Edwin Meese Last Updated: October 13, 2008
US Attorney General during the Reagan-Bush administration, Meese led the organized
theft of a breakthrough software program, known as PROMIS, from a private company
leasing Meese then oversaw its modification for covert use, and personal profit,
from sales to foreign governments and banks.
The PROMIS system was
created by a company named Inslaw, for US Attorneys to merge criminal case data
across the nation. Beyond requirements, it produced far greater depths of
information access. It devised an omniscient blueprint of its host’s innermost
workings, down to details ever known possible.
In 1982, the Justice
Department signed a $10 million contract with Inslaw for distribution of an
enhanced, even more powerful version. This contract specified that the enhanced
PROMIS features were Inslaw’s property, to be later compensated for in good-faith
negotiation.
The enhanced PROMIS software was spectacular. It created its own
inquiries, to reveal every minute bit of information throughout any operation with
which it made contact. The precursor of artificial intelligence, PROMIS was able to
actually improve its own information gathering and control abilities.
As
later confirmed in Federal courts and Congressional hearings, Meese and his
assistants, realizing PROMIS potential, cut off contract payments to Inslaw, forcing
it into bankruptcy. They then pirated this next-generation software, and turned it
over to Meese’s colleague from California Governor Reagan years, named Earl Brian.
Meese’s wife was loaned money to invest in Brian’s company, named Hadron
Inc.
Meese’s Deputy AG, another California crony named Lowell Jensen, had
actually owned a company that lost a government bid to Inslaw. Not surprisingly,
Jensen was put in charge of breaching the PROMIS contract with Inslaw.
Afterward, Meese arranged for Jensen’s appointment as U.S. District Judge in
San Francisco.
Meese and Earl Brian arranged for the development of an
untraceable “backdoor” component. It provided the ability, by satellite, to covertly
transfer or even alter information, within any system linked to it. Ultimately,
entire systems’ content could be secretly replaced by parallel “alternate reality”
systems, chosen by those in control of the hidden “back door.” This quickly became
the ultimate tool/weapon for clandestine intelligence operations, whether legitimate
or not.
Several witnesses and documents identified Brian as a key figure in
the 1980 election “October Surprise” Iran hostage outrage. The PROMIS bonanza was
reportedly in reward for his services. A highly skilled political and financial
manipulator, Brian eventually gained control of United Press International and the
Financial News Network. In 1996 he was convicted on ten counts of securities fraud
and sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
Congressional reports
estimated that PROMIS versions were sold to at least 80 foreign governments, and
many more international financial entities. One of the first was the notorious BCCI, the 1980s’ money laundry for narcotics
cartels, terrorist fronts, dictators and the CIA. During the Iran/Contra hearings,
Colonel Oliver North testified that BCCI
was the illegal operation’s cash clearinghouse. When the secret arms sales became
exposed in November 1986, raising questions of legality and prompting congressional
and public scrutiny, Meese became the point man for the Reagan Administration’s
effort, in Meese's words, “to limit the damage.”
In 1987, federal bankruptcy
judge George Bason ruled that Justice had stolen PROMIS through "trickery, fraud and
deceit." He awarded INSLAW $6.8 million in damages and, in the process, found that
Justice Department officials made a concerted effort to bankrupt Inslaw and force
its liquidation.
The DOJ appealed and lost, but then the D.C. Circuit Court
of Appeals reversed the case on a legal technicality. A petition to the Supreme
Court in October 1991 was denied review. Then-Attorney General Dick Thornburgh
refused to investigate the DOJ or appoint an independent counsel.
Three
months after the initial verdict was issued, George F. Bason, the federal bankruptcy
judge presiding over the original case, was denied reappointment to the bench by the
Justice Department ending a 14-year tenure. His replacement, S. Martin Teel, had
been the attorney who unsuccessfully argued the Inslaw case before Judge Bason on
the Justice Department's behalf.
The lawsuits and widening disclosures
prompted House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks, a Texas Democrat, to launch
a two-year investigation into the Inslaw affair. The resulting report in 1992 said
that, among others, Meese and others had indeed conspired to steal PROMIS.
In
1991, after his own year-long investigation, free lance reporter Danny Casolaro told friends he’d had
conclusive evidence linking Meese’s theft of PROMIS to murderous, officially
sanctioned CIA arms and drug deals. The morning before his final meeting with an
implicated government official, Casolaro’s body was found in a West Virginia motel
room, his arms slashed at least fourteen times, all his notes and documents missing.
His death was ruled a suicide.
International sales of PROMIS in the ‘80s
were estimated to be at least $800 million, though how much Meese, Brian and the
others made from it is not known.
From 1996 until September 11, 2001, a small
company named Ptech, owned by later declared terror financier Yassin Al-Qadi, was somehow given control of the
US Government’s most vital computer systems, using an enhanced version of PROMIS.
Convicted FBI traitor Robert Hannsen, according to the Washington Times and
Fox News in 2001, sold the Bureau’s own version of PROMIS to the Soviet KGB, and
Osama bin Laden then bought the software on the Russian black market.
Edwin Meese left the Justice Department in
1988, most well known for his official Report on Pornography the year before. He
found that it was harmful.
Since then he’s been a featured board member and
spokesman for various right-wing organizations. Among them is the Capital Research
Center (CRC), whose stated purpose is “opposition research” to disclose where
funding is really coming from for various so-called “consumer causes.” However, in
the early ‘90s, it was learned that CRC was also a lobby group, supported by the
tobacco industry, until its cancer-link cover-ups were revealed in Congressional
hearings.
Categories
Functionaries | Information Technology | Government Officials | International Finance