Aftermath News

Cameras Could Record Police-Involved Shootings

Fox News | May 12, 2008

MYFOXNY.COM — A state senator in New York who is also a former New York City police officer has proposed putting mini-cameras on police handguns to help resolve contested police-involved shootings, such as those in the cases of Sean Bell (killed in 2006 in a hail of 50 shots) and Amadou Diallo (killed in 1999 in a barrage of 41 shots). Both men were apparently unarmed.

Sen. Eric Adams, a Brooklyn Democrat, is seeking support for the cameras, which would cost $695 each. He said New York would be the first to mandate the cameras. The Newburgh, N.Y., police department is currently testing the pistol cameras.

The camera, called the PistolCam, would follow the gun barrel’s movement and include a laser targeting pointer and a light. It can record up to 60 minutes of digital video and sound, according to the company’s Web site.

The camera and lights would start just over a second after the officer pulls the handgun from the holster. The cop could turn off the light, but the camera and optional audio recording would continue.

The New York City Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the union that represents uniformed police officers of the NYPD, had no immediate comment.

In 2006, Adams retired from the NYPD as a captain. He is also the co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a group of law enforcement personnel and supporters who provide funding and grants to community-based organizations.

Robert Downey Jr. stars as billionaire industrialist Tony Stark in a scene from Iron Man. The film is the first movie Marvel financed itself and has culminated a five-year plan to break from its strategy of licensing its top comic book heroes to other studios.

SPACE.com | May 13, 2008

By Jeremy Hsu

When superhero Tony Stark isn’t donning his Iron Man armor to personally rough up villains, he’s pitching the U.S. military on new gadgets to fight the War on Terror.

The Marvel comic book character’s suit embodies a futuristic technology that may enhance human capabilities in war, but the current battlefield belongs to a growing swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and robots that could someday give even Iron Man a run for his money. UAVs clocked more than 500,000 hours in the air by the beginning of 2008, performing many of the tasks normally done by piloted aircraft.

“There’s a scene of Iron Man flying against [F-22] Raptors,” said Peter Singer, Brookings Institute defense expert and author of the forthcoming book Wired for War. Those are among the last generation of manned fighter jets.”

Someone still needs to develop and sell those manned or unmanned technologies, and that’s where Stark might be the new face of military contractors. Private individuals and companies might not be as visible as UAVs soaring above the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq, yet their role has grown just as dramatically during the recent conflicts.

Howard Hughes, the original Halliburton

Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr., is based partly on real-life wealthy industrialist Howard Hughes, who lent his eccentric genius and financial resources to oddball U.S. military efforts during World War II and the Cold War.

Hughes built and piloted many of his own aircraft, including the Hughes H-1 Racer that he flew to set a transcontinental airspeed record in 1937.

“He was really doing this sort of thing even before there was a military-industrial complex,” said Alex Roland, military historian at Duke University. He compared Hughes to a “one-man Halliburton empire,” referring to one of the largest defense contractors currently working in Iraq.

The military-industrial complex really took off in the 1950s as the United States sought new weapons and technologies for its growing military, which gave Hughes and other military contractors a market to sell everything from helicopters to satellites.

Yet some Hughes projects contracted by the military simply fizzled. The all-wood “Spruce Goose” remains the largest plane ever built; it was meant to carry troops safely across the Atlantic during World War II, but was completed after the war and flew just once. Another effort that foundered involved building a secret ship that could raise a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine from the bottom of the Pacific.

Such doomed investments were just one symptom of the troubles that plagued the early military-industrial complex. A “revolving door” allowed military officers to join companies that they had just awarded defense contracts to, while private executives went to work for the Pentagon and funneled contracts back to their companies, Roland said. He added that tightened regulations now prevent many of those earlier abuses of the system.

Cycles of military spending

Still, those powerful interests combined with the cry of “how much is enough for defense?” during the Cold War to make a seemingly irresistible call for bigger and pricier weapons, according to Roland.

And the military-industrial complex remains hungry today for increased funding. Private companies are eager for contracts, the military looks for next-generation weapons, and some in Congress jockey for new defense-related jobs for their districts.

“That’s how Dad did it, that’s how America does it and it’s worked out pretty well so far,” Stark says in the movie.

Roland observed that U.S. military spending has gone up and down in cycles largely unrelated to the constant pressure from the military-industrial complex, with spikes in 1940, 1960, 1980 and again during the Bush administration.

The trouble arises when the sense of national urgency that accompanies those spikes can lead to relaxed government oversight, just as millions of new defense dollars suddenly become available and companies rush in. Such has been the case with the latest boost in military spending, Roland said.

However, there’s now the additional twist of reduced competition among contractors.

“From 1986 to 2006, the number of Pentagon prime contractors competing on major defense programs went from twenty to six,” said Singer, the Brookings Institute defense expert. “There’s often just two going at it, competing on both sides of [contract] bundles, so that they win no matter what.”

‘Minimal competition’

That reduced competition among major contractors may contribute to problems of inefficiency, Singer said.

Budget overruns and delays for weapon systems appear to be the rule. The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major defense systems exceeded their budgets by $295 billion collectively in a March 2008 report, including an upgraded version of the F-22 Raptors that duel with Stark in Iron Man.

But even non-competitive, no-bid contracts are “perfectly legitimate under certain circumstances,” said James Jay Carafano, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and retired U.S. Army Lt. Colonel. The U.S. military awarded such contracts to get on a war footing quickly and invade Iraq.

Now that U.S. efforts have switched to providing long-term security and reconstruction, though, experts say contracts should be more competitive to boost efficiency.

Corruption and waste among contractors and local officials in Iraq caused the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction to deem the problem the “second insurgency” in 2007, according to the Associated Press.

“There’s minimal competition with very few eyes and ears watching the contracting,” Singer noted. “Should you be surprised to be billed for one hundred guys working on a site, if you never visited to see if there were even ten?”

Singer blamed the government for acting like a “stupid client.” Carafano agreed, adding that the sudden flood of military spending resulted in poorly defined contracts hastily given out.

“It’s not about greedy contractors, it’s not about backdoor deals, and it’s not about politicians making sure certain companies get contracts,” Carafano said. “It’s about the government not being a very good customer.”

Who is on the front lines?

Whatever happens, no one questions that the United States could not fight a war now without outsourcing to military contractors.

“Do you always get value for your money? Not always, but generally, yes you do,” Carafano said. “These wars wouldn’t be possible without private sector support.”

That means military contractors have also expanded beyond just selling military hardware. They now run supply lines, feed troops, build base camps, consult on strategy and even fight as private security forces.

“Companies don’t just build the weapons of war, they provide the personnel to use it,” Singer said. “They provide the service side of war. That’s a pretty historic shift.”

The change amounted to more than 180,000 Americans, Iraqis and other nationals working as private contractors in Iraq as of July 2007, exceeding the 163,000 U.S. troops there at the time. Some of those contractors necessarily carry guns in their line of work.

Movie audiences probably won’t be troubled by Iron Man dealing out vigilante justice, but experts question how to hold military contractors accountable for their actions if things go badly. Private individuals work in a murky area where no law seems to apply, leading to incidents such as the shooting of Iraqi civilians by guards working for the private military company Blackwater.

“Every human endeavor has bad apples, and that’s true whether you’re talking about the real world or a comic book world,” Singer said. “But do you have a system in place to ensure that the bad apples are punished?”

There’s no need to worry about Tony Stark, though. He is, by cinematic definition, one of the good guys.

Ants swarm over Houston area, fouling electronics

Associated Press | May 15, 2008

by LINDA STEWART BALL

DALLAS - In what sounds like a really low-budget horror film, voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers.

The hairy, reddish-brown creatures are known as “crazy rasberry ants” — crazy, because they wander erratically instead of marching in regimented lines, and “rasberry” after Tom Rasberry, an exterminator who did battle against them early on.

“They’re itty-bitty things about the size of fleas, and they’re just running everywhere,” said Patsy Morphew of Pearland, who is constantly sweeping them off her patio and scooping them out of her pool by the cupful. “There’s just thousands and thousands of them. If you’ve seen a car racing, that’s how they are. They’re going fast, fast, fast. They’re crazy.”

The ants — formally known as “paratrenicha species near pubens” — have spread to five Houston-area counties since they were first spotted in Texas in 2002.

The newly recognized species is believed to have arrived in a cargo shipment through the port of Houston. Scientists are not sure exactly where the ants came from, but their cousins, commonly called crazy ants, are found in the Southeast and the Caribbean.

“At this point, it would be nearly impossible to eradicate the ant because it is so widely dispersed,” said Roger Gold, a Texas A&M University entomologist.

The good news? They eat fire ants, the stinging red terrors of Texas summers.

But the ants also like to suck the sweet juices from plants, feed on such beneficial insects as ladybugs, and eat the hatchlings of a small, endangered type of grouse known as the Attwater prairie chicken.

They also bite humans, though not with a stinger like fire ants.

Worse, they, like some other species of ants, are attracted to electrical equipment, for reasons that are not well understood by scientists.

They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner’s gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven’t caused any major problems there yet.

Exterminators say calls from frustrated homeowners and businesses are increasing because the ants — which are starting to emerge by the billions with the onset of the warm, humid season — appear to be resistant to over-the-counter ant killers.

“The population built up so high that typical ant controls simply did no good,” said Jason Meyers, an A&M doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on the one-eighth-inch-long ant.

It’s not enough just to kill the queen. Experts say each colony has multiple queens that have to be taken out.

At the same time, the ants aren’t taking the bait usually left out in traps, according to exterminators, who want the Environmental Protection Agency to loosen restrictions on the use of more powerful pesticides.

And when you do kill these ants, the survivors turn it to their advantage: They pile up the dead, sometimes using them as a bridge to cross safely over surfaces treated with pesticide.

“It looked like someone had come along and poured coffee granules all around the perimeter of the rooms,” said Lisa Calhoun, who paid exterminators $1,200 to treat an infestation of her parents’ home in the Houston suburb of Pearland.

The Texas Department of Agriculture is working with A&M researchers and the EPA on how to stop the ants.

“This one seems to be like lava flowing and filling an entire area, getting bigger and bigger,” said Ron Harrison, director of training for the big pest-control company Orkin Inc.

Bilderberg 2008 Evades All Scrutiny in Vouliagmeni, Greece

Bilderberg.org | May 13, 2008

by Tony Gosling

Well the old tricksters did it this year. They evaded all our efforts to track them down to a precise date and venue. There has been a lot of Bilderberg searching activity on the forum:

including examination of bilderbergers’ schedules, checking of hotels but no 100% definite answer.

Whilst I had been displaying this at the top of the Bilderberg.org front page as a possible venue and date for a week or so Bilderberg researchers such as Marek Tysis, Jim Tucker and myself simply did not have enough hard facts to pin them down beforehand.

The trouble is that this year particularly all the key Bilderberg people have been keeping very quiet about their future plans. In past years they have been relatively open about where they were planning to be and it’s then quite a simple matter to identify gaps in the schedules of, say the boss of the European Central Bank and the Queen of the Netherlands, that coincide.

Marek Tysis believed, rightly as it transpired, that it would be in Vouliagmeni, Greece in one of the first two weekends of May. What they were talking about we may never know. Let’s hope at least SOMEBODY who realises that these people are where war and money meets and far too close to the Nazis (through Prince Bernhard and the occult connections particularly) has got some leaks.

What are they planning for us this year then? We might guess that Henry Kissinger has had problems with his War on Terror because nobody is believing it is anything other than a US, Israeli and British grab for empire. A continuation of Hitler’s diseased dream of an occult empire to rival the extent of the old British Empire and Commonwealth and all the psychological pressure is now being piled on Gordon Brown who is not playing ball with the Bilderbergers’ fascistic ‘consensus’.

There is not a lot of doubt in my mind that the immense power that Bilderberg wields is ultimately satanic. One could pick a random homeless tramp on the streets of London to preside over such a conference you would get more common sense in his little finger than all the Bilderberg Steering committee have in their collective greedy bodies.

Maybe that is what is needed. A jubilee of renewal to remove these despots and their freemasonic underlings from the committees that select candidates for the political parties.

What seemed a real political hope in the UK, the Liberal Democrat Party has somehow got itself a City of London stooge, Nick Clegg, in charge now so has made itself unelectable just a the time when it could have swept to power because of voter hatred of both Labour and Tory parties.

Israel too is ‘celebrating’ 60 years of existence and as such 60 years of terrorism, horror and hatred of the arabs. The Jewish people don’t want it but what can they do with a fanatical far right Zionist government there. Jews are in exactly the same bind as the rest of us. Democracy has been stealthily and deliberately undermined in Israel just as in the US and Britain and Europe by Secret Societies operating within the ‘cover’ of freemasonry.

The Beijing Olympics looming appears something like the Berlin Olympics of 1936. A derisory show of male and female machismo with a few who will be this year’s Jesse Owens?

So Bilderberg may have been successful in stopping scrutiny of themselves this year, no participant list, nothing whatsoever has emerged. And that bodes extremely ill for the coming Summer and Autumn. Whatever bloodcurdling warstarting event, whether or not connected with the Beijing Olympics, and whether or not leading to a global crash which will make a few people very very rich, you can be sure they will be in the know. Which means that Bilderberg is culpable, there’s a lot of bucks riding on this. That is why they do everything they can, with their limitless supply of money, to keep these meetings out of the public eye.

What we need of course is a united front such as that which has formed in South America, probably because they have been the subject of so much evil and illegal US interference. A united front based on a media free of racist Zionist moles and on an understanding of the true facts behind 9/11 which kicked off all this ‘War on Resistance Fighters’ madness. It really is as if the war is against the plucky partisans and leaders of the French Resistance to Nazi occupation.

So it doesn’t take a lot of imagination, once you’ve joined the Nazi dots, to see where Henry Kissinger and Bilderberg are coming from. His present company, Kissinger Associates, is the biggest protection racket on the planet and the UN eats out of its hands, that means the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions have been torn to pieces by these people, paving the way for mass slaughter and maybe a little more power. Kissinger gets kudos from his impunity and Rockefeller, Rothschild and his financial backers and other underground friends are egged on to further madness by our gullibility. Then their is their love of Eugenics, what more proof do we need? How much more can we forget?

They want a more subtly spun global version of what Hitler had in the early 1940s and they are not going to get it because the human spirit will not have it. But they are so greedy and determined, indeed psychopathic in their goal, that they would rather pull our whole beautiful God-given world down around our heads than allow us to be the free people we were made to be. The real solutions to the problem of wage slavery, poverty, are so simple as to be almost obvious. Land reform and money reform, putting land back into the hands of those who need it as a ree gift to mankind. Taking the power to issue money out of private corporate hands.

Carrying a can of pepper spray is illegal in Britain. Fighting off intruders into your home is illegal. Taking pictures on the street is illegal. Eating a sandwich in your car is illegal. Shouting at criminal gangs is illegal. Saying certain words like ‘homosexual’ , is illegal. Children horseing around is illegal. Putting a bottle in the trash is illegal. Smoking is illegal. Criticizing religion is illegal. Preaching religion is illegal (unless it is radical Islam apparently).

Everything conceivable is illegal so that you cannot turn and scratch your bum without breaking some Imperial Law of the feudal elite. So what do you think? They have completely stripped Brits of their right to self-defense, while they have armed legions of criminals to take the streets away from citizens. There is no other way to view it. Britain is an Orwellian Masonic Neofeudal Tyranny on steroids.

PW

Evening Standard | May 14, 2008

By Justin Davenport

Police are to use hundreds of airport-style and hand-held weapon detectors in the crackdown on knife crime.

Police admit the “in your face policing” is expected to raise community tensions in some areas.

But they say they are getting significant support from communities desperate for them to crack down on the problem.

Officers will use contentious Section 60 powers to enforce effective “no-go” areas for people carrying knives.

The powers enable officers to stop people and search them without the need to have “reasonable suspicion” that they are engaged in wrong doing.

There has been criticism of the powers because research has found it hits black communities disproportionately.

Stop and search has been strongly criticised in the past but police say there is now more support for the action - provided it it is done with sensitivity

WFAA-TV | May 13, 2008

By JEFF BRADY

DALLAS - In the next two minutes, four teenagers will drop out of school. The national average is one every 26 seconds.

Using satellite technology, a pilot program may be able to turn the tide on Dallas drop outs by stopping truancy in its tracks. It’s called AIM, which stands for Attendance Improvement Management. The program attempts to steer kids back on track by watching them everywhere they go.

Last year, Ricardo Pacheco was a Crips gang leader at Bryan Adams High School. He rarely went to class and was failing out of school. But today, he’s a soccer star on the same campus. He is also ready to graduate June 1.

“I’m coming to school every day, on time,” he said.

Pacheco’s secret tool has been GPS technology, which tracks his every move.

“Yeah, it helped me a lot,” he said.

Pacheco and several other students at Bryan Adams High wore ankle monitors last year. They were tracked by global positioning satellites, and that data was relayed to a monitor in the school.

This year, nine students in the tracking program carry hand held units that are about the size and shape of a cell phone. When they get to school each morning, they check in by hitting a small button three times. They do the same thing once during lunch and again when they get home each afternoon.

The signals show up as yellow dots on a website monitored by an attendant at the school. They are updated every ten minutes.

If a student isn’t at the right place, the attendant calls parents or police.

“What we’re trying to do is say, ‘We’re going to keep in touch with you,’” said retired psychologist Paul Pottinger.

He came up with the idea and contracted with a GPS technology company to design the system.

Several local donors funded it. Pottinger’s now proposing to track 450 students on two DISD campuses for about $365,000.

“It’s effective in getting the kids to show up, but the school has to work on getting them to catch up,” he said.

Faculty and staff at Bryan Adams have started a tutoring program in the form of a parent education class to stimulate support for AIM. They have initiated a Saturday classroom recovery schedule, so that students with truancy problems can make up lost school days.

“What we wanted to do was provide support for the hopelessness that many of these kids have by the time they’re truant,” said Cynthia Goodsell, the principal at Bryan Adams.

She said attendance among the GPS-assisted students is almost 100 percent.

This is the second time students at Bryan Adams have worked with the GPS truancy tracking program.

Last year, several students in truancy trouble wore ankle bracelets as part of a GPS tracking system, but critics deemed that too similar to criminal monitoring programs.

Now the system has been modified. Pottinger said he has prepared a plan to enroll 450 kids at two DISD campuses in the fall.

For Pacheco, it’s been a high-tech helping hand that kept him on track by tracking him daily.

“What is at stake is more than one small country [Iraq], it is a big idea, a New World Order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause …”

- President George H.W. Bush, in a speech on September 11th, 1991

Obama Hails Bush Sr’s ‘Excellent Job’ in First Gulf War

Highway of death

George Bush New World Order

Says masses should be indoctrinated to stop having children in order that the human race can die out and save the planet

Infowars | May 12, 2008

By Steve Watson

An environmental group says it’s sole purpose is to recruit volunteers and educate enough people to eventually realize that the human race needs to completely die out in order that the planet can survive.

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) says humans need to stop breeding and voluntarily progress our own slow demise in order that plants, animals and fragile ecosystems can survive.

The group’s motto is “May we live long and die out”. Their website explains their commitment to a long term goal of convincing the population of Earth that it has no future…

Full Story

Associated Press | May 11, 2008

By KEVIN FREKING

WASHINGTON - Families claiming that a mercury-based preservative in vaccines triggers autism will challenge mainstream medicine Monday as they take their case to a federal court.

They seek vindication and financial redress from a government fund that helps people injured by shots.

Two 10-year-old boys from Portland, Ore., will serve as the test cases that determine whether the children and their families should be compensated. Attorneys for the boys will attempt to show the boys were happy, healthy and developing normally. But, after being exposed to vaccines with thimerosal, they began to regress and show symptoms of autism.

Thimerosal has been removed in recent years from standard childhood vaccines, except the flu shot. In 2004, a committee with the Institute of Medicine concluded there was no credible evidence that vaccines containing thimerosal caused autism.

Overall, nearly 4,900 families have filed claims with the U.S. Court of Claims alleging that vaccines caused autism and other neurological problems in their children. Lawyers for the families will present three different theories of how vaccines caused autism.

The case beginning Monday focuses on the second of those theories: that thimerosal-containing vaccines alone cause autism. Lawyers for the petitioning families said they will present evidence that injections with thimerosal deposit a form of mercury in the brain. That mercury excites certain brain cells that stay chronically activated trying to get rid of the intrusion.

“In some kids, there’s enough of it that it sets off this chronic neuroinflammatory pattern that can lead to regressive autism,” said attorney Mike Williams.

In the end, the families’ attorneys hope to convince a special master of the U.S. Court of Claims that thimerosal belongs on the list of causes for the inflammation that leads to regressive autism.

To win, the attorneys for the two boys, William Mead and Jordan King, will have to show that it”s more likely than not that the vaccine actually caused the injury.

Many members of the medical community are skeptical of the families’ claims. They worry that the claims about the dangers of vaccines could cause some people to forgo vaccines that prevent illness.

“I think that what’s so endearing to me about the anti-vaccine people is they’re perfectly willing to go from one hypothesis to the next without a backward glance,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Autism is a developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life and affects a person’s ability to communicate and interact with others. Dr. Andrew Gerber, a psychiatrists, said that medical experts don’t have a comprehensive understanding of what causes autism, but they do know there is a strong hereditary component.

Toxins from the environment could play a role, but currently, data does not support that they do, Gerber said.

Arguments are scheduled to go on throughout the month. A final decision could take several more months to occur. Claims that are successful would result in compensation taking into account lost earnings after age 18 and up to $250,000 for pain and suffering.

The families or the federal government can also appeal the decision of the special master to the Court of Federal Claims or to a federal appeals court.

While there have been about 5,000 claims relating to autism, there have been fewer than 3,000 claims for all other vaccines.

Queen Elizabeth I & Francis Walsingham

Red Ice |May 5, 2008

By Michael Howard

It is not really surprising that historically occultism and espionage have often been strange bedfellows. The black art of espionage is about obtaining secret information and witches, psychics and astrologers have always claimed to be able to predict the future and know about things hidden from ordinary people.

Gathering intelligence is carried out under a cloak of secrecy and occultists are adept at keeping their activities concealed from sight. Like secret agents they also use codes, symbols and cryptograms to hide information from outsiders. Occultists and intelligence officers are similar in many ways, as both inhabit a shadowy underworld of secrets, deception and disinformation. It is therefore not unusual that often these two professions have shared the same members.

The ‘father of the British Secret Service’ was the Elizabethan lawyer, politician, diplomat and spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. He was a Protestant and as a young man during the bloody reign of the Catholic Queen Mary was forced to flee abroad to escape persecution. While in exile, Walsingham learnt Italian and French and became acquainted with the work of the famous Venetian Secret Service that used its spying skills for trade and commerce under the cloak of diplomacy.

When Queen Elizabeth I was crowned Francis Walsingham returned to England. He was appointed as a secretary to the English ambassador to the French court in Paris and also worked as a secret agent reporting back the intelligence he gleaned to Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil, later Lord Burghley. Between 1568 and 1570 Walsingham, who had become a Member of Parliament, worked in England in domestic counter-espionage exposing Catholic plots against the monarchy.

In 1570 Walsingham was appointed as the new ambassador to France. He proceeded to set up his own network of undercover agents in France, Italy, Spain and the Low Countries. The late Cecil Williamson, who worked for British Intelligence during World War II and later ran a witchcraft museum, told this writer that Walsingham often used witches as spies.

The Mysterious Dr Dee

One of the famous occultists he is known to have recruited was Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer and the magical architect of the British Empire, the Welsh magician Dr John Dee. Walsingham was involved in the machinations for the proposed marriage of the Duc d’Anjou and Elizabeth. At the spy master’s personal recommendation, the queen dispatched Dee to France with orders to report back on the progress of the marriage negotiations. The magus travelled to the Duchy of Lorraine and drew up the birth charts of both the Duc and his brother, who was also regarded as a possible husband for the English monarch. Dr Dee, probably influenced by Walsingham, diplomatically reported back to London that the stars suggested a political alliance would be far wiser than matrimony and the queen took his advice.

In 1573 Sir Francis returned to London and became a privy councillor. This placed him at the heart of government and he proceeded to set up what amounted to the first organised foreign espionage service to operate from England. In 1566 he had put in place a pan-European network of spies extending as far to the east as Turkey and Russia, where Dr Dee reported on the goings-on at the Tsar’s court. This network mostly gathered intelligence on the military activities of the Spanish, who were England’s primary enemies at this time. Walsingham was also responsible for foiling the Catholic plot whose exposure led to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Using Dr Dee’s psychic powers, he was apparently able to discover that the plotters were passing secret messages to the imprisoned Scottish queen hidden in bottles of wine.

While travelling in Europe in 1562, Dr Dee had come across a book written by Abbot Trimethus of Spanhiem (1462-1516). This was a guide to writing ciphers and secret codes for magical purposes and Dee informed Sir William Cecil about his discovery. On his return to England Dr Dee adapted the abbot’s cryptography and gave it to Sir Francis Walsingham for use by his secret agents. He also passed on the political and military intelligence he had acquired during his travels across Europe. It has been alleged that Dee used the famous Enochian magical alphabet as a code to disguise this information. If he had been arrested his captors would not have understood it and dismissed it as nonsense.

In 1587 Dee even claimed he had received a spirit message from one of his angelic contacts concerning a threat to the English Fleet. The message said that a group of disguised Frenchmen working for the Spaniards was secretly visiting the Forest of Dean. The forest was the centre for English ship-building and the French agents planned to bribe disloyal foresters to burn it down. Dr Dee sent his supernatural intelligence to Walsingham and the saboteurs, who were masquerading as squatters, were arrested.

Information supplied to Sir Francis Walsingham from his European spy network convinced him that a Spanish armada would be launched against England in 1588. He asked Dee to use his knowledge of astrology to calculate the weather prospects for an invasion. The magus told him there would an impending disaster in Europe caused by a devastating storm. When news of this prophecy was leaked and reached Spain, naval recruitment fell and there were desertions of sailors from the Spanish Fleet. In Lisbon an astrologer who repeated the prediction was charged with spreading false information. In an act of psychological warfare, Dr Dee also informed Emperor Rudolf of Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic) and King Stephen of Poland that the predicted storm would “cause the fall of a mighty empire.” Rudolf, who was an occultist and Dee’s patron when he stayed in Bohemia, passed on the warning to the Spanish ambassador.

It is a fact that in 1588 a great storm did scatter the ships of the Spanish Armada in the English Channel and aided the English victory. This metrological event was popularly credited to a magical ritual performed by the buccaneer Sir Francis Drake on the cliffs at Plymouth. Superstitious people believed Drake was a wizard and sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for success over the Spanish. It is claimed that he also organised several covens of witches to work magically to raise the storm and prevent the invasion. Meanwhile, as a result of scrying in his shewstone or crystal, Dr Dee saw a symbolic vision of a castle with its drawbridge drawn up (England) and the image of the elemental king of fire. As a result he urged the Navy to employ fire-ships against the Armada and they did so with good results.

After Sir Francis Walsingham’s death in 1590, and the ascension to the English throne of the Scottish king James, Dr John Dee fell into royal disfavour. The new king had an unhealthy obsession with witchcraft and his early reign was dominated by this preoccupation. It led him to employ the Secret Service in his own personal vendetta against suspected witches. James I ordered its agents to hunt down alleged practitioners of witchcraft and expose their alleged plots against the monarchy. One of those involved was the Earl of Bothwell, accused of high treason for organising a coven of Scottish witches to work magic against the king in an attempt to seize the throne. To assist his secret agents in their new witch-hunting activities, King James persuaded Parliament in 1604 to pass a new and stronger Witchcraft Act to deal with the problem. The Bill was rushed through and it was made law within three months.

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