Deja vu all over again. Intelligence links to the Sen. Landrieu attempted break in

[Magda Hassan]

No doubt people have heard of the attempted office break in of Senator Landrieu. So far in the MSM these guys have been treated with kid gloves as one can see in the NYT article below. Now, how would the NYT cover it if they were 'muslims' or 'communists'? But there is a whole lot more to it. David Price is writing about ICCAE in his article on Counter punch (for CP subscribers)

High Jinks to Handcuffs for Landrieu Provocateur

From left, James O’Keefe III, Stan Dai, Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel.

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By JIM RUTENBERG and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Published: January 30, 2010
James O’Keefe III, the guerrilla videographer, advised conservative students this month that they needed to start taking more risks.
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The house in New Orleans where three of the arrested men stayed.



“The more you put yourself out there and you take those calculated risks,” he told the Web site CampusReform.org, which works to foster conservative activism on college campuses, “you’re actually going to get opportunities.”
Just days later, Mr. O’Keefe, 25, took his own advice, but did not get quite the opportunity he expected.
He and three other men — including a 24-year-old associate, Joseph Basel, who was interviewed alongside Mr. O’Keefe by the Web site — were arrested and charged with a federal felony, accused of seeking to tamper with the office telephone system of Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. Two of them were impersonating repairmen in the senator’s New Orleans office and were caught after being asked for identification.
Mr. O’Keefe said Friday that the four men had been trying to determine whether Ms. Landrieu was avoiding constituent complaints about the Senate health care bill after her phone system was jammed in December. (Her office said no calls had been intentionally avoided.) On reflection, he said in a statement, “I could have used a different approach to this investigation.”
But that approach was precisely the kind that he and others have been perfecting for years, a kind of gonzo journalism or a conservative version of “Candid Camera.”
Those methods took root on college campuses in the latter half of George W. Bush’s presidency, fostered by a group of men and women in their late teens and early 20s with a taste for showmanship and a shared sense of political alienation — a sort of political reverse image of the left-wing Yippies of the 1960s. They studied leftist activism of years past as their prototype, looking to the tactics of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago community organizer who laid the framework for grass-roots activism in the ’60s, as well as those of gay rights and even Communist groups.
They held “affirmative action” bake sales with prices set based on the age and race of the buyer, posed as donors to Planned Parenthood seeking to contribute to the abortion of African-American fetuses only, and held a mock “Love Thy Prisoner” campaign to find American homes for Guantánamo inmates.
Mr. O’Keefe made his biggest national splash last year when he dressed up as a pimp and trained his secret camera on counselors with the liberal community group Acorn — eliciting advice on financing a brothel on videos that would threaten to become Acorn’s undoing.
He quickly became a cult hero among young conservatives who saw his work as groundbreaking and sought to emulate him.
Liberals have denounced his methods as dishonest, a form of entrapment, but national Republican leaders seized on them as revelatory, pressuring Congress into cutting Acorn’s financing.
Mr. O’Keefe produced his videos with a partner, Hannah Giles, who posed as a prostitute in them. Although he may be the most public face of this new approach, he is just one of a group of young conservatives who use political pranks and embarrassing recordings to upend what they view as overwhelming liberal biases on college campuses and in the culture at large.
The Path to New Orleans
In the incident in New Orleans, several of the group’s central players came together. They had met through a small community of conservative college newspaper editors that is fostered by advocacy organizations supported by old Republican families like the Coorses and Scaifes.
One of those arrested was Stan Dai, 24, a former editor in chief of the irreverent GW Patriot at George Washington University, where he published an anti-feminist article lampooning the play “The Vagina Monologues.” His version was called “The Penis Monologues.”
Another was Mr. Basel, 24, the co-founder of a conservative publication at the University of Minnesota, Morris, that features headlines like “Third World Countries Need Sweatshops” and “I Hate Che Guevara T-Shirts.”
The fourth was Robert Flanagan, 24, who did not know the others before roughly two weeks ago, his lawyer said, when Mr. O’Keefe gave a speech for the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, a libertarian organization in New Orleans for which Mr. Flanagan works a few hours a week. Until then, Mr. Flanagan, a star athlete and son of a federal prosecutor, had not been known by friends to be particularly provocative in his conservatism, though he had been sharply critical of Ms. Landrieu on the institute’s blog.
And then there was Ben Wetmore, 28, who was not arrested but who allowed Mr. Dai, Mr. O’Keefe and Mr. Basel to stay at his house in New Orleans this month. The authorities have not indicated that Mr. Wetmore, a Loyola law student, was connected to the incident at Ms. Landrieu’s office, but he has nonetheless played a vital role in Mr. O’Keefe’s career, as well as that of Mr. Basel and other activists.
Mr. Wetmore helped introduce many of the activists to one another and inspired them through his take on attention-grabbing tactics. His often behind-the-scenes role was detailed in a trail he left on the Internet, as well as in several interviews.


“Benjamin Wetmore: a mentor of mine; a genius,” Mr. O’Keefe said during an interview with The New York Times in September, after the Acorn videos were released. “He said, ‘Take on the politically correct crowd on campus, satirically.’ ”
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Senator Mary L. Landrieu.

Related

Mr. O’Keefe declined several interview requests, and Mr. Wetmore responded to an e-mail message by sending photographs of Jayson Blair, a reporter for The New York Times who resigned after admitting to plagiarism and fabrication. Mr. Dai, Mr. Basel and Mr. Flanagan could not be reached for comment. (The four men arrested were freed on bail, awaiting a pretrial hearing.)



The partnership between Mr. O’Keefe and Mr. Wetmore appears to have started in earnest in 2004.
As a philosophy major at Rutgers University, Mr. O’Keefe came to believe that conservative-leaning students were being force-fed a diet of academic liberalism. As he put it at the time, they were “drowned in relativism, concepts of distributive justice and redistribution of wealth.”
He and some friends started an alternative conservative publication called The Centurion with $500 from the conservative Leadership Institute’s Balance in Media grant program, which was overseen at the time by Mr. Wetmore. The institute, founded in 1979, is based in Arlington, Va., and is best known for training campus conservatives to influence public policy.
Before joining the institute, Mr. Wetmore had established his own bona fides as a college provocateur at American University. He drew national attention after being arrested by the campus police and accused of breaking a prohibition against recording Tipper Gore during a speech she gave there in 2002 and refusing to surrender the tape.
The arrest became a cause célèbre for First Amendment advocates and showcased what would become a standard technique of Mr. Wetmore and his cohort: taping classes, lectures and other campus events in the hopes of catching professors and others in moments of excessive political correctness or other embarrassments. He made headlines again roughly two years later when American University’s president, Benjamin Ladner, unsuccessfully tried to stop Mr. Wetmore from running the Web site BenLadner.com, which was devoted to criticizing him.
Campus pranks have a long tradition, but Mr. O’Keefe and Mr. Wetmore were “among the early users of putting multimedia content online for the conservative cause,” said Ryan Nichols, a grass-roots conservative activist and former colleague of both men at the Leadership Institute. “In that sense, they were pioneering.”
The group’s other main tactic, which Mr. O’Keefe has said was inspired by “Rules for Radicals,” Mr. Alinsky’s manifesto for left-wing organizing, was to caricature liberal political and social values by carrying them to outlandish extremes.
In the Times interview last September, Mr. O’Keefe credited Mr. Wetmore with giving him the idea for one of his most talked-about video farces, which continues to draw attention on YouTube: a campaign to rid a dining hall of Lucky Charms cereal, because it was offensive to Irish students.
In the video, Mr. O’Keefe quickly exhibited his absurdist improvisational style, telling a school official that the leprechaun on the cereal box appeared as “an Irish-American” who is “portrayed as a little green-cladded gnome or huckster.”
Making Waves
His first issue of The Centurion — with a mock New York Times front page with headlines like “Study Shows Mr. Bush Unfit for Presidency” — drew an immediate reaction, and a following.
“Everyone was like: ‘Whoa, what is this? Oh my goodness,’ ” said Gregory W. Levitsky, a friend and colleague of Mr. O’Keefe at The Centurion. Anthony Gioia, another former Rutgers student, said he joined the newspaper after seeing that first issue.
“Rutgers, like every university, is a very liberal institution, so we were a small group of friends trying to combat that atmosphere,” Mr. Gioia said. “The way we went about it was very provocative and made people take notice, and we won over a lot of people to our way of thinking.”
Mr. Gioia recalled discussions of “Rules for Radicals” and visits to the paper by Mr. Wetmore, whose motto was “Don’t complain about the media — be the media.”
But if The Centurion delighted fellow conservatives, it frequently left campus liberals flabbergasted. When it published an opinion article titled “The Inequality of Black History Month,” a student, Whitney Pennington, wrote in The Rutgers Daily Targum, “Honestly, in responding to this article, I do not even know where to begin.”
Tabitha Rice, who was in the College Democrats at Rutgers and who had numerous run-ins with Mr. O’Keefe, described him as “insufferable.”
“He always would do something that would get a rise, but he always knows how to work the system,” she said.
Around the same time, Mr. Wetmore wrote on his blog about a visit with another recipient of a Leadership Institute grant, Mr. Basel, who used the money to start his newspaper, The Counterweight.



Among Mr. Basel’s stunts was one in which he put up posters all over his campus in Minnesota that said “End Racism & Sexism Now: Kill All White Males.” The posters prompted such an outcry that he was asked to speak at a campus forum, where, according to two students, he asked why everyone could not use racial epithets the way black rappers do. Many black students walked out.
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“His methods were kind of to create an uproar,” said Nate Giles, a former president of the black student union at the university. “That’s what was abrasive, not his actual points.”
After college, Mr. O’Keefe took a job with Mr. Wetmore at the Leadership Institute and began traveling the country to help students with their publications. He worked intensely, said Morton Blackwell, the institute’s founder, remaining dedicated to his own projects. But eventually the institute developed some discomfort with the approach.
“He wanted to do sting operations that would affect legislation; he made some calls which have been covered in the news media to Planned Parenthood,” Mr. Blackwell said. “That was beyond the scope of what we had hired him to do. We are an educational organization. We are not an activist organization.”
Mr. Blackwell said he offered Mr. O’Keefe the choice between pursuing activism or working for his organization, “and he said he was committed to the activism.”
In the end, Mr. O’Keefe’s Planned Parenthood campaign — in which some of the organization’s workers were recorded accepting donations from one of Mr. O’Keefe’s characters who said the money should go to abort only black fetuses — forced Planned Parenthood to apologize in multiple states, though officials also complained that some tapes were “heavily edited.”
Old Tactics, New Goals
The campaign caught the eye of Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Web publisher and a former editor of The Drudge Report. In an interview, he said he had admired the Planned Parenthood campaign but did not know who was behind it until Mr. O’Keefe approached him with the Acorn project.
Mr. Breitbart likened Mr. O’Keefe’s approach to that of Abbie Hoffman and Hunter S. Thompson. His business arrangement with Mr. O’Keefe to run the videos on his Big Government site is widely credited with giving them national exposure, and making Mr. O’Keefe a star of his movement.
By last fall, Mr. Wetmore seemed less involved in Mr. O’Keefe’s projects, apparently because he had moved to New Orleans to attend law school at Loyola University. Nonetheless, Mr. O’Keefe, Mr. Basel and Mr. Dai showed up in town a few months later.
Mr. O’Keefe had been invited to speak at a Pelican Institute luncheon on Jan. 21. The invitation had come about, said the institute’s president, Kevin Kane, because the institute had done its own investigations of Acorn, albeit of the more traditional kind.
The topic of the day was undercover video and new media, but Mr. O’Keefe made it clear to some who attended the luncheon that he had other, unspecified work to do in New Orleans.
Also at the luncheon was Mr. Flanagan, who had worked as an intern in the offices of several Republican members of Congress. He moved to New Orleans last year, putting in a few hours a week as a blogger for the Pelican Institute.
David Centofante, who was in a defense and strategic studies program with Mr. Flanagan at Missouri State University, said he received an e-mail message from Mr. Flanagan a couple of weeks ago.
“He said to me, ‘You know the guy O’Keefe who did the Acorn thing?’ ” Mr. Centofante said. “ ‘We’re working together on something kind of cool.’ ”
Things did not quite work out as planned.

There is this for a start:

Is this the same Stan Dai arrested for trying to bug Mary Landrieu's office?

Stan Dai is one of the four men arrested with a failed attempt to bug Sen. Mary Landrieu's office.
I did some research. Ten bucks says this is the little (would-be) bugger:

STAN DAI, Lisle, Ill., attends The George Washington University majoring in Political Science. He is editor-in-chief of The GW Patriot, an alternative conservative student newspaper, a Club 100 Activist of Young America’s Foundation, and an Undergraduate Fellow on Terrorism of the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies. He is co-founder of GW’s Students Defending Democracy, a volunteer on several political campaigns, and active in the GW College Republicans and GW Colonials for Life. He was a 2003 Honorable Mention in the U.S. Institute of Peace Essay Contest.

One Stan Dai was listed as the Assistant Director of the The Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence (ICCAE) at Trinity (Washington) University. The ICCAE says it prepares young people for careers in intelligence.
(Original reporting, please credit Lindsay Beyerstein.)
Update: Welcome, Politico readers. Many thanks to Laura Rozen for the link.


Stan Dai spoke about torture and terrorism last June at a "CIA day" organized by the Junior Statesmen Summer School at Georgetown. The program included a field trip to the CIA and lectures at Georgetown the next day, according this event program I found online. As we know, Dai served as the assistant director of a program dedicated to steering young people into careers in intelligence.
Get this: according to the flier, Adam Brandon, the press secretary of FreedomWorks (Dick Armey's town hall mob outfit) was on the same program. David Mark of POLITICO also spoke at the event. Update: Mark says he didn't know about the CIA component of the event when he was invited to speak. A Chinese human rights activist and an official from the NAACP also spoke that day. Mark stressed that he didn't meet Dai at the Georgetown event and had no idea who Dai was until he read about his arrest.
Some highlights from Stan Dai's bio:

B. Career History• Mr. Dai has been involved in JSA since 2001: after attending summer school at Yale, he founded the JSA chapter at Naperville North, served in various Midwest region positions, and was a resident assistant at Georgetown.
• Mr. Dai was the first Assistant Director of the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity in D.C.
• Prior to that, he served as the Operations Officer of a Department of Defense irregular warfare fellowship program.
• Mr. Dai graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the George Washington University. He was the editor-in-chief of The GW Patriot, an alternative conservative student newspaper, a Club 100 Activist of Young America’s Foundation, and an Undergraduate Fellow on Terrorism of the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies.

In college, Stan Dai co-wrote a satirical work entitled The Penis Monologues, apparently a takeoff on the Vagina Monologues. Here's a taste:

My Angry Penis
MY PENIS IS ANGRY!!!!!!! You want to know what happened to my penis? Joan happened to my penis! There I was, sleeping peacefully when Joan stormed in and dragged me out for “an educational program.” I thought was going to see Mr. Rogers! But nooooooo! It turned out to be the “Whine-gina Monologues!”

From angry penises to irregular warfare. Quite the trajectory. Would you be surprised to learn that a guy like this got arrested for helping his buddies dress up like telephone repairmen/Village People and trying to bug a senator's office? I wouldn't.http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise...-dai-.html

and this:

Landrieu phone plot: Men arrested have links to intelligence community


By Sahil Kapur
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 -- 10:54 am



WASHINGTON -- Two of the three men arrested on Monday along with "ACORN pimp" James O'Keefe for "maliciously tampering" with Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-LA) phones in her New Orleans office have ties to the United States intelligence community.
The three accused by the FBI of "aiding and abetting" O'Keefe are Stan Dai, Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel. O'Keefe is 25, and the other three are 24.
Dai's links to the intelligence community appear to be particularly strong. He was a speaker at Georgetown University's Central Intelligence Agency summer school program in June 2009, and is also listed as an Assistant Director at the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity in D.C.
The university's president Patricia McGuire told The Associated Press that it promoted careers in intelligence but denied that it trains students to be spies.
The Trinity program received a "$250,000 renewable grant from the U.S. Intelligence Community" upon launching in 2004, according to its Web site. The program's goals are stated:

The IC CAE in National Security Studies Program was established during 2005 in response to the nation's increasing need for IC professionals who are educated and trained with the unique knowledge, skills and capabilities to carry out America's national security objectives.

The CIA summer school packet also notes that Dai "served as the Operations Officer of a Department of Defense irregular warfare fellowship program."
Dai has been an undergraduate fellow with the Washington-based national security think tank Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies (FDD), according to his College Leadership Program award biography at the Phillips Foundation -- as Lindsay Beyerstein first reported.
FDD claims that it's partly funded by the US State Department. Its Leadership Council and Board of Advisers comprise many high-profile conservative politicians and public figures -- including former House speaker Newt Gingrich, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), former Bush official Richard Perle and columnist Charles Krauthammer.
Dai traveled to Israel for two weeks in 2004 on an FDD-sponsored trip, the Daily Herald reported. "All expenses (room, board and travel) will be assumed by FDD," FDD's Web site said of its Israel program.
A host of FDD testimonials from Academic Fellows reveal that many fellows have traveled to Israel for training and field trips. The Foundation says the course includes "lectures by academics, diplomats, military and intelligence officials, and politicians from Israel, Jordan, India, Turkey and the United States."
FDD proclaims that "Like America, Israel is at the forefront in the war on terrorism." Further explaining its interest in Israel, FDD declares:

Both the United States and Israel are democracies, and both face the same enemy. It is this connection between Israel's experience and the future of the United States that is the essence of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

One FDD testimonial, by 2004-2005 fellow Dr. Cathal J. Nolan, highlighted the group's bond with high-level intelligence and government officials in Israel:

The access which FDD provided to top government officials--and to academic, police, security service, and intelligence experts at the highest levels--was truly remarkable. I know of no other foundation or fellowship program which is able to provide so much top-level access and first-hand intelligence and security service information in so compact a form, or in such an intellectually stimulating environment.

The CIA and Office of Director of National Intelligence have both told Politico that despite Dai's evident connections to the intelligence community, he never officially worked for them.
Dai's co-conspirator Robert Flanagan is currently seeking a Master of Science degree from the Missouri State University's (Fairfax, Virginia) Defense and Strategic Studies program, according to his LinkedIn profile (which was captured by Beyerstein before it was taken down Tuesday.)
The DSS Web site description affirms its connections to "the intelligence community":

The program’s location also provides DSS with the opportunity to draw adjunct faculty members from the top ranks of government, the defense industry, and the intelligence community.

The program also appears to have a close relationship with the conservative establishment. Inside Higher Ed reported in 2007 that the program's "full-time faculty of three and its nine affiliated lecturers tend to come mainly from positions in Republican administrations and conservative-leaning institutions."
It appears to be an elite program and one Facebook group bills it as ardently conservative on national security and foreign policy issues. "We Do Defense (far) Right!" it proclaims:

Are you preparing for the inevitable U.S. v. ChiCom War? Are you praying every night for the employment of Ballistic Missile Defense? Do you think nuclear weapons are important for American security? Do you think MAD is a trashy liberal theory? Are you educated by great professors with real life experience?
Then this is the place for you.

Flanagan has also blogged for the conservative Pelican Institute until as recently as this month. In one post last month, he highlighted criticisms directed at Landrieu.
Flanagan's father, William Flanagan, is currently the acting US Attorney for Louisiana's western district. But because Flanagan was arrested in the state's eastern district, his father will not oversee his prosecution.
The New Orleans newspaper NOLA.com, which first broke the news, reported that "one of the four was arrested with a listening device in a car blocks from the senator's offices." The FBI's affidavit noted that Flanagan and Basel were in the building with O'Keefe, and a federal law enforcement official confirmed to AP that Dai was the one in the car.
The New York Times pointed out that "[t]he [FBI] affidavit did not accuse the men of trying to tap the phones, or describe in detail what they did to the equipment." But the optics of the situation have led to suspicions that bugging Landrieu's phones was their intention.
Although Robert Flanagan's Facebook page has been removed, the other three all list each other as "friends" on the social networking site.
All four of the men arrested in the plotMonday have well-documented conservative ties, The Associated Press revealed. Three of the suspects wrote for conservative publications while in college, and Flanagan has written for the national Pelican Institute.
Flanagan's blog, flanaganreport.com, has also been deleted, but some of its content can still be found in Google's archives. In one post, Flanagan criticized former vice president Dick Cheney.
Joseph Basel was listed by the University of Minnesota, Morris in 2005 as one of its fifteen "College Republicans."
The publications O'Keefe and Basel wrote for while in college allegedly received money from the nonprofit education foundation The Leadership Institute.
"Leadership Institute Vice President David Fenner said in a phone interview this morning that the group had 'informal, above-board relationships' with both James O'Keefe and Joseph Basel when they were college students," Talking Points Memo reported Wednesday.
Landrieu's office released the following statement on the incident, according to NPR:

Because the details of yesterday's incident are part of an ongoing investigation by federal authorities, our office cannot comment at this time.

The community activist group ACORN slammed O'Keefe, who angered them after unveiling their ostensibly dodgy practices. "Couldn't have happened to a more deserving soul," the group posted on its Twitter feed.
The incident "is further evidence of his disregard for the law in pursuit of his extremist agenda," ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis told AP in a statement.
the first Assistant Director of the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity in D.C.
Additional research provided by Ron Brynaert
http://rawstory.com/2010/01/men-charged-...nce-links/