intelligence agencies

Emma Gonzalez’s Curious Connections

Posted on by newpoplitnews

THE MOTHER LODE OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES?

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EVERYONE KNOWS Parkland student David Hogg is the son of a former FBI agent. One can figure Dad has advised young David each step of the way during the remarkable movement which has sprung from the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

But what about the other face of the student movement, Emma Gonzalez? Does her father have ties, past or present, to the U.S. intelligence community?

He does.

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Emma’s father, Jose E. Gonzalez, is the CEO of Trapezoid Inc., a Miami-based digital security firm. One of Trapezoid’s chief partners is DigitalEra Inc. Mr. Gonzalez was recently named to DigitalEra’s board of directors, along with James Cason. See this:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/digitalera-group-appoints-james-cason-jose-gonzalez-to-its-board-300494494.html

James Cason has an interesting biography:

“Cason spent 38 years as a Foreign Service Officer for the US State Department, serving in 12 countries. He’s been the Ambassador to Paraguay and Chief of Mission in Havana, Cuba.  Cason has received numerous awards from State, Defense, the White House and the intelligence community.”

Before founding Trapezoid, Jose E. Gonzalez worked for DigitalEra, helping them expand into “managed information security services.”

Among its other tasks, DigitalEra tracks “key security events,” including hacker conventions like DEF CON in Las Vegas– an event, according to DigitalEra, regularly attended by Federal law enforcement agents.

Another major investor in Trapezoid is CoVant Management Inc., based in McLean, Virginia. CoVant invests in the federal government technology services industry. Meaning, in firms which do business with the federal government.

TERREMARK

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Jose E. Gonzalez’s most interesting employment was from 2000 to 2007 with the now-defunct Terremark Inc., where he worked as its Chief Legal Officer, then as Senior Vice-President.

Founder, and CEO when Gonzalez worked there, was Manuel D. Medina. Born in Cuba, Medina left that country with his parents in 1965, at age 13, “because of the extensive political changes in the country” per wikipedia.

JAMIE DOS SANTOS

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In 2001, Medina hired Jamie Dos Santos to oversee the transition of Terremark from a real estate firm to a security firm. She became CEO and President of subsidiary Terremark Federal Group, which was based not in Miami but in Herndon, Virginia. Its objective was to secure government security contracts– which were in abundance following 9-11.

Ms. Dos Santos has been involved in a number of similar corporations, during her time at Terremark and afterward. One example is the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, incorporated in 2003 with Dos Santos as Director. It’s currently inactive.

A noteworthy incorporation which took place after her Terremark time was the curiously-named Isis Defense Corporation in McLean, Virginia (less than a mile away from the Department of Homeland Security), created in 2013 with Jamie Dos Santos as President and CEO, and still active.

In 2014 Jamie Dos Santos was appointed as a Member of President Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board. Currently Dos Santos is the CEO of Cybraics Inc., which uses Artificial Intelligence to enhance security– presumably for business and government.

It’s not known how close a business or personal relationship Jose E. Gonzalez has with Jamie Dos Santos– other than they’re both prominent in the government-business security field and both worked in important positions at the same time for the same company.

MORE TERREMARK

Exactly how big and powerful Terremark was in the government-security field is evidenced by this analysis of why Verizon purchased Terremark Worldwide Inc. in 2011.

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Verizon-Terremark was given the enormous government contract to run the healthcare.gov website, which infamously crashed late 2013. This fiasco led to the end of Terremark, whose data centers were sold to Equinix Inc. for $3.6 billion.

ARTHUR L. MONEY

Another past Terremark employee of note is Arthur L. Money, on its board and a strategic advisor to Terremark on homeland security affairs from 2003 to 2011. Money has played huge roles in the government-business security relationship, including as the Assistant Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton, and later as first chairman of the FBI‘s Science and Technology Advisory Board under George W. Bush.

Arthur L. Money has been on the board of too many security firms to count. One example is the Paladin Capital Group, set up three months after 9-11 specifically to capitalize on federal investments in security after the terrorist attacks.

CONCLUSIONS

Jose E. Gonzalez, father of Parkland survivor student activist Emma Gonzalez, is an expert on security, and has direct connections to several of the most important players in the government security field. It’s highly ironic that the two most important Parkland activists have fathers who were or are in that field. When the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School took place, all their expertise went for naught– despite numerous warnings about the shooter given to police agencies and the FBI.

THIS commentator doesn’t believe there was any advance conspiracy to stage the shooting, or even to allow it to take place. It’d be absurd to think parents would purposely allow their children in the vicinity of that kind of danger. However, it’s logical to believe the parents would do everything they could after the tragedy to transfer focus away from the failure of police agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation to act on the many advance warnings.

What some see as conspiracy, NPL News sees (despite the many observed connections) as simple government incompetence.

-K.W.

(Be sure to read the other interesting posts on this blog– and check out our main site, New Pop Lit.)

Literature and Foreign Policy

Posted on by newpoplitnews

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THAT key Anglo-American literary figures during the Cold War used literature as a tool of foreign policy, through journals like Paris Review and Encounter, raises a host of questions.

-Has literature been used as a tool of U.S. foreign policy at other times during the past sixty years?

-During this year’s renewed Cold War, the West versus Russia, are segments of the establishment literary world being used as instruments of foreign policy NOW?

-To what extent do U.S. intelligence agencies support current journals or institutions of literature?

 

The Wise Men

Posted on by newpoplitnews

American Masters: Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself

Who steered the direction of American literature after World War II?

Editors like George Plimpton, Robie Macauley, Reed Whittemore, Robert Silvers, and William Phillips. Men on a mission who, as much as they professed no artistic ideology, very much pushed an artistic ideology. They’d been formed by various factors, whether by privilege, or the war, or by disillusion with Communism. By 1950 all were Wilsonians out to save the world by making it “Safe for Democracy”– their own special internationalist version of democracy.

Literature was their tool– they fully believed in the importance of the art. Paris Review (like Encounter magazine in the UK) was founded as a cultural ambassador for Anglo-American liberal ideals– presenting an intellectual alternative to the twin totalitarianisms of fascism and Communism. Liberal Cold Warriors, these editors disdained– or had rejected– the populism of the American past. John Steinbeck and his kind were out. Henry James as the ideal cosmopolitan author was in.

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For our cultural aristocrats, literature, to be safe, must never engage too strongly in ideas. As an editor at New York Review of Books told me in a note in the late 1990’s, characters must never serve as mouthpieces for ideas. George Plimpton told me essentially the same thing on the one occasion I met him, at a literary debate held at CBGB’s in 2001. To these people, burdened– as they saw it– with the task of preserving literature, a broad view of the world was considered dangerous. An Ayn Rand or Frank Norris wrote beyond their well-regulated lines.

Focus moved instead to the delicate sensibilities of the bourgeois self. American literature became gnostic: insular and solipsistic. Cleansed, nuanced, refined; denuded of its loud voice but also much of its energy. For prose: John Updike. For poetry: John Ashbery.  Aesthetics was not the only weapon. No longer could a writer appear off the street like Thomas Wolfe or Jack London and be taken seriously. Writing programs and markers of breeding ensured all who entered the Halls of Approval were thoroughly screened.

Did these men and their journals have influence? Tremendous influence. They understood the concept of leverage; that a publication with a readership of 10,000 could determine who did or did not receive a large book contract– chiefly because that small readership was powerful and elite.

The change in aesthetic direction made the wise men– as well as their sources of money– very happy. Literature came under the control not of the unpredictable American people, but of themselves. The Elect.
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American Masters: Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself

The thing to know about these men and their journals is that the faces they showed the world were misleading. George Plimpton was a smiling bon-vivant but also much more than that. The notion that he didn’t know the source of Paris Review‘s original funding is an absurdity.

Likewise, New York Review of Books, founded by Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, postured for a long while as a radical Leftist publication– yet it was started with Random House money during a New York newspaper strike as a way for the giant book companies to advertise their new releases. It’s always been an extension of New York-based Big Corporate Publishing. Sophisticated PR for them, one might say.

In the New York literary world, nothing is ever as it seems.