away when Graham pulled the trigger. Following the obligatory testimony from federal investigators concerning the crime scene, former AIM members told how they learned what happened to Anna Mae. Many of them, armed with coached testimony, walked a fine line between implicating others and implicating themselves.

Troy Lynn Yellow Wood, for example, forgot to mention that she provided the rope used to tie Anna Mae’s hands. She recalled, however, as did several follow-on witnesses, that John Boy, Arlo and mother hen Theda Clarke marched Anna Mae out the rear of Troy Lynn’s Denver apartment not long after Corky Gonzalez drew his finger across his throat. A dozen or so onlookers watched as a young woman with her hands bound was led away and loaded into the back of Theda’s red Ford Pinto hatchback. Not one of them called the police, not then or later when they learned how Anna Mae died. Today, each of these witnesses will tell you that they were Anna Mae’s friend.

On the third day, Friday, Judge Delaney ruled that witness Ka-Mook Ecoffey, the former common-law wife of AIM founder Dennis Banks, would not be allowed to tell the jury what convicted killer Leonard Peltier told her and Anna Mae about his role in the murder of two FBI Agents. This undoubtedly came as a disappointment to the prosecution. In his opening statement, US Attorney Marty Jackley (deputized by the state of South Dakota), had said that Peltier admitted murdering FBI Agent Ron Williams. This was one of the reasons Anna Mae posed a threat to those who thought she was an informant; she knew too much. Peltier’s boast might have been the last straw for Anna Mae’s accusers; now they had to get rid of her. As Jackley put it, “She now had seriously incriminating evidence against Leonard Peltier.” Late on Friday, however, Judge Delaney reversed himself and informed the attorneys he would allow Ka-Mook to say the words she had already mentioned under oath at the first two trials: “The mother---er was begging for his life, but I shot him anyway.”

Over the weekend, I was invited to a book signing at the Prairie Edge bookstore and museum, and then to a short trip to the Crazy Horse memorial. There in the gift shop, we found two stacks of American Indian Mafia, prophetically surrounding Russell Means’ Where White Men Fear To Tread. Since Russ and his AIM buddies were nowhere to been seen during the trial, perhaps they are the ones who are fearful now. They should fear, for their freedom. Justice will have its say. On Sunday, I was invited to a predawn ceremony atop the cliff where Anna Mae was left to die. It was deadly cold, much like that night when, as Arlo says, Anna Mae was still moving at the bottom of the ravine. Justice must prevail.

People often ask why it took so long to begin indicting those responsible. Another way of asking the question might be: How did the AIM leaders and their lawyers keep the troops in line all these years? Well, for starters, as one the members later recalled, “No one ever crossed Russell or Dennis.” The agreed-upon story, first aired in Peter Matthiessen’s somewhat farcical, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, was that the FBI was behind the murder. Former AIM legal aid Candy Hamilton likes to tell this story. In fact, she carried that chum bucket into the courtroom.

On the witness stand, Candy crowed that the FBI and their Agent David Price, one of the investigators who worked on the case, were perhaps more likely suspects than say, Dennis Banks, Russell Means, Clyde Bellecourt, Dave Hill, Bill Means, Ted Means, Lorelie DeCora Means, Madonna Gilbert, Angie Begay, Tom Poor Bear, Charlie Abourezk, Ken Tilsen, or the Pinto trio who simply followed orders. This would be the same Candy Hamilton who had fairly frequent contact with several of those involved; the same Candy Hamilton who forgot to mention that she saw AIM attorney Bruce Ellison waving a piece of paper and claiming it was proof that Anna Mae was a traitor. And later, when it was obvious that Anna Mae had been murdered by Candy’s associates, she showed no interest in contacting law enforcement. Candy says she didn’t know who to trust. Seriously? Was Candy really suggesting that her AIM pals conspired with the people trying to solve the murder? Gosh, I guess everyone was against Anna Mae, except Candy of course.

For the most part, Candy’s story fell on deaf ears. At one time, the “FBI did it” theory had more legs. Today, after so many revelations of AIM complicity, the old saw has dulled. And as I put it to the Rapid City Journal, which gave Candy’s cackling a headline, the wheel of justice looks momentarily, then plows right through the nonsense. Hamilton’s story is still embraced by many of the people involved in the conspiracy, however. Along with a long list of complaints about his extradition from Canada, poor John Boy wanted it known that he also believed the FBI was somehow complicit in the murder he stood accused of committing. You see, Graham’s story was that he dropped Anna Mae off at a friend’s house, not off a cliff.

On the sixth day of the trial, the government rested its case. Now it was up to counselor Murphy to undo the damage from ten witnesses, each of whom had tied his client to the kidnapping and subsequent ride into the wilderness. The next morning, when Judge Delaney asked him if he was ready to call his first witness, Murphy responded, “Judge, the defense rests.” Graham’s defender was perhaps acknowledging that he had no earthly idea how to present evidence that would bolster his client’s story about an AIM safe house where supposedly Anna Mae was let go.

Graham’s supporters might have wondered why he himself didn’t take the stand. Graham would have presumably told the jury all about that house somewhere on the Pine Ridge reservation and how, after talking it over with Arlo and Theda, he emancipated Anna Mae. Poor girl must have run into some bad luck that night. Some safe house, huh? The jury never heard Graham’s description of the building that otherwise had no address, no physical description, no identifying characteristics, no owner, no chain of title, no utility bills, no tax receipts, no records of any kind. Maybe the reason Graham was kept off the stand is that he simply couldn’t remember where this house of safety was, who was living there, or if it had running water and a welcome mat.

No defense was supposedly no problem, but how to explain it to the ignorant masses? Once again, it was the Rapid City Journal to the rescue. Quoting an expert on such matters, attorney Robert Van Norman, the Journal explained that defense witnesses might not hold up too well on cross-examination, that is, if the defense had any witnesses worth calling. Perhaps Murphy thought better about putting AIM supporter and Graham defender David Seals on the stand, the one person who might have endorsed Graham’s safe house story. But then, on cross-examination, the prosecution would have had the chance to question Seals about his abduction by aliens, a story he also swears is true. Maybe Van Norman has a point.

For some of us in the courtroom, Graham’s fate was foretold by his victim, observed during Arlo’s rather damning testimony. It began with a knock on the courtroom back door. When the bailiff answered, there was no one there. A few moments later, the projector came on, casting a white beam on the wall. I was sitting a few feet away from it when this happened, and no one touched the darn thing. The prosecutors had been using it to show evidentiary photographs and perhaps now it was showing the light of truth. And then, in the middle of Arlo’s testimony, Judge Delaney’s landline phone began ringing, and he could not turn it off. Perhaps this was Anna Mae’s way of saying that the jury should believe Arlo. Apparently, they did.

After closing arguments on Thursday, the case went to the jury. The last thing the jury heard was state prosecutor Rod Oswald telling them that Graham’s safe house idea was just plain stupid. The end came in a few tension-filled moments. Late in the afternoon, after being hung on one of the charges, the jury came back with a 1 and 1; not guilty on the pre-meditation count, guilty on the kidnapping and accessory to murder. Either one was a fatal defeat for the defense, and for the others involved. By taking his client to state court, Murphy may have blundered, perhaps thinking he would have an easier time raising reasonable doubt under state statute. Graham will get life and fare worse than the parole-eligible Arlo Looking Cloud, convicted in 2004 of aiding and abetting the murder. Because, under state sentencing rules, Graham’s life sentence comes wrapped in a no-parole blanket. Graham will live the rest of his life behind bars, forever wondering if he should have cooperated with investigators.

Leonard Peltier likewise cannot be happy about the verdict, or about what was said of him. Witness Yellow Wood had offered that Anna Mae was first interrogated by Peltier some six months before her death. After he put a gun in Anna Mae’s mouth, Yellow Wood testified that Peltier laughed it off, saying that he wanted to “…hear it from the horse’s mouth.” With each new revelation, it becomes clearer that Peltier was in consultation with Dennis Banks over the fate of Anna Mae. And like Banks, Peltier has a problem answering a question, as posed by Anna Mae’s daughter, Denise: “I’m interested to know how Peltier knew my mother was dead in December when her unidentified body wasn’t found until February 24, and our family wasn’t informed that my mother was dead until March 5?” A very good question, given Peltier’s admissions:

“I wasn’t running to Canada just to hide. I spend most of my time in the United States.”

“I think it was around that December when I heard that Anna Mae was dead. I was in that jail over there in Canada right around whenever they exposed who she really was and what she died from, but I believe I didn’t hear about it until December.”

And then there’s Peltier’s mistaken belief that the two young investigators he shot to death were looking for him:

“I can’t tell the system I was shooting at their police officers that were trying to arrest me…”

If Graham flips, perhaps he will clarify all the above. There were, after all, a lot of people involved in Anna Mae’s thoroughly pre-meditated murder. As Graham was quoted as saying when he was fighting extradition from his native Canada, “When everything comes out, I’ll have a lot of people to go with me.” Candy, anyone?