Douglas Caddy
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Report: U.S. Upgrading Diego Garcia Base For Attack on Iran
The Scottish newspaper The Herald is reporting the US is secretly upgrading special stealth bomber hangars on the British island protectorate of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for possible strikes on Iran. The U.S. has used Diego Garcia during the first Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Bush Requests $88 Million To Fit Bunker Busting Bombs on B-2 Bombers
In Washington the Bush administration has requested $88 million to fit bunker busting bombs to B-2 stealth bombers. Some Democratic lawmakers have questioned if the proposal is linked to an attack on Iran. Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia said "My assumption is that it is Iran, because you wouldn't use them in Iraq, and I don't know where you would use them in Afghanistan."
U.S. & France Criticize El Baradei's Comments on Iran
This comes as the UN Nuclear watchdog Mohamaed El Baradei is being criticized by some for publicly saying there is no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons.
French defense minister Herve Morin: "Everyone has their view. Our information, and it is backed up by other countries, is contrary to IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei's comments)."
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack brushed aside El Baradei's comments and urged him to not to speak about diplomatic issues. McCormack said: "He will say what he will. He is the head of a technical agency. I think we can handle diplomacy on this one."
from www.democracynow.org Oct 30, 07
Its comming soon...folks...wake up!
30 Senators warn Bush that he has no authority to attack Iran
AFP"
Published: Thursday November 1,
Thirty US senators wrote to President George W. Bush Thursday, warning he had no authority to launch military action against Iran, and expressing concern about the administration's "provocative" rhetoric.
The senators, 29 Democrats and one independent, urged the resolution of disputes with the Islamic Republic through diplomacy.
"We wish to emphasize that no congressional authority exists for unilateral military action against Iran," the letter signed by senators including presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden said.
The letter warned that a resolution passed by the Senate in September, calling for the designation of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist group, should not be used as a pretext for war.
It hit out at "provocative statements and actions" by the administration on Iran, after Bush last month warned Tehran must be barred from nuclear weapons to avoid the prospect of "World War III."
"These comments are counterproductive and undermine efforts to resolve tensions with Iran through diplomacy," the letter, coordinated by Virginia Senator Jim Webb, said.
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a fierce critic of the administration's policies, sent his own letter this week to Bush, reportedly calling on him to open direct talks with Tehran.
His staff confirmed the letter had been sent, but declined to release a copy.
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Report: U.S. Upgrading Diego Garcia Base For Attack on Iran
The Scottish newspaper The Herald is reporting the US is secretly upgrading special stealth bomber hangars on the British island protectorate of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for possible strikes on Iran. The U.S. has used Diego Garcia during the first Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Bush Requests $88 Million To Fit Bunker Busting Bombs on B-2 Bombers
In Washington the Bush administration has requested $88 million to fit bunker busting bombs to B-2 stealth bombers. Some Democratic lawmakers have questioned if the proposal is linked to an attack on Iran. Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia said "My assumption is that it is Iran, because you wouldn't use them in Iraq, and I don't know where you would use them in Afghanistan."
U.S. & France Criticize El Baradei's Comments on Iran
This comes as the UN Nuclear watchdog Mohamaed El Baradei is being criticized by some for publicly saying there is no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons.
French defense minister Herve Morin: "Everyone has their view. Our information, and it is backed up by other countries, is contrary to IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei's comments)."
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack brushed aside El Baradei's comments and urged him to not to speak about diplomatic issues. McCormack said: "He will say what he will. He is the head of a technical agency. I think we can handle diplomacy on this one."
from www.democracynow.org Oct 30, 07
Its comming soon...folks...wake up!
Letting the Cat Out of the Bag
Attacking Iran for Israel?
By RAY McGOVERN
www.counterpunch.org
October 31, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern10312007.html
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is at her mushroom-cloud hyperbolic best, and this time Iran is the target. Her claim last week that "the policies of Iran constitute perhaps the single greatest challenge to American security interests in the Middle East and around the world" is simply too much of a stretch.
To gauge someone's reliability, one depends largely on prior experience. Sadly, Rice's credibility suffers in comparison with Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Basing his judgment on the findings of IAEA inspectors in Iran, ElBaradei reports that there is no evidence of an active nuclear weapons program there.
If this sounds familiar it is, in fact, déjà vu. ElBaradei said the same thing about Iraq before it was attacked. But three days before the invasion, American nuclear expert Dick Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert, "I think Mr. ElBaradei is, frankly, wrong."
Here we go again. As in the case of Iraq, US intelligence has been assiduously looking for evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran; but, alas, in vain. Burned by the bogus "proof" adduced for Iraq-the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes-the administration has shied away from fabricating nuclear-related "evidence." Are Bush and Cheney again relying on the Rumsfeld dictum, that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?" There is a simpler answer.
Cat Out of the Bag
The Israeli ambassador to the US, Sallai Meridor, let the cat out of the bag while speaking at the American Jewish Committee luncheon on Oct. 22. In remarks paralleling those of Rice, Meridor said Iran is the chief threat to Israel. Heavy on the chutzpah, he then served gratuitous notice on Washington that countering Iran's nuclear ambitions will take a "united United States in this matter," lest the Iranians conclude, "come January '09, they have it their own way."
Meridor stressed that "very little time" remained to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. How so? Even were there to be a nuclear program hidden from the IAEA, no serious observer expects Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon much sooner than five years from now.
Truth be told, every other year since 1995 US intelligence has been predicting that Iran could have a nuclear weapon in about five years. It has become downright embarrassing-like a broken record, punctuated only by so-called "neo-conservatives" like James Woolsey, who in August publicly warned that the U.S. may have no choice but to bomb Iran in order to halt Tehran's nuclear weapons program.
Woolsey, self-described "anchor of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs," put it this way: "I'm afraid that within, well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they [the Iranians] could have the bomb."
The day before Ambassador Meridor's unintentionally revealing remark, Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated, "We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon." That remark followed closely on President George W. Bush's apocalyptic warning of World War III, should Tehran acquire the knowledge to produce a nuclear weapon.
The Israelis appear convinced they have extracted a promise from Bush and Cheney that they will help Israel nip Iran's nuclear program in the bud before they leave office. That is why the Israeli ambassador says there is "very little time"-less than 15 months.
Never mind that there is no evidence that the Iranian nuclear program is any more weapons-related than the one Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld persuaded President Gerald Ford to approve in 1976. Westinghouse and General Electric successfully lobbied for approval to sell the Shah for $6.4 billion the kind of nuclear facilities that Iran is now building, but the deal fell through when the Shah was ousted in 1979.
With 200-300 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, the Israelis enjoy a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. They mean to keep that monopoly and Israel's current leaders are pressing for the US to obliterate Iran's fledgling nuclear program.
Anyone aware of Iran's ability to retaliate realizes this would bring disaster to the whole region and beyond. But this has not stopped Cheney and Bush in the past. And the real rationale is reminiscent of the one revealed by Philip Zelikow, confidant of Condoleezza Rice, former member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and later executive director of the 9/11 Commission. On Oct. 10 2002, Zelikow said this to a crowd at the University of Virginia:
"Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat is-it's the threat to Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name...the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell."
Harbinger?
The political offensive against Iran coalesced as George W. Bush began his second term, with Cheney out in front pressing for an attack on its nuclear-related facilities. During a Jan. 20, 2005 interview with MSNBC, just hours before Bush's second inauguration, Cheney put Iran "right at the top of the list of trouble spots," and noted that negotiations and UN sanctions might fail to stop Iran's nuclear program. Cheney then added, with remarkable nonchalance:
"Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards."
Does this not sound like the so-called "Cheney plan" being widely discussed in the media today? An Israeli attack; Iranian retaliation; the United States springing to the defense of its "ally" Israel?
A big fan of preemption, the vice president was the first U.S. official to speak approvingly of Israel's air attack on Iraq's reactor at Osirak in 1981. He included that endorsement in his important speech of Aug. 26, 2002, in which he set the terms of reference for the subsequent campaign to persuade Congress to approve war with Iraq.
Cheney has done little to disguise his attraction to Israel's penchant to preempt. Ten years after the attack on Osirak, then-Defense Secretary Cheney reportedly gave Israeli Maj. Gen. David Ivri, commander of the Israeli Air Force, a satellite photo of the Iraqi nuclear reactor destroyed by U.S.-built Israeli aircraft. On the photo Cheney penned, "Thanks for the outstanding job on the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981."
Nothing is known of Ivri's response, but it is a safe bet it was along the lines of "we could not have done it without your country's help." Indeed, although the U.S. officially condemned the attack (the Reagan administration was supporting Saddam Hussein's Iraq at the time), intelligence and operational support that the Pentagon shared with the Israelis made a major contribution to the success of the Israeli raid. With Vice President Cheney now calling the shots, similar support is a virtual certainty in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran.
It is no secret that former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was already pressing in 2003 for an early preemptive strike, insisting that Iran was likely to obtain a nuclear weapon much earlier than the time forecast by U.S. intelligence. Sharon even brought his own military adviser to brief Bush with aerial photos of Iranian nuclear-related installations.
More troubling still, in the fall of 2004 Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush and as Chair of the younger Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, made some startling comments to the Financial Times.
A master of discretion with the media, Scowcroft nonetheless saw fit to make public his conclusion that Sharon had Bush "mesmerized;" that he had our president "wrapped around his little finger." Needless to say, Scowcroft was immediately ousted from the advisory board and is now persona non grata at the White House in which he worked for so many years.
An Unstable Infatuation
George W. Bush first met Sharon in 1998, when the Texas governor was taken on a tour of the Middle East by Matthew Brooks, then executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. Sharon was foreign minister at the time and took Bush on a helicopter tour of the Israeli occupied territories. An Aug. 3, 2006 McClatchy wire story by Ron Hutcheson quotes Matthew Brooks:
"If there's a starting point for George W. Bush's attachment to Israel, it's the day in late 1998, when he stood on a hilltop where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and, with eyes brimming with tears, read aloud from his favorite hymn, 'Amazing Grace.' He was very emotional. It was a tear-filled experience. He brought Israel back home with him in his heart. I think he came away profoundly moved."
Bush made gratuitous but revealing reference to that trip at the first meeting of his National Security Council on Jan. 30, 2001. After announcing he would abandon the decades-long role of "honest broker" between Israelis and Palestinians and would tilt pronouncedly toward Israel, Bush said he had decided to take Sharon "at face value" and unleash him.
At that point the president brought up his trip to Israel with the Republican Jewish Coalition and the flight over Palestinian camps, but there was no sense of concern for the lot of the Palestinians. In Ron Suskind's Price of Loyalty, then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who took part at the NSC meeting, quotes Bush: "Looked real bad down there," the president said with a frown. He then said it was time to end America's efforts in the region: "I don't see much we can do over there at this point."
O'Neill reported that Colin Powell, the newly minted but nominal secretary of state, was taken completely by surprise at this nonchalant jettisoning of more nuanced and balanced longstanding policy. Powell demurred, warning that this would unleash Sharon and "the consequences could be dire, especially for the Palestinians." According to O'Neill, Bush just shrugged, saying, "Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things." O'Neill says that Powell seemed "startled."
It is a safe bet that the vice president was in no way startled.
What Now?
The only thing that seems to be standing in the way of a preemptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities is unusual-but-sensible foot-dragging by the U.S. military. It seems likely that the senior military leadership has told the president and Cheney: This time let us brief you on what to expect on Day 2, on Week 4, on Month 6-and on the many serious things Iran can do to Israel, and to us in Iraq and elsewhere.
CENTCOM commander Admiral William Fallon is reliably reported to have said, "We are not going to do Iran on my watch." And in an online Q-and-A on Sept. 27, award-winning Washington Post reporter Dana Priest spoke of a possible "revolt" if pilots were ordered to fly missions against Iran. She added:
"This is a little bit of hyperbole, but not much. Just look at what Gen. Casey, the Army chief, has said...that the tempo of operations in Iraq would make it very hard for the military to respond to a major crisis elsewhere. Besides, it's not the 'war' or 'bombing' part that's difficult; it's the morning after and all the days after that. Haven't we learned that (again) from Iraq?"
How about Congress? Could it act as a brake on Bush and Cheney? Forget it. If the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) with its overflowing coffers supports an attack on Iran, so will most of our spineless lawmakers. Already, AIPAC has succeeded in preventing legislation that would have required the president to obtain advance authorization for an attack on Iran.
And for every Admiral Fallon, there is someone like the inimitable retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, a close associate of James Woolsey, "cakewalk" Ken Adelman and other "neo-cons." The air campaign "will be easy," says McInerney, a FOX pundit who was a rabid advocate of shock and awe over Iraq. "Ahmadinejad has nothing in Iran that we can't penetrate," he adds, and several hundred aircraft, including stealth bombers, will be enough to do the trick:
"Forty-eight hours duration, hitting 2,500 aim points to take out their nuclear facilities, their air defense facilities, their air force, their navy, their Shahab-3 retaliatory missiles, and finally their command and control. And then let the Iranian people take their country back."
And the likely White House rationale for war? Since, particularly with the fiasco of Iraq as backdrop, it will be a hard sell to promote the idea of an imminent threat from a nuclear-armed Iran, the White House PR machine has already begun focusing on other "evidence"- amorphous so far-indicating that Iran is supporting those who are "killing our troops in Iraq."
The scary thing is that Cheney is more likely to use the McInerneys and Woolseys than the Fallons and Caseys in showing the president how "easily" it can all be done-Cakewalk II.
Madness.
It is not as though our country has lacked statesmen wise enough to warn us against foreign entanglements and about those who have difficulty distinguishing between the strategic interests of the United States and those of other countries:
"A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation facilitates the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, infuses into one the enmities of the other, and betrays the former into participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."
(George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796)
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990 and Robert Gates' branch chief in the early 1970s. McGovern now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com
A shorter version of this article appeared first on Consortiumnews.com.
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Well, it provided a few good laughs!
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"Well, it provided a few good laughs!"
Try this one on your "funny-bone" for size, my beloved infidel.
http://wlym.com/PDF-77-85/CAM8304.pdf
Anton Chaitkin is a member of this forum, as well.
Your,
Femme Nikita
Over the years I have received telephone calls from Anton, who asked for information that I might have on specific topics. I always found that he had diligently done his research beforehand on the topics, with the net result being that he provided me with valuable insights to which I otherwise would not have been privy.
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Posted on Sun, Oct. 07, 2007
Nuke transportation story has explosive implications
BY ROBERT STORMER
SPECIAL TO FORT WORTH (TEXAS) STAR-TELEGRAM
Last month, six W80-1 nuclear-armed AGM-129 advanced cruise missiles were flown from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana and sat on the tarmac for 10 hours undetected.
Press reports initially cited the Air Force mistake of flying nuclear weapons over the United States in violation of Air Force standing orders and international treaties, while completely missing the more important major issues, such as how six nuclear cruise missiles got loose to begin with.
Opinion columns and editorials appeared in America's newspapers, some blasting the Air Force for flying nukes over the U.S. and some defending the Air Force procedure. None of the news reports focused on the real questions of our nuclear security.
Let me be very clear here: We are not talking about paintball cartridges or pellet gun ammo. We are talking nuclear weapons.
There is a strict chain of custody for all such weapons. Nuclear weapons handling is spelled out in great detail in Air Force regulations, to the credit of that service. Every person who orders the movement of these weapons, handles them, breaks seals or moves any nuclear weapon must sign off for tracking purposes.
Two armed munitions specialists are required to work as a team with all nuclear weapons. All individuals working with nuclear weapons must meet very strict security standards and be tested for loyalty -- this is known as a "Personnel Reliability Program." They work in restricted areas within eyeshot of one another and are reviewed constantly.
All security forces assigned are authorized to use deadly force to protect the weapons from any threat. Nor does anyone quickly move a 1-ton cruise missile -- or forget about six of them, as reported by some news outlets, especially cruise missiles loaded with high explosives.
The United States also does not transport nuclear weapons meant for elimination attached to their launch vehicles under the wings of a combat aircraft. The procedure is to separate the warhead from the missile, encase the warhead and transport it by military cargo aircraft to a repository -- not an operational bomber base that just happens to be the staging area for Middle Eastern operations.
Yes, we still do fly nuclear warheads over the United States today. We also drive them over land as well. That's not the point.
This is about how six nuclear advanced cruise missiles got out of their bunkers and onto a combat aircraft without notice of the wing commander, squadron commander, munitions maintenance squadron (MMS), the B-52H's crew chief and command pilot and onto another Air Force base tarmac without notice of that air base's chain of command -- for 10 hours.
It is time that we got to the bottom of it through a comprehensive investigation.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has asked Larry Welch, a former Air Force chief of staff, to lead an independent inquiry into the implications of the incident. That is in addition to the existing Air Force investigation headed by Maj. Gen. Douglas Raaberg, director of air and space operations at Air Combat Command, which is responsible for all Air Force bombers and fighters.
The questions that must be answered:
1 Why, and for what ostensible purpose, were these nuclear weapons taken to Barksdale?
2 How long was it before the error was discovered?
3 How many mistakes and errors were made, and how many needed to be made, for this to happen?
4 How many and which security protocols were overlooked?
5 How many and which safety procedures were bypassed or ignored?
6 How many other nuclear command and control non-observations of procedure have there been?
7 What is Congress going to do to better oversee U.S. nuclear command and control?
8 How does this incident relate to concern for reliability of control over nuclear weapons and nuclear materials in Russia, Pakistan and elsewhere?
9 Does the Bush administration, as some news reports suggest, have plans to attack Iran with nuclear weapons?
10 If this was an accident, have we degraded our military to a point where we are now making critical mistakes with our nuclear arsenal? If so, how do we correct this?
Yes, heads must roll and careers will end. But let's make sure that this includes the ranks from general officers to noncommissioned ones.
Or is this to be the Air Force version of the Abu Ghraib investigation?
Robert Stormer of Chicago is a retired lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve, serving with the Navy's Supervisor of Salvage, and was a specialist in weapons retrieval. He is a marine engineer and marine salvage specialist.
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Weekend Edition
October 6 / 7, 2007
New Revalations About the Attack on the USS Liberty
So Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby?
By RAY McGOVERN
www.counterpunch.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern10062007.html
Virtually everyone: Republican, Democrat-Conservative, Liberal. The fear factor is non-partisan, you might say, and palpable. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) brags that it is the most influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol Hill, and has demonstrated that time and again-and not only on Capitol Hill.
Seldom has the Lobby's power been as clearly demonstrated as in its ability to suppress the awful truth that on June 8, 1967, during the Six Day War:
o Israel deliberately attacked the intelligence collection ship USS Liberty, in full awareness it was a U.S. Navy ship, and did its best to sink it and leave no survivors;
o The Israelis would have succeeded had they not broken off the attack upon learning, from an intercepted message, that the commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet had launched carrier fighters to the scene; and
o By that time 34 of the Liberty's crew had been killed and over 170 wounded.
Scores of intelligence analysts and senior officials have known this for years. That virtually all of them have kept a forty-year frightened silence is testament to the widespread fear of touching this live wire. Even more telling is the fact that the National Security Agency apparently has destroyed voice tapes and transcripts heard and seen by many intelligence analysts, material that shows beyond doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing.
The Ugly Truth
But the truth will out-eventually. All it took in this case was for a courageous journalist (of the endangered species kind) to listen to the surviving crew and do a little basic research, not shrinking from naming war crimes and not letting senior U.S. officials, from the president on down, off the hook for suppressing-even destroying-damning evidence from intercepted Israeli communications.
The mainstream media have now published an exposé based largely on interviews with those most intimately involved. A lengthy article by Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter John Crewdson appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun on Oct. 2 titled "New revelations in attack on American spy ship." the subtitle goes the prize for understatement of the year: "Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn't tell full story of deadly 1967 incident."
Better 40 years late than never, I suppose. Many of us have known of the incident and cover-up for a very long time and have tried to expose and discuss it for the lessons it holds for today. It has proved far easier, though, to get a very pedestrian Dog-Bites-Man article published than an article with the importance and explosiveness of this sensitive story.
A Marine Stands Up
On the evening of Sept. 26, 2006, I gave a talk on Iraq to an overflow crowd of 400 at National Avenue Church in Springfield, Missouri. A questioner asked what I thought of the study by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." The study had originally been commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly. When the draft arrived, however, shouts of "Leper!" were heard at the Atlantic. The monthly wasted no time in saying thanks-but-no-thanks, and the leper-study then wandered in search of a home, finding none among American publishers. Eventually the London Review of Books published it in March 2006.
I had read that piece carefully and found it an unusual act of courage as well as scholarship. That's what I told the questioner, adding that I did have two problems with the study:
o First, it seemed to me the authors erred in attributing virtually all the motivation for the U.S. attack on Iraq to the Israel Lobby and the so-called "neo-conservatives" running our policy and armed forces. Was Israel an important factor? Indeed. But of equal importance, in my view, was the oil factor and what the Pentagon now calls the "enduring" military bases in Iraq, which the White House and Pentagon decided were needed for the U.S. to dominate that part of the Middle East.
o Second, I was intrigued by the fact that Mearsheimer and Walt made no mention of what I believe to be, if not the most telling, then perhaps the most sensational proof of the power the Lobby knows it can exert over our government and Congress. In sum, in June 1967, after deliberately using fighter-bombers and torpedo boats to attack the USS Liberty for over two hours in an attempt to sink it and kill its entire crew, and then getting the U.S. government, the Navy, and the Congress to cover up what happened, the Israeli government learned that it could-literally-get away with murder.
I found myself looking out at 400 blank stares. The USS Liberty? And so I asked how many in the audience had heard of the attack on the Liberty on June 8, 1967. Three hands went up; I called on the gentleman nearest me.
Ramrod straight he stood:
"Sir, Sergeant Bryce Lockwood, United States Marine Corps, retired. I am a member of the USS Liberty crew, Sir."
Catching my breath, I asked him if he would be willing to tell us what happened.
"Sir, I have not been able to do that. It is hard. But it has been almost 40 years, and I would like to try this evening, Sir."
You could hear a pin drop for the next 15 minutes, as Lockwood gave us his personal account of what happened to him, his colleagues, and his ship on the afternoon of June 8, 1967. He was a linguist assigned to collect communications intelligence from the USS Liberty, which was among the ugliest-and most easily identifiable-ships in the fleet with antennae springing out in all directions.
Lockwood told of the events of that fateful day, beginning with the six-hour naval and air surveillance of the Liberty by the Israeli navy and air force on the morning of June 8. After the air attacks including thousand-pound bombs and napalm, three sixty-ton torpedo boats lined up like a firing squad, pointing their torpedo tubes at the Liberty's starboard hull. Lockwood had been ordered to throw the extremely sensitive cryptological equipment overboard and had just walked beyond the bulwark separating the NSA intelligence unit from the rest of the ship when, he recalled, he sensed a large black object, a tremendous explosion, and sheet of flame. The torpedo had struck dead center in the NSA space.
The cold, oily water brought Lockwood back to consciousness. Around him were 25 dead colleagues; but he heard moaning. Three were still alive; one of Lockwood's shipmates dragged one survivor up the hatch. Lockwood was able to lift the two others, one-by-one, onto his shoulder and carry them up through the hatch. This meant alternatively banging on the hatch for someone to open it and swimming back to fish his shipmate out of the water lest he float out to sea through the 39-foot hole made by the torpedo.
At that Lockwood stopped speaking. It was enough. Hard, very hard-even after almost 40 years.
What Else We Know
John Crewdson's meticulously documented article, together with the 57 pages that James Bamford devotes to the incident in his book "Body of Secrets" and recent confessions by those who played a role in the cover-up, paint a picture that the surviving crew of the USS Liberty can only find infuriating. The evidence, from intercepted communications as well as testimony, of Israeli deliberate intent is unimpeachable, even though the Israelis continue to portray the incident as merely a terrible mistake.
Crewdson refers to U.S. Navy Captain Ward Boston, who was the Navy lawyer appointed as senior counsel to Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, named by Admiral John S. McCain (Sen. John McCain's father) to "inquire into all the facts and circumstances." The fact that they were given only one week to gather evidence and were forbidden to contact the Israelis screams out "cover-up."
Captain Boston, now 84, signed a formal declaration on Jan. 8, 2004 in which he described himself as "outraged at the efforts of the apologists for Israel in this country to claim that this attack was a case of 'mistaken identity.'" Boston continued:
"The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack...was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew...Not only did the Israelis attack the ship with napalm, gunfire, and missiles, Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned three lifeboats that had been launched in an attempt by the crew to save the most seriously wounded-a war crime...I know from personal conversations I had with Admiral Kidd that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of 'mistaken identity' despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary."
Why the Israelis decided to take the draconian measure of sinking a ship of the U.S. Navy is open to speculation. One view is that the Israelis did not want the U.S. to find out they were massing troops to seize the Golan Heights from Syria, and wanted to deprive the U.S. of the opportunity to argue against such a move. Another theory: James Bamford, in "Body of Secrets," adduces evidence, including reporting from an Israeli journalist eyewitness and an Israeli military historian, of wholesale killing of Egyptian prisoners of war at the coastal town of El Arish in the Sinai. The Liberty was patrolling directly opposite El Arish in international waters but within easy range to pick up intelligence on what was going on there. And the Israelis were well aware.
As for the why, well, someone could at least approach the Israelis involved and ask, no? The important thing here is not to confuse what is known (the deliberate nature of the Israeli attack) with the purpose behind it, which remains a matter of speculation.
Other Indignities
Bowing to intense pressure from the Navy, the White House agreed to award the Liberty's skipper, Captain William McGonagle, the Medal of Honor....but not at the White House, and not by the president (as is the custom). Rather, the Secretary of the Navy gave the award at the Washington Navy Yard on the banks of the acrid Anacostia River. A naval officer involved in the awards ceremony told one of the Liberty crew, "The government is pretty jumpy about Israel...the State Department even asked the Israeli ambassador if his government had any objections to McGonagle getting the medal."
Adding insult to injury, those of the Liberty crew who survived well enough to call for an independent investigation have been hit with charges of, you guessed it, anti-Semitism.
Now that some of the truth is emerging more and more, others are showing more courage in speaking out. In a recent email, an associate of mine who has followed Middle East affairs for almost 60 years, shared the following:
"The chief of the intelligence analysts studying the Arab/Israeli region at the time told me about the intercepted messages and said very flatly and firmly that the pilots reported seeing the American flag and repeated their requests for confirmation of the attack order. Whole platoons of Americans saw those intercepts. If NSA now says they do not exist, then someone ordered them destroyed."
Leaving the destruction of evidence without investigation is an open invitation to repetition in the future.
As for the larger picture, visiting Israel this past summer I was constantly told that Egypt forced Israel into war in June 1967. This does not square with the unguarded words of Menachem Begin in 1982, when he was Israel's prime minister. Rather he admitted publicly:
"In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."
Israel had, in fact, prepared well militarily and mounted provocations against its neighbors, in order to provoke a response that could be used to justify an expansion of its borders. Israel's illegal 40-year control over and confiscation of land in the occupied territories and U.S. enabling support (particularly the one-sided support by the current U.S. administration) go a long way toward explaining why it is that 1.3 billion Muslims "hate us."
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990 and Robert Gates' branch chief in the early 1970s. McGovern now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com
A shorter version of this article appeared originally on Consortiumnews.com
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Various people have predicted Bush was “about” to attack Iran since at least 2004. Though I don’t put anything past him I hope that he not so insane as to attempt such a thing. I imagine doing would me wide scale resistance in the US military.
Weekend Edition
September 8 / 9, 2007
CounterPunch Diary
Will the US Really Bomb Iran?
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09082007.html
"They're about taking out the entire Iranian military."
This particular spine-chiller comes from Alexis Debat, excitingly identified as "director of terrorism and national security" at the Nixon Center. According to Debat, the big takeout is what the U.S. Air Force has in store, as opposed to mere "pinprick strikes" against the infamous nuclear facilities.
Predicting imminent war on Iran has been one of the top two items in Cassandra's repertoire for a couple of years now, rivaled only by global warming as a sure-fire way to sell newspapers and boost website hits.
Debat was re-roasting that well-scorched chestnut, the "Shock and Awe" strategy, whereby-back in March of 2003-the U.S. Air Force proposed to reduce Iraq's entire military to smoldering ruins. In the event, "Shock and Awe" was a resounding failure, like all such pledges by Air Force commanders to destroy the enemy's military since the birth of aerial bombardments nearly a century ago. Such failures have never stopped the US Air Force from trying once again, and there are no doubt vivid attack plans now circulating the government.
Will it come to pass? In his memoirs, I Claud (which I'm happy to say CounterPunch Books/AK Press will be republishing next spring) my father offers a useful journalistic recipe on this matter of prediction.
Will it come to pass? In his memoirs, I Claud (which I'm happy to say CounterPunch Books/AK Press will be republishing next spring,) my father offers a useful recipe on this matter of prediction.
One morning, as we at length relaxed at breakfast by a brazier on the terrace of the Café du Dôme, he [Robert Dell, the diplomatic correspondent of the Manchester Guardian] said to me: "Do you want to get what used to be called a 'scoop' for your horrid little paper every day?" (The "horrid little paper" was, of course, the Daily Worker, whose diplomatic correspondent I then was.)
"That would be nice."
"Well then, all you have to do is to read all the continental papers available every morning, take lunch with one or more of Europe's leading politicians or diplomats, make up your mind what is the vilest action that, in the circumstances, the French, British, Italian or German government could undertake, and then, in the leisure of the afternoon, sit down at your typewriter and write a dispatch announcing that that is just what they are going to do. You can't miss. Your news will be denied two hours after it is published and confirmed after twenty four."
So, whether in 24 hours or 24 days or at some point before the end of his term, we should predict Bush will send the bombers on their way to Teheran to destroy the usual targets--power stations and kindred civilian infrastructure, hospitals, maybe a few bomb shelters crammed with women and children.
But will it really come to pass?
Despite the unending stream of stories across the months announcing that an attack on Iran is on the way, I've had my doubts. Amid the housing slump here, with the possibility of an inflationary surge as the credit balloon threatens to explode, would the US government really want to see the price of gas at the pump go over $5? What would Hugo Chavez do? Even a hiccup in flows from Venezuela would paralyze refineries here, specifically designed for Venezuelan crude. China has a big stake in Iran. It's also Uncle Sam's banker. The Chinese don't have to destroy the dollar, merely squeeze its windpipe, or revalue their currency enough to double retail prices in Wal-Mart. The Republicans and the presidential candidates wouldn't want that on the edge of an election year.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff know the Iraq War has almost broken the US Army. Wouldn't they adamantly oppose the notion of an attack on Iran, which would see Shiite resistance groups in Iraq cut US supply convoys from Kuwait bringing fuel and water to the big US bases? Wouldn't Shiite forces as a whole finally commence a campaign of eviction of the American occupier? Wouldn't this puncture the fantasy that General Petraeus' "surge" is working?
The other side of the ledger isn't hard to fill in either. The oil companies like a crisis that sends up the price of their commodity. The Chinese are a prudent lot and don't want to rock the world economy. Politically, both they and Russia would like to see the US compound the disaster in Iraq and get into a long-term mess in Iran. Israel wants an attack on Iran, and the Israel lobby calls the shots in US foreign policy. What Israel wants, Israel gets. The US peace movement is in disarray, and sizable chunks of it would be delighted to see bombs shower down on the woman-hating ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad, the holocaust denier.
Amid the disaster of their Middle Eastern strategy Bush and his advisors may hype themselves into one last desperate throw, emboldened by the fact that the selling of the surge has been a success even though all the Democrats need to do is cite the UN, which says the number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has gone from 50,000 to 60,000 a month. Or quote Associated Press which counted 1,809 Iraqi civilians killed in August, compared with 1,760 in July. The Sunni split in Anbar province is not one likely to be replicated in Baghdad or elsewhere and anyway had nothing to do with the hike in US troop levels. Bush didn't dare go to Baghdad.
Weigh it all up, and you'd be foolish to bet that an attack on Iran couldn't happen. I knew Noam Chomsky used to be dubious about the likelihood of a U.S. attack emailed his last week to ask if he is still of that opinion. Here's his answer.
"Yes, I was quite sceptical. Less so over the years. They're desperate. Everything they touch is in ruins. They're even in danger of losing control over Middle Eastern oil -- to China, the topic that's rarely discussed but is on every planner or corporation exec's mind, if they're sane. Iran already has observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization -- from which the US was pointedly excluded. Chinese trade with Saudi Arabia, even military sales, is growing fast. With the Bush administration in danger of losing Shiite Iraq, where most of the oil is (and most Saudi oil in regions with a harshly oppressed Shiite population), they may be in real trouble.
"Under these circumstances, they're unpredictable. They might go for broke, and hope they can salvage something from the wreckage. If they do bomb, I suspect it will be accompanied by a ground assault in Khuzestan, near the Gulf, where the oil is (and an Arab population -- there already is an Ahwazi liberation front, probably organized by the CIA, which the US can "defend" from the evil Persians), and then they can bomb the rest of the country to rubble. And show who's boss."
The peace movement had better pull itself together, remembering that should the bombs start to fall on Tehran, most of the Democrats in Congress will be on their feet, cheering.
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September 6, 2007
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
A Prosecutorial Brief Against Israel and Its Supporters
By WILLIAM GRIMES
The New York Times
THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
484 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/books/06....html?ref=books
“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” arrives carrying heavy baggage. John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, set off a furor last year by arguing, in an article that appeared in The London Review of Books, that uncritical American support for Israel, shaped by powerful lobbying organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, does grave harm to both American and Israeli interests.
A bitter debate has raged ever since, with accusations of anti-Semitism leveled by, among others, Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, and Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the principal lobbying organizations taken to task by Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt.
“The Israel Lobby,” an extended, more fully argued version of the London Review article, has done nothing to calm the waters. The authors have been barred from making appearances by at least one university and several cultural centers to discuss their subject, and continue to reap a whirlwind of criticism and abuse. If they were looking for a fight, they have found it.
Slowly, deliberately and dispassionately Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt lay out the case for a ruthlessly realistic Middle East policy that would make Israel nothing more than one of many countries in the region. On those occasions when Israel’s interests coincide with America’s, it should count on American support, but otherwise not. What Americans fail to understand, the authors argue, is that most of the time the two countries’ interests are opposed.
The reason they do not realize this, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt insist, can be explained quite simply: The Israel lobby makes sure of it. Working closely with members of Congress, public-policy organizations and journals of opinion, energetic, well-financed groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the American Jewish Committee, along with dozens of political-action committees, perpetuate the myth, as the authors see it, of Israel as an isolated, beleaguered state surrounded by enemies and in need of America’s unstinting financial and military support.
This lobby is particularly adept at stifling debate before it begins, the authors argue. “Whether the issue is abortion, arms control, affirmative action, gay rights, the environment, trade policy, health care, immigration or welfare, there is almost always a lively debate on Capitol Hill,” they write. “But where Israel is concerned, potential critics fall silent and there is hardly any debate at all.”
There is nothing underhanded or devious about this, the authors say. Like the National Rifle Association or the AARP, the Israel lobby relies on the traditional political weapons available to any special-interest group in pressing its agenda. It just happens to be unusually skillful and effective.
“It is simply a powerful interest group, made up of both Jews and gentiles, whose acknowledged purpose is to press Israel’s case within the United States and influence American foreign policy in ways that its members believe will benefit the Jewish state,” they write.
The problem, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt argue, is that Israel has become a strategic liability with the end of the cold war and a moral pariah in its dealings with the Palestinians and, most recently, the Lebanese. Uncritical American support for its closest Middle East ally has damaged American credibility in the Arab world, encouraged terrorism, stymied the search for a solution to the Palestinian problem, and in every way made America’s international position weaker and more dangerous.
Coolly, not to say coldly, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt mount a prosecutorial brief against Israel’s foreign and domestic policies, and against the state of Israel itself. They describe a virtual rogue state, empowered by American wealth and might, that blocks peace at every turn, threatens its cowering neighbors with impunity, crushes the national aspirations of the Palestinians and, whenever the opportunity arises, bites the hand that feeds it.
Working tirelessly in the background is the Israel lobby, playing Iago to America’s Othello, leading president after president down ever more dangerous paths. Without intense pressure from the Israel lobby, the authors argue, America would not have undertaken the war in Iraq.
Most American readers will bristle at the authors’ characterization of Israel. This is to be expected, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt argue, because of the completely false image of Israel and its history that has been manufactured by the Israel lobby. As a result, Americans completely misinterpret the Palestinian issue and fail to support a productive policy that would tilt away from Israel and toward the Palestinians.
The authors state, on several occasions, their belief that Israel has a moral and legal right to exist, but the effect of their book is to leave it dangling by a moral and strategic thread. In essence they call for the United States to cut Israel loose, to return more or less to American policy before the 1967 war, when the United States tried to occupy a middle ground between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Strangely, the authors do not itemize the fabulous benefits delivered by this approach in the 1950s and ’60s.
It is a little odd that so chilly a book should generate such heat. Most of Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt’s arguments are familiar ones, and it is hardly inflammatory to point out that the major Jewish organizations tend to take a much tougher line on, say, a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem, the Iraq war or settlements in the West Bank, than most American Jews favor. The writers stand on eminently defensible ground when they argue for a more constructive, creative American role in peace talks.
The general tone of hostility to Israel grates on the nerves, however, along with an unignorable impression that hardheaded political realism can be subject to its own peculiar fantasies. Israel is not simply one country among many, for example, just as Britain is not. Americans feel strong ties of history, religion, culture and, yes, sentiment, that the authors recognize, but only in an airy, abstract way.
They also seem to feel that, with Israel and its lobby pushed to the side, the desert will bloom with flowers. A peace deal with Syria would surely follow, with a resultant end to hostile activity by Hezbollah and Hamas. Next would come a Palestinian state, depriving Al Qaeda of its principal recruiting tool. (The authors wave away the idea that Islamic terrorism thrives for other reasons.) Well, yes, Iran does seem to be a problem, but the authors argue that no one should be particularly bothered by an Iran with nuclear weapons. And on and on.
“It is time,” Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt write, “for the United States to treat Israel not as a special case but as a normal state, and to deal with it much as it deals with any other country.” But it’s not. And America won’t. That’s realism.
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August 27 2007
A Global Justice Movement
Why the US and Israel Should Lose Middle East Wars
By BILL CHRISTISON
Former CIA Analyst
www.counterpunch.org
August 27, 2007
George W. Bush has once again thrown down the gauntlet. The Mideast wars of the United States, he announced to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention on August 22, must end only with a U.S. victory. He has not wavered in this position since September 11, 2001.
The unspoken but real purpose of his efforts has been and will be to concentrate increasing power over the Middle East in the hands of the small group of rich and greedy elites who rule the U.S. and Israel today, and perhaps he will achieve this goal. The more important result, however, will be the elimination of any movement toward greater global justice, stability, and peace in the world for decades to come.
It is past time to challenge the arrogant Mr. Bush directly.
For overwhelming moral reasons, I do not want the U. S. and Israeli governments to be victorious in any present or future Middle East wars. I want them to lose such wars.
U.S. policies in the Middle East since 9/11 have already caused a million or so killings and have created more injustice in the world than existed formerly. Every day results in more killings, more injustice. Unless might does indeed make right, we have no right whatever to win these wars. We should lose them.
If the U.S. were to "win" these wars, whatever that means, more of the world's people than at present would be ruled by the U.S. Most of these people do not want to be ruled by the U.S. -- which makes the wars themselves anti-democratic. That fact alone is reason enough to conclude that our country should lose these wars.
My personal belief is that the United States and Israel will inevitably lose these wars over time in any case. If this loss is in fact inevitable, conventional wisdom would argue that it is better for the loss to happen rapidly in order to hold casualties down. In a continuing civil war over which outsiders have limited control, however, conventional wisdom may not apply.
Nevertheless, a truly rapid -- meaning within the next six months -- acceptance of defeat by the U.S. and Israel of their own Mideast policies would probably offer the only possibility of mitigating the blame assigned to these two nations by the rest of the world for future mass killings of human beings throughout this unstable area.
Much of global public opinion will in any case correctly attribute a large residual responsibility to the U.S. and Israel for the utterly disproportionate and one-sided killings already carried out since 9/11 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. Further killings that occur during even a short and rapid transition to inevitable U.S. and Israeli defeat will only enlarge this residual. But a short, quick, and determined acceptance of defeat will still reduce to some extent the charges of U.S. responsibility for future killings.
A lasting peace in the Middle East will only happen, of course, if the U.S. and Israel are wise enough publicly (and honestly) to end their drive for joint imperium over the Middle East and Central Asia and also to cease their efforts to bring about regime change in Iran and Syria. In other words, as has long been the case, the U.S. and Israel will need to make serious long-term changes in their own foreign policies if they wish to avoid a conflict lasting for generations that ultimately they cannot win.
As of now, no evidence exists that either country is willing even to consider such policy changes, and no evidence exists that either the Republican or Democratic Parties in the U.S., any political parties in Israel, the military-industrial complexes of the U.S. and Israel, the Israel lobby in the U.S., the U.S. Protestant Christian Right, the Catholic Church, or the ruling elites of any EU states will bring one jot of meaningful pressure to bear on the Israeli or the U.S. government to change their policies.
If change is to come, it must come from ordinary voters, particularly in the U.S., applying pressure on the various groups listed above, or from ordinary people succeeding in setting up new groups or parties that will succeed in bringing greater pressure to bear. The pressures must be very strong and very explicit. People must emphasize day after day to both Democratic and Republican members of Congress and to every presidential candidate that the U.S. must first and foremost change its own policies. And people must emphasize to all politicians that the Israel lobby is one of the strongest forces pressing both Democrats and Republicans not to change U.S. policies, thereby preventing healthy political debate in the country. This must stop.
Finally, my hope is that sensible U.S. voters will agree with the opinions summarized here and in addition create a groundswell of support for the immediate impeachment and conviction of Bush and Cheney. This is the only action, in my view, that opens up the possibility of rapidly bringing about the necessary changes in U.S. policies.
Other Considerations
Let's say it bluntly. War with Iran is inevitable before January 2009 unless Bush and Cheney are both impeached first. New Israeli-U.S. hostilities in Lebanon are also likely. Either warfare or covert actions conducted by the U.S. and/or Israel to bring about regime change in Syria are also probable.
But those of us in the U.S. who claim to be peace activists ought to be ashamed. With rare exceptions, the powers in the movement are confident that things are already going our way, what with the Democratic Party's success in the 2006 congressional elections and the continuing disaster the Bush administration faces in Iraq. Most self-labeled peace activists think the odds so favor further Democratic victories that, as a group, we do not need to run any risks or do anything new to take the presidency away from the Republicans in 2008. It's old hat, maybe, but the best thing to do, most peace activists believe, is just to keep talking about withdrawal from Iraq, while patting ourselves on the back and emphasizing to each other that we are being admirably mature and responsible in not moving too fast toward actual withdrawal.
So let's admit that many of us sustain ourselves with hot air even when the subject is limited to Iraq. Let's admit too that few want to discuss the role Israel played in encouraging the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003, because that would be unnecessarily criticizing Israel. In fact, both the Israel lobby and the Israeli government probably concluded as early as May 2003 that they had already achieved their own principal objectives in Iraq, and that it was counterproductive for them to waste their own credibility by continuing to oppose every aspect of the U.S. peace movement's criticism of the war. Even before things began going wrong in the war's execution, Israeli propagandists were soft-pedaling their own top officials' support for the war. But underneath, the support was definitely there, hard and firm.
When it comes to matters in the Middle East other than Iraq, most peaceniks are even less willing to address questions of the Israel lobby's involvement in U.S. policymaking. Talking about this would be the surest way to reveal the disunity and embarrassing differences within the so-called peace movement. In order to avoid an open discussion, it is easier for most of us simply to ignore the voluminous evidence that both the lobby, and senior U.S. officials who are in effect part of the lobby, are pushing the U.S. toward war, particularly with Iran, but also toward regime change in Syria and resumed hostilities in Lebanon. If it comes to war with any or all of these countries, most peace types note that they are not pushing for it, and they will silently hope more wars do not erupt, but they will not make a lot of noise about stopping such wars before they start. In this, they are simply following most of the leaders of the Democratic Party.
All of this, of course, is logically nonsensical. Take a minute and think of the mess the peace movement has created. First, the very name reflects the movement's shallowness. What good is a hypocritical, utterly out-of-touch and ineffective "peace movement," when beyond question ordinary people on this earth want justice before they want peace? The U.S. government and its ultra-close ally Israel actually want more unjust colonial wars and covert action to strengthen their own already unjust influence over a major part of the globe, in this case the Middle East. Peace above all is for those who support the status quo, but if you're in that category you're in a small minority. So let's banish the peace movement and get a global justice movement going. Peace may be all right long-term, but if you're one of the angry billions on this earth constantly surrounded by a stench of injustice that smothers all hope, chances are that, in your mind, peace should follow justice, not precede it. Chances are, in fact, that you have no favorable thoughts of any type about U.S. peaceniks.
Let's look at another question that is not just about the Middle East but is about the broader Islamic world as well. It seems clear that Samuel Huntington's concept of a clash of civilizations has expanded its intellectual appeal since September 11, 2001. We do indeed seem to have an example of a clash of civilizations that has become a growing force today. This force is nourished by the desire of Muslims for real freedom from the increasing political domination over the Islamic peoples by Western (Christian and Jewish) parts of the world. The principal Islamic motivation has little to do with "hatred of our freedoms." The Islamic hatred (and it does exist) is aimed at U.S., Israeli, and Western policies.
Huntington's book was published in the mid-1990s, and the events of September 11 can be seen as a major example of this type of clash of civilizations. The point to be made here is that ideas in the book, conveniently titled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, lend themselves to being twisted fairly easily into ideas that the neocons, the Israel lobby, recent Israeli governments, EU elites, the Catholic Church, the Protestant Christian Right in the U.S., and the Bush administration itself all have established as part of their own views toward the Islamic world. The book therefore becomes an object of considerable value to the present rulers of the United States and Israel, since it can be seen as providing intellectual justification not only for the special relationship between these two nations, but also for the newly cordial ties of the European Union to U.S. and Israeli policies.
Those among us who wish to counter the notion that a clash of civilizations justifies what the U.S. and Israel are doing in the Middle East today should stand up and state their opposition loudly and directly. Supporters of the concept that the "clash" is a significant part of the present global political system seem to suggest that the very existence of the clash makes unjust, oppressive treatment of Islamic people somehow acceptable. But we should point out that the existence of a real clash is questionable, and that in any case injustice and oppression are never acceptable. People everywhere should realize that in this increasingly globalized world the importance of nationalism is beginning to fade. All of us should begin thinking much more about what are the best policies for the entire world to pursue, not what are the best policies for their own nations. To start this ball rolling, those who happen to live in the U.S. should stop thinking of themselves as exceptional. Americans are perfectly average -- no better and no worse than average people everywhere else. There are some -- a few -- exceptional people anywhere you look, but most of us do not make the cut.
We should emphasize that in today's world a Middle East empire dominated jointly by two nationalist powers, the U.S. and Israel, is not only anti-democratic, but is impossibly anachronistic as well
Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. He can be reached at kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net.
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Sometimes it is difficult to conceive of an event as simply a coincidence. It is easy in the JFK case to view events as part of or proof of a conspiracy when they might be only coincidences.
As proof that strange coincidences do happen, last night I switched from news coverage of the tragic bridge accident in Minneapolis to watch "CSI Miami". In the opening minutes, a large yacht crashed into a bridge in Miami, collapsing the bridge and sending cars crashing in to the water. The scenes looked just like the actual news scenes from Minneapolis. It was eerie.
So this just proves that odd coincidences can indeed occur.
The case for conspiracies
As JFK proves, the theories are usually much more interesting than the truth.
By Meghan Daum
Los Angeles Times
August 4, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-...inion-rightrail
Since the May release of his 1,612-page book, "Reclaiming History," criminal prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has been appearing on everything from C-Span to "The Colbert Report" telling the world that JFK's death had nothing to do with a government conspiracy. By most accounts, he's made a pretty airtight case.
Bugliosi, famous for prosecuting Charles Manson and for coauthoring the book about the case, "Helter Skelter," has spent 20 years examining just about every theory ever put forth about the assassination. "It's my view that it's impossible for any reasonable, rational person to read this book without being satisfied beyond all reasonable doubt that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone," Bugliosi told the New York Times in May. Since then, overwhelmingly favorable reviews have suggested that the days of the grassy knoll-Mafia-missing bullets conspiracy theories might at last be over.
Despite the sense that Bugliosi's is the final word, for some people the simple explanation remains less compelling than the labyrinthine alternatives. It was notable that Tuesday, the print edition of the New York Times published a two-page ad, an "open letter" from one Paul Kuntzler, declaring that "President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered by vice president London [sic] Baines Johnson in a widespread, incredibly complex and brilliantly planned conspiracy. . . ." The letter went on to implicate Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, Arlen Specter, the United States military, the Ford Motor Co., Life magazine and something Kuntzler called "big Oil of Midland, Texas," among many others.
Who is Kuntzler? Since he included his telephone number at the bottom of his letter, I called him to find out. As you might imagine, I learned more than can possibly fit in this space, but the basics are these: He's 65, a former exhibits and sales director of the National Science Teachers Assn. and once a prominent D.C.-based gay activist. He first became interested in the JFK assassination in 1991 after reading Jim Marrs' book, "Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy" (this was also, incidentally, the year of Oliver Stone's film "JFK," which Kuntzler calls "98% accurate").
In 2004, Kuntzler's longtime partner, Stephen Miller, died of complications from AIDS and left him Miller Reporting Co., which had transcribed documents that Kuntzler believes are relevant to the assassination. Following the company's demise (Kuntzler referred to "millions in estate taxes"), he sold the building that housed it, using the money to pay off his credit card debts (including $25,000 he spent organizing an assassination panel discussion last year) and spent $186,000 on the New York Times ad. Altogether, Kuntzler estimates he's spent a quarter of a million dollars on what he calls "the last opportunity for the American public to have confirmation on what happened on Nov. 22, 1963."
"I don't have much money left," he added. "I expect that once the truth comes out, I'll go on a speaking tour. If not, I'll have to take out another mortgage on my house."
After I talked to Kuntzler, I called Bugliosi, who listed for me many of the same points he made on C-SPAN and "The Colbert Report," including his belief that the Stone film is "one continuous lie, [other than] he did have the correct date and the correct victim."
"I didn't read [Kuntzler's letter] carefully," Bugliosi told me. "But I went through it enough to see that he was regurgitating all the old hoary theories that even those in the mainstream community have rejected. He's not even reading mainstream conspiracy dogma."
We then spent some time talking about why, despite the conventional wisdom that the simplest explanation is usually the best explanation, the human mind seems so naturally drawn to the complexities and innuendoes of conspiracy theories. Bugliosi admitted that they are usually more interesting than the truth. In the case of President Kennedy, he said, they point to a kind of collective inability to accept that such a monumental, historical event could be caused by a single, ordinary person.
"It gives more meaning to his life and death," Bugliosi said, "to believe dark forces are responsible for his death. Jackie herself said we don't even have the satisfaction of him being killed for a cause."
That makes sense. But speaking of simple explanations, what about the fact that every once in a while a conspiracy theory comes along that has some truth to it? Take, for example, this particular moment in this particular nation. You don't have to believe in fake moon landings or even stolen elections to sense that we're experiencing one of the most secretive periods in recent political history. When it comes to the current state of things, smelling a rat isn't necessarily contingent on living in your mother's basement and wearing T-shirts that say things like "Inside Job!" It's simply a matter of paying attention.
Then again, there's such a thing as paying too much attention. "If you're a parent and your child gets interested in the JFK case, it's toxic," Bugliosi told me. "It's caused divorces, bankruptcies and suicides."
"My mother and my sisters received copies of the ad via FedEx," Kuntzler told me. "They knew how much I was spending. Well, actually, I haven't told my mother yet."
mdaum@latimescolumnists.com
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Excerpts from Without Honor: The Impeachment of President Nixon and the Crimes of Camelot by Jerry Zeifman, former Chief Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee(1995)
"After Hale's disappearance, Lindy and Hale's brother, a Jesuit priest in New Orleans, were fearful that he had been murdered because of his inside knowledge about the role of the FBI, CIA, and organized crime in events leading up to the Kennedy assassination--knowledge that he had acquired as a member of the Warren Commission and that might also have some relevance to Watergate.
Congresswoman Boggs had expressed her fears to Congressman Bill Hungate as well as to me and Peter Rodino in the strictest confidence."
"In 1971 Boggs had made an extraordinary speech on the House floor. The then-majority leader accused the Department of Justice of using "Gestapo-like" police-state tactics that included bugging the offices and homes of members of Congress and other political leaders--and in some cases using illegally obtained information to blackmail public officials."
"The unreported truth was that when Boggs made the speech he ws undergoing psychiatric treatment for manic depression, and the CIA and FBI were concerned that his judgement had become sufficiently impaired to endanger national security."
Also killed with Rep. Boggs was Rep. Nick Begich, Sr. of Alaska.
His son, Dr. Nick Begich, is a frequent guest on the international radio show coasttocoastam. He has commented on his father’s death several times when being interviewed, always leaving the impression that he thinks there is more to the story that just a tragic plane crash.
His website is www.earthpulse.com. Below is his biography as posted on the coasttocoastam web site under guests who have been interviewed.
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Dr. Nick Begich serves as Executive Director of The Lay Institute on Technology, Inc., a Texas non-profit corporation. He is also the publisher and co-owner of Earthpulse Press Incorporated, an Alaska based organization. Dr. Begich is the eldest son of the late United States Congressman from Alaska, Nick Begich Sr., and political activist Pegge Begich. He is well known in Alaska for his own political activities. He was twice elected President of both the Alaska Federation of Teachers and the Anchorage Council of Education. He has been pursuing independent research in the sciences and politics for most of his adult life.
Begich received his doctorate in traditional medicine from The Open International University for Complementary Medicines in November 1994. He co-authored with Jeane Manning the book Angels Don't Play This HAARP; Advances in Tesla Technology. Begich has also authored Earth Rising I & II, both with the late James Roderick. He has published articles in science, politics and education and is a well known lecturer, having presented throughout the United States and in nineteen countries. He has been featured as a guest on thousands of radio broadcasts reporting on his research activities including new technologies, health and earth science related issues. He has also appeared on dozens of television documentaries and other programs throughout the world including BBC-TV, CBC-TV, and TeleMundo.
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That's quite interesting; I hope further research goes into discovering the cause. I generally support GM agriculture, but we have to make sure that we have not unintentionally tampered with a delicate process.
I'd be grateful if you keep us up to date on this Doug, and I'll repost it at a science forum I belong to.
Asian Parasite Killing Western Bees - Scientist
July 19, 2007 - Reuters
MADRID - A parasite common in Asian bees has spread to Europe and the Americas and is behind the mass disappearance of honeybees in many countries, says a Spanish scientist who has been studying the phenomenon for years.
The culprit is a microscopic parasite called nosema ceranae said Mariano Higes, who leads a team of researchers at a government-funded apiculture centre in Guadalajara, the province east of Madrid that is the heartland of Spain's honey industry.
He and his colleagues have analysed thousands of samples from stricken hives in many countries.
"We started in 2000 with the hypothesis that it was pesticides, but soon ruled it out," he told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.
Pesticide traces were present only in a tiny proportion of samples and bee colonies were also dying in areas many miles from cultivated land, he said.
They then ruled out the varroa mite, which is easy to see and which was not present in most of the affected hives.
For a long time Higes and his colleagues thought a parasite called nosema apis, common in wet weather, was killing the bees.
"We saw the spores, but the symptoms were very different and it was happening in dry weather too."
Then he decided to sequence the parasite's DNA and discovered it was an Asian variant, nosema ceranae. Asian honeybees are less vulnerable to it, but it can kill European bees in a matter of days in laboratory conditions.
"Nosema ceranae is far more dangerous and lives in heat and cold. A hive can become infected in two months and the whole colony can collapse in six to 18 months," said Higes, whose team has published a number of papers on the subject.
"We've no doubt at all it's nosema ceranae and we think 50 percent of Spanish hives are infected," he said.
Spain, with 2.3 million hives, is home to a quarter of the European Union's bees.
His team have also identified this parasite in bees from Austria, Slovenia and other parts of Eastern Europe and assume it has invaded from Asia over a number of years.
Now it seems to have crossed the Atlantic and is present in Canada and Argentina, he said. The Spanish researchers have not tested samples from the United States, where bees have also gone missing.
Treatment for nosema ceranae is effective and cheap -- 1 euro (US$1.4) a hive twice a year -- but beekeepers first have to be convinced the parasite is the problem.
Another theory points a finger at mobile phone aerials, but Higes notes bees use the angle of the sun to navigate and not electromagnetic frequencies.
Other elements, such as drought or misapplied treatments, may play a part in lowering bees' resistance, but Higes is convinced the Asian parasite is the chief assassin.
Story by Julia Hayley
Story Date: 19/7/2007
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Posted on Fri, Jul. 13, 2007
USDA buzzing with new plan to fight collapse of bee colonies
Michael Doyle | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: July 14, 2007 09:50:15 AM
WASHINGTON — Agriculture Department scientists are mobilizing to fight the puzzling and potentially catastrophic collapse of the nation's honey bee colonies.
Citing a "perfect storm for beekeepers," alarmed officials admitted Friday they still don't know why bees are dying in large numbers in more than 22 states. But prodded by Congress and farmers alike, the scientists will be devoting new resources to protecting the diligent pollinators some call six-legged livestock.
"There were enough honey bees to provide pollination for U.S. agriculture this year, but beekeepers could face a serious problem next year and beyond," Agriculture Undersecretary Gale Buchanan warned Friday.
Nationwide, honey bees pollinate more than 130 crops. They are particularly dutiful in some areas, such as California's nearly $3 billion-a-year almond industry. Of the nation's 2.4 million commercial bee colonies, 1.3 million pollinate almond orchards.
"The bee industry is facing difficulty meeting the demand for pollination in almonds because of bee production shortages in California," the Agricultural Research Service noted.
Prepared with the help of scientists at North Carolina State University and Pennsylvania State University, among others, the 28-page action plan issued Friday proposes:
• Spending more money. The Agricultural Research Service has a bee research budget of $7.4 million this year. Officials will redirect new funds to the cause, including an additional $1 million annually for work on honey bee health.
• Conducting new surveys. Officials cautioned Friday that current colony surveys have been either "limited in scope (or) fundamentally flawed." Agriculture Department agencies will collaborate with university researchers to obtain "an accurate picture of bee numbers," as well as a better understanding of the pesticides, pests and environmental stresses plaguing the bees.
• Finding fixes. This is particularly hard, since no one really knows why the bee colonies are collapsing. But officials say they will focus on "developing general best management practices" and distributing information through the Internet.
The new work will focus on so-called "colony collapse disorder." This is when the colony's adult bee population abruptly dies, leaving only the queen and a few attendants alive. Typically, there is no sign of mite or beetle damage. Some think toxic exposure or nutritional deficits might be undermining the bees' immune systems.
Gene Brandi, a beekeeper in California's San Joaquin Valley, told lawmakers that 800 of his 2,000 bee colonies collapsed inexplicably last winter. Brandi lost an estimated $60,000 in pollination income from his Los Banos-based operation, and he's spent an additional $48,000 to restock his lost colonies.
"This is the greatest winter colony mortality I have ever experienced in 30 years of beekeeping," Brandi testified earlier this year.
A draft farm bill scheduled for House Agriculture Committee approval next week includes new funding to study colony collapse disorder. Separately, Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., has introduced legislation to authorize an additional $7.25 million annually for related research.
"Colony collapse disorder is a looming disaster on the horizon," Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., said Friday. "We must continue to devote significant resources to understanding and treating the disorder."
Earlier this year, as chair of the House horticulture and organic agriculture subcommittee, Cardoza convened the first congressional hearing into the colony collapses. Spokesman Jamie McInerney said Friday that Cardoza and other lawmakers might seek additional honey bee funding as part of the fiscal 2008 Agriculture Department appropriations package.
The Agriculture Department plan sets out goals for both the short and long term. Immediately, for instance, scientists will "refine" symptoms to define what colony collapse disorder "is and what it is not." Longer term, the National Agricultural Statistics Service will develop a more reliable annual survey on honey bee colony production and health.
At the same time, officials are ruling out some theories.
"Based on misleading news reports, the public has become concerned that cell-phone use may be causing bee die-offs," the Agricultural Research Service noted Friday. "However, scientists have largely dismissed this theory, because exposure of bees to high levels of electromagnetic fields is unlikely."
McClatchy Newspapers 2007
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Yes, it's clear that the fear factor from 9/11 is fading and worse still, the public can now see the war on terror for what it is. 'Murkans need a booster shot.
The Bush Administration's backers value life cheaply (unless its one of them and theirs of course), so the human cost of any planned false flag will not be an issue. However, getting a highly skeptical public to support any 'retaliatory' action against Iran might be a problem, I think.
Bush, his loyal puppet Western leaders, and the shrill supporters of war in the western media have too much form. It won't fool anyone, not even the flag waving trailer park crowd.
Tonkin Gulf II and the Guns of August?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
July 19, 2007
Is the United States provoking war with Iran, to begin while the Congress is conveniently on its August recess?
One recalls that it was in August 1964, after the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, that the Tonkin Gulf incident occurred.
Twice it was said, on Aug. 2 and Aug. 4, North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked the U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy in international waters. The U.S. Senate responded by voting 88 to two to authorize President Johnson to assist any Southeast Asian nation whose government was threatened by communist aggression.
The bombing of the North began, followed by the arrival of U.S. Marines. America's war was on.
As Congress prepares for its August recess, the probability of U.S. air strikes on Iran rises with each week. A third carrier, the USS Enterprise, and its battle group is joining the Nimitz and Stennis in the largest concentration of U.S. naval power ever off the coast of Iran.
And Tonkin Gulf II may have already occurred.
In Baghdad, on July 1, Gen. Kevin J. Bergner charged that Iranians planned the January raid in Karbala, using commandos in American-style uniforms, that resulted in the death of five U.S. soldiers.
As the New York Times reports, this "marks the first time that the United States has charged that Iranian officials have helped plan operations against American troops in Iraq and have had advance knowledge of specific attacks that have led to the death of American soldiers."
The Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards is using Hezbollah to train Shi'ites to attack our soldiers and providing them with enhanced IEDs that have killed scores of U.S. troops, Bergner charged. He says we have captured a veteran Hezbollah agent and documents pointing to direct Iranian complicity in the Karbala raid.
Iran has denounced the charge as "ridiculous." But the Senate has voted 97 to zero to censure Iran for complicity in killing the Americans.
If what Bergner alleges is true, President Bush has not only the right but appears to have the blessing of Congress to attack Iran. And he now has the naval and air forces at hand. What is stopping him?
For it is surely not Congress, which buried a resolution last spring declaring that Bush must come to Congress before taking us into a new war in the Middle East. Congress appears to be signaling Bush: "If you want to hit Iran, you have the green light. No need to consult us."
Is this yet another abdication by Congress of its moral and constitutional duty to decide when and whether America goes to war?
And something smells awfully fishy here.
Iran has no interest in a war with the United States, which it seems to be toying with. Iran supports the pro-American Shia regime in Baghdad. And the al-Qaeda umbrella group in Iraq, which is our mortal enemy, has just warned Iran it faces terror attacks if it does not stop supporting Shi'ites in Iraq.
Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who leads the al-Qaeda group known as the Islamic State in Iraq, says his fighters have been preparing for four years for war on Iran.
"We are giving the Persians, and especially the rulers of Iran, a two-month period to end all kinds of support for the Iraqi Shi'ite government and to stop direct and indirect intervention – otherwise a severe war is waiting for you," Baghdadi said in a 50-minute videotape.
Baghdadi also warned Arab Sunnis in the region who do business with Shi'ites in Iran that they were inviting assassination.
Query: If Iran's ally, the Maliki government, is our ally, and if Iran's enemy, al-Qaeda in Iraq, is our enemy, why would Iran use the Quds Force to attack Americans and risk U.S. retaliation?
Killing Americans in Iraq is not going to defeat the United States. But it could trigger heavy U.S. retaliation, not only on the Quds Force, but on Iran's nuclear facilities – and a war with the United States. Yet Iran's diplomatic behavior suggests it wishes to avoid such a war.
Another explanation comes to mind. Iran is not initiating, but is responding to U.S.-inspired attacks inside Iran, in the Kurdish north, the Arab southwest, and the Baluchi southeast of its country. Was Karbala an attempted kidnapping to exchange U.S. soldiers for the five Iranian "diplomats" we are holding?
Has Bush secretly authorized covert attacks inside Iran? Are U.S. and Israeli agents in Kurdistan behind the attacks across the border to provoke Iran? On July 11, Iranian troops clashed with Kurd rebels inside Iran, and the Iranians fired artillery back into Iraq.
Why is Congress going on vacation? Why are a Democratic-controlled House and Senate not asking these questions in public hearings? Why is Congress letting Bush and Vice President Cheney decide whether we launch a third war in the Middle East?
Or is Congress in on it?
July 19, 2007
Patrick J. Buchanan [send him mail] is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and A Republic Not An Empire.
Find this article at:
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Or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy
Impeach Now
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Www.counterpunch.org July 16, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07162007.html
Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.
Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of "executive orders" that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, "terrorist" events in the near future.
Many attentive people believe that the reason the Bush administration will not bow to expert advice and public opinion and begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq is that the administration intends to rescue its unpopular position with false flag operations that can be used to expand the war to Iran.
Too much is going wrong for the Bush administration: the failure of its Middle East wars, Republican senators jumping ship, Turkish troops massed on northern Iraq's border poised for an invasion to deal with Kurds, and a majority of Americans favoring the impeachment of Cheney and a near-majority favoring Bush's impeachment. The Bush administration desperately needs dramatic events to scare the American people and the Congress back in line with the militarist-police state that Bush and Cheney have fostered.
William Norman Grigg recently wrote that the GOP is "praying for a terrorist strike" to save the party from electoral wipeout in 2008.
Chertoff, Cheney, the neocon nazis, and Mossad would have no qualms about saving the bacon for the Republicans, who have enabled Bush to start two unjustified wars, with Iran waiting in the wings to be attacked in a third war.
The Bush administration has tried unsuccessfully to resurrect the terrorist fear factor by infiltrating some blowhard groups and encouraging them to talk about staging "terrorist" events. The talk, encouraged by federal agents, resulted in "terrorist" arrests hyped by the media, but even the captive media was unable to scare people with such transparent sting operations.
If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.
A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives' Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel's complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.
Think about it. If another 9/11-type "security failure" were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has "a gut feeling" that America will soon be hit hard?
Why would Republican warmonger Rick Santorum say on the Hugh Hewitt radio show that "between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public's (sic) going to have a very different view of this war."
Throughout its existence the US government has staged incidents that the government then used in behalf of purposes that it could not otherwise have pursued. According to a number of writers, false flag operations have been routinely used by the Israeli state. During the Czarist era in Russia, the secret police would set off bombs in order to arrest those the secret police regarded as troublesome. Hitler was a dramatic orchestrator of false flag operations. False flag operations are a commonplace tool of governments.
Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging "terrorist" attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?
Only a diehard minority believes in the honesty and integrity of the Bush-Cheney administration and in the truthfulness of the corporate media.
Hitler, who never achieved majority support in a German election, used the Reichstag fire to fan hysteria and push through the Enabling Act, which made him dictator. Determined tyrants never require majority support in order to overthrow constitutional orders.
The American constitutional system is near to being overthrown. Are coming "terrorist" events of which Chertoff warns and Santorum promises the means for overthrowing our constitutional democracy?
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
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Exorcising Nixon's ghost
By David Greenberg
Los Angeles Times
July 9, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-...inion-rightrail
A FEW YEARS after Richard M. Nixon's death in 1994, the LA Weekly reported that a guard at the Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda had noticed some eerie phenomena: a phosphorescent green cloud over the former president's headstone; a specter entering Nixon's boyhood house; knocking sounds from inside the museum's Watergate room.
From his multiple political comebacks to his post-Watergate bid to repair his tattered reputation, Nixon has refused to expire. If his ghost isn't literally with us, his influence very much is. This year alone has brought half a dozen major Nixon books and a play (soon to be a movie), "Frost/Nixon." And Wednesday, after nearly 17 years of exile, the Nixon Library will become part of the National Archives as an official federal presidential library.
Since 1974, Nixon's presidential papers and tapes have resided, by an act of Congress, not at the privately run Yorba Linda facility but at a National Archives building outside Washington. In 2004, however, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress, with scarce debate or attention, changed the 1974 law, clearing a place for Nixon in the government-run library system.
I was among the many historians who objected. It seemed poetic justice that the Nixon Library, alone among such institutions, existed outside the system — for outside the system was where Nixon had operated. As the only president forced to resign for illegal deeds, he deserved pariah status, and excluding the Nixon Library from National Archives membership reflected that.
Practical concerns also recommended keeping Nixon's presidential documents out of Nixonian hands. Just as no president worked harder, through fair means or foul, to shape his public image while in office, so none pressed harder to revise history's judgment after he served. He tried to remove and destroy some of his records and sued to suppress others. Supporting a decision against Nixon in one of those lawsuits, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens described him as "an unreliable custodian."
The singularly self-serving and misleading exhibits about Nixon on display at the library, which opened in 1990, reinforced this prevalent skepticism. So did the library's cancellation in 2005 of a scholarly conference on the Vietnam War after it became clear that Nixon critics would outnumber defenders on the program. After that fiasco, 16 scholars appealed (in vain) to Congress to stop the library's transfer to the National Archives.
Surprising academics who feared he would toe a conservative line, Allen Weinstein, the archivist of the United States, won an agreement from the Nixon Foundation to overhaul the museum, grant full control of the documents to the National Archives, and even deed to the archives additional materials previously deemed private.
No one can predict how sweeping or effective that agreement will prove in practice. Several questions remain: Will the library finally make public the remaining unheard Oval Office tapes? Will the Nixon Foundation, which will still raise funds for the library, stay out of all questions of access to the tapes and papers? Or will it continue to throw up roadblocks for scholars? Will the newly released documents be spared the excessive redaction that can render them almost useless — as happened recently with the so-called CIA family jewels?
Wariness is warranted. As a longtime skeptic, however, I'm beginning to develop a cautious optimism that the change might be real.
My optimism may be, in part, a result of resignation. The transfer is a fait accompli. Stopping it would have taken an expensive, time-consuming and risky effort by a devoted scholar — something like historian Stanley Kutler's heroic, years-long battle to release Nixon's White House tapes. It's not surprising that no one tried to do so this time.
But my optimism also follows some encouraging signs. Timothy J. Naftali, a serious historian without loyalties to Nixon, was appointed library director last year, and he ripped out the shameful Watergate portion of the exhibit. He has expanded public programming beyond the old fare of Nixon apologists and Fox News-style pundits. His public statements bespeak a resolve to oversee a new, depoliticized institution.
Finally, it's becoming clear that Nixon's last comeback failed. When Gerald R. Ford died in December, some fretted that the outrage over his 1974 pardon of Nixon had faded, that Americans had forgotten Watergate's gravity and Nixon's malevolence. But I think any newfound support for the pardon signaled the opposite: Nixon's name has become so securely fused with the abuse of power that whether he served time in prison no longer troubles us much. Indeed, by 2006, Nixon's approval rating, having peaked at his death, had fallen back to 28%, near its Watergate nadir.
It was Nixon's war on history that made scholars leery of affording any legitimacy to his library. But while the process of revision never ceases, it now seems safe to say that — like the once-contentious debates about the morality of slavery, the futility of Prohibition or the greatness of FDR — that war is over. Nixon lost.
On Wednesday, the new Nixon Library will host a ceremony celebrating its debut as an official presidential archives. Whatever is sighted there, we can be confident that Nixon's ghost is not coming back.
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DAVID GREENBERG, the author of "Nixon's Shadow," teaches history and media studies at Rutgers University.
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Not all would put a heroic sheen on Thompson's Watergate role
By Michael Kranish, Boston Globe | July 4, 2007
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washingt...te_role/?page=2
WASHINGTON -- The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight -- asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system -- he telephoned Nixon's lawyer.
Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with "no authority" in divulging the committee's knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon's resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson's actions.
"Thompson was a mole for the White House," Armstrong said in an interview. "Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was."
Asked about the matter this week, Thompson -- who is preparing to run for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination -- responded via e-mail without addressing the specific charge of being a Nixon mole: "I'm glad all of this has finally caused someone to read my Watergate book, even though it's taken them over thirty years."
The view of Thompson as a Nixon mole is strikingly at odds with the former Tennessee senator's longtime image as an independent-minded prosecutor who helped bring down the president he admired. Indeed, the website of Thompson's presidential exploratory committee boasts that he "gained national attention for leading the line of inquiry that revealed the audio-taping system in the White House Oval Office." It is an image that has been solidified by Thompson's portrayal of a tough-talking prosecutor in the television series "Law and Order."
But the story of his role in the Nixon case helps put in perspective Thompson's recent stance as one of the most outspoken proponents of pardoning I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Just as Thompson once staunchly defended Nixon, Thompson urged a pardon for Libby, who was convicted in March of obstructing justice in the investigation into who leaked a CIA operative's name.
Thompson declared in a June 6 radio commentary that Libby's conviction was a "shocking injustice . . . created and enabled by federal officials." Bush on Monday commuted Libby's 30-month sentence, stopping short of a pardon.
The intensity of Thompson's remarks about Libby is reminiscent of how he initially felt about Nixon. Few Republicans were stronger believers in Nixon during the early days of Watergate.
Thompson, in his 1975 memoir, wrote that he believed "there would be nothing incriminating" about Nixon on the tapes, a theory he said "proved totally wrong."
"In retrospect it is apparent that I was subconsciously looking for a way to justify my faith in the leader of my country and my party, a man who was undergoing a violent attack from the news media, which I thought had never given him fair treatment in the past," Thompson wrote. "I was looking for a reason to believe that Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States, was not a crook."
Thompson was a little-known assistant US attorney in Tennessee when the Watergate investigation in Congress got underway. He had served as campaign manager for the successful 1972 reelection of Senator Howard Baker, a powerful Tennessee Republican.
When the Senate Watergate Committee was established in 1973, Baker became the ranking Republican member and brought Thompson to Washington to serve as minority counsel. Baker, who has been among those now urging Thompson to seek the presidency, did not return a call seeking comment.
John Dean , Nixon's former White House counsel, who was a central witness at the hearings, said he believed that Baker and Thompson were anything but impartial players. "I knew that Thompson would be Baker's man, trying to protect Nixon," Dean said in an interview.
The website of Thompson's presidential exploratory committee, imwithfred.com, suggests that Thompson helped reveal the taping system and expose Nixon's role in the Watergate coverup. And while Thompson's question to presidential aide Alexander Butterfield during a Watergate hearing unveiled the existence of the taping system to the outside world, it wasn't Thompson who discovered that Nixon was taping conversations. Nor was Thompson the first to question Butterfield about the possibility.
On July 13, 1973, Armstrong, the Democratic staffer, asked Butterfield a series of questions during a private session that led up to the revelation. He then turned the questioning over to a Republican staffer, Don Sanders, who asked Butterfield the question that led to the mention of the taping system.
To the astonishment of everyone in the room, Butterfield admitted the taping system existed.
When Thompson learned of Butterfield's admission, he leaked the revelation to Nixon's counsel, J. Fred Buzhardt .
"Even though I had no authority to act for the committee, I decided to call Fred Buzhardt at home" to tell him that the committee had learned about the taping system, Thompson wrote. "I wanted to be sure that the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action."
Armstrong said he and other Democratic staffers had long been convinced that Thompson was leaking information about the investigation to the White House. The committee, for example, had obtained a memo written by Buzhardt that Democratic staffers believed was based on information leaked by Thompson.
Armstrong said he thought the leaks would lead to Thompson's firing. "Any prosecutor would be upset if another member of the prosecution team was orchestrating a defense for Nixon," said Armstrong, who later became a Washington Post reporter and currently is executive director of Information Trust, a nonprofit organization specializing in open government issues.
Baker, meanwhile, insisted that Thompson be allowed to ask Butterfield the question about the taping system in a public session on July 16, 1973, three days after the committee had learned about the system.
The choice of Thompson irked Samuel Dash , the Democratic chief counsel on the committee, who preferred that a Democrat be allowed to ask the question. "I personally resented it and felt cheated," Dash wrote in his memoirs. But he said he felt he had "no choice but to let Fred Thompson develop the Butterfield material" because the question initially had been posed by Sanders, a Republican staffer.
When Dash told Thompson on the day of the hearing that he had agreed to let Thompson ask the question that would change US history, Thompson replied: "That's right generous of you, Sam."
So it was, at the hearing, that Thompson leapt into the national spotlight:
"Are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?" he asked Butterfield during the national televised hearings.
"I was aware of listening devices, yes, sir," Butterfield responded.
Even as he quizzed Butterfield during the hearing, Thompson said later, he believed the tapes would exonerate Nixon, so he saw no problem in pressing for their release. It was after Thompson heard Nixon incriminate himself on the tapes that Thompson finally decided that Nixon was a crook -- and stopped be ing a Nixon apologist.
"Looking back, I wonder how I could have failed to realize at once . . . the significance of the tapes," Thompson wrote. "I realized that I would probably be thinking about the implications of Watergate for the rest of my life."
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I genunely believe that if all the secretsbof the CIA were to be revealed, Washington would implode, such would be the resulting damage. That is why I also think the so called "Family Jewels" are made of paste and hung out to glitter and tempt but the real diamonds remain concealed in the safe.
David
Some of the Missing 'Family Jewels'
by William Norman Grigg
www.lewrockwell.com
July 5, 2007
“I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun.... Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, rape, and pillage with the sanction of the all-highest?” – Federal counter-narcotics agent George White, who conducted involuntary drug tests on unwitting subjects as part of the CIA's MKULTRA program.
As an agent of the federal Bureau of Narcotics, the forerunner to the Drug Enforcement Administration, George White “knew how to milk a drug bust for all it was worth – a skill that grew out of early years spent as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco and Los Angeles,” notes John Marks in his perversely fascinating study The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.
White migrated from journalism to law enforcement in 1934. Although he was too late to find employment enforcing alcohol prohibition, he was just in time to make a handsome living in the emerging field of narcotics enforcement, which began in earnest in 1937. Decades later, before dying of the liver disease brought about by his insatiable appetite for liquor (he reportedly could consume a bottle of gin in a single sitting), Marks would serve as a consultant for TV detective dramas, helping to create the now-customary image of police as intrepid, largely incorruptible paladins of public order.
Many police have earnestly tried to live up to that image. Marks had little use for such pretense. As a missionary in the service of the Almighty State, Marks indulged every familiar whim, as well as some that would never occur to most people.
For example: I doubt that most people would be party to an experiment in which an aerosol dispenser would be used to subject an unwitting guest to a potent dose of LSD. That particular experiment went awry because of unfavorable weather, but White and others involved in the CIA's MKULTRA program were successful in testing the drug on many unsuspecting people. It's likely that we'll never know how many.
During World War II, when the proto-CIA was known as the OSS, Marks – while on the payroll of a federal counter-narcotics agency, mind you – was used to test concentrated marijuana on several people associated with the Manhattan Project, both volunteers and unwitting non-volunteers. He also slipped a dose to August Del Gracio, a lieutenant in Lucky Luciano's criminal syndicate. (In exchange for “strategic cooperation” from his Sicilian syndicate in World War II, Luciano was permitted to run his criminal enterprises – which included the American heroin trade – unhindered from his prison cell.)
White was eager to join the CIA after WWII, but somehow this was prevented by J. Edgar Hoover. He also sought appointment as head of New York City's narcotics bureau, only to have his candidacy blocked by Governor Thomas Dewey. But his talents – such as they were – and, more importantly, his connections made White irresistible to Richard Helms, Sid Gottlieb, and the others involved in MKULTRA, who were eager to learn of LSD's utility as a truth serum, mind control drug, and general-purpose chemical weapon.
Photo: "My name is Sid Gottlieb. I'm a nice, clean-living Jewish man married to an equally upright Presbyterian woman. I milk goats every morning. My hobby – nay, passion – is folk dancing. My career is mind control." (All of these biographical details are accurate.)
“As a high-ranking narcotics agent, White had a perfect excuse to be around drugs and people who used them,” writes Marks. “He had proved during the war that he had a talent for clandestine work, and he certainly had no qualms when it came to unwitting testing. With his job, he had access to all the possible subjects the Agency would need, and if he could use LSD or any other drug to find out more about drug trafficking, so much the better.”
In May 1953, White and Sid Gottlieb set up a “safehouse” in Greenwich Village that was used to lure guinea pigs for drug experiments of various kinds (particularly LSD and concentrated marijuana), as well as tests involving knock-out drops and various kinds of surveillance equipment. The CIA paid all the bills, including the exorbitant expenses involved in keeping White's liquor cabinet full.
Two years later, with questions being asked by New York officials about White's activities, the CIA transferred the “safehouse” operation to the San Francisco Bay Area; he opened his first “pad” on Telegraph Hill, and later set up a branch in Marin County. The Bay Area safehouses were used to test drugs “on individuals of all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign,” noted an Inspector General's report years later. (San Francisco, ironically, was one of the first American jurisdictions to enact severe anti-narcotics laws in the late 19th Century.)
As the CIA examined the possible field use of LSD against hostile foreign leaders – such as Fidel Castro – it was necessary to test it on as many unsuspecting targets as possible. To facilitate such “dry runs,” White expanded his little federally sponsored criminal syndicate by setting himself up as a full-service vice lord – both drug pusher and pimp.
John Marks describes how this worked:
“An unsuspecting john would think he had bought a night of pleasure, go back to a strange apartment, and wind up zonked. A CIA document that survived Sid Gottlieb's shredding recorded this process.... For the MKULTRA chief, the whores were 'certain individuals who covertly administer this material [that is, the narcotics] to other people in accordance with [White's] instructions. White normally paid the woman $100 in Agency funds for their night's work.... The CIA's auditors had to settle for canceled checks which White cashed himself and marked either 'Stormy' or, just as appropriately, 'Undercover Agent.' The program was also referred to as 'Operation Midnight Climax.'”
By the time White's grimy business was shut down in 1963, the harvest had begun to come in from Sid Gottlieb's efforts – which had begun ten years earlier – to cultivate the drug culture in academia. Using tax-exempt foundations as cut-outs – particularly the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation and the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research – Gottlieb funded “LSD pathfinders” in such institutions as Columbia University, the University of Rochester, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Illinois Medical School, Mt. Sinai Hospital, Boston Psychopathic, and the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky (which was also funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health).
These CIA-sponsored researchers have been described as the “Johnny Appleseeds of LSD”; nearly all of them tried the drug themselves before experimenting with it on others. Prison inmates were offered various inducements – including other hard narcotics – to serve as test subjects. Among those recruited into this program was a small-time thug named James Bulger, who would go on to become the FBI-protected head of Boston's Irish Mob.
“Sharing the drug with the Army here, setting up research programs there, keeping track of it everywhere, the CIA generally presided over the LSD scene during the 1950s,” writes Marks. It is no small matter that there were, at that time, two companies producing LSD – Eli Lilly and the Swiss firm Sandoz; Lilly turned over its entire supply to the Agency, and Sandoz kept it apprised of every shipment it made anywhere in the world.
By the mid-1960s, the trade in narcotics – including LSD – had become more diversified, thanks in no small part to the academic “Johnny Appleseeds” who had worked with MKULTRA.
A 1969 study of LSD published by the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (George White's employer) noted that the drug's “early use was among small groups of intellectuals at large Eastern and West Coast universities. It spread to undergraduate students, then to other campuses. Most often, users have been introduced to the drug by persons of higher status. Teachers have influenced students; upperclassmen have influenced lower-classmen.” The BNDD described this as a “trickle-down phenomenon,” but as Marks points out, the agency missed the point that “somebody had to influence the teachers, and that up there at the top of the LSD distribution system could be found the men of MKULTRA.”
There's more than simple nastiness involved in the CIA's creation of the modern narcotics industry.
About a decade ago, former DEA undercover agent Mike Levine – one of the bravest and most self-effacing men I've been honored and blessed to meet – described a 1979 conversation with a CIA officer in Argentina.
"There was a small group of us gathered for a drinking party at the CIA guy's apartment," Levine recounted to me. "There were several Argentine police officers there as well; at the time, Argentina was a police state in which people could be taken into custody without warning, tortured, and then 'disappeared.'"
In other words, it was essentially the same as the United States under the reign of Bush the Dumber and Cheney the All-Malignant. Got it. To continue:
"At one point my associate in the CIA said that he preferred Argentina's approach to social order, and that America should be more like that country."
Wherever that guy is, assuming he's still among the living, he must be exceptionally pleased with what America has become; he may be playing a hands-on role in the nasty business he found so attractive. But again, I digress:
"Somebody asked, 'Well, how does a change of that sort happen?' The spook replied that it was necessary to create a situation of public fear – a sense of impending anarchy and social upheaval in which the people will literally plead with Congress, "Take whatever rights you need, but save us...."
That is, "save us" from the scourge of drugs, or terrorism, or violent crime, or whatever social plague leaves the public usefully terrified.
Levine, who spent decades in "deep cover" operations for the DEA, candidly admits that the "war on drugs" turned the federal government into "essentially a criminal enterprise." He also acknowledges that "the CIA has long been a major supporter of the people and organizations responsible for supplying drugs to this country"; this includes various factions of the Afghan Mujahadin and the Nicaraguan Contras, Khun Sa's Shan United Army in Burma's Golden Triangle, small-caliber despots like Manuel Noriega (anybody remember him?), the Kosovo Liberation Army, and others of that ilk.
"Los Novios de La Muerte," the paramilitary group that – with the CIA's help –turned Bolivia into (Klaus) Barbie's Playhouse.
The CIA, according to Levine, has also staged coups in order to install narco-regimes, as it did in Bolivia in 1980, working in concert with Los Novios de la Muerte ("The Fiancees of Death"), a paramilitary force recruited by Nazi fugitive Klaus Barbie.
The "war on drugs," as I've pointed out elsewhere, is a narcotics price support program, in addition to being a form of employment insurance for various three-letter agencies and militarized police units across the country.
I'm convinced that one reason so much effort is invested in drug "interdiction" campaigns – which is a bit like taking a sponge mop to the Atlantic Ocean – is that this inflates the amount of off-the-books funding available to the CIA and its satellite organizations. And as Levine points out, it's not true that the War on Drugs is a losing proposition: "The fundamental problem with the so-called war on drugs is that both sides are winning – the drug lords and the 'suits' – because they both are making a killing."
July 5, 2007
Find this article at:
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What they didn't say at Kennebunkport
By Spengler
www.asiatimes.com
July 2, 2007
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IG03Aa03.html
Nothing like the imagined dialogue below will have occurred at the Bush family compound on the Maine sea coast during President Vladimir Putin's July 1 retreat with US President George W Bush.
Putin, I expect, will have done his best to humor his American counterpart and keep him off his guard. Bush is prepared neither intellectually nor psychologically to understand what a Russian leader must do, and a practical man like Putin would not waste words explaining the unexplainable to the uncomprehending. Putin's unenviable task is to persuade Bush of his good intentions, while gaining maneuvering room to take measures that the US will regard as hostile. I have no idea how he tried to bring this off in Kennebunkport. But it is sobering to imagine how the conversation might have gone if Putin had told Bush the unvarnished truth.
Bush: You know, Vladimir, a lot of Americans worry that progress toward democracy in Russia has run into a rough patch. They see journalists being intimidated, businessmen being put in jail, and opponents of your government dying under suspicious circumstances. I want to improve relations with you, but you're getting a lot of bad press.
Putin: Tell me, George - what is your idea of Russian democracy?
Bush: Well, when Boris Yeltsin stood on top of a tank to face down the communists and then had free elections, Americans really got the idea that Russia was on the road to democracy.
Putin: We were on the road to something, that's for sure. Why do you think we went bankrupt in 1998? Everything that wasn't nailed down was going into someone's Swiss bank account. Ask your father about it - he gave a speech to a Goldman, Sachs conference in Moscow in July of that year telling investors what a great opportunity Russia was, a month before we ran out of money.
Bush: You don't need to drag my father into this ...
Putin: I'm not saying he was involved in the looting of Russia, the greatest larceny of all time - I'm pointing out that he was as clueless as the rest of you. If we hadn't cracked down on the crooks and thieves who took the country over and stole everything, we wouldn't be talking right now. There wouldn't be a Russia.
Bush: But can't you keep the country honest by democratic means?
Putin: George, everybody isn't like Americans. If Americans don't like what's going on, they elect a different congressman, sign a petition, take out newspaper advertisements, or whatever. For two generations Russians learned that if you made the wrong kind of joke, you disappeared in the middle of the night. You survived by keeping your head down and drinking your vodka. We used to have political troublemakers - in fact, some of the most enthusiastic ones in the world. They were called "communists". The ones that Josef Stalin didn't kill, he sent to the Gulag. Just who do you think is going to take the lead against crime syndicates with private armies? If the government doesn't do it, no one can - and the means we employ aren't going to be pretty.
Bush: I don't mean to get personal, Vladimir, but I guess you know something about those means.
Putin: You had better believe that I do. Why do you think that the Russian government is in the hands of people who served in State Security? In the bad old days, the only institution that could take initiative was the security services. There was no other place to learn how to exercise power.
Bush: I can understand how bad things were, Vladimir, but you've got to understand how much Americans care about democracy.
Putin: Of course you care about democracy - your population is made up of people who left their countries, forgot their language, abandoned their culture and threw themselves into the melting pot. They believe they have rights. Russians never had any rights to begin with and don't know what it means to defend them.
Bush: I've got to say, Vladimir, that's a hell of a way to run a country.
Putin: Who told you we were a country, George? Russia is an empire. We have 160 different ethnic groups spread across six time zones, and we have plenty of Russians in territories that used to belong to the Soviet Union. Maybe you don't like our history, but you can't run the tape in reverse. Let me give you an example: how many Muslims do you have in the US?
Bush: I don't see why that's relevant, but it's probably 3 million or 4 million.
Putin: That's not even 2% of your population. Do you know how many Muslims we have in Russia? At least 25 million, out of 150 million - and they might be a majority in 50 years, given their birth rates.
Bush: I don't understand your point.
Putin: My point is, do you really want democracy in Russia - one man, one vote? Because if you do, you might end up with an Islamic state half a century from now with more oil than Saudi Arabia and a big nuclear arsenal.
Bush: Vladimir, I don't get what you are driving at. Americans just don't think that way. We're trying to help Muslim countries build democracy so the Middle East can be at peace.
Putin: I don't want to throw cold water on your idea, George, but it doesn't seem to be working out too well in Iraq, or Palestine, or Lebanon, does it?
Bush: Vladimir, I just don't get you at all. If you are so concerned about the Muslims, how come you are making it so hard for us to put sanctions on Iran?
Putin: Did it ever occur to you that you have an insignificant number of Muslims to answer to - and half of them are native-born American blacks who never vote Republican? I have millions of Azeri Shi'ites attending mosques supported by Iran. I don't have the luxury to rap the mullahs on the knuckles and hope they stick their hands back in the pockets. Read what Niccolo Machiavelli had to say on the subject: never inflict a minor injury upon an opponent. Men will avenge themselves against minor injuries, but they can't avenge themselves against major injuries.
Bush: You're not telling me to inflict a major injury on Iran, by any chance, are you, Vladimir?
Putin: If anyone is going to do it, George, it's going to be you - you or the Israelis. I simply can't afford to - at least not for the moment, certainly not until after our presidential elections next March. Maybe you won't have to. Iran is weak. There's still an outside chance that someone reasonable like Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani might replace that lunatic Mahmud Ahmadinejad as president. But there's one thing you can count on: nobody hates the idea of an Iran with nuclear weapons more than we do. Our "near abroad" shares a border with Iran.
Bush: So when push comes to shove, Vladimir, you're going to let me do the dirty work and keep your hands clean?
Putin: Remember, I've got elections six months before you do, and a different kind of succession problem. Your democracy has been around for more than 200 years. We're barely adolescents. I need someone to follow me who's hard and sly enough to prevent Russia from flying apart. We can be tough when we have to be. Or haven't you heard of Chechnya?
Bush: You're not taking into account how tough my problem is - unless I can settle the Iran problem, there's no way I can get US troops out of Iraq without a full-scale war between Shi'ites backed by Iran and Sunnis backed by Saudi Arabia.
Putin: Well, you're on your own there. Don't blame me for that.
Bush: Vladimir, I was hoping we'd come out of this discussion with an understanding of at least one point: Why are you so upset about our putting anti-missile systems into places like the Czech Republic? You know that we can't defend Europe against a Russian missile attack.
Putin: George, it's not just about the missiles. It's about your lily-pad bases in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and elsewhere in our near abroad. It's about fomenting those pointless color revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. You aren't going to get democracy in these places - it's silly presumption. All you will do is foster the centrifugal forces that threaten to tear apart the Russian Federation. Don't you get it, George? We are only three-quarters Russian, and in a generation we might be only half Russian. We haven't recovered from the beating you gave us in the 1980s. Half of adult male deaths in Russia are due to alcoholism. Our women have 13 abortions for every 10 live births. We're fighting for our life. We are not going to let what remains of Russia be torn to pieces.
Bush: Do you think we can find some kind of common ground over Kosovo?
Putin: That's where you are really playing with fire, George. You are proposing to dismember Serbia to add a province to Greater Albania, and you will set a precedent for every breakaway minority that wants to leave Russia. We can't possibly accept this - and I warn you that if you insist on this dangerous and reckless course of action, we will do precisely the same for disputed territories in the near abroad, starting with South Ossetia.
Bush: But Vladimir, how are we going to convince the Muslim world that we can partner up with them for peace if we don't respect the wishes of an overwhelming Muslim majority in Kosovo?
Putin: I hate to put it this way, George, but I think I could teach you a lesson about how to gain influence among Muslims. You aren't particularly popular among Muslims at the moment.
Bush: Okay, you don't have to rub it in. How do you propose to gain influence among Muslims?
Putin: Do you know how many civilians died in Chechnya when we suppressed the rebellion there? No one knows exactly, but the number is around 100,000. We know that half a million Chechens lost their homes. That's half the country. We've been killing Muslims for 300 years. That's why they respect us.
Bush: Vladimir, what you are saying is horrible. The American people will never see the world that way.
Putin: The American people don't have to. They are sitting comfortably in their own continent and think it's a great disaster when a few thousand people are killed in an office building. I'm not suggesting that you go out and explain to your voters that things might be very different in other
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Word for Word | Spying on Reporters
J.F.K. Turns to the C.I.A. to Plug a Leak
By TIM WEINER
The New York Times
July 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/weekinre...ef=weekinreview
THE unsealing by the C.I.A last week of the documents it called its “family jewels” was an only-in-America moment. A secret intelligence service freely admitted its crimes and blunders. Americans were reminded of a piece of living history: the time in the 1960s and 1970s when presidents turned the spying powers of American intelligence on the United States itself, searching for an enemy within.
As the “family jewels” make clear, this web of intrigue began in the Kennedy White House.
Another treasure trove, however, was already in public view — tapes that President John F. Kennedy himself recorded in the Oval Office. Here are edited transcripts — and a link to the tapes themselves — of two August 1962 conversations in which Kennedy took steps to spy on the national security reporter for The New York Times, Hanson Baldwin. The president was furious. He wanted to stop secrets from leaking.
These Oval Office transcripts were published in October 2001 by the Miller Center of Public Affairs. But that was the month after 9/11, and they went largely unnoticed — until last week, when the more closely guarded “family jewels” were released.
Those documents include a description of Project Mockingbird, which involved the C.I.A.’s wiretapping of two unnamed Washington reporters. This surveillance began on March 12, 1963, under the authority of John A. McCone, the director of central intelligence, and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, both of whom were present in the Oval Office in August 1962.
It was 45 years ago. But it seems like yesterday. And it is.
In December 2005, The Times revealed that the executive branch was once again using its foreign intelligence powers to spy within the borders of the United States, also by warrantless wiretapping. We may learn the full story a generation from now, if and when the first of the 21st century’s “family jewels” are revealed. TIM WEINER
•
The chief protagonists in the transcripts:
President John F. Kennedy
John A. McCone, director of central intelligence.
James Killian, chairman of the president’s foreign intelligence advisory board.
Clark Clifford, adviser to Democrats since the Truman administration, and a member of the intelligence advisory board.
Hanson Baldwin, military analyst for The New York Times since 1937, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from Guadalcanal and the western Pacific in 1943, a dependably pro-military reporter. He had infuriated the president with an article on the Soviets’ efforts to protect their intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites with concrete bunkers. His reporting accurately stated the conclusions of the C.I.A.’s most recent national intelligence estimate. He is not present; he is the object of the participants’ anger and concern.
Aug. 1, 1962, 5:35 p.m.-6:25 p.m., President Kennedy meets with his foreign intelligence advisory board. Present: the president, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Clark Clifford, Dr. James Killian, Dr. Edwin H. Land, a physicist, and Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, the president’s military representative and soon to be his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Killian: We would say to you unequivocally that this has been a tragically serious breach of security.
J.F.K.: What I find is incomprehensible ... that someone of Baldwin’s experience and stature and the status of The Times would do it. ...
Killian: The F.B.I. may not be the best agency to conduct investigations of leaks to this kind. ... We would suggest, therefore, that the director of central intelligence be encouraged to develop an expert group that would be available at all times to follow up on security leaks.
Clifford: I think this is the most effective recommendation that the group makes: that there be a full-time small group, devoting themselves to this all the time. I believe that that group could become knowledgeable about the pieces that these various men write, like Baldwin. ...
Killian: There are many things that such a sensitized group could do ... They could follow the press and see evidence of ——
Taylor: We’d know the trends, where their contacts ——
J.F.K.: That’s a very good idea. We’ll do that.
...
Clifford: They can find out who are Hanson Baldwin’s contacts. When he goes over to the Pentagon, who does he see? Nobody knows now. The F.B.I. doesn’t know. But I think it would be mighty interesting ... To my knowledge it’s never been done before and it is long overdue.
Aug. 22, 1962, 6:10-6:37 p.m.,meeting on intelligence matters. Present: The president, McCone, General Taylor.
J.F.K.: How are we doing with that set-up on the Baldwin business?
McCone: Well, I’ve got a ... finally got a plan in which C.I.A. is completely in agreement with. It does a number of things that were recommended, including the setting up this task force, which would be a continuing investigative group reporting to me. ...
J.F.K.: Would you have supervision over the leakage from the Department of Defense?
McCone: As far as intelligence information is concerned. ...
J.F.K.: Then anyone who had intelligence would have to log their meetings?
McCone: That’s right ... I get a log every week of all the contacts they make and memoranda of the discussions.
Taylor: Do you?
McCone: I write a memoranda ——
Taylor: Has that ever been revealed to the press? [Have] you ever been ——
McCone: Oh, no ——
Mr. McCone then awkwardly returned to the subject of the task force or investigative group the president wanted him to create. It was arguably illegal, and almost inarguably prohibited by the C.I.A.’s charter. That charter was signed on July 26, 1947, and Mr. Clifford was among those who helped to write it. The charter commanded the C.I.A. to protect intelligence sources and methods, but barred it from operating within the United States, spying on Americans, or behaving like secret police. Mr. McCone mumbles, and the tape is unclear.
McCone: It’s clearly a, it’s kind of a, of a directive that ... [to] avoid getting involved, you or your office getting involved ... [unclear] I can do under the law — there’s nothing wrong [with it] — By the National Security Act, I’m charged with [unclear].
J.F.K.: Well, I think they’re scared. ... Hanson Baldwin and these fellows who’ve got these very good contacts over there [at the Pentagon]. They’re all well regarded and they talk to them so frankly. So I think if they begin to think they’re going to have to write a report on it, it’s going to have a very inhibiting effect, I think. And especially when I saw from Hoover that they figured that there were 761 people that had this secret information.
•
After an interrogation from J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. about his New York Times article on Soviet nuclear forces, a shaken Hanson Baldwin told a colleague, in a conversation wiretapped and taped by the bureau: “I think the real answer to this is Bobby Kennedy and the president himself.” A transcript of that conversation was on the attorney general’s desk the next day.
As the newly released “family jewels” and other now public United States government records confirm, the C.I.A. kept watch on reporters and some of their sources for three years after Kennedy and Mr. McCone met. The surveillance continued after the president’s assassination, until 1965.
So now the record is clear: long before President Nixon created his “plumbers” unit of C.I.A. veterans to stop news leaks, President Kennedy tried to use the agency for the same goal. Nevertheless, throughout the decades, reporters have continued to plague the C.I.A. and presidents alike by reporting on secrets of state.
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In May 1979 two men were arrested in Los Angeles while President Jimmy Carter was visiting there in an alleged assassination attempt on Carter.
One was an Anglo and the other an Hispanic.
The Anglo, upon being arrested, was found to have a starter pistol on his person with 70 rounds of blank ammunition. The Anglo identified the Hispanic as his co-conspirator. Both men led the authorities to a hotel where the men, who were street people, claimed that they were recruited by three men from Mexico. The role of the two men was to create a diversion while the three men from Mexico assassinated Carter.
Within hours of the incident Carter cancelled a planned national television appearance that had been previously announced, which was never rescheduled.
The above incident is recounted by Jim Marrs in an interview this week for subscribers on www.dreamland.com.
Marrs noted that the names of the two men arrested were Raymond Lee Harvey and Oswaldo Artiz.
According to Marrs, after the incident, Carter evolved into a do-nothing president, apparently having come to the realization that the country was really run by a selected group of men and that being President of the United States meant he had power inferior to that exercised by the selected group.
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June 30, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
The Break-In That History Forgot
By EGIL KROGH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/opinion/...amp;oref=slogin
Seattle
THE Watergate break-in, described by Ron Ziegler, then the White House press secretary, as a “third-rate burglary,” passes its 35th anniversary this month. The common public perception is that Watergate was the principal cause of President Nixon’s downfall. In fact, the seminal cause was a first-rate criminal conspiracy and break-in almost 10 months earlier that led inexorably to Watergate and its subsequent cover-up.
In early August 1971, I attended a secret meeting in Room 16, a hideaway office in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. Huddled around the table were G. Gordon Liddy, a former F.B.I. agent; E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. agent; and David R. Young Jr., a member of the National Security Council staff. I was deputy assistant to the president.
Two months earlier, The New York Times had published the classified Pentagon Papers, which had been provided by Daniel Ellsberg. President Nixon had told me he viewed the leak as a matter of critical importance to national security. He ordered me and the others, a group that would come to be called the “plumbers,” to find out how the leak had happened and keep it from happening again.
Mr. Hunt urged us to carry out a “covert operation” to get a “mother lode” of information about Mr. Ells-berg’s mental state, to discredit him, by breaking into the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding. Mr. Liddy told us the F.B.I. had frequently carried out such covert operations — a euphemism for burglaries — in national security investigations, that he had even done some himself.
I listened intently. At no time did I or anyone else there question whether the operation was necessary, legal or moral. Convinced that we were responding legitimately to a national security crisis, we focused instead on the operational details: who would do what, when and where.
Mr. Young and I sent a memo to John Ehrlichman, assistant to the president, recommending that “a covert operation be undertaken to examine all of the medical files still held by Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.” Mr. Ehrlichman approved the plan, noting in longhand on the memo, “if done under your assurance that it is not traceable.”
On Sept. 3, 1971, burglars broke into Dr. Fielding’s Beverly Hills office to photograph the files, but found nothing related to Mr. Ellsberg.
The premise of our action was the strongly held view within certain precincts of the White House that the president and those functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the nation’s security demanded it. As President Nixon himself said to David Frost during an interview six years later, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” To this day the implications of this statement are staggering.
With the Fielding break-in, some of us in the Nixon White House crossed the Rubicon into the realm of lawbreakers. In November 1973, I pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy in depriving Dr. Fielding of his civil rights, specifically his constitutional right to be free from an unwarranted search. I no longer believed that national security could justify my conduct. At my sentencing, I explained that national security is “subject to a wide range of definitions, a factor that makes all the more essential a painstaking approach to the definition of national security in any given instance.”
Judge Gerhard Gesell gave me the first prison sentence of any member of the president’s staff: two to six years, of which I served four and a half months.
I finally realized that what had gone wrong in the Nixon White House was a meltdown in personal integrity. Without it, we failed to understand the constitutional limits on presidential power and comply with statutory law.
In early 2001, after President Bush was inaugurated, I sent the new White House staff a memo explaining the importance of never losing their personal integrity. In a section addressed specifically to the White House lawyers, I said that integrity required them to constantly ask, is it legal?
And I recommended that they rely on well-established legal precedent and not some hazy, loose notion of what phrases like “national security” and “commander in chief” could be tortured into meaning. I wonder if they received my message.
Egil Krogh, a lawyer, is the author of the forthcoming “Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices and Life Lessons From the White House.”
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This is very important if it is true.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7062102434.html
By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 22, 2007; Page A01
The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.
The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.
"Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history," Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.
In anticipation of the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts.
A New York Times article by reporter Seymour Hersh about the CIA's infiltration of antiwar groups, published in December 1974, was "just the tip of the iceberg," then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned Ford, according to a Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation.
Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, "blood will flow," saying, "For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of [Cuban President Fidel] Castro." Kennedy was the attorney general from 1961 to 1964.
Worried that the disclosures could lead to criminal prosecutions, Kissinger added that "when the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA, this could end up worse for the country than Watergate," the scandal that led to the fall of the Nixon administration the previous year.
In a meeting at which Colby detailed the worst abuses -- after telling the president "we have a 25-year old institution which has done some things it shouldn't have" -- Ford said he would appoint a presidential commission to look into the matter. "We don't want to destroy but to preserve the CIA. But we want to make sure that illegal operations and those outside the [CIA] charter don't happen," Ford said.
Most of the major incidents and operations in the reports to be released next week were revealed in varying detail during congressional investigations that led to widespread intelligence reforms and increased oversight. But the treasure-trove of CIA documents, generated as the Vietnam War wound down and agency involvement in Nixon's "dirty tricks" political campaign began to be revealed, is expected to provide far more comprehensive accounts, written by the agency itself.
The reports, known collectively by historians and CIA officials as the "family jewels," were initially produced in response to a 1973 request by then-CIA Director James R. Schlesinger. Alarmed by press accounts of CIA involvement in Watergate under his predecessor, Schlesinger asked the agency's employees to inform him of all operations that were "outside" the agency's legal charter.
This process was unprecedented at the agency, where only a few officials had previously been privy to the scope of its illegal activities. Schlesinger collected the reports, some of which dated to the 1950s, in a folder that was inherited by his successor, Colby, in September of that year.
But it was not until Hersh's article that Colby took the file to the White House. The National Security Archive release included a six-page summary of a conversation on Jan. 3, 1975, in which Colby briefed the Justice Department for the first time on the extent of the "skeletons."
Operations listed in the report began in 1953, when the CIA's counterintelligence staff started a 20-year program to screen and in some cases open mail between the United States and the Soviet Union passing through a New York airport. A similar program in San Francisco intercepted mail to and from China from 1969 to 1972. Under its charter, the CIA is prohibited from domestic operations.
Colby told Ford that the program had collected four letters to actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda and said the entire effort was "illegal, and we stopped it in 1973."
Among several new details, the summary document reveals a 1969 program about CIA efforts against "the international activities of radicals and black militants." Undercover CIA agents were placed inside U.S. peace groups and sent abroad as credentialed members to identify any foreign contacts. This came at a time when the Soviet Union was suspected of financing and influencing U.S. domestic organizations.
The program included "information on the domestic activities" of the organizations and led to the accumulation of 10,000 American names, which Colby told Silberman were retained "as a result of the tendency of bureaucrats to retain paper whether they needed it or acted on it or not," according to the summary memo.
CIA surveillance of Michael Getler, then The Washington Post's national security reporter, was conducted between October 1971 and April 1972 under direct authorization by then-Director Richard Helms, the memo said. Getler had written a story published on Oct. 18, 1971, sparked by what Colby called "an obvious intelligence leak," headlined "Soviet Subs Are Reported Cuba-Bound."
Getler, who is now the ombudsman for the Public Broadcasting Service, said yesterday that he learned of the surveillance in 1975, when The Post published an article based on a secret report by congressional investigators. The story said that the CIA used physical surveillance against "five Americans" and listed Getler, the late columnist Jack Anderson and Victor Marchetti, a former CIA employee who had just written a book critical of the agency.
"I never knew about it at the time, although it was a full 24 hours a day with teams of people following me, looking for my sources," Getler said. He said he went to see Colby afterward, with Washington lawyer Joseph Califano. Getler recalled, "Colby said it happened under Helms and apologized and said it wouldn't happen again."
Personal surveillance was conducted on Anderson and three of his staff members, including Britt Hume, now with Fox News, for two months in 1972 after Anderson wrote of the administration's "tilt toward Pakistan." The 1972 surveillance of Marchetti was carried out "to determine contacts with CIA employees," the summary said.
CIA monitoring and infiltration of antiwar dissident groups took place between 1967 and 1971 at a time when the public was turning against the Vietnam War. Agency officials "covertly monitored" groups in the Washington area "who were considered to pose a threat to CIA installations." Some of the information "might have been distributed to the FBI," the summary said. Other "skeletons" listed in the summary included:
· The confinement by the CIA of a Russian defector, suspected by the CIA as a possible "fake," in Maryland and Virginia safe houses for two years, beginning in 1964. Colby speculated that this might be "a violation of the kidnapping laws."
· The "very productive" 1963 wiretapping of two columnists -- Robert Allen and Paul Scott -- whose conversations included talks with 12 senators and six congressmen.
· Break-ins by the CIA's office of security at the homes of one current and one former CIA official suspected of retaining classified documents.
· CIA-funded testing of American citizens, "including reactions to certain drugs."
The CIA documents scheduled for release next week, Hayden said yesterday, "provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."
Barred by secrecy restrictions from correcting "misinformation," he said, the CIA is at the mercy of the press. "Unfortunately, there seems to be an instinct among some in the media today to take a few pieces of information, which may or may not be accurate, and run with them to the darkest corner of the room," Hayden said.
Hayden's speech and some questions that followed evoked more recent criticism of the intelligence community, which has been accused of illegal wiretapping, infiltration of antiwar groups, and kidnapping and torturing of terrorism suspects.
"It's surely part of [Hayden's] program now to draw a bright line with the past," said National Security Archive Director Thomas S. Blanton. "But it's uncanny how the government keeps dipping into the black bag." Newly revealed details of ancient CIA operations, Blanton said, "are pretty resonant today."
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
CIA's family jewels reveal chilling past
www.newscientist
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shortshar...lling-past.html
Like many other reporters, I spent much of yesterday scrolling through the 702 pages of CIA documents known as "the family jewels", finally released after more than three decades in the shadows. Dating from 1973, they detail responses from CIA staff to then-director James Schlesinger, who wanted to know about activities that might be "inconsistent with the Agency's charter" – illegal, in plain English.
The documents reveal a paranoid web of domestic wiretapping and break-ins, and discuss the failed plot to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Most interesting to me, however, was the dearth of reports on some of the most unethical experiments ever conducted by the US government: the mind-control research programme known as MKULTRA, under which LSD and other drugs were given to unwitting subjects, including prison inmates and the patrons of brothels set up by the CIA.
The programme resulted in at least one death, that of Frank Olson, a biochemist at the US Army's biowarfare research centre in Fort Detrick, Maryland. After being given a drink spiked with LSD, he began behaving oddly and was taken to New York for psychiatric treatment. It was too late: on 28 November 1953, Olson plunged to his death from a hotel window.
This sordid enterprise was documented in John Marks' 1979 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. The surviving official documents, obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act, can be viewed here.
Some of MKULTRA's activities were also detailed in a 1963 internal report from the CIA's inspector general. This acknowledged that "concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people both within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical" and warned that "some MKULTRA activities raise questions of legality". But the details didn't become public until the late 1970s. So I was surprised not to see more on the programme in the "family jewels". Perhaps CIA staff didn't think that forcing mind-altering drugs onto unwitting citizens was a big deal. There was a lot of it going on in the 1960s, after all.
Still, the few references to drug testing in the newly-released documents make chilling reading. Go to page 416, and you will learn of a behavioural drug screened as part of "larger programme, in which the Agency had relations with commercial drug manufacturers, whereby they passed on drugs rejected because of unfavorable side effects". Drugs deemed interesting were later tested on "volunteer members of the Armed forces". The programme was apparently considered "defensive, in the sense that we would recognize certain behavior if similar materials were used against Americans".
It's the complicity of the pharmaceutical industry, passing on drugs known to be harmful, that I find most disturbing. Any ex-spooks or pharma executives care to comment?
Peter Aldhous, San Francisco Bureau Chief
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Does this document include a chapter on the clandestine uses of Polonium-210?
By Anonymous on June 27, 2007 5:20 PM
Not to my knowledge, but as of today, the documents are available as a PDF that can be searched by keyword at the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org
By Peter on June 27, 2007 8:58 PM
John Prados, a senior fellow with the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington DC sent me the following comment, which provides some interesting background:
MK/ULTRA is only one of a number of topics that seem to be underrepresented in the "Family Jewels." There are several contributing factors in my view. One is certainly the "people factor." Jim Schlesinger (contrary to his reception among CIA audiences today) was not well-liked at the agency, and learned only what agency employees wanted to tell him. The set represents a compilation of reports from division chiefs, and Sidney Gottlieb of the Technical Services Division, I'm sure, was not happy to be reporting on this at all, especially since he knew death had resulted. Since the experiments were not well known within the agency he probably thought he could get away with it. Especially given that TSD had a number of other things to report that would be sure to divert attention.
Another reason, I think, is that Watergate was a main impetus for the report and, again, would be sure to divert attention. My feeling is that Gottlieb put in enough to be able to say he had reported this, while avoiding details that might have called attention to it.
Peter Aldhous, San Francisco Bureau Chief
By Peter on June 28, 2007 6:42 PM
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......This $60 billion [intel budget] accounts for the funding received via the tax payer, but this figure is likely to grow by a huge amount when the drug trade is taken into account.
Is this figure included in the military budget or is it undisclosed as a seperate matter? I would assume that military intelligence and the CIA draw cash from different pots.
Sterling Seagrave makes a compelling case that many of the intelligence agencies made use of enormous stockpiles of gold that were plundered post-WWII for their blackest ops.
Besides the WWII plunder, intell agencies have access to enormous black funds via all sorts of illegal trade and other manipulations, including (but not limited to) revenue from the global drugs trade, arms sales (stolen from US domestic stockpiles warehoused in national armouries) vast stock and financial market manipulations, blood diamond transactions. In fact anything that can turn a quick and bountiful buck will do -- and often does.
David
June 12, 2007
The Biggest Scam in the World
Closing Down the Tax Haven Racket
By RALPH NADER
www.counterpunch.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/nader06122007.html
Lucy Komisar of the Tax Justice Network-USA (taxjustice-usa.org) spoke at the Conference on Taming the Giant Corporation last week about "Closing Down the Tax Haven Racket." Her words were so compelling that the rest of this column is devoted to excerpts from her presentation:
"The tax haven racket is the biggest scam in the world. It's run by the international banks with the cooperation of the world's financial powers for the benefit of corporations and the mega-rich. [M]ost Americans, including progressive activist Americans, don't know what I'm going to tell you. And that's part of the problem.
"Tax havens, also known as offshore financial centers, are places that operate secret bank accounts and shell companies that hide the names of real owners from tax authorities and law enforcement. They use nominees, front men. Sometimes offshore incorporation companies set up the shells. Sometimes the banks do it. Often someone will use a shell company in one jurisdiction that owns a shell in another jurisdiction that owns a bank account in a third. That's called layering. No one can follow the paper trial.
"Offshore is where most of the world's drug money is laundered, estimated at up to $500 billion a year, more than the total income of the world's poorest 20 percent. Perhaps another $500 billion comes from fraud and corruption.
"Those figures fit with [international Monetary Fund] numbers that as much as $1.5 trillion of illicit money is laundered annually, equal to two to five percent of global economic output.
"Wall Street wants this money. The markets would hurt, even shrivel without that cash. That's why Robert Rubin as Treasury Secretary had a policy, as Joseph Stiglitz told me, not to do anything that would stop the free flow of money into the US. He was not interested in stopping money laundering because the laundered funds ended up in Wall [street], maybe in Goldman Sachs where he had worked, or Citibank, where he would work.
"Attempts to find laundered funds are usually dismal failures. According to Interpol, $3 billion in dirty money has been seized in 20 years of struggle against money laundering -- about the amount laundered in three days.
"The other major purpose of offshore is for tax evasion, estimated to reach another $500 billion a year.
"That's how corporations and the rich have opted out of the tax system.
"They have sophisticated mechanisms. There's transfer pricing. A company sets up a trading company offshore, sells its widgets there for under market price, the trading company sells it for market price, the profits are offshore, not where they really were generated.
"Two American professors, using customs data, examined the impact of over-invoiced imports and under-invoiced exports for 2001. Would you buy plastic buckets from the Czech Republic for $973 each, tissues from China at $1874 a pound, a cotton dishtowel from Pakistan for $154, and tweezers from Japan at $4,896 each!
"U.S. companies, at least on paper, were getting very little for their exported products. If you were in business, would you sell bus and truck tires to Britain for $11.74 each, color video monitors to Pakistan for $21.90, and prefabricated buildings to Trinidad for $1.20 a unit.
"Comparing all claimed export and import prices to real world prices, the professors figured the 2001 U.S. tax loss at $53.1 billion.
"Or a company sets up subsidiaries in tax havens to "own" logos or intellectual property. Like Microsoft does in Ireland, transferring software that was made in America, that benefited by work done by Americans, to Ireland so Microsoft can pay taxes there (at 11%) instead of here (at 35%). Why is Ireland getting the benefit of American-created software? It's legal. We need to change the law.
"When logos are offshore, the company pays royalties to use the logo and deducts the amount as expenses. But the payments are not taxed or are taxed minimally offshore where they are moved. When Cheney ran Halliburton, it increased its offshore subsidiaries from 9 to at least 44.
"Half of world trade is between various parts of the same corporations. Experts believe that as much as half the world's capital flows through offshore centers. The totals held offshore include 31 percent of the net profits of U.S. multinationals.
"The whole collection of tax scams is why between 1989 and 1995, of US and multi-national corporations operating in the United States, with assets of at least $250 million or sales of at least $50 million, nearly two-thirds paid no U.S. income tax.
"In 1996-2000, Goodyear's profits were $442 million, but it paid no taxes and got a $23-million rebate. Colgate-Palmolive made $1.6 billion and got back $21 million. Other companies that got rebates in 1998 included Texaco, Chevron, PepsiCo, Pfizer, J.P. Morgan, MCI Worldcom, General Motors, Phillips Petroleum and Northrop Grumman. Microsoft reported $12.3 billion U.S income in 1999 and paid zero federal taxes. (In two recent years, Microsoft paid only 1.8 percent on $21.9 billion pretax U.S. profits.)
"During the 1950s, U.S. corporations accounted for 28 percent of federal revenues. Now, corporations represent just 11 percent.
"Those unpaid taxes can buy a lot of politicians and power. When Nixon needed money to pay the Watergate burglars, he got it from some corporate offshore bank accounts.
"The system has given the big banks and corporations and the super-rich mountains of hidden cash they use to control our political systems.
"The offshore system must be dismantled.
"So why isn't the progressive movement doing something about this? This is a case where some people in Congress are ahead of the activists. There are a handful of Democrats like Senators Levin (MI), Dorgan (ND) and Conrad (ND), like Rep. Doggett (TX), who are speaking out and introducing legislation. But there is no movement behind them. And while Obama has signed onto the Levin Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, Clinton, Biden and Dodd have not."
Ms. Komisar spreads out the proposed strategies at taxjustice-usa.org. One or more are structured so that you can play a part in furthering them toward adoption.
As she concluded: "Let's get the country to tell the corporations that the taxes they are dodging is our money."
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June 03, 2007
Exclusive: Office of Nation's Top Spy Inadvertently Reveals Key to Classified National Intel Budget
by Dr. R. J. Hill house
http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_w...sive_offic.html
In a holdover from the Cold War when the number really did matter to national security, the size of the US national intelligence budget remains one of the government's most closely guarded secrets. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the highest intelligence agency in the country that oversees all federal intelligence agencies, appears to have inadvertently released the keys to that number in an unclassified PowerPoint presentation now posted on the website of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). By reverse engineering the numbers in an underlying data element embedded in the presentation, it seems that the total budget of the 16 US intelligence agencies in fiscal year 2005 was $60 billion, almost 25% higher than previously believed.
In the presentation originally made to a DIA conference in Colorado on May 14, Terri Everett, an Office of the Director of National Intelligence senior procurement executive, revealed that 70% of the total Intelligence Community budget is spent on contractors. (This was reported by Tim Shorrock on Salon.com.) Everett also included a slide depicting the trend of award dollars to contractors by the Intelligence Community from fiscal year 95 through a partial year of fiscal year 06 (i.e. through August 31st of FY06.) Because these figures are classified, a scale of the total number of award dollars was omitted from the Y-axis of the bar chart. The PowerPoint presentation was first obtained by Shorrock for Salon.com and it was later posted on the DIA's website where I downloaded it. Although it would not have been visible to the conference attendees, the data underlying the bar graph--the total amount of Intelligence Community funds spent on contractors--is readily available in the actual presentation. By double clicking on the bar chart, a small spreadsheet with the raw classified data appears:
http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_w...sive_offic.html
(To view this spreadsheet in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's actual PowerPoint presentation, make sure you are opening the presentation in the PowerPoint program and not a web browser, view slide #11 and, depending upon your version of PowerPoint, making sure you're not on the 9/11 image object double-click on the chart or right click on it and choose Chart Object/Open.)
Here are the dollar amounts in tens of millions spent by the US Intelligence Community on contractors, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as embedded in the spreadsheet data underlying the bar graph (pictured above):
http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_w...sive_offic.html
Note: FY06 data as of 31 August. (The numbers are in tens of millions of dollars, although this is not noted, but it is previously known that the amount spent on contracts is a double-digit billion plus dollar figure.)
This 70% of the Intelligence Community budget spent on contractors most likely includes all Intelligence Community direct acquisitions from contractors, including satellites and other very expensive hardware programs as well as more mundane supplies in addition to contracted services--(e.g. "green badgers" or staff contracted to the CIA.) The remaining 30% of the Intelligence Community budget most likely includes both personnel (i.e., civilian federal employee) and as well as intergovernmental operations and maintenance and supplies (e.g. payments by some Intelligence Community elements to GSA to lease office space and acquire government pens and office supplies.) By taking the 70% of the intelligence community budget that now goes to contractors in conjunction with the actual dollars spent on contractors, it is possible to reverse-engineer the budget using simple algebra.
This top line $60 billion figure is 25% above the estimated $48 billion budget for FY 08. It is quite probable that this total figure was not even known by the government until recently. Greater control and oversight of the Intelligence Community budget was a hallmark of the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 that created the position of the Director of National Intelligence and gave it the mandate to get an overview of the entire amount spent on intelligence government-wide. To this end, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has recently gathered all parts of the previously fragmented Intelligence Community budget together for the first time as part of its Intelligence Resource Information System (IRIS). In the report from the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence released last Thursday, the committee praised the Office of the Director of Intelligence for creating a "single budget system called the Intelligence Resource Information System." It also recognizes their efforts in helping create what "will be used for further inquiry by the Committee’s budget and audit staffs and will be a baseline that allows the Congress and DNI to derive trend data from future reports."
Earlier, lower estimates were most likely only included what fell directly under the Director of Central Intelligence and which would have omitted parts of NSA, NRO. A total Intelligence Community number, with the Intelligence Community as defined by 50 U.S.C. 401a(4), would also now include the various military intelligence services (e.g. Army Intel, Navy Intel, etc.), each with its respective weapon technology intelligence exploitation shop. A total budget would also include a large portion of the budget of the Department of Homeland Security which was previously fragment across multiple government agencies. A $60 billion government-wide Intelligence Community budget is not at all out of line with the post 9/11 organizational reality. It seems that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is just now getting a clear picture of the fragmented intelligence community budget.
The overall Intelligence Community budget has long been a well kept secret and this classification did once have relevance when a large shift in the budget could have indicated to the Soviets an addition or cancellation of a major defense program. Now that our greatest adversaries are stateless entities that run on a shoestring budget and strike soft targets, signals of changes in high-dollar defense systems hardly seem worth hiding. Nonetheless, the federal government has frequently gone to court to keep the amount of the national intelligence budget secret. Only the budgets for 1963, 1997 and 1998 have been officially revealed, largely in response to FOIA lawsuits. And in 2005 a US News reporter picked up an apparent slip of the tongue by an official of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at a conference when it was stated the national intel budget was $44 billion, but it was not clear which fiscal year this was in reference to and the DNI refused to confirm if the figure was accurate or the release accidental. At this time, they would not have had total dollar figures through the new IRIS system. But with such a staggering budget, it does seem that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would be well advised to find some room in the Intelligence Community budget for a staff training on PowerPoint and OPSEC.
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That's quite interesting; I hope further research goes into discovering the cause. I generally support GM agriculture, but we have to make sure that we have not unintentionally tampered with a delicate process.
I'd be grateful if you keep us up to date on this Doug, and I'll repost it at a science forum I belong to.
Suddenly, the bees are simply vanishing
Scientists are at a loss to pinpoint the cause. The die-off in 35 states has crippled beekeepers and threatened many crops.By Jia-Rui Chong and Thomas H. Maugh II
Los Angeles Times
June 10, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci...=la-home-center
The dead bees under Dennis vanEngelsdorp's microscope were like none he had ever seen.
He had expected to see mites or amoebas, perennial pests of bees. Instead, he found internal organs swollen with debris and strangely blackened. The bees' intestinal tracts were scarred, and their rectums were abnormally full of what appeared to be partly digested pollen. Dark marks on the sting glands were telltale signs of infection.
"The more you looked, the more you found," said VanEngelsdorp, the acting apiarist for the state of Pennsylvania. "Each thing was a surprise."
VanEngelsdorp's examination of the bees in November was one of the first scientific glimpses of a mysterious honeybee die-off that has launched an intense search for a cure.
The puzzling phenomenon, known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, has been reported in 35 states, five Canadian provinces and several European countries. The die-off has cost U.S. beekeepers about $150 million in losses and an uncertain amount for farmers scrambling to find bees to pollinate their crops.
Scientists have scoured the country, finding eerily abandoned hives in which the bees seem to have simply left their honey and broods of baby bees.
"We've never experienced bees going off and leaving brood behind," said Pennsylvania-based beekeeper Dave Hackenberg. "It was like a mother going off and leaving her kids."
Researchers have picked through the abandoned hives, dissected thousands of bees, and tested for viruses, bacteria, pesticides and mites.
So far, they are stumped.
According to the Apiary Inspectors of America, 24% of 384 beekeeping operations across the country lost more than 50% of their colonies from September to March. Some have lost 90%.
"I'm worried about the bees," said Dan Boyer, 52, owner of Ridgetop Orchards in Fishertown, Pa., which grows apples. "The more I learn about it, the more I think it is a national tragedy."
At Boyer's orchard, 400 acres of apple trees — McIntosh, Honey Crisp, Red Delicious and 11 other varieties — have just begun to bud white flowers.
Boyer's trees need to be pollinated. Incompletely pollinated blooms would still grow apples, he said, but the fruit would be small and misshapen, suitable only for low-profit juice.
This year, he will pay dearly for the precious bees — $13,000 for 200 hives, the same price that 300 hives cost him last year.
The scene is being repeated throughout the country, where honeybees, scientifically known as Apis mellifera, are required to pollinate a third of the nation's food crops, including almonds, cherries, blueberries, pears, strawberries and pumpkins.
Vanishing colonies
One of the earliest alarms was sounded by Hackenberg, who used to keep about 3,000 hives in dandelion-covered fields near the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.
In November, Hackenberg, 58, was at his winter base in Florida. He peeked in on a group of 400 beehives he had driven down from his home in West Milton, Pa., a month before. He went from empty box to empty box. Only about 40 had bees in them.
"It was just the most phenomenal thing I thought I'd ever seen," he said.
The next morning, Hackenberg called Jerry Hayes, the chief of apiary inspection at the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and president of the Apiary Inspectors of America.
Hayes mentioned some bee die-offs in Georgia that, until then, hadn't seemed significant.
Hackenberg drove back to West Milton with a couple of dead beehives and live colonies that had survived. He handed them over to researchers at Pennsylvania State University.
With amazing speed, the bees vanished from his other hives, more than 70% of which were abandoned by February.
Hackenberg, a talkative, wiry man with a deeply lined face, figured he lost more than $460,000 this winter for replacement bees, lost honey and missed pollination opportunities.
"If that happens again, we're out of business," he said.
It didn't take researchers long to figure out they were dealing with something new.
VanEngelsdorp, 37, quickly eliminated the most obvious suspects: Varroa and tracheal mites, which have occasionally wrought damage on hives since the 1980s.
At the state lab in Harrisburg, Pa., VanEngelsdorp checked bee samples from Pennsylvania and Georgia. He washed bees with soapy water to dislodge Varroa mites and cut the thorax of the bees to look for tracheal mites; he found that the number of mites was not unusually high.
His next guess was amoebic infection. He scanned the bees' kidneys for cysts and found a handful, but not enough to explain the population decline.
VanEngelsdorp dug through scientific literature looking for other mass disappearances.
He found the first reference in a 1869 federal report, detailing a mysterious bee disappearance. There was only speculation as to the cause — possibly poisonous honey or maybe a hot summer.
A 1923 handbook on bee culture noted that a "disappearing disease" went away in a short time without treatment. There was a reference to "fall dwindle" in a 1965 scientific article to describe sudden disappearances in Texas and Louisiana.
He found other references but no explanations.
VanEngelsdorp traveled to Florida and California at the beginning of the year to collect adult bees, brood, nectar, pollen and comb for a more systematic study. He went to 11 apiaries, both sick and healthy, and collected 102 colonies.
A number of the pollen samples went to Maryann Frazier, a honeybee specialist at Penn State who has been coordinating the pesticide investigation. Her group has been testing for 106 chemicals used to kill mites, funguses or other pests.
Scientists have focused on a new group of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, which have spiked in popularity because they are safe for people, Frazier said. Studies have shown that these pesticides can kill bees and throw off their ability to learn and navigate, she said.
Researchers have yet to collect enough data to come to any conclusions, but the experience of French beekeepers casts doubt on the theory. France banned the most commonly used neonicotinoid in 1999 after complaints from beekeepers that it was killing their colonies. French hives, however, are doing no better now, experts said.
Sniffing out the culprit
Entomologist Jerry J. Bromenshenk of the University of Montana launched his own search for poisons, relying on the enhanced odor sensitivity of bees — about 40 times better than that of humans.
When a colony is exposed to a new chemical odor, he said, its sound changes in volume and frequency, producing a unique audio signature.
Bromenshenk has been visiting beekeepers across the country, recording hive sounds and taking them back to his lab for analysis. To date, no good candidates have surfaced.
If the cause is not a poison, it is most likely a parasite.
UC San Francisco researchers announced in April that they had found a single-celled protozoan called Nosema ceranae in bees from colonies with the collapse disorder.
Unfortunately, Bromenshenk said, "we see equal levels of Nosema in CCD colonies and healthy colonies."
Infected swarms?
Several researchers, including entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Penn State and Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a virologist at Columbia University, have been sifting through bees that have been ground up, looking for viruses and bacteria.
"We were shocked by the huge number of pathogens present in each adult bee," Cox-Foster said at a recent meeting of bee researchers convened by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The large number of pathogens suggested, she said, that the bees' immune systems had been suppressed, allowing the proliferation of infections.
The idea that a pathogen is involved is supported by recent experiments conducted by VanEngelsdorp and USDA entomologist Jeffrey S. Pettis.
One of the unusual features of the disorder is that the predators of abandoned beehives, such as hive beetles and wax moths, refuse to venture into infected hives for weeks or longer.
"It's as if there is something repellent or toxic about the colony," said Hayes, the Florida inspector.
To test this idea, VanEngelsdorp and Pettis set up 200 beehive boxes with new, healthy bees from Australia and placed them in the care of Hackenberg.
Fifty of the hives were irradiated to kill potential pathogens. Fifty were fumigated with concentrated acetic acid, a hive cleanser commonly used in Canada. Fifty were filled with honey frames that had been taken from Hackenberg's colonies before the collapse, and the last 50 were hives that had been abandoned that winter.
When VanEngelsdorp visited the colonies at the beginning of May, bees in the untouched hive were clearly struggling, filling only about a quarter of a frame. Bees living on the reused honeycomb were alive but not thriving. A hive that had been fumigated with acetic acid was better.
When he popped open an irradiated hive, bees were crawling everywhere. "This does imply there is something biological," he said.
If it is a pathogen or a parasite, honeybees are poorly equipped to deal with it, said entomologist May Berenbaum of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The honeybee genome has only half as many genes to detoxify poisons and to fight off infections as do other insects.
"There is something about the life of the honeybee that has led to the loss of a lot of genes associated with detoxification, associated with the immune system," she said.
In the absence of knowledge, theories have proliferated, including one that Osama bin Laden has engineered the die-off to disrupt American agriculture.
One of the most pervasive theories is that cellphone transmissions are causing the disappearances — an idea that originated with a recent German study. Berenbaum called the theory "a complete figment of the imagination."
The German physicist who conducted the tiny study "disclaimed the connection to cellphones," she said. "What they put in the colony was a cordless phone. Whoever translated the story didn't know the difference."
Another popular theory is that the bees have been harmed by corn genetically engineered to contain the pesticide B.t.
Berenbaum shot down the idea: "Here in Illinois, we're surrounded by an ocean of B.t. pollen, and the bees are not afflicted."
And so the search continues.
Many beekeepers have few options but to start rebuilding. Gene Brandi, a veteran beekeeper based in Los Banos, Calif., lost 40% of his 2,000 colonies this winter.
Brandi knows plenty of beekeepers who sold their equipment at bargain prices.
Scurrying around a blackberry farm near Watsonville, Brandi, 55, was restocking his bees. In a white jumpsuit and yellow bee veil, he pulled out a frame of honeycomb from a hive that had so many bees they were spilling out the front entrance.
"When it's going good like this, you forget CCD," he said.
Hackenberg, who has spent his whole life in the business, isn't giving up either. He borrowed money and restocked with bees from Australia.
In April, the normally hale Hackenberg started feeling short of breath. His doctor said he was suffering from stress and suggested he slow down.
Not now, Hackenberg thought. "I'm going to go down fighting."
A secret meeting of U.S. and Soviet military officials
in Political Conspiracies
Posted
Last night I saw the new hit movie, “American Gangster,” starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe.
Scenes in the movie brought back memories of conversations that I had 10 years ago with an acquaintance, a retired Military Policeman (MP).
The MP’s assignment during the Viet Nam war was to serve as bodyguard to the chief U.S. Air Force General there.
Among the startling revelations told me by the retired MP were:
(1) In the midst of the war in Viet Nam, his boss, the chief U.S. Air Force General, along with other key U.S. military leaders in Viet Nam, flew on a secret mission to Moscow. They stayed there for a week, conferring with the Soviet’s top military brass. The MP and the other bodyguards assigned to the U.S. military leaders were given their own quarters during the visit and were well taken care of by their Soviet hosts while the high level talks took place.
(2) During the war, LIFE magazine published a sensational photo story about a huge warehouse in South Viet Nam were siphoned U.S. military equipment was for sale to whoever wanted it. Anything and everything was for sale, no questions asked. The MP, in his role as bodyguard to the chief U.S. Air Force General, accompanied his boss on at least one visit to the warehouse for the latter’s purpose of making certain the operation was running smoothly.
(3) After the Viet Nam war, the MP was assigned to the Las Vegas area. There he developed a private security firm on the side that provided protection to celebrities when they were in Las Vegas. Without warning, he suddenly received new orders assigning him to Alaska, forcing him to cease the lucrative operation of his security firm. Apparently, someone wanted him out of Las Vegas and had enough Pentagon pull to have new orders cut for him.
In Alaska, his duty was to meet and search U.S. military air craft that landed at a military air base. One night, on what he thought would be a routine occasion, he approached a military air craft that had just landed from Viet Nam. He had with him two dogs trained to sniff out contraband. The plane had only one passenger: a high ranking U.S. General. The MP was shocked to find that the entire plane from one end to the other was filled with bales of marijuana. The MP immediately alerted his superiors at the base and filed a written report. However, the plane was soon allowed to take off with the passenger and illegal load aboard. For months thereafter the MP and his family received deadly threats and were subjected to physical harassment in a calculated campaign to keep the criminal incident covered up.
Back to why seeing “American Gangster” had an impact on me: The movie, based on a true story, provides scenes where U.S. Military air craft from Viet Nam bring into the U.S. loads of pure heroin in an operation orchestrated by a Harlem drug lord.
I had always thought that I would never live to see the day when what the MP told would come to public light. But with the release of the movie, a portion is told in a no-holds-barred form.
Now I wonder if I shall ever see the day when we find out why the top U.S. military leaders, from Viet Nam and the Pentagon, met for a week with their counterparts in Moscow in the midst of the war in Viet Nam.
Also, I wonder if I shall see the day when we find out about the shipments of heroin into the U.S. aboard military aircraft flown from Afghanistan. If our invasion of Iraq was about oil, our invasion of Afghanistan was about heroin. Under the Tabiban, the poppy crop was decimated. Under the U.S. military now running that country, with the Tabiban’s power greatly reduced, the poppy crop has never been larger.
Maybe 30 years from now a movie will be made about it.