Tony Blair (MI5), Bill Clinton (CIA) Barack Obama (?)

[John Simkin]

I have mentioned before the claim that Tony Blair was recruited into MI5 when he was at university to spy on CND and the Labour Party. This became a double-edged sword once he became leader of the Labour Party. He could be blackmailed to carry out certain policies. However, he would also be protected from being exposed for corruption. The most important thing about this arrangement was that the ruling classes could replace a Conservative Party that was sure to lose the election in 1997 with another Thatcherite government.

According to Robin Ramsay's new book, Politics & Paranoia, the same thing happened to Bill Clinton. On page 75 Ramsay reports Richard Goodwin, a JFK adviser who has shown a lot of interest in the assassination, as saying that he was told by a CIA source that Clinton was recruited into the CIA after he won his Rhodes scholarship at Oxford. His task was to spy on young American students in the UK who were members of the anti-war movement and was part of the CIA's Operation Chaos. As a result of this CIA background, like Blair, Clinton was protected once in power.

It makes perfect sense for the ruling elite to recruit young radicals who appear to have the potential to reach the top. This was especially true of the 1960s and the eary 1970s when it seemed that the capitalist world would have to endure left of centre governments in the future.

If that is the case, was Barack Obama recuited into the CIA when he was a student? The situation is very similiar to the one that the UK faced in 1997. The American people are ready for change. Will they get what we got in the UK? More of the same.

[Guest David Guyatt]

The pattern of intelligence agencies running presidents and prime ministers seems to have become entrenched. Poppy Bush, arguably a long term CIA officer, sat behind Reagan -presumably controlling the sleeping actor. Thatchler was an intelligence "groupie", with former spooks like Airey Neave running her campaign for Troy leadership.

Assuming that the intelligence agencies control of national leaders is correct, the really important question this raises, I think, is who do they serve?

[Paul Rigby]

Sometimes a photo can be worth a lot of words.....this one speaks volumes to me. Yes, I think it is generally so that the Oligarchs have their own 'military' called the intelligence agencies and they make sure only vetted candidates run or get elected. Problems are 'eliminated' one way or another. So, the 'elected' leaders certainly don't serve the People - at least not the 'average' person....only the few, behind the curtains of power.

One of these two men is a right-wing lecher - the other is the President's father.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

John Simkin wrote:

It makes perfect sense for the ruling elite to recruit young radicals who appear to have the potential to reach the top. This was especially true of the 1960s and the eary 1970s when it seemed that the capitalist world would have to endure left of centre governments in the future.

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Yes. This point has recently been illustrated abundently for me. One way is by reading about the so-called Non-Communist Left that the CIA perceived as

a valuable weapon in the Cold War both in terms of domestic and international perception of US motives.

Another, more specific example is the ostensibly weird relationship btween Frank Carlucci and Allard Lowenstein. Carlucci was a consrvative who served worked high up in the CIA and later became Secretary of Defense toward the end of Reagans presidency. Lowenstein cultivated a perception as a "left-liberal" while working with the CIA in places like Spain, Portugal and southern Africa to create the appearance of a non-communist opposition to regimes that were otherwise supported by the US.

were otherwise supported by the US.

Again and again we see Frank Carlucci working hand in hand with Lowenstein, most notably in Portugal, where Carlucci dissuaded Kissinger from going on the overt offensive against the new left of center government there around 1974-75. It was illuminating to see a guy who could be made Reagan's Secretary of Defense telling Kissinger, in effect, 'relax we can work with these peeps' after the new socialist-communist coalition emerged in Portugal in 1975.

Presumably, Frank was not crooning to Henry "all we are saying is give Peace a Chance" His thinking was at least 18% more Machiavellian.

What the Carlucci-Lowenstein team was really saying is "we have a non-communist left toehold in this mountain, and we can ride out the storm for a year or two until we can flip the country back our way" There seems to have been some in the CIA who thought a similar approach might have been used in Italy during the 1950s (Colby) but they met with opposition from those on the right who did not seem down with the right-ostensibly left tag team approach to dealing with socialist-communist coalition governemtns (Angleton)

"You say Carlucci, I say Lowenstein. You say tomato...." Music to the Langley ear?

[Len Colby]

The photo of Bush and Hitler is pretty obviously faked, I don't know what the others are supposed to prove.

The charge against Clinton is beyond flimsy, a 2nd hand report of a claim by an anonymous source

[Ron Ecker]

The charge against Clinton is beyond flimsy

Well, someone was sure protecting him and still does. It had to be someone or something pretty powerful. I assume, though, that you don't think he's a criminal other than lying about sex, so he didn't and doesn't need protection.

[Len Colby]

The charge against Clinton is beyond flimsy

Well, someone was sure protecting him and still does. It had to be someone or something pretty powerful. I assume, though, that you don't think he's a criminal other than lying about sex, so he didn't and doesn't need protection.

What crimes do you think he's gotten away with? Star, a partisan Republican, spent millions of dollars and thousand of man hours investigating him and the worst he could cum up with was the Lewinsky mess.

[Ron Ecker]

The charge against Clinton is beyond flimsy

Well, someone was sure protecting him and still does. It had to be someone or something pretty powerful. I assume, though, that you don't think he's a criminal other than lying about sex, so he didn't and doesn't need protection.

What crimes do you think he's gotten away with? Star, a partisan Republican, spent millions of dollars and thousand of man hours investigating him and the worst he could cum up with was the Lewinsky mess.

I won't go into the Clinton body count, other than the fact that it is clear that Vince Foster was murdered and his body dumped in Fort Marcy Park. I refuse to believe that Bill Clinton doesn't at least know who did it. The FBI conducted one of the bogus investigations for which it is infamous (for whom or on whose orders?), then rubberstamped its own investigation again for Starr.

The case for murder is covered well in the book The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, though of course Clinton apologists think the book is discredited by the fact that the author (whose name escapes me at the moment) was part of the "right wing conspiracy" against Slick Willie. Whatever the author's politics, he deserved a Pulitzer Prize or the equivalent for his investigative journalism.

The autopsy on Foster was even more of a joke than the JFK autopsy. At least there are JFK x-rays, whether they are bogus or not, whereas there are no x-rays from the Foster autopsy because the doc (lying) said the machine wasn't working. But my favorite aspect of the Foster case (analogous to the magic bullets in the JFK, RFK, and Reagan cases) are the magic car keys, which weren't on Foster's body when the Park Police searched for them at the park (where he supposedly drove himself), but miraculously turned up in Foster's pocket at the morgue after two White House officials dropped by to "identify the body." Ha ha ha ha ha.