They have polished us to a fine art. They know all the lies to tell. They know how to put on a great facade, but behind it all is money, money, money. We're on this gravy train. Let's make money. We're only here for so long. You have to think of it in terms of they're the ones with power, and they're going to use it to extort us from every which direction they can. It's utterly painful to think about. It's all surrounded with a hall of mirrors and a floor of quicksand. No one is accountable.

No one can be held up and say, here it is. Right, right. It's amazing. Even to the point now, apparently covering up the death of Vincent Foster. How could the whole system? People say, oh, it can't be a cover-up. How could so many people lie about it? It's easy. Simple. People are scared to death at their jobs. They're scared to death at the government. All it takes is a few people pushing the button, calling the shots, and you have everybody just lines up and salutes. And when you put a stamp of national security over the thing, then there's also the risk they could be prosecuted and sent to jail for blabbing about something. And in fact, what I learned from military intelligence guys in cases like this, there is actually an authorized cover story that is imposed on something which actually, technically, reduces the penalty for lying from being a felony for perjury to being merely a misdemeanor for, you know, misstatement of fact.

That's interesting. Yeah, there's a whole different world here in this intelligence, national security realm that you wonder is the tail wagging the dog here. So here we are in 1996, we've got a group of people, four, five, six of them maybe, called the 5th Comm. that literally is trying to clean house on a hundred, hundred and fifty, two hundred years of historical structural corruption in the governmental halls of this country. It's amazing. It's mind boggling. You wonder how could these guys get away with it?

Well, I think partly they protected themselves because if anything happens to these guys, there would just be this gush of information that would come spewing out and the jig would be up. So, I guess, that's the one way I think about it. There's so much I don't know. There's so much I don't understand about this stuff. It's just been my misfortune to have stumbled onto a big piece of this. Well, you have shouldered the responsibility magnificently, Jim Norman, and we appreciate that. We're going to take our next break now. At the end of the line, I'm Jeff Rents. We'll be back with much more.

Talk Radio 990. Take care, everybody. Talking with Jim Norman about the 5th Com and its activities to clean out some of the garbage. You were asking at one point, is there any precedent for what we're seeing here? And actually there is, and it actually involves, I think, some of the same 5th Column crowd. It's an effort called, the code name for it is BOPTROT. B-O-P-T-R-O-T, two words, BOPTROT. Yeah, I don't know where they get that from. But it was a code name put on a major public integrity enforcement effort.

It began about five years ago. It was manned by several hundred people and handpicked out of various federal enforcement agencies, FBI, Treasury, IRS, Customs, and I think some intelligence community people were seconded to it. It was focused, it began on the state of Kentucky just because that state apparently, next time we see Hanna, is known for being just a rat's nest of public corruption. They began a back of the basics approach, looking at the assets that all these public officials had, trying to figure out how they could have afforded it on their meager public income. Yes.

and going back, going through all the bank records, checking all of this stuff, amassing powerful cases against these people, and then... there have been some 65 indictments. I mean, it's a massive number of indictments. In a 100% conviction rate. In Kentucky alone? In just... this is just in Kentucky. There's very little publicity about it, partly because they have not gone through the usual US attorneys who are basically publicity hounds.

There is very little discussion in the press. It showed up in the press a little bit down there. But before this wrath of indictments began, there was this eerie wave of retirements and resignations of people, very similar to what we're seeing right now. There's a pattern to this. Maybe the fifth column is cutting its teeth here in some of these smaller operations and then got the big picture. I think so. In fact, they're rolling this out across the country. I think they went from Kentucky, there's a crew that is doing some work in Chicago.

I've heard that Connecticut is on a hit list, maybe soon. I think there's like 16 states that they're trying to roll this out to. But again, this is basically a federal effort aimed at state-level corruption. The problem is, who's going to police the federal government. No government can really police itself. So that's the problem with the corruption at the highest levels. How do you get at it? That's why I think these people decided the vigilante action was about the only way you could do it. But it's applying essentially some of these same techniques. It's amazing when you think and you contrast the efforts of these five or six people in the fifth column to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have allied themselves with various militia or patriotic groups and are studying the Constitution and so forth and wanting very badly to take this country back from the graft and corruption which has permeated virtually every level of big government.

And yet you've got five or six guys with high technology, a Cray computer and a truck, apparently, and this may be oversimplifying it, but doing everything that most of us who care about this country would like to see happen. Well, it's not just you, they're getting a lot of help from their buddies in the intelligence community and other agencies. I think that it's like these guys are just like the rallying cry around which a lot of good people in government now are. There's information apparently coming out of government like a set of files that people have been maintaining for years that they knew they could never do anything with. Now all of a sudden, oh, hey, here's another account you ought to go look at.

Here's somebody's assets up in the bottom, and there's none of that, and they start getting swamped with leads now. They're going to have to get another truck. They do have another truck. They've got a second computer. I don't know if it's rolling yet, but... Jim Norman knows more than he lets on here, folks. It's just amazing. I've been just ragging on these guys for months and months to explain this.

How could it possibly work this way? And they sort of say, well, you don't need to know that yet. You don't need to know that yet. But it's slowly starting to take shape. And what they've been saying has been coming true. In front of my eyes, before we could even get to make it, means I'll make ink dry on them. Bingo. More of these people are resigning. I mean, like, in December we ran that.

In the December issue we had the story of mentioning Colin Powell, you know, identifying him as this thing. Before the magazine could even get printed, he'd announced he wasn't running for president. You know, you mentioned that this is not simply five or six people. There's certainly a lot of support from within other various agencies with a lot of clout. It has to be true. One would think that Jim Norman is being watched over and protected too by these same elements. I think so, and the fact that I don't have any other documents on this. I'm up front about that. I don't have records of these Swiss bank accounts yet myself, but I tell you this, nobody has sued me, nobody has even written me a letter threatening me.

And in fact, that brings us to another interesting point. The government's efforts to suppress this story, you know, I wrote this for Forbes, Forbes chickened out, wouldn't run it, but they gave me permission to publish it elsewhere. I think knowing that no other big deal publication would dare touch it because of the heavy duty issues involved. The official silence is, as they say, deafening. They took it, another place they took it was to Insight Magazine. Paul Rodriguez, the editor there, did a lot of work to corroborate it, made a lot of calls around Washington. He got a visit from a military intelligence guy from the Pentagon saying, lay off this story, you don't know what you're dealing with.

Wall Street Journal wouldn't touch it. New York Times, scared to death of it. It was media bypass. This funny little magazine from Indiana, I kind of refer to it as sort of the Hustler magazine of right-wing political writing. Actually they're quite eclectic, more of a libertarian sort of thing. God by that, it's a pretty good serving of various viewpoints. Yeah. They called me because they had heard that, I had this story out there from one of their sources, and in fact they had managed to corroborate a key element on their own. They had found out from one of their sources that the IRS had a four man team surveilling Foster during daylight hours.

In fact, one of those guys actually read part of the surveillance report off a computer screen to us all. So, it wasn't that hard for them to corroborate. I don't think it would be that hard for any of these big deal media conglomerates to corroborate the fact that there was a surveillance thing going on. In fact, the Paris-based intelligence newsletter, they corroborated this too. It's not that hard to prove, substantially. Yeah, there's no documents, but I mean Woodward and Bernstein didn't have documents. They had trusted sources and they went with stories when they believed they were true. Why the media hasn't touched this, I don't know. It's totally bizarre, but in the case of Media Bypass, before it was just as it was going to press, Jim Leach, his House Banking Committee staff, called up. This is after I'd spent like three hours with them in Washington explaining all this to them.

Really? When they found out the story was actually going to be published, they called up and requested a pre-release copy of the story and they immediately leaked it to the libel attorney for Systematics, which is now called Alltel Information. In Arkansas. Yeah, this is this Arkansas company that Foster was involved in so that their San Francisco attorney could try and threaten media bypass and prevent them from running the story. Media Bypass, tell them to just stuff their noses and go take a flying leap. We're going to run this story.

We think it's true. They went away. They never sued. They never wrote a threatening letter. Guess what? A couple of weeks ago, John Sturry, the CEO of Systematics, announced his retirement at age 56 to go spend more time with his family. There's another one. It's the nuts. I mean, the government went overboards trying to prevent the publication of this story in rather heavy-handed ways.

Why? National security, probably. I think just the fear of exposure to corruption. Well, national security has taken on an entirely different meaning in many ways, hasn't it? Well, it's a cloak under which, it's a rug under which you can sweep a lot of dust. Maybe you can put it that way. Yeah, a lot of lumps under that rug nowadays too. Media Bypass Magazine for information on how to obtain the copy, the February 1996 copy, you can call 812-477-8670. That's 812-477-8610. We'll take our last break with Jim Norman and come back and find out what we as individuals can do besides sitting around and waiting for the IRS and so forth to take action against some of these people. What we can do on an individual basis to try and clean up this country. As we continue here, at the end of the line.

Once again, the phone number for Media Bypass, Media Bypass Magazine for the issue in which This article appears February 1996 issue 812-477-8670. What can individuals do, James Norman, to try to move this entire process forward besides stand on the sidelines and cheer loudly as I'm sure many of them will do as the months roll by? Well, one thing I've started to do is pray a lot. But another thing that we're making a modest proposal of in Media Bypass is that we all basically become members of the column society and start doing some of the basic link work ourselves of keeping these people honest. And actually it turns out it's not that hard to do.

In fact, we've got another story going to run on a March issue. It was written by a former Wharton University professor. This guy is a character. His name is Orlin Gravy. He lives in Reno now. What's his name? Orlin Gravy. G-R-A-V-E. All right. He's one of my heroes.

After he left Wharton, he started his own software company, developing software for pricing derivatives. I mean, really arcane stuff. But this stuff became essentially one of the most frequently used pieces of software in major banks and brokerage houses for financial pricing of financial instruments. And well you know the intelligence community comes to his company and says, hey can we use you guys as a front company so we can help spy on all of these banks and brokerage houses. And I think that's what sent him up the wall in these handling smokes. We're living in a surveillance state there.

And so he, I think, got quite upset about it and he's actually written a sort of a primer on the kind of databases and public sources of information you can go to to basically go back to the basics. Find out what kind of assets these people have. Where are they? What are they worth? How could they possibly have amassed this? The home on Martha's Vineyard, the million dollar condo in Washington, the two Volvo's, the expensive kids education, all of the perks and all of this stuff on their meager public salaries.

The numbers don't add up. If you just go back and do this kind of stuff, and what we are proposing in media bypass. Everybody does this kind of stuff. Send it to your local newspaper. Send it to the IRS. And if nobody does anything about it, send it to media bypass. And be sure to tell us what newspaper wouldn't print it. And we'll just keep going into this stuff. We could fill up this magazine for years and years on this kind of stuff.

It will be a whole new career for us. And I think it needs to be done. The government can't police itself. It's corrupt. And the enforcement system is essentially corrupt. It takes the public doing this kind of stuff. One thing Americans have a hard time coming to grips with is the idea that their government is corrupt. Oh, we're not a third world banana republic. The fact of the matter is there's no country on the face of the earth that has ever been more worth corrupting than this one. And frankly, no government that's been quite susceptible to it. Because I think we are naive about this. I think that the systems are not well developed.

And we've gotten so far away from the thinking of our founding fathers who rightly knew the frailty of human morality. They really did, didn't they? They were completely anticipatory of all of this largesse that has come home to roost and has turned people's heads in every possible direction, tempted them, corrupted them, led them. It's amazing. Yeah, and the people who poo-poo that stuff now are these fat cats now who are feeding at the top. They say, oh well, those were the quaint old days, you know.

We've moved far beyond that. It's wrong. Human nature is just human nature and it will tend to corruption. Well, I think you made that point very eloquently when we surveyed Mexico, Canada, South Korea, Japan and Panama. I mean, that's just amazing. Well, and they have the Italian governments in prison too. I forgot to mention that. By the way, there's record numbers of retirements in the English Parliament. That's connected too. There's something going on here. I think the fifth column has been sharing information with a bunch of other governments. There is something very big here going on. I hear a lot of guarded optimism, maybe guarded euphoria in the back of your voice way back there. This really may be the only way to do it.

Yes, I think it's going to be traumatic, it'll be cathartic, and it'll be inevitable. It doesn't work at the ballot box really, it's too slow, it's too easily short-circuited and circumvented it seems, again by the temptation of greed, graft, corruption and all of that. It has to be something like this. This is an amazing story you've shared with us tonight. How much more and how more quickly do you think we're going to see it unfold? I think the pace is going to accelerate now because I think the whole cover-up of Foster's death is unwinding. And as that becomes known, the position of President Clinton and Hillary Clinton is going to become untenable. And it's going to just raise all other kind of questions. And the state of retirement, the lame excuses are not going to be able to hold up anymore. You putting together, obviously, in Media Bypass a number of photographs, you're going to have a who's who calendar of people with all of their famous quotes under them.

Want to spend more time with the kids? Want to go back to the house of the prairie? I didn't know there was this awful pace in Washington. Some great quotes could be pulled out, put under these people's pictures. Now, we're not saying they're all guilty. We can't make that across-the-board statement, but there are far more coincidences than could ever be expected in any circumstance like this. The next time you hear somebody announce their retirement, think with bank account. It would probably make a lot more sense.

Wow, amazing. What's next for James Norman, besides coming back and visiting with us again, I hope, in about three or four months? Well, I'm just going to keep poking along at this as much as I can, and media bypasses. I'm eager to get more of this stuff. I haven't gone out looking for another job. Oh, that's the other thing. Part of it, I got fired from Forbes basically, not because of the story in this, but because after Rain and Media Bypass, and I was continuing to work on it my own time, basically, I came across the fact that Caspar Weinberger had one of these Swiss bank accounts.

Yeah, there's another. Secretary of Defense, he's the chairman of Forbes. He's the co-chairman of the Steve Forbes presidential campaign which is his account if you're not going to read it for 2.3 million dollars. In a sec, this account number that had been given to me, I didn't even know whose it was. I gave it to these column guys, they played around with it for a while and months later they said, oh yeah, didn't you know whose account number that was? It was Katz. Boing! Two hours after I put that in a memo to the boss, I was offered a buyout, he said, you have to roll it by. So, that's quick.

Yeah. Two hours. So I have not gone out looking for another job yet. That's one journalist friend said, ah, Jim, you're probably a little too radioactive right now for that. Well, that's a pretty quaint way of phrasing it. Red hot, untouchable, sure. But I am working on a book effort here. And somehow we're going to get this stuff into print. I think you need to do that.

I think it will happen even if it is in these so-called underground or alternative media. I'd like to see pictures with captions now Jim, remember that. Okay, all right, we'll work on that. Take these last words. Yes, indeed. I can't thank you enough for spending two hours with us. It has been enlightening to say the very least. Will you come back again Jim and keep us updated? Sure, sure, sure. I think we are going to have a lot to talk about over the next few months.

Great. Well, I congratulate you, I salute you, and a lot of our listeners would do the same. And thank you. Have a good evening, and we'll talk again. You too. Okay. My guest tonight, James Norman. I'll be back next Saturday, same time, same station, with another edition of The End of the Line. Until then, have yourselves a great week, and good luck.