Man! The information keeps flowing. I was looking into the October Surprise of 1980 which led me back to the Mena Arkansas/Iran-Contra cover-up, which led me to Gene Wheaton, which led me to the to the Air Arrow Flight 1285 "crash". On the way I came across this:

Matt Ehling Declassified Radio/Indymedia January 04, 2002

GENE WHEATON: When Harry Truman signed the National Security Act creating the CIA, he specifically stated in that act that they could not have any police powers, and they could not operate domestically in the United States, because he feared a secret police coup. By creeping in a little at a time, that coup has taken place.

NARRATOR: You are listening to "Declassified", an ongoing interview and documentary series dealing with America’s national security establishment. In this episode, "Declassified" discusses covert operations and covert crime with former military criminal investigator, Gene Wheaton.

...

The intelligence establishment was designed to operate under a veil of official secrecy, in order to make its functions opaque to foreign espionage. A body of secrecy laws and protocols grew up around these agencies, shielding them from foreign spies, but also from scrutiny by much of the American public. Congressional oversight of the intelligence establishment is limited to a select few committee members, intelligence budget information is restricted and classified, and even the existence of entire agencies, such as the NSA, has been hidden from the public at various time in the past.

Critics of the intelligence community have long contended that the institutional secrecy these agencies operate under allows them too much latitude, and too little oversight. This secrecy, they contend, has led to violations of the Constitution, and to violations of the law. The Pike and Church Committee hearings of the 1970s revealed broad-based abuses of the intelligence community, including CIA surveillance of legal American political groups, and CIA sponsored mind-control experiments performed on unwilling subjects. The Iran-Contra hearings of the 1980s uncovered a massive operation that involved illegally selling weapons to avowed enemies of the United States, and the arming of paramilitary militias in violation of laws passed by Congress.

Congressional oversight of the intelligence community was increased after the Pike and Church hearings of the 1970s, but in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks, many of the restrictions placed on America’s intelligence agencies are being lifted. Civil libertarians and intelligence agency critics have been quick to warn that an increase of secret police powers in the United States will do little to defend the country against terrorism, but will do much to erode traditional constitutional protections.

One such critic is Gene Wheaton, a former military criminal investigator and security contractor, who has worked as a counter-terrorism consultant for Rockwell Corporation, the Saudi Royal Family, and the Shah of Iran. Gene Wheaton was also recruited into the early stages of the Iran-Contra enterprise, and he is best known for his role in exposing elements of the Iran-Contra affair during the mid-eighties.

...

GENE WHEATON:

The covert operations subculture and the pyramid system of it is difficult for the average citizen to understand. And I understand it because I saw it, but it’s awfully hard to describe. This stuff goes back to the scandals of the 70s ... of Watergate and Richard Helms, the CIA director, being convicted by Congress of lying to Congress, of Ted Shackley and Tom Clines and Dick Secord and a group of them being forced into retirement as a result of the scandal over Edmond P. Wilson’s training of Libyan terrorists in conjunction with these guys, and moving C-4 explosives to Libya. They decided way back when, ‘75-’76, during the Pike and Church Committee hearings, that the Congress was their enemy. They felt that the government had betrayed them and that they were the real heroes in this country and that the government became their enemy. In the late 70s, in fact, after Gerry Ford lost the election in ’76 to Jimmy Carter, and then these guys became exposed by Stansfield Turner and crowd for whatever reason ... there were different factions involved in all this stuff, and power plays ... Ted Shackley and Vernon Walters and Frank Carlucci and Ving West and a group of these guys used to have park-bench meetings in the late 70s in McClean, Virginia so nobody could overhear they conversations. They basically said, "With our expertise at placing dictators in power," I’m almost quoting verbatim one of their comments, "why don’t we treat the United States like the world’s biggest banana republic and take it over?" And the first thing they had to do was to get their man in the White House, and that was George Bush.

Reagan never really was the president. He was the front man. They selected a guy that had charisma, who was popular, and just a good old boy, but they got George Bush in there to actually run the White House. They’d let Ronald Reagan and Nancy out of the closet and let them make a speech and run them up the flagpole and salute them and put them back in the closet while these spooks ran the White House. They made sure that George Bush was the chairman of each of the critical committees involving these covert operations things. One of them was the Vice President’s Task Force On Combating Terrorism. They got Bush in as the head of the vice president’s task force on narcotics, the South Florida Task Force, so that they could place people in DEA and in the Pentagon and in customs to run interference for them in these large-scale international narcotics and movement of narcotics money cases. They got Bush in as the chairman of the committee to deregulate the Savings and Loans in ’83 so they could deregulate the Savings and Loans, so that they would be so loosely structured that they could steal 400, 500 billion dollars of what amounted to the taxpayers’ money out of these Savings and Loans and then bail them out. They got hit twice: they stole the money out of the Savings and Loans, and then they sold the Savings and Loans right back to the same guys, and then the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation -- the taxpayers money -- paid for bailing out the Savings and Loans that they stole the money from ... and they ran the whole operation, and Bush was the de facto president even before the ‘88 election when he became president.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLZJ2L1eIfs&feature=channel

Daniel Ellsberg on GRITtv today:
The full interview w/ Laura Flanders isn't up yet, but the beginning is posted above. The "most dangerous man in the world" is most clear with his message.