Paul Rigby
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How did the US produce a generation of European leaders whose fealty lies with Washington and not their own people? Three case studies for three different European colonies:
Declassified UK: Secretive US embassy-backed group cultivating UK left
Matt Kennard
24 NOVEMBER 2022
https://declassifieduk.org/the-secretive-us-embassy-backed-group-cultivating-the-british-left/
The British-American Project (BAP), founded in the 1980s with US embassy funding in response to CIA concerns about 'anti-American' drift in the Labor Party, has recently added senior Labor politicians to its secret membership rolls, according to Declassified.
How Did the German Greens Become the Party of Warmongers?
by Conor Gallagher
Posted on February 10, 2023
Unlocked: Young Jens: What Was Stoltenberg Doing at Age 15?
https://www.patreon.com/posts/unlocked-young-78471711
The consequences for Europe of America’s attempt to cling on to global hegemony:
The Newly Poor in Germany
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6dgE7Lp5j_w&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE
Ukraine War means "dark times" for the UK by Andrew Marr for The New Statesman podcast:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2mrgfkIS6PQ&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE
Companies in UK Are Hitting the Wall at Fastest Rate Since Global Financial Crisis
Posted on February 3, 2023 by Nick Corbishley
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And a brief reminder of how the CIA's goons in Ukraine dealt with the anti-coup opposition, here in Odessa:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wu2tXG2Yo-g&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE
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Neocons are very found of the word freedom, but not so fond of the practice. Craig Murray on the attempts to suppress opposition to NATO in the UK; and the consequences of the Anglo-American deep state's successful purge of the Labour Party's left-wing. We are back to the days of the British invasion of the Boer Republics and the Jingo mobs organised to smash public protests against that brutal imperial war:
QuoteThose of us critical of the aggressive promotion of war in Europe, are not only barred from all mainstream media and confined to corners of the internet, and even then heavily suppressed on social media (which is why Sy Hersh’s article does not have the scores of millions of readers it merits).
We can’t even obtain freedom of assembly.
Two established left wing venues have cancelled the No 2 Nato meeting I am addressing in London on 25 February. Conway Hall’s reasons for cancellation included threats to funding and fears for the safety of staff.
We are now reduced to a guerrilla meeting, the Central London venue for which will not be announced until the evening before.
Is this really a democracy, where it is not possible for dissidents to hold a public meeting without secrecy, subterfuge and hiding from supporters of the state?
I do urge you to come along on the day, whatever your views on the subject, to support the right to freedom of speech…
There is no longer an Overton window of permitted debate. It has narrowed and should be renamed the Overton letterbox.
One of those small difficult ones right down at the bottom of the door. With a very fierce spring, and snarling dogs guarding it.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/02/sy-hersh-and-the-way-we-live-now/
The extirpation of the Left within the UK Labour Party:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=njyIauSPQc0&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE
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Does a long war favour the Bidenescu regime? Not according to two studies - by Rand & CSIS (links below) - as noted by this shrewd Indian observer:
FEBRUARY 9, 2023 BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR
Waiting for Biden’s definition of victory in Ukraine
https://www.indianpunchline.com/waiting-for-bidens-definition-of-victory-in-ukraine/
There was an air of magical realism in the daylong visit to Kiev last Friday by the EU’s policy commissioners comprising the executive branch of the group — the so-called College — led by the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
At the end of the day in Kiev on Friday, during a joint press conference in Kiev with President Volodymyr Zelensky, all that the EU’s super bureaucrats would promise was that “Ukraine’s future is in the EU.”
However, as the BBC reported, “Typically, it takes years for countries to join — and the EU has declined to set a timescale, describing the sign-up process as “goal-based.” It all depends now on what sort of Ukraine emerges out of the war.
Surely, there is a pall of gloom in the western media lately about the war storms gathering on the horizon. A Ukrainian military officer told the BBC that the Russian forces have occupied a third of the highly strategic Bakhmut city, the hub of the so-called Zelensky Line in Donbass. Since then, there have been reports of more Russian successes. The Ukrainian defence line is cracking through which an elephant can pass to the steppes en route to the Dnieper River.
An AP report quoting Ukrainian officials in Kiev says, “Russian forces are keeping Ukrainian troops tied down with attacks in the eastern Donbass region as Moscow assembles additional combat power there for an expected offensive in the coming weeks.” Reuters too reports that Russian forces have been advancing “in relentless battles in the east. A regional governor said Moscow was pouring in reinforcements for a new offensive that could begin next week.”
Writing for Bloomberg, Hal Brands at the American Enterprises Institute, drastically trims the Biden Administration’s priorities to “reluctance to further inflame Putin’s ire.” Hal sums up: “Washington’s goal is a Ukraine that is militarily defensible, politically independent and economically viable; this doesn’t necessarily include retaking difficult areas such as the eastern Donbass or Crimea.”
There is no more talk about destroying the Russian “war machinery” or an insurrection against the Kremlin and a regime change.
Two recent think tank reports that appeared in the US last month — Avoiding a Long War by the Rand Corporation (affiliated to the Pentagon) and Empty Bins by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies — epitomise a rude awakening.
The Rand Corporation report starkly warns that given the NATO countries’ indirect involvement in the war — “breathtaking in scope” — keeping a Russia-NATO war below the nuclear threshold is going to be “extremely difficult.”
It introduces another chilling thought that a protracted war in Ukraine, which “many” in the Beltway subscribe to as a means to degrade the Russian military and weaken the Russian economy, “would also have consequences for US foreign policy,” as the US’ ability to focus on other global priorities — particularly, competition with China — will remain constrained.
The Rand report argues that “Washington does have a long-term interest in ensuring that Moscow does not become completely subordinated to Beijing.” The report concludes that the paramount US interest lies in avoiding a long war, since “the consequences of a long war — raging from persistent elevated escalation risks to economic damage — far outweigh the possible benefits.”
The report presents a frank assessment that “it is fanciful to imagine that it [ Kiev] could destroy Russia’s ability to wage war.” Its most astounding finding, perhaps, is two-fold: firstly, the US does not even share Ukraine’s drive for retrieving “lost” territories”; and, secondly, that it is in the American interest that Russia remains independent of China with a measure of strategic autonomy vis-a-vis the US-China rivalry.
On the other hand, the CSIS report, authored by the well-known strategic thinker Seth Jones (formerly at the Rand) is a wake-up call that the US defence industrial base is grossly inadequate for the “competitive security environment that now exists.” The report has a chapter titled Ukraine and the Great Awakening, which underscores that the US arms supples to Ukraine have “strained the [US] defence industrial base to produce sufficient quantities of some munitions and weapon systems.” Jones represents the duality of the US military-industrial complex, which is disinterested in the objective of the war in Ukraine as such.
His grouse is that the US defence industrial base — including the munitions industrial base — is not currently equipped to support a protracted conventional war, although, as the UK newspaper Sunday Times wrote last week, “All wars spawn profiteers, and the Ukraine conflict is no exception… The enormous supply of western arms to Ukraine has bolstered all weapons manufacturers, mainly in restocking Nato’s own arsenals and fulfilling the big orders from countries now spending more on defence….In the US, Lockheed, Raytheon and Northrop are among the big arms and jet fighter manufacturers with bulging order books.”
The Rand and CSIS reports appeared at a time when the war has reached a tipping point. Thus, within the last month, the US has announced three of the largest aid packages to Ukraine in a sign of ongoing support as the war nears its one-year mark. And on Friday, the Biden Administration announced yet another new Ukraine security package worth approximately $2.2 billion that includes longer-range missiles with a range of 90 miles for the first time.
Herein lies the paradox. On February 1, four senior Defense Department officials reportedly told the US House Armed Services Committee lawmakers in a classified briefing that the Pentagon doesn’t believe Ukraine has the ability to force Russian troops out of the Crimean peninsula. After the briefing, the House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) asserted in an interview that the war “needs to end this summer.”
Senator Rogers said: “There’s a school of thought … that Crimea’s got to be a part of it. Russia is never going to quit and give up Crimea… What is doable? And I don’t think that that’s agreed upon yet. So I think that there’s going to have to be some pressure from our government and NATO leaders with Zelensky about what does victory look like. And I think that’s going to help us more than anything to be able to drive Putin and Zelensky to the table to end this thing this summer.”
This is the first time that a top US political personality has called for a timeline for the war. It came as no wonder, as Senator Bob Menendez the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who presided over the hearings on Ukraine on January 26 — also addressed the core issue in a question for the record to the US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland who was testifying.
The influential senator bemoaned that Washington has “no definition of victory,” and sought an answer from Nuland, who was rendered speechless. But it must have rankled her, for, at the fag-end of the hearing, she volunteered a reply: “If we define winning as Ukraine surviving and thriving as a cleaner democratic state, it can, it must, it will.” Period.
Nuland fudged. But that is also what President Biden did in his State of the Union address on Wednesday by sticking to his tiresome mantra — that the US will support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” That said, significantly, Zelensky has taken off for a tour of major European capitals to discuss what could possibly constitute peace.
Indeed, all this is a far cry from Von der Leyen’s rhetoric as she set out for Kiev last week: “With the visit of the College to Kyiv, the EU is sending today a very clear message to Ukraine and beyond about our collective strength and resolve in the face of Russia’s brutal aggression. We will continue supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes. And we will continue to impose a heavy price on Russia until it ceases its aggression. Ukraine can count on Europe to help rebuild a more resilient country, that progresses on its path to join the EU.”
There is something that either Von der Leyen doesn’t know about, or doesn’t want to talk about. Meanwhile, Biden seems closer to her than to Rand and the CSIS or Senator Menendez and Nuland — leave alone Republican Senator Rogers. That must be an optical illusion.
Avoiding a Long War: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA2510-1.html
Empty Bins in a Wartime Environment: https://www.csis.org/analysis/empty-bins-wartime-environment-challenge-us-defense-industrial-base
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46 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:
Did you ever read Catherine Belton's book, Putin's People, as I advised?
I wouldn't bother, it's boilerplate Deep State pap albeit with the rare distinction of having been tested - and found wanting - in court.
Below, a selection of John Helmer’s (Dances with Bears website) exposes of Catherine Belton as Deep State transmission belt:
Thursday, April 16th, 2020: http://johnhelmer.net/the-gospel-version-of-russia-catherine-belton-and-sergei-pugachev-preach-a-sermon-for-rupert-murdoch-to-sell-and-for-luke-harding-to-proselytise/
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021: http://johnhelmer.net/reuters-russia-lies-put-to-truth-test-in-uk-high-court-rupert-murdoch-sergei-pugachev-catherine-belton-charged-by-roman-abramovich/
Wednesday, July 28th, 2021: http://johnhelmer.net/catherine-belton-loses-first-truth-test-rupert-murdoch-publisher-to-retract-apologise-reuters-pretends-it-isnt-so/
Monday, October 4th, 2021: http://johnhelmer.net/beltons-people-fbi-investigation-casts-new-shadow-over-catherine-beltons-book-in-court/
Investigations by US government officials, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), of Christopher Steele’s (lead image, right) Russiagate dossier have identified Catherine Belton (left) as one of the targets for his fabrications. Belton was herself investigated as one of the journalists Steele recruited to plant his allegations of Russian interference days before the 2016 presidential election.
In her book Putin’s People, Belton repeats many of Steele’s allegations but she does not cite him or his consulting company Orbis as her source. Belton adds at the end of the book: “I’ll always be grateful to Chris [Steele] for his moral support.” After Belton’s book appeared in April 2020, Steele admitted to lawyers engaged in a London High Court lawsuit against him that Belton is “a friend, yes, she’s a friend”.
Fresh evidence revealed in the indictment issued by the US Department of Justice on September 16, shows that the FBI has concluded Steele was lying when he and his American accomplices planted false allegations of Russian election interference through several named intermediaries, including a Russian bank and Russian émigrés in the US,. The New York Times and The Atlantic were identified in last month’s US court papers as willing outlets for the fabrications. Earlier litigation by the Alfa Bank group in the US has identified five New York Times reporters and David Corn of Mother Jones as collaborators in the scheme.
Belton’s name, tagged with the note “London meeting”, has also surfaced in meeting notes taken at the State Department on October 11, 2016, when Steele met with Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland and a deputy, Kathleen Kavalec. Kavalec’s meeting notes, partially declassified, reveal that Steele’s allegations of Russian election interference followed a briefing of the same allegations at the FBI a month earlier, on September 19, 2016, by Michael Sussmann, a lawyer working in secret for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Sussmann is now charged with lying then to the FBI.
The Justice Department’s indictment says Sussmann was one of the plotters with Steele and others, including journalists, university academics, and IT experts in publishing false stories of Russian election interference; their plot aimed at hurting the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, by making it appear he was in cahoots with the Kremlin to hurt the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.
“In or about late October 2016 – approximately one week before the 2016 U.S. Presidential election – multiple media outlets reported that U.S. government authorities had received and were investigating allegations concerning a purported secret channel of communications between the Trump Organization, owned by Donald J. Trump, and a particular Russian bank (‘Russian Bank-I’).”
The Kavalec notebook also reveals that Steele claimed there were “3 distinct channels” for this Russian operation “run by Kremlin, not FSB, Ivanov, Peskov, Putin.” In addition to accusing Alfa Bank as the first channel “Alfa-Trump-Kremlin-comms”, Steele told Nuland that Serge Millian, a Russian émigré businessman in the US, was the second; Carter Page, a wannabe Trump campaign adviser, was the third.
In the sequence of Kavalec’s notes. Steele told Nuland there were “hackers out of R[ussia] – acting in US – [payments out of the state] pension fund Miami consulate payments – implants. Operations Paige [sic], Millian (émigrés?), Manafort.” Steele then mentioned the London meeting with Belton whom he identified as “FT [Financial Times]”.
Reporting by Belton in the Financial Times followed days after her meeting was mentioned by Steele to Nuland. In Belton’s published report, she named Serge Millian as the channel Steele had alleged at State and the FBI. “Now, “ Belton claimed on November 1, one week before Election Day, “the US administration has formally accused Russia of attempting to interfere in the US electoral process through the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s email servers, Mr Millian’s activities — and his ties to the Republican presidential nominee — are coming under increasing scrutiny.” Belton did not identify her sources for her allegations against Millian. She implied, however, that they were US intelligence agents and the FBI. “Mr Millian came on to the FBI’s radar”, Belton reported. “The FBI probe was part of a wake-up call for US intelligence over suspicions that Russia was activating networks long thought defunct after the end of the cold war.”
Millian avoided Belton for an interview and she reported. “He declined repeated requests for an interview and left the US for Asia on a business trip in early October.” Two weeks before, Steele had told Nuland, according to Kavalec’s transcript, Millian was “now in China.”
According to Belton, Millian had been a real estate broker for Trump, selling Trump organisation properties to Russians. Steele had told Nuland “real estate entities used for massive set of purchases by Russians. Set up espionage network in FL[orida] – to buy a lot of properties for POTUS [Trump’s] businesses through a R[ussian] brokage. 100’s of real estate transactions.”
Two months ago, on July 28, Belton was exposed as a xxxx and fabricator of her source material by her British publisher, HarperCollins. Settling the High Court case brought against them both by Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven of Alfa Bank, the publisher said there was “no significant evidence” for Belton’s allegations of KGB connections in the early careers of Fridman and Aven; and that she had failed to check her claims with Fridman and Aven before publishing them. The publisher agreed to delete Belton’s allegations from the book.
The terms of that settlement, and the ongoing High Court case in London, have stopped Macmillan, the US publisher of the book, from issuing the paperback edition, according to industry sources.
Once Belton’s allegations against the Alfa Bank group were abandoned by HarperCollins, lawyers for the remaining plaintiffs – Roman Abramovich, Rosneft and Shalva Chigirinsky – are now focusing on Belton’s acknowledged dependence on Steele – and on the fabrications Steele got Belton to print before the US election.
Tuesday, October 19th, 2021: http://johnhelmer.net/computer-analysis-reveals-catherine-beltons-book-has-another-author/
Wednesday, November 24th, 2021: http://johnhelmer.net/british-high-court-judge-rules-against-catherine-belton-harpercollins-in-double-barreled-blast/
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Richard Hofstadter 😅
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48 minutes ago, Michael Griffith said:
I think it is very sad and perplexing to see anyone, in 2023, minimizing the scale and horror of Soviet brutality and aggression, given all that we now know.
And I find it appalling that anyone, in 2023, would seek to minimize the scale and horror of American brutality and aggression across the globe given all that we now know.
Fortunately, not all American conservatives are as blind as you to the massacres perpetrated by as policy by the US:
The Korean War Atrocities No One Wants to Talk About
For decades they covered up the U.S. massacre of civilians at No Gun Ri and elsewhere. This is why we never learn our lessons.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-korean-war-atrocities-no-one-wants-to-talk-about/
Jim Bovard
Jun 26, 2020 (12:01 AM)
June 25th was the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers fought bravely in that war, and almost 37,000 were killed. But the media is ignoring perhaps the war’s most important lesson: the U.S. government has almost unlimited sway to hide its own war crimes.
During the Korean War, Americans were deluged with official pronouncements about how the U.S. military was taking all possible steps to protect innocent civilians. Because the evils of communism were self-evident, few questions arose about how the U.S. was thwarting Red aggression. When a U.S. Senate subcommittee appointed in 1953 by Sen. Joseph McCarthy investigated Korean War atrocities, the committee explicitly declared that, “war crimes were defined as those acts committed by enemy nations.”
In 1999, forty-six years after the cease fire in Korea, the Associated Press exposed a 1950 massacre of Korean refugees at No Gun Ri. U.S. troops drove Koreans out of their village and forced them to remain on a railroad embankment. Beginning on July 25, 1950, the refugees were strafed by U.S. planes and machine guns over the following three days. Hundreds of people, mostly women and children, were killed. The 1999 AP story was widely denounced by American politicians and some media outlets as a slander on American troops.
The Pentagon promised an exhaustive investigation. In January 2001, the Pentagon released a 300-page report purportedly proving that the No Gun Ri killings were merely “an unfortunate tragedy” caused by trigger-happy soldiers frightened by approaching refugees.
President Bill Clinton announced his “regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri.” In a January 2001 interview, Clinton was asked why he used “regret” instead of “apology.” He declared, “I believe that the people who looked into it could not conclude that there was a deliberate act, decided at a high enough level in the military hierarchy, to acknowledge that, in effect, the government had participated in something that was terrible.” Clinton specified that there was no evidence of “wrongdoing high enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect, the government was responsible.”
In 2005, Sahr Conway-Lanz, a Harvard University doctoral student, discovered a letter in the National Archives from the U.S. ambassador to Korea, John Muccio, sent to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the day the No Gun Ri massacre commenced. Muccio summarized a new policy from a meeting between U.S. military and South Korean officials: “If refugees do appear from north of U.S. lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.” The new policy was radioed to Army units around Korea on the morning the No Gun Ri massacre began. The U.S. military feared that North Korean troops might be hiding amidst the refugees. The Pentagon initially claimed that its investigators never saw Muccio’s letter but it was in the specific research file used for its report.
Conway-Lanz’s 2006 book Collateral Damage quoted an official U.S. Navy history of the first six months of the Korean War stating that the policy of strafing civilians was “wholly defensible.” An official Army history noted: “Eventually, it was decided to shoot anyone who moved at night.” A report for the aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge justified attacking civilians because the Army insisted that “groups of more than eight to ten people were to be considered troops, and were to be attacked.”
In 2007, the Army recited its original denial: “No policy purporting to authorize soldiers to shoot refugees was ever promulgated to soldiers in the field.” But the Associated Press exposed more dirt from the U.S. archives: “More than a dozen documents—in which high-ranking U.S. officers tell troops that refugees are ‘fair game,’ for example, and order them to ‘shoot all refugees coming across river’—were found by the AP in the investigators’ own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None of those documents was disclosed in the Army’s 300-page public report.”
A former Air Force Pilot told investigators that his plane and three others strafed refugees at the same time of the No Gun Ri massacre; the official report claimed “all pilots interviewed … knew nothing about such orders.” Evidence also surfaced of other massacres like No Gun Ri. On September 1, 1950, the destroyer USS DeHaven, at the Army’s insistence, “fired on a seaside refugee encampment at Pohang, South Korea. Survivors say 100 to 200 people were killed.”
Slaughtering civilians en masse became routine procedure after the Chinese Army intervened in the Korean war in late 1950. U.S. Commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur spoke of turning North Korean-held territory into a “desert.” The U.S. military eventually “expanded its definition of a military target to any structure that could shelter enemy troops or supplies.” In a scoring method that foreshadowed the Vietnam war body counts, Air Force press releases touted the “square footage” of “enemy-held buildings” that it flattened. General Curtis LeMay summarized the achievements: “We burned down every town in North Korea… and some in South Korea, too.” A million civilians may have been killed during the war, and a South Korean government Truth and Reconciliation Commission uncovered many previously unreported atrocities.
The Pentagon strategy on Korean War atrocities succeeded because it left truth to the historians, not the policymakers. The facts about No Gun Ri finally slipped out—ten presidencies later. Even more damaging, the Rules of Engagement for killing Korean civilians were covered up until after four more U.S. wars. If U.S. policy for slaying Korean refugees had been exposed during that war, it might have curtailed similar killings in Vietnam (many of which were not revealed until decades after the war).
Former congressman and decorated Korean War veteran Pete McCloskey warned, “The government will always lie about embarrassing matters.” The same shenanigans permeate other U.S. wars. The secrecy and deceit surrounding U.S. military interventions has had catastrophic consequences in this century. The Bush administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to justify attacking Iraq in 2003, and it was not until 2016 that the U.S. government revealed documents exposing the Saudi government’s role in financing the hijackers (15 of 19 were Saudi citizens). The Pentagon covered up the vast majority of U.S. killings of Iraqi civilians until Bradley Manning and Wikileaks exposed them in 2010. There is likely reams of evidence of duplicity and intentional slaughter of civilians in U.S. government files on its endlessly confused and contradictory Syrian intervention.
When politicians or generals appear itching to pull the U.S. into another foreign war, remember that truth is routinely the first casualty. The blood of civilian victims of U.S. wars is the political version of disappearing ink. But the kinfolk and neighbors of those victims could pursue vengeance regardless of whether cover-ups con the American people.
James Bovard is the author of Lost Rights, Attention Deficit Democracy, and Public Policy Hooligan. He is also a USA Today columnist. Follow him on Twitter @JimBovard.
Get off your high horse: America is to democracies what Jack the Ripper was to the care of fallen women. You extirpate them wherever you find them.
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One of the lines of attack upon Wallace concerned his championship of Nicholas Roerich:
The New Deal And The Guru
https://www.americanheritage.com/new-deal-and-guru
J. Samuel Walker
March 1989 (V40 N2)
Early in 1934 Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace appointed Nicholas Roerich, a renowned painter and a self-proclaimed guardian of world peace and culture, to lead a scientific expedition to North China and Manchuria, to search for drought-resistant grasses that might revive the Dust Bowl. By the time the project ended, in 1935, the eccentric artist had compromised America’s diplomatic position in Asia, embarrassed the Roosevelt administration, humiliated Wallace, and damaged the careers of several botanists. And he had not advanced the cause of combating the drought in the United States.
The episode—one of the most bizarre in the history of the New Deal—began with Henry Wallace’s infatuation with Roerich’s mystical philosophy. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1874, Roerich had studied painting, drawing, and archeology in various academies, and had become president of the Society for Encouragement of Fine Arts in Russia and a noted theater designer—he created the sets and costumes for the epochal 1913 Nijinsky premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. He emigrated from Russia a short time after the Bolshevik Revolution, apparently by his own choice, and after a brief stay in England moved to the United States, arriving in New York City in 1920.
At first Roerich had a hard time here, living modestly while selling paintings and designing stage sets. But then Louis L. Horch, a wealthy New York broker, and his wife, Nettie, became greatly impressed by Roerich and spent large sums settling Roerich’s debts and financing his activities. Roerich claimed he had the ability to communicate with the spiritual sphere through “automatic writings.” With his eyes covered, the artist could record thoughts and instructions from another world—on one occasion he received specific directions on how to raise funds to build a museum in New York to display Roerich’s work.
In 1925 Roerich went off to India and Tibet to paint a “great panoramic series of works” and to translate “original manuscripts, folk lore, and artistic material of these countries.” At Horch’s expense he traveled widely in Asia for four years. While there, he generated so much turmoil that the British Foreign Office labeled him an “unbalanced individual.” He claimed to have discovered a manuscript in a Tibetan monastery proving that Christ had lived and preached in India as a young man. He also made a mysterious trip to the Soviet Union, where he apparently conferred with government officials. Subsequently he wrote books praising the Soviet system and describing both Christ and Buddha as communists, but the United States State Department found no convincing evidence that linked him “in any way with communist movements.” At any rate, he eventually severed his ties with Russia in favor of a fantastic scheme to create an autonomous state under his leadership in Siberia.
While Roerich was traveling in Asia, a writer named Frances Grant who admired him wrote adulatory articles and pamphlets. Her efforts, along with his genuine artistic ability, helped win him an enviable international reputation as a painter. Horch, meanwhile, worked at building a museum for Roerich’s work. Between 1923 and 1929 Horch erected at 103rd Street and Riverside Drive in New York a twenty-nine story apartment house whose bottom floors constituted the Roerich Museum, with exhibit space for more than a thousand of the artist’s paintings. Horch served as president of the museum and Grant as vice-president. Roerich returned to the United States to speak at the museum’s dedication but neglected to thank the architects, builders, or contributors, or even Horch, for their efforts on his behalf. He also insisted on the addition of stained-glass windows and an expensive change in the wallpaper, which Horch carried out.
With his museum established and his fame growing, Roerich turned to a new project. He called for an international agreement to protect cultural monuments and artistic treasures, particularly during wartime. In 1929 he and several associates formally drafted a treaty that they hoped would gain worldwide acceptance. It became known as the Roerich Pact. They also adopted a “Banner of Peace”—a red circle surrounding three spheres on a field of white, representing the common bonds of culture, spirit, and humanity that transcended the divisions among people. Delegates from more than twenty countries attended conferences to discuss the pact in Bruges, Belgium, in 1931 and 1932, but they failed to take any action on it. The U.S. Department of State found the pact “futile, weak, and unenforceable,” but after Roosevelt took office, his endorsement of the treaty and Henry Wallace’s aggressive advocacy of it eventually prevailed over the State Department’s opposition.
Wallace was himself somewhat mystically inclined. He was a brilliant plant geneticist, who had developed the first hybrid corn for commercial use, and a respected economist, whose writings on farm problems had made him a leading agricultural spokesman—Roosevelt once referred to him as “Old Man Common Sense”—but he also exhibited a prominent strain of fervent idealism. He was an intensely religious man who disdained “the wishy-washy goodygoodness and the infantile irrelevancy” of conventional Christianity. He viewed the Depression as an opportunity for a spiritual reformation; the “fundamental cure” for it, Wallace believed, entailed “changing the human heart,” a renunciation of selfishness and greed.
Continued at link
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Two great podcasts from Burt Cohen's Keeping Democracy Alive series:
Henry Wallace: One of our greatest Americans. Who?
February 12, 2013
The Cold War and Red Baiting of the 50s. America’s war in Vietnam. Civil rights and women’s equality. All would have been far different had the Democratic machine not replaced FDR’s vice president Henry Wallace with their own choice Harry Truman at the 1944 party convention. Wallace opposed imperialism and sought good relations with revolutionary movements throughout the world. Though practically unknown today, according to Petrer Dreier, author of The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century, Wallace was was truly one of our greats. If only…
https://keepingdemocracyalive.com/henry-a-wallace-one-of-our-greatest-americans-who/
An actual coup in America: Democrats in 1944
August 3, 2017
In the long held American tradition of opposition to colonialism and a government serving the common good, FDR’s vice president Henry A Wallace was an outstanding visionary. Then a corrupt political machine performed a bloodless coup at the 1944 Democratic convention. Just as his name was to be placed in nomination (he easily had the votes to win) the gavel was brought down and the convention instantly adjourned despite a huge outcry from the floor. Had Wallace remained as VP, he would have become president instead of Truman. American University History Professor Peter Kuznick explains the incredibly significance of this act to the next seventy years of American history. There would have been no atomic bombs dropped and no Vietnam War, had Wallace’s name simply been placed in nomination. The difference was about nine seconds. Listen in and learn.
https://keepingdemocracyalive.com/actual-coup-america-democrats-1944/
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Bill,
Penn Jones, Jr, in his Continuing Inquiry, responded to the 1977 publication of Rather’s The Camera Never Blinks with a four page review that can be found here:
There is much on Rather, including important interventions from Ken Rheberg, the owner of Dan Rather’s personal log book, in this thread, in which I argue, inter alia, that Rather was telling the truth about a number of key points in the first version of the Zapruder film:
In this Deep Politics Forum thread, I provided numbered line-by-line transcripts of Rather’s three known descriptions of the Z film on CBS-TV in the course of November 25, 1963:
https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/thread-12359.html
Robert Prudhomme’s thread on this forum concerning Rather & Zapruder is well-worth a look, too:
Happy hunting.
Paul
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Gil,
Read the Krock piece again - it's an extended defence of the CIA, and an attack on both Richard Starnes, from whose "Arrogant CIA" dispatch Krock quotes so extensively, and JFK, for permitting public criticism of the Agency.
I lost a deal of work on Krock, and much else besides, following a computer crash, so what follows is merely a surviving rough draft outlining his career-long service to the Allen Dulles wing of the US elite.
NYT’s Arthur Krock as CIA mouthpiece
The NYT’s Arthur Krock, the Princeton-educated doyen - by virtue of his stint as the NYT's Washington bureau chief (1931-1953) (1), then resident senior commentator (1953-1966) (2) – of capitol correspondents is often depicted as a Kennedy family intimate in general, and a loyal friend of President Kennedy in particular. The later is a half-truth designed to hide an inconvenient fact. For while Krock did contribute a foreword to JFK’s Why England Slept, and was the book’s dedicatee, there were profound disagreements between the journalist and the politician, disagreements that widened as the Kennedy presidency unfolded. At their root lay politics. Krock was a hard-line economic and racial conservative. As late as 1968, he continued to insist, quite surreally, that union power ruled “supreme over the economy”(3); and that the Department of Justice under Kennedy and Johnson had “spinelessly established the fact of being a Negro as a grant of immunity”(4). He was also American journalism’s most devoted servant of the CIA and both its forerunners, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Central Intelligence Group (CIG).
Krock’s career of lying in the service of power and wealth began in earnest in the pages of the New York World. Taking his cue from the paper’s star reporter, Edward Bayard Swope, Krock used his op. ed. contributions to burnish the reputation of Bernard Baruch, the financier and serial political eminence grise, in return for lucrative stock market tips. He simultaneously supplemented his income by serving as what he himself termed a “private counsel” on “public relations” to the banking firm of Dillon, Reid. It was for leaking details of “an editorial likely to effect the price” of certain Dillon, Reid stocks that the paper’s editor, Walter Lippmann, in one of his career-defining fits of selective indignation, barred Krock from further contributions to the editorial pages. As a token of its enduring commitment to the highest levels of journalistic integrity, the New York Times responded by hiring, then swiftly promoting, the offending Krock (5).
By the 1930s, Krock was a zealous isolationist with a hands-off approach to European fascism. In 1935, according to Krock, FDR wrote to the NYT’s publisher urging Krock’s dismissal (6). Krock’s memoir makes this action appear capricious and unwarranted. FDR was prescient. A Krock column of May 1937 sought to pressure the President into removing William Dodds, the determinedly anti-Hitler US Ambassador to Berlin, with a figure more congenial to both Hitler and his backers within the US elite (7). A year later, a Krock column sought to scupper the attempt to repeal the US embargo on aid to the democratically elected Spanish Republican government (8). In August 1940, he tried “to turn Wilkie from co-operation with Roosevelt on the question of releasing destroyers to Britain,” citing “Roosevelt’s failure to co-operate with Hoover in the critical months between Roosevelt’s election and inauguration” (9). Krock’s gift for the apposite and timely analogy, be it historical, constitutional, or merely moral, was a recurring characteristic of his journalism.
Krock did not come under sustained attack from the massive covert propaganda effort undertaken by British intelligence against US isolationism in the years 1940-41 for the very good reason that the journalist, like the faction within the US elite for whom he was such a dutiful mouthpiece, was too powerful to offend. That faction was, in any case, ready to move. By late September 1941, Krock was noting, with well-concealed dismay, the collapse of solidarity among the Congressional advocates of continued isolationism, a change effected in part by a British intelligence-concocted opinion poll which appeared to show a dramatic shift in attitudes among delegates to the American Legion convention of earlier that same month(10).
Krock’s championship of the modern “external” US intelligence community began with an October 1941 puff piece in support of William Donovan’s disinterested call for a presidential war room. The latter was to function as the focal point of, and clearing house for, intelligence supplied by men like…William Donovan, the Wall Street lawyer who became the OSS’s first and only head (11). With the war’s end, FDR ordered the winding up of the OSS (12). He was not alone in his fears. A prescient Republican Senator, Edward V. Robertson (Wyoming), argued - when opposing the National Security bill – that the resultant bureaucracy would become “an American Gestapo,” and create “a vast military empire” (13). Truman initially endorsed his predecessor’s verdict (14), but was soon to discover that the presidential writ runs only where real power permits.
In the summer and autumn of 1945, the OSS fought tooth and nail the decision to fold of successive US Presidents. As Donovan’s assistant, Robert H. Alcorn, later revealed, his boss had no intention of seeing his creation abolished (15). In the classic manner of the spook bureaucracy, this campaign was waged by simultaneous suppression and propaganda. As a CIA propagandist observed: “Propaganda thrives best if there are no competing expressions of opinion to disturb the audience” (16). Thus Drew Pearson’s critical swipe at the class composition of the OSS, and the effect its ruling Wall Street claque had in determining policy toward occupied Germany, contained in a despatch filed from San Francisco on 27 April 1945, gained a public airing not thanks to the Bell Syndicate, his customary distributors, but Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, who read it into the Congressional Record (17).
At the same time as it suppressed criticism, the OSS selectively declassified its own files, and spoon-fed them to tame hacks (18). Among the group charged with either spicing up the sanitised boys own adventure stories fed them, or else drawing the correct conclusions from same, was, inevitably, Krock. In July, he lamented the ingratitude shown the OSS for its war-time heroics (19). In August, he argued that America’s newly-won global dominance merited nothing less than “an active intelligence looking to the outside world,” not least to prevent the repetition of “pre-war mistakes” (20).
Two months later, he memorialised OSS Colonel Peter Dewey, “the first American to die in Vietnam” (albeit only until the early 1960s, when the next first American to die on active service in Vietnam did so). The paragon Dewey, NYT readers learned, was “shot from ambush” by ungrateful natives who had mistaken him for a French officer, and thus unwittingly deprived themselves of an anti-colonialist liberator (21). Vast numbers of the great unwashed, not only in Vietnam, were of course to persist in this absurd error for many decades to come. The victory of those campaigning for a vast “external” intelligence bureaucracy saw the formation of, first, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), then the CIA. With Truman’s change of heart came approval. In July 1946, Krock praised Truman as the best-briefed President ever, one who would not repeat the mistakes of Roosevelt in making too many concessions to the Russians because, thanks to the existence of the CIG, he would be much better informed (22).
The CIA’s overthrow of the elected government of Guatemala in 1954 saw Krock welcoming the defeat of “the world Bolshevik conspiracy to take over the country” and the advent of a military junta, albeit only “until there can be free and democratic elections again.” Precisely how and when that happy state was to be achieved were subjects that did not obsess Krock. He denied any US involvement, and thought America, the serial invader of Central American countries, had been slow to respond to burgeoning Moscow-directed intervention in the region (23).
Aware of the U-2 flights over the USSR “long before they became public knowledge” (24), Krock whitewashed the CIA’s role in arming and financing Fidel Castro (25), and later censored the key phrase of Eisenhower’s ominous farewell address to the nation as President (from the actual “military-industrial complex” to the more ideologically acceptable “industry-government spending combination” (26)).
The less public face of Krock’s role as elite insider saw repeated service as messenger and intermediary. As early as January 1933, Krock conveyed a message from Herbert Hoover to his successor, FDR, on the subject of independence for the Philippines (27). That role endured, as was strikingly illustrated by his involvement in the startling revelation of Eisenhower’s last head of the Atomic Energy Commission - and that revelation’s part in the cover-up of the supply by the Pentagon and the Agency of atomic weaponry to Israel.
In December 1960, an Arabic-language broadcast from Moscow insisted that Israel had recently taken receipt of a ready-made atomic bomb, courtesy of the United States. The claim drew the tacit endorsement of The Times, which noted in its comment on the broadcast that a cover-story was already in motion: “Surprised indignation about the idea of a Franco-Israel bomb seemed a more effective response than a mere denial” (28). In fact, de Gaulle had severed all such co-operation upon his return to power in 1958 (29).
The cover-story took wing in the NYT of 19 December 1960, courtesy of reporter John Finney, who had been steered in the direction of the Atomic Energy Commission head by Arthur Krock (30). Within days of the interview’s emergence, the AEC chief, the cover story launched, announced his resignation on NBC’s Meet The Press. John A. McCone was to replace Allen Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence only after a fierce and neglected power struggle, one that saw the unexplained displacement of Kennedy’s first choice, Fowler Hamilton, who had spent months at Langley preparing for the role (31).
Krock’s opposition to Kennedy’s policies – from the Congo to Alabama – led to some of the most hypocritical attacks launched by an American journalist on a President. In February 1963, he joined in the attack on the Kennedy administration’s news manipulation: “A news management policy not only exists but in the form of direct and deliberate actions has been enforced more cynically and more boldly than by any other previous Administration…One principal form that it takes is social flattery of Washington reporters and commentators – many more than ever got this treatment in the past – by the President and his high-level supporters” (32). As a right-wing English journalist noted, “Arthur Krock had a grouch, no doubt, since he was not among those who were being flattered.” (33). Krock’s hypocrisy was complete and unabashed. This was the same journalist, of course, who had participated in the OSS campaign against Truman in 1946, and who worked for the newspaper that denounced and censored Bertrand Russell’s claims that the US was using napalm and defoliants in Vietnam in 1963 (34).
(1) Arthur Krock. Memoirs: Intimate Recollections of Twelve American Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1970), p. 92.
(2) Ibid., p. 78.
(3) Ibid. p. 278.
(4) Ibid., p.277.
(5) Ronald Steel. Walter Lippmann and the American Century (NY: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 200-201. In his Memoirs (p. 63), Krock dates his joining the NYT to 1 May 1927.
(6) Arthur Krock. Memoirs: Intimate Recollections of Twelve American Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1970), p. 182.
(7) Arnold A. Offner. American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933-1938 (NY: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1976), p. 205. NYT, 5 May 1938.
(8) Ibid., p. 159. NYT, 14 May 1937.
(9) Mark Lincoln Chadwin. The Warhawks: American Interventionists before Pearl Harbor (NY: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1970), pp. 94-95. NYT, 1 August 1940.
(10) Thomas E. Mahl. Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (Washington: Brasseys, 1998), p. 96. Krock’s NYT column of 21 September 1941.
(11) John Ranelagh. The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (London: Sceptre, 1988), p. 60. See the NYT, 8 October 1941.
(12)
(13) Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, “Why was the CIA Established in 1947?,” Intelligence and National Security, January 1997, (Vol. 12, No. 1), p. 29.
(14) “[F]ollowing the Japanese surrender on 2 September 1945, Truman ordered the disbanding of the OSS as of 1 October of that year.” (Athan G. Theoharis & John Stuart Cox. The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (London: Harrap Books, 1989), p. 190.)
(15) Richard J. Barnet. Roots of War: The Men and the Institutions behind US Foreign Policy (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 32.
(16) Thomas E. Mahl. Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (Washington: Brasseys, 1998), p. ?
(17) George Seldes. The People Don’t Know: The American Press and the Cold War (NY: Gaer Associates, 1949), pp.324-325: “The OSS…has, strangely [sic], distributed some of the most powerful bankers representatives in the United States at key points where they can influence U.S. policy in occupied Germany. The roster of OSS men who have been or are operating in Europe reads like a bluestocking list of the first 60 families…”
(18) William R. Corson. The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Community (NY: The Dial Press/James Wade Books, 1977), p. 244. The other named journalistic servants of the OSS were: Joseph Loftus (“Secret Thai Role in War Detailed,” NYT, 9 September 1945, p.20), Bess Furman, and Tillman Durdin (“US ‘Cloak and Dagger’ Exploits and Secret Blows in China Bared,” New York Times, 14 September 1945, p.1).
(19) R. Harris Smith. OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1972), p. 424, citing Krock’s “OSS Gets It Coming And Going,” New York Times, 31 July 1945.
(20) Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, “Why was the CIA Established in 1947?,” Intelligence and National Security, January 1997, (Vol. 12, No. 1), p. 23. See also the same author’s The CIA and American Democracy (Yale UP, 1989), p. 37. The Krock column in question appeared in the NYT on 16 July, 1946.
(21) Noam Chomsky. Turning the Tide: US Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace (London: Pluto Press, 1985), p. 164. Krock in the NYT, 29 June 1954.
(22) Arthur Krock. Memoirs: Intimate Recollections of Twelve American Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1970), p. 181.
(23) Ibid., pp. 275-6. Krock pointed the finger at the State Department. The later was unquestionably used for cover by the Agency, but was most definitely not the driving force behind the policy. To hide the CIA’s role, Krock cites the penultimate US Ambassador to Cuba, Arthur Gardner, but not the last, Earl T. Smith, who attested to the CIA’s backing for Castro before a Senate Sub-committee in late August 1960.
(24) Ibid., p. 276. The effect is eerily echoed in the shifting variants employed by President Bush on the subject of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.” Orwellian right-speak, no less.
(25) Ibid., p. 128-129.
(26) “Israel Fails to Allay U.S. Anxiety,” The Times, 21 December 1960, p. 6. Time, for example, the ever-faithful mouthpiece of the military-industrial complex, was eagerly running the cover-story. See “The Atom,” 26 December 1960, p. 11.
(27) Bernard Ledwidge. De Gaulle (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p. 304.
(28) Seymour Hersh. The Samson Option: Israel, America and the Bomb (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), p.71.
(29)
(30)
(31) Helen Fuller. Year of Trial: Kennedy’s Crucial Decisions (NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), p. 271: “A New York lawyer, Fowler Hamilton, with considerable experience behind him, had been brought to Washington and installed at the CIA with the general expectation that he would succeed Allen Dulles…”
AP, "Retirement of CIA Chief Announced," Washington Post, 1 August 1961, p.A2: Salinger yesterday announced retirement of Allen Dulles, claiming retirement in November 1961 had been Dulles' intention when accepted JFK's offer to stay on. Salinger declined to answer questions concerning Fowler Hamilton. Hamilton, according to forthcoming issue of Newsweek (August 7), due to succeed Dulles in October "after several months of working with Dulles".
CIA propagandist Victor Lasky sought to mask Hamilton’s displacement with a red herring candidate: “The Liberals had hoped that CIA would be given to one of their own…there had been pressure on Kennedy to appoint someone like New York attorney Telford Taylor…,” JFK: The Man and the Myth (NY: Dell, 1977), p. 672.
Of Kennedy’s inner circle, Sorensen comes closest to the truth about the appointment of Dulles’s successor. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, with characteristic dishonesty, merely that Hamilton “had been under consideration,” A Thousand Days, p. 518.
(32) Henry Fairlie, “Camelot Revisited: The bright promises that led to bloodshed and despair,” Harper’s, January 1973, p. 73.
(33) Wayne H. Nielsen, “The Second Indo-China War and the American Press,” The Minority of One, October 1964, p. 11.
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After nearly a fortnight of fantastic Ukrainian successes, unrelenting Russian failure, and accurate reporting of a kind found on this thread, the armed forces of Kyiv find themselves, er, completely surrounded.
Shome mishtake, shurely?
Patricia Arquette, the geopolitical guru seemingly inspiring the Bidenescu regime, had it right: Kick Russia out of NATO
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44 minutes ago, Matt Allison said:
Putin has shown all the signs of victim complex and mental illness that we've seen from other dictators, and has perversely enjoyed discussing his nuclear arsenal on more than one occasion, despite exactly no one having ever demonstrated any interest in invading his inhospitable homeland.
https://www.businessinsider.com/likely-us-nuclear-targets-2017-5?amp
"Perversely enjoyed discussing his nuclear arsenal"? Oooh er Missus, this really is the Frankie Howard school of history. For the record, it was the comedian cowering in Lvov who, on February 19, in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, got all hot & desirous of nuclear weapons. You can read a very informative discussion of the speech in question here: http://eu.eot.su/2022/02/21/zelenskys-statement-a-bluff-or-a-dream-of-nuclear-weapons/
As for the claim that "no one...ever demonstrated any interest in invading his inhospitable homeland" - you've obviously never been to Moscow or St Petersburg, both of which are wonderful - Wikipedia provides the following helpful list of those who did precisely that:
- Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus' (1223–1236), a series of invasions that resulted in the Rus states becoming vassals of the Golden Horde.
- Russo-Crimean Wars (1571), an Ottoman invasion that penetrated Russia and destroyed Moscow.
- Polish–Muscovite War (1605–1618), Poland gained Severia and Smolensk.
- Ingrian War (1610–1617), a Swedish invasion which captured Novgorod and Pskov.
- Swedish invasion of Russia (1707), an unsuccessful Swedish invasion.
- French invasion of Russia (1812), an unsuccessful invasion by Napoleon's French Empire and its allies.
- Japanese invasion of Sakhalin (1905), an invasion and annexation by the Japanese.
- Eastern Front (World War I) (1914–1918), Russia was forced to cede Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states to Germany as the Russian Empire collapsed.
- Caucasus campaign (1914-1918), a series of conflicts between the Russian Empire, its various successor states, and the Ottoman Empire.
- Japanese intervention in Siberia (1918-1922), an occupation of the Russian Far East by Japanese soldiers during the Russian Civil War.
- Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and the contemporaneous Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921), the Polish occupation of Belarus and West Ukraine.
- Operation Barbarossa (1941), a German-led invasion that started the Eastern Front of World War II.
- Kantokuen (1941), an aborted plan for a major Japanese invasion of the Russian Far East during World War II.
- Operation Unthinkable (1945), a proposed contingency plan for an Anglo-American invasion of the Soviet Union developed by the British Chiefs of Staff during the later stages of World War II.
- War of Dagestan (1999), a repulsed Chechen invasion of Dagestan.
The one led by the Austrian watercolourist cost the Soviet Union a mere 27 million inhabitants, the kind of minor intrusion you may have forgotten, but which the Russians most unreasonably haven't.
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He is surrounded by enemies, some of them uniformed, and presides over a crumbling economy beset by gross inequality, hyperinflation, a devalued currency, a collapsing supply chain, and militarism run amok. And then there’s the small matter of an imminent, deeply humiliating, military defeat. His position is surely untenable.
But enough of the Bidenescu regime. What about that other feeble Deep State puppet, Zelenskyy, eh?
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Five observations:
The retreat of the CIA, the real ruler of the post-coup (2014) rump Ukrainian terror-state, to Lvov appears to portend the attempted creation, within an area of central rump-Ukraine encompassing Kiev, of an arc of instability designed to sever connectivity within Eurasia
The teetering Bidenescu regime is resolved for a classic “khaki election” in an effort to ward off a devastating mid-term electoral defeat
The prolongation of the manufactured rump-Ukraine crisis will be accompanied by a concerted programme of domestic repression, most likely along Trudescu lines, albeit one supplemented by false flag terrorism
The costs of the Bidenescu regime’s geopolitical gambits, both to the American consumer and non-military component of the domestic economy, are almost certain to prove devastating, and even worse within America’s European satrapies, most notably Germany – they’re out of gas, and fast running out of time
The inevitable heightening of the economic crises within the American empire will likely lead to a kinetic attack on Russia
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48 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:
The way to counter misinformation is with Information, not with repression or shooting the messenger. It’s a sorry day when we try to shut down alternative voices. There is much room for discussion when it comes to Covid 19. There is still much to learn about viral mechanisms and about effective human responses. The Great Barrington declaration is interesting and well reasoned, and pointing out their financial backers doesn’t prove them wrong. That’s a debate we should have, and it worries me that the mainstream shuts them out. If Big Pharma would share MRNA technology rather than horde it for profit I would feel differently.
the question I have about Jan 6 is where were the guns? I’ve heard the explanation put forth that it was a trial run. I don’t agree with Ben’s analysis. I like the trial run idea. I do think that Trump, and the Proud Boys and others like them are a real danger, much more so than nameless and faceless Antifa, which has now become a parody and a scapegoat and could really be anyone in black doing anyone’s bidding.Try here, Paul, for rapid and lucid updates. The latest variant of Omicron appears set to deliver us from yet another round of excessive, irrelevant and/or wildly counter-productive restrictions. This most conscientious and informative of men boasts the highest recommendation the UK can confer - he was recently smeared by the BBC
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Though Neil Young wrote three of my favourite songs – “After the Blackstone Deal,” “Heart of Hipgnosis” and “What did you do to my potatoes?” – the fact is that there is no hypocrite like an ageing Canadian hippy.
There is much profanity in what follows, and the expose is all the better for it:
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3 hours ago, Matt Allison said:
Detroit is doing fine, Ben. I'm not sure why you think otherwise.
I fear, Matt, that you are being somewhat churlish in your appraisal of Detroit – it still offers outstanding value as a city in which be homicided, raped, and/or relieved of surplus property, most notably the vehicular.
I rely for my information on no less a source than that notorious far-right extremist, Detroit Police Chief James White , upon release of the city’s crime statistics in early January. He offered this reassuring quote in the course of his briefing to the city’s reptiles:
"The unfortunate reality is at some point in the next 30 days, I'll be talking about a heinous act in this community."
We all need to have more faith in Detroit’s rich traditions of mayhem and butchery, and rather less in the governing Deep State-Dem junta.
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A further piece of house-keeping following previous posts, and one that illustrates yet again how the espionage past does telescope into the future of intelligence work: Why did the small, independent Metromedia TV group get the privilege of debuting – on its New York flagship, WNEW-TV - the first version of the Z fake on US television? The answer lies in the name and career of its owner, John W Kluge; and the preference of the Dallas coup plotters for deploying seasoned oak at the plot’s major stress points. The extract to follow is from a recent post by a well-informed Russian journalist:
QuoteKluge is known all over the world as a tycoon who bought up media assets in different countries. However, a number of no-no sources reported him as a high-ranking American intelligence officer. As the journalist Oleg Lurie told us, Kluge was responsible for the US intelligence agencies during World War II for the export of German prisoners of war, including even Wernher von Braun, who were valuable to the Americans. The goal was to create for Washington the maximum superiority over the USSR in the nuclear race. At the same time, a number of sources report that the division led by Kluge P.O. Box 1142 (District of Columbia) is famous for its sadistic torture of prisoners.
John Kluge died in 2010, but we managed to find an interesting document – a transcript of a fragment of a recording of a US Congress meeting, which contains an appeal to honour the memory of the deceased secret US intelligence officer John Kluge. Here is the most interesting quote from the document:
But perhaps his most important contribution was one that he is least known for. Mr Kluge enlisted in the United States Army in 1940. In 1942, during World War II, he was promoted to Captain and appointed as the senior officer at the top secret military intelligence post located in Fort Hunt Park, along the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The top secret post was known only by its mailing address. P.O. Box 1142. While there, Captain Kluge led the men and women at the post in reviewing top secret documents and performing interrogations of more than 4,000 important German prisoners of war. Through the efforts of his unit, our military was provided with crucial information that helped end World War II and give the United States an early advantage in the Cold War.
The Alsos mission extended – indeed, began – in Italy, where a youthful OSS officer called James Angleton was shortly to cross its path. Small world.
210214 E Kucher, Navalny, Bellingcat & the Fifth Column in the FSB (Stalkerzone, 26pp)
The full tribute:
[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 133 (Wednesday, September 29, 2010)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1837-E1838]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HONORING MR. JOHN WERNER KLUGE
______
HON. JAMES P. MORAN
of Virginia
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Mr. MORAN of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor the accomplishments of Mr. John Werner Kluge, who recently passed away on September 7, 2010, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Mr. Kluge's lifetime of achievements included being a world-renowned businessman and philanthropist, as well as a key contributor to our national security during the Second World War.
Mr. Kluge created Metromedia in 1960, which was the Nation's first major independent broadcasting entity, a conglomerate that grew to include seven television stations, 14 radio stations, the Harlem
Globetrotters, the Ice Capades, radio paging and mobile telephones. Although his success as a businessman supplied him with vast wealth, acknowledged as the wealthiest man in America in 1989 by Forbes Magazine, he believed some of his greatest achievements came from the benefits society gained from his wide-ranging donations.
Mr. Kluge gave a total of more than $63 million to the University of Virginia throughout his lifetime, which has allowed one of our Nation's most prestigious Universities to maintain itself in the top-tier of
colleges nationwide. His donations to medical programs provided crucial aid to disabled and chronically ill children, while his involvement in prostate cancer research has led to groundbreaking advancements towards containing the disease once being detected. He also believed in the need for better end-of-life care, which led him and his wife, Tussi, to provide funding to establish professorships in the field at the
University of Virginia. In 2000, his generosity even reached the Capitol through his $73 million donation to the Library of Congress, of which he will always be remembered by the Kluge Prize for the Study of
Humanities.
But perhaps his most important contribution was one that he is least known for. Mr. Kluge enlisted in the United States Army in 1940. In 1942, during World War II, he was promoted to Captain and appointed as the senior officer at the top secret military intelligence post located in Fort Hunt Park, along the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The top secret post was known only by its mailing address, P.O. Box 1142. While there, Captain Kluge led the men and women at the post in reviewing top secret documents and performing interrogations of more than 4,000 important German prisoners of war. Through the efforts of his unit, our military was provided with crucial information that helped end World War II and give the United States an early advantage in the Cold War. Even more impressive were the tactics he used to obtain such information. Rather than physical torture, Captain Kluge honored the Geneva Convention by obtaining information from prisoners through earning their trust. It was a clear contrast from the approach we initially pursued with captured terrorists and suspected terrorists at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons. Through casual conversation, card games, and taking walks, he and his unit were able to extract vital information that led to the discovery of most of Germany's secret
weapons programs that included research to develop the atomic bomb, the jet engine, and the V-2 rocket.
Madam Speaker, I wish to commend Mr. John W. Kluge on his lifelong accomplishments and contributions to society, as well as for the crucial service he provided our country with at a time of war. While he was a man of numerous successes, he was also a man of endless generosity. He refused to ask for recognition or acknowledgement for his numerous charitable donations, but instead preferred the
[Page E1838]
grins and smiles from those who knew him well. Mr. Kluge was not only an outstanding soldier and American, but most importantly an outstanding human being.
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On 5/5/2021 at 3:42 PM, Paul Rigby said:
While Jeremy Bojczuk breaks in his all-new, O J Groden-approved footwear, it is time for the rest of us to take one small step for research, one giant leap out of group-think.
In 1964, the task of the Warren Commission lawyers was to support the revised Z fake, first, by excluding those whose recall was deemed too dangerous and/or those whose profession and proximity (motorcycle outriders) conferred added, and decidedly unwelcome, authority to their observations; and then by browbeating the carefully willowed few in an attempt to make their testimony either conform, or merely pose no threat, to the fraudulent film. Subsequent defenders of the Z fake laboured under no such encumbrance, and the message could therefore be delivered much more simply: human memory fallible, film inerrant. But is this true? Is there a germane example that can be tested to see if this proposition is as reliable as it sounds, if only to some? There is.
Consider the periodic recrudescence of claims, many following the alleged debut* of the Z fake on Geraldo Rivera’s ABC-TV’s late-night “Good Night America” on 6 March 1975, that the film was first shown in the days following JFK’s assassination. To venture in to print, online or in hard copy, with such a supposedly defective memory was to suffer, post-1975, the condescension of an outraged orthodoxy. The latter held that this was impossible: the Z film rights had been bought by Time-Life on Monday, 25 November 1963, and the film thereafter suppressed, supposedly on the grounds of taste. A film of the assassination had been shown within that rough timeframe, though, but it was Marie Muchmore’s, not Zapruder’s.
What general impression did this film leave and how did it impact upon viewers? The best description of both was provided by Rick Friedman, in a piece for Editor & Publisher, which likely went to print on 26 or 27 November, for an edition dated 30 November 1963. According to Friedman, many viewers considered the assassination sequence they had just viewed as “too gruesome,” and had responded accordingly, with “at least one television station… besieged with protests after it had shown scenes of the President’s motorcade at the moment of the shooting.”
For comparison purposes, here are the only two known contenders for the identity of that film. I have labelled them in accordance with current orthodoxy:
Very obviously, the two are labelled the wrong way round. The Zapruder film is gruesome, the Muchmore not.
In 2007, a New York-based contributor to an online forum discussion recalled seeing, just before or after JFK’s funeral, a film of the assassination playing “over and over.” She was right, as a 26 November 1963 article, describing the first showing in the country of the film on WNEW-TV (at the unearthly time of 0046hrs), confirmed: “The film was shown in slow motion and also stopped at key points in the assassination. The scene was shown four times at different speeds and under different magnifications.” Strike 2 for human memory.
On the same day, Tuesday, 26 November, the Milwaukee Journal named the film as Zapruder’s, adding this piece of confirmatory detail: “Mrs. Kennedy then jumps up and crawls across the back deck of the limousine, apparently seeking the aid of a secret service man who has been trotting behind the slowly moving vehicle. He jumps onto the car and shoves Mrs. Kennedy back into the seat. Then he orders the driver to speed to the hospital where the president died.” The film attributed to Muchmore, even the pre-splice black and white version, has never extended this far (though perhaps we ought to give the CIA a bit more time).
One man in no doubt that Zapruder’s film (version 1) had been shown on US television – certainly by Metromedia’s stations, including the aforementioned WNEW & Los Angeles’ KTLA – was none other than Mark Lane. In the course of penning his lawyer’s brief for Oswald, printed in December 1963 by the National Guardian, but commenced on Tuesday, 26 November – he observed that a “motion picture taken of the President just before, during, and after the shooting, and demonstrated on television showed that the President was looking directly ahead when the first shot, which entered his throat was fired. A series of still pictures taken from the motion picture and published in Life magazine on Nov. 29 show exactly the same situation.”
The orthodox history the Zapruder film is bunk. And it is time for Jeremy to pass me an enormous slice of mooncake.
*At least two non-national TV showings preceded the television “debut”: at 5pm news feature on 14 February 1969, by KTLA-TV in Los Angeles; and in the late hours by WSNS-TV, Ch 44, Chicago, in 1970. The film was given to director Howie Samuelsohn by Penn Jones and later aired in syndication to Philadelphia, Detroit, Kansas City and St. Louis
The assumed bidding process for the Z fake that left the Lucepress in (nominal) control of the still rights, and UPI-Newsfilm with the film equivalent, was either serendipitous in the extreme, or else a fairy tale to disguise a remarkably shrewd allocation by the plotters. There is every reason to suspect the latter, not least from the ludicrously melodramatic terms in which, for example, Stolley characterized his alleged triumph over CBS’s Rather in the supposed battle for the film rights. Hyperbole is, after all, a characteristic of the anti-alterationists, as a further specimen, this time from James Altgens, amusingly reminds us.
The point of what follows is to suggest, without overtly lying, that Altgens’ photographs went straight from Dallas to the world – without first journeying to AP’s HQ in New York. “All the wires were connected together, which means they got in Africa and London, all over the world, at the same time that people got it in the USA. It was fantastic.” Indeed. The reader is thrown into the benign world of Heath Robinson, where newswires behave like rope or spaghetti, and no CIA beasts lurk.
To confirm how well the combination of Lucepress and UPI-Newsfilm gelled, consider the proximity of their Chicago centers of operation. All three facilities lay within a security friendly, and distinctly handy, walking distance. How much easier to set up a coordinating office charged with preventing discrepancies and, if necessary, responding to any freshly occurring problems, such as, for wild examples, the necessity to terminate the distribution of the film-as-film; or break the plates in response to a changed selection of images.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec04873x/?sp=399&r=0.699,0.147,0.304,0.157,0
Illinois White Pages Chicago July 1964 KICH through Z
Image 399 (of 480)
United Press International
news & administrative 430 N Mich 467-5050
news pictures 430 N Mich 644-8320
news film div 161 E Grand 644-8890
coml photography div 430 N Mich WH 4-4733
https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec04873x/?sp=384&r=0.732,0.015,0.304,0.157,0
Illinois White Pages Chicago July 1964 KICH through Z
Image 399 (of 480)
Time & Life Bldg 540 N Mich DE 7-5860
Time Magazine
advs & editorial ofs 221 NLoSal AN 3-2860
circulation & subscription dept 540 N Mich WH 4-4720
production ofc 330 E Cermak DA 6-1212
https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec04874x/?sp=208&r=0.475,0.16,0.607,0.314,0
Illinois White Pages Chicago July 1964 A through KICA
Image 208 (of 418)
Donnelly RR & Sons Co printers
Corporate Hdqtrs 2223 SoPkwy 431-8000
Chicago Mfg Div 350 E Cerkak 431-8000
Did the agency set up a coordinating center in the midst of UPI-Newsfilm, Time and R R Donnelley’s? It may not have been necessary. The four-man Life delegation dispatched from New York to Chicago, ostensibly to provide oversight only for the magazine and its printer, included John Dille, co-author with a 1959 Polish defector, Pawel Monat, of The Spy Among Us (Harper & Row, 1962), a work designed to both stoke Cold War paranoia, and, perhaps less obviously, bolster the counter-intelligence link between Angleton and Papich. As part of the book’s promotion, it produced one of the more surreal moments of CBS’ 1963 output
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CIA advice to its employees, 1961
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-...i2a03p_0001.htm
APPROVED FOR RELEASE 1994
CIA HISTORICAL REVIEW PROGRAM
18 SEPT 95
OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Intelligence market for the product of the camera fan's fun.
SNAPSHOTS AT RANDOM
Jane Schnell
Everyone who has taken photographs in a foreign country has collected potential ground photographic intelligence. The traveler turns his camera upon anything that excites his interest -- the civil engineer on peculiarities in the construction of dams, roads, bridges, and city buildings; a woman perhaps on clothing, jewelry, and hair styles; a doctor on things related to disease and therapy; a farmer on crops and tools and methods of farming. The more widely traveled the man behind the camera and the broader his interests, the more discriminating he is likely to be in photographing subject matter peculiar to a particular place. But the potential intelligence thus collected is often lost; there are two minimum requirements for transforming it into actual photo intelligence. One is that the pictures must be identified, at least by the name of the place or subject, the direction the camera was facing, and the date. The other is that they must get to the market.
The most omnivorous and insatiable broker for the photo intelligence market is the CIA Graphics Register. If you have a batch of photos taken anywhere abroad, properly identified and preferably with negatives, the Register would like to look them over. If they were taken in London or Paris or Vienna, say, the pickings may be slim, but the Register would like to decide for itself. And if it knows in advance that you are going to have a tour in some less well frequented place, it may be interested enough in promoting your hobby to supply you with camera and film. With a minimum of effort, adding to the pictures you normally would take anyway a notation of the place, time, and direction and as much descriptive data as you can, you are likely to produce some useful photos.
Targets of Opportunity
The results will be much better, however, if you add to this minimum effort a little more and become as familiar as you can with photo collection manuals and lists of requirements on the area. Graphics Register can refer you to general publications on these subjects;1 and attaché offices in all the U.S. diplomatic missions have such manuals and requirements lists in detail for their particular areas. You can pick out of the listings a few things that are of interest to you and accessible for photographing in the course of your normal day-to-day activities. One standing requirement, for example, is photographs of prominent persons in almost any field, especially the military, political, economic, and scientific. If an election is coming up and campaigning is in progress, why not take a few pictures of the speakers? If they are within 50 feet of a 35 mm. camera, the heads can be enlarged to an identifiable likeness. The closer the better, naturally, but the main thing is to get them on film and in focus.
The fact that an object may have been photographed previously by no means disqualifies it: changes, or the absence of changes, in it over a period of years or of weeks may be important. And changes aside, it is amazing how many pictures of the same object can be taken without telling the whole story. Although I must have seen hundreds of photographs of the Eiffel Tower before I went to France, it wasn't until I walked under it that I realized the first balcony has a big hole in it. So looking up, I photographed the tower through the hole; and then, just for fun, I kept trying to find another photograph that showed there was such a hole in the middle of the balcony. It was three and a half years before I saw one. A good photographic practice is to take the normal view of an object and then try to think up a different viewpoint and take that also. Few people look up, and it is often by looking up that you find an extraordinary picture.
If a new gas storage tank is being built in the city where you are stationed and you drive past it going to work every day, why not photograph it once a week or once a month? The photos will tell how long it takes to build it, what types of materials and methods of construction are used, and how much gas storage capacity is being added. Maybe you don't know what a gas storage tank looks like, and all you see is a big tank being built. Take a picture of it anyway; obviously it is built to store something. What you don't know about it the analyst will. That is what he is an analyst for, but he can't analyze it if you don't get him the pictures.
Captions
A bit of extra effort put into captioning your shots will pay off, too. One kind of information you may not be in the habit of noting for your own purposes, technical data, may be of importance to the Register. This includes the kind of camera and lens, the type of film, and the speed of exposure, as well as a serial number for each roll and frame. You should especially make note if you have used a telephoto or wide-angle lens. Information on the type of film and exposure speed will not only assist in its development but also make it possible for you to get advice on how to correct any mistakes you make and improve your technique.
Roll 20, frame No. 3. 2 May 1959. 1100 local time. Malaya, Kelantan state. Town, road, waterway.
Main road between Kota Bharu and Kuala Trengganu looking south at ferry toward village of Jerteh. Note cut at right for bridge under construction (see frames 1 and 2 for other shots of bridge).
Most important, however, is good identifying data about each picture. The essential elements are the date (and the time of day may be useful); the precise place; the subject or subjects, with special note of particular features of intelligence interest; and the direction the camera was facing, by compass or with reference to landmarks. It might be noted, for example, that frame no. 7 of roll 2 was exposed at 1330 on 17 November, one mile east of Otaru, Hokkaido, on the road to Sapporu, looking north and showing a Soviet trawler in the bay. Or from a second-floor street window of the Hotel Europe in Bangkok, looking down on a passer-by identified as so-and-so on his way to the corner to hail a samlor.
These essentials can frequently be supplemented to advantage with additional comments or with printed matter bearing on a particular picture. Perhaps the idea of the target came from facts you read in the newspaper; clip the article out and send it along. You find your way around unfamiliar cities with the help of guidebooks, free tourist maps, and maps bought at local survey offices or book stores. The analyst can use the same material to find his way around your photographs; if you can't send copies, at least make reference to the tools of travel you used. In the absence of printed material it is extremely useful to draw a sketch showing the relationship of pictured objects. A sketch is particularly good when there are several shots of the same subject from different vantage points, or of different subjects near each other, or of subjects that are not mapped. The analyst never complains that he is given too many facts about a picture.
Spies and People
You may want to shoot beyond your targets of casual opportunity and make trips or excursions expressly for the purpose of getting useful pictures. Fine; but since you are presumably abroad on some other government business, it is paramount that you remember you are taking pictures for fun. You should never take photos at the risk of your proper work, your purpose in being there. This need for discretion is of course a greater limitation in some places than in others. Once you have decided upon a target, the thing to do is become as familiar with it as possible, learn for sure just what the limitations of law and discretion are, and forget completely why you want the pictures. Try to take them for some other reason than intelligence collection.
I once wanted to photograph a new electric power plant in Malaya. So far as I knew, nobody would question my taking the pictures; but it is a little odd for a girl to go around photographing power plants. First, I had to find it, somewhere around a certain town. I drove out the main road from that town, which finally passed under some high power wires. After taking pictures of the road in both directions, and the wires and towers in both directions, I drove on, planning to take the next road turning off either right or left parallel with the wires. But at the next turn a sign pointed to the power plant.
I photographed the side road and then drove down it until I came to a one-way bridge with a policeman at each end and the power plant on the other side. The first policeman waved me to a stop. I got out of the car, camera in hand, and went up and asked him why. He said I had to wait a few minutes, the Sultan was coming. I asked what was the big building on the other side of the river. "That's our new power plant," he said proudly. "That's nice," I said, "Does it work now?" "Oh, yes." "Golly," I said, "Can I take a picture of it?" "Sure, why don't you go to the other end of the bridge, you get a better shot." So I shot a lot of pictures, some including the bridge and a nearby railway bridge, with a lot of kibitzing, until the Sultan came past in his Mercedes. Then I thanked the policeman and left, congratulating myself that nothing could have been easier. If I'd been as smart as I thought I was I'd have got a good picture of the Sultan and one of the policeman. No matter how much you see, if it isn't in your camera it's worthless.
The biggest hazard to the camera fan who has ulterior motives is people-himself, ordinary people, and people who might suspect him. If you act suspicious even the ordinary people will become suspicious. If you act quite ordinary even the suspicious people will think you quite ordinary. That is why it is important for you to forget the reason you are taking your pictures. Just take them; but know what you will say if you are questioned. Sometimes if people are watching me take pictures it makes me nervous, so I retaliate by turning my camera on them to make them nervous. In the places I've been they are either so pleased they stop being inquisitive or suspicious or else they are embarrassed and go away. I have been told that in the Middle East they often throw things, and that in the Soviet bloc it can be quite dangerous; but in Asia usually they giggle. Some friends of mine in Borneo used a polaroid camera to divert the people with pictures of themselves while they took candid shots. One Dyak requested a photo of the tattoo on his back; he had never seen it!
Refer to Hard Copy for Image
Roll 27, frame 11. February 1960.
Burma, Kachin state, Shwegu village. Sociological.
Man cutting bamboo.
The necessary equipment for ground intelligence photography consists of one camera and plenty of film. A camera, like a pair of shoes, is an individual and personal matter. I prefer a 35 mm. negative because its 20 or 36 frames per standard roll last longer without changing film, and larger cameras are too heavy and bulky. I would not use a smaller one, of the subminiature class, except for some special reason; the negative is so small that enlargement potential is seriously limited. And ordinary people, if they bother to think about it, think spies use tiny cameras that can be hidden. If you go around more or less like a tourist with a popular-sized one you avoid being conspicuous.
There are many publications on cameras and photographic techniques, on special lenses, on the respective advantages of black-and-white and color, of fine-grain and fast film. I haven't tried to touch on these subjects. All I have tried to do is point out that an opportunity exists for travelers interested in photography to make a considerable contribution to basic intelligence through collecting ground photos. I collected them because I thought it important, because it helped me learn about the place where I was living, and because it was fun.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Guide for Graphics Coordinators. INR/State, October 1960. An excellent new handbook.
A Manual for the Collection of Ground Photography and Related Data. Bureau of Aeronautics, NAVAER 10-35-650, March 1953. This is the best previous guide, illustrating many techniques and giving many examples.
Techniques for Producing Good Ground Photography for Intelligence Purposes. Secret. Photographic Intelligence Memorandum, CIA/ORR, GP/I-198, 18 July 1956.
Volume 4-Political Affairs, of Foreign Service Manual. TL:PA-28, 7-25-60.
A Guide to the Collection of Ground Intelligence Photography on Ports and Harbors. Confidential. Photographic Intelligence Memorandum, CIA/ORR, PIM-2, September 1957.
Amateur Photography from Commercial Aircraft. Secret. Photographic Intelligence Memorandum, CIA/ORR, GP/I--205, 14 August 1956.
Intelligence Collection Guidance Manual-Intelligence Photography. Confidential. Air Force Manual 200-9, 1 February 1955. Intelligence Collection Guidance Manual-Industrial Recognition. Air Force Manual 200-7, 15 December 1955.
Intelligence Collection Guide-Telecommunications. Confidential. Army Pamphlet 30-100, July 1955.
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The Dullesian approach to imperfection:
"As I say, if you stopped always and think of all the consequences of all the actions you take, you do nothing. This wasn’t a world in which one could do nothing. It wasn’t a do-nothing world."
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5 hours ago, John Butler said:
David,
This is from your work.
How difficult would it be to simply change the interior contents of the cab of the p. limo? Let's say with film from another film or from an earlier part of the Zapruder film (Zapruder Gap) on the motorcade route. How easy would that be to substitute and change what we see in the cab of the p. limo? Then, add a few touches such as the Hollywood black patch or the blow up of the head wound?
105+ witnesses said shooting occurred elsewhere, in front of the TSBD mostly. This would reposition the assassination from in front of the TSBD so that Lee Harvey Oswald could be blamed for a rear head shot from the TSBD where the event actually happened earlier. Change testimony or coerce witnesses and you have supportive data for the film.
Alas, John, no shooting took place in the approach to, or during, the turn from Houston on to Elm, despite the fact that this location would have provided much great plausibility for both shooting scenarios potentially available – a single assassin or an ambush.
In the first, the twin issues of the patsy’s marksmanship and choice of weapon would have been greatly diminished, if not vanquished all together. Deploying the second alternative, a plot in which Oswald worked in conjunction with “fellow” agents of, say, Castro and/or Krushchev*, the headlines write themselves: America’s Petit-Clamart! Dallas’ Bastien-Thiry executed in desperate cinema shoot-out!
So why didn’t the plotters select this much better site? The answer is obvious: the credibility of the shooting scenario was subordinated to the need to minimise the number of potential witnesses and cameras.
In fairness to you, it should be note that the plotters did briefly utilize the fiction of a shooting sequence which commenced on Houston, though only for the purpose of attempting to reconcile the Z fake with the import of the Doctors’ press conference at Parkland. Here’s how the CIA briefers spun it, in stages:
Note how in example 1, the first shot, which does not impact, is fired while the presidential limousine is on Houston:
John Herbers, “Kennedy Struck by Two Bullets, Doctor Who Attended Him Says,” New York Times, November 27, 1963, p.20:
“…The known facts about the bullets, and the position of the assassin, suggested that he started shooting as the President’s car was coming toward him, swung his rifle in an arc of almost 180 degrees and fired at least twice more.
A rifle like the one that killed President Kennedy might be able to fire three shots in two seconds, a gun expert indicated after tests.
A strip of color movie film taken by a Dallas clothing manufacturer with an 8-mm camera tends to support this sequence of events.
The film covers about a 15-second period. As the President’s car come abreast of the photographer, the President was struck in the front of the neck.”
In this second example, the first shot, which now does impact, occurs as the turn is made from Houston onto Elm:
Arthur J. Snider (Chicago Daily News Service), “Movies Reconstruct Tragedy,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, (Evening edition), November 27, 1963, section 2, p.1:
“Chicago, Nov. 27 – With the aid of movies taken by an amateur, it is possible to reconstruct to some extent the horrifying moments in the assassination of President Kennedy.
As the fateful car rounded the turn and moved into the curving parkway, the President rolled his head to the right, smiling and waving.
At that instant, about 12:30 p.m., the sniper, peering through a four-power telescope sight, fired his cheap rifle.
The 6.5 mm bullet – about .25 caliber – pierced the President’s neck just below the Adam’s apple. It took a downward course.”
And here’s the process completed in example 3, with the presidential limousine now “50 yards past Oswald” on Elm:
Paul Mandel, “End to Nagging Rumors: The Six Critical Seconds,” Life, 6 December 1963:
“The doctor said one bullet passed from back to front on the right side of the President’s head. But the other, the doctor reported, entered the President’s throat from the front and then lodged in his body.
Since by this time the limousine was 50 yards past Oswald and the President’s back was turned almost directly to the sniper, it has been hard to understand how the bullet could enter the front of his throat. Hence the recurring guess that there was a second sniper somewhere else. But the 8mm film shows the President turning his body far around to the right as he waves to someone in the crowd. His throat is exposed–toward the sniper’s nest–just before he clutches it.”
Given that the film-as-film could not be reshown while the above delineated process of fraudulent harmonisation - of medical testimony with the lone-assassin-from-the-rear – was undertaken, you now have the explanation for why the first version of the Z fake shown on TV (26 November 1963) failed to contain the Houston Street sequence described the day before by Rather; and was then suppressed on the very same day it was shown. It seems highly likely to me that the detailed, if thoughly bogus, briefings plainly afforded Herbers, Snider and Mandel emanated from among those plotters intent upon suppression and the head snap reversal. They were, after all, classic episodic CIA fictions of precisely the kind we find issued – by amazing coincidence, among others, Hal Hendrix - following the Bay of Pigs landing.
*And if you don’t like that combination of conspirators, they have others...
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The second great flaw of Horne’s work resided in his failure, entirely excusable given the vast amount of diverse and unrelated material with which he was confronted, to work through the implications of the Z fake’s second, clandestine visit to the NPIC. Only one senior figure within, but not constrained by, the formal CIA hierarchy had the bureaucratic heft, autonomy and resource to pull off this mini-coup. Of all of the leading contenders of the day, only one figure not only those qualities in spades, but also the motivation, to do so. It was the same man whose unit controlled the patsy and obstructed all efforts, both before and after the coup, to clarify Oswald’s true purposes, allegiances and movements. James Angleton also possessed the counter-intelligence background, mind-set, and methodology for the task of utilizing assassination films precisely as one would human assets, not for instant resolution, but rather long-range deception.
The most penetrating and lucid passages on Angleton and his philosophy of intelligence are to be found in Robin Winks’ 1987 study, Cloak and Gown, which devoted its longest chapter to the man and his reign. For Winks, the story began in war-time London, where the youthful OSS-er pondered the specific lessons of Ultra: “If one is prepared to pay a price high enough price to deceive the enemy…” The enemy, this time, was us and the first version of the Z fake, the one that had passed muster at the first NPIC visit on the evening of Saturday, 23 November, paid no price. It offered, to the contrary, mere reinforcement to the Washington establishment consensus lie that a single assassin had struck his target high from the rear. Angleton, together with his minions and allies, despised that consensus and saw far richer potentialities. If the majority of the US political establishment sought to close the door on the case, Angleton et al were intent upon throwing it open – to paranoia, doubt, and unresolvable mystery.
If the idea of using film on a grand scale to cover up the assassination did not originate with Angleton and his immediate circle, it was nevertheless assured of a warm welcome. For Angleton, according to Winks, “the object…was to live in a real world while thrusting the enemy into an unreal one.” This object was especially achievable if, “after establishing the superior source…in place…an orchestration could be built up, to the point of layer upon layer of confirming information would also support the deception.” One film of the assassination good: Two or three buttressing it? Even better. Film, replacing human assets, offered Angleton the perfect means to achieve this end. More than a mere screen between history and the execution, it offered nothing less than an alternate reality. But why waste such potential riches on swift resolution? There were, after all, two Kennedys still to deal with, not to mention a number of other high-profile irritants likely to require disposal in future days. And the small matter of reviving the Cold War, complete with Cuban or Soviet assassins in Dallas, once all the post-assassination hullaballoo had quieted.
The failure of the plotters to achieve the planned post-mortem surgery to JFK’s body at Parkland Hospital, followed by the doctors’ press conference, created the perfect opportunity to subvert the pre-packaged establishment consensus under the guise of redeeming it. In response to the insistence of Perry and Clark that the two shots which hit Kennedy came from the front, the first version of the Z fake would be scrapped, and a key change made to neutralise the suspicion aroused by that medical testimony: the moment of the throat wound impact would be moved back down Elm and a road sign interposed to cover it. But that would take Time ( and Life), and while it was undertaken, Angleton could ensure the first bread crumbs were seeded leading to his masterstroke, the change that would ensure the conscription of most potential critics in defence of the unreal world - the reintroduction of previously excised frames revealing Kennedy’s propulsion forward, not back, in response to the headshot.
Angleton was prepared to pay the price.
1) The lesser of two evils & 2) the value of undefined conspirators
Jim Douglass. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters (NY: Orbis Books, 2008), p.456 n367:
Those who would argue that the film was not altered point especially to its depiction of the backward snap of JFK’s head, providing evidence of a shot from the front. As David Wrone writes, “Why would the government steal and alter the Zapruder film to hide a conspiracy only to have that alteration contain evidence that a conspiracy killed JFK?” (David Wrone, The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003], p.122)
However, if as we have seen the initial assassination scenario’s purpose included scapegoating the Soviet Union and Cuba, evidence of a conspiracy was no problem, so long as it did not implicate the U.S. government per se – as would have been the case if the film revealed the Secret Service stopping the car to facilitate the shooting.
Allen Dulles and his Nazi Pals in Ukraine 🇺🇦
in Political Discussions
Posted
Video: America is at War with Europe
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, February 11, 2023
Luxmedia and Global Research
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-america-is-at-war-with-europe/5808102
“Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”
“This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”
(How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline, By Seymour M. Hersh, February 08, 2023, emphasis added)
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Unfolding “Political Nightmare”
The evidence amply confirms that The Nord Stream was the object of an act of sabotage ordered by President Joe Biden.
Nord Stream –which originates in Russia– transits through the (maritime) territorial jurisdiction of four member states of the European Union. In international law, “Territorial Integrity” extends to “properties” located within the territorial waters of the Nation State.
From a legal standpoint (International Law: UN Charter, Law of the Sea) this was a U.S. Act of War against the European Union.
The deliberate destruction of said “properties” within a country’s territorial waters by or on behalf of a foreign state actor constitutes an act of war.
Germany’s Prosecutor General Peter Frank confirmed in an in-depth investigation that:
“there is no evidence to blame Russia for the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines”.
If it Wasn’t Russia, Who was Behind it?
According to the Prosecutor General:
“[The suspicion] that there had been a foreign sabotage act [in this case], has so far not been substantiated”
Peter Frank casually dispels the role of the US president (which is amply confirmed) (see below).
The Attack is “Traceable”. It’s an Act of Economic and Social Warfare against the European Union.
The US act of sabotage coupled with the sanctions regime has created social havoc and hardship throughout the European Union. Inflation spearheaded by rising energy costs has gone fly high. People are freezing, unable to pay their heating bills.
While media reports fail to acknowledge the social and economic impacts of the US act of sabotage, official EU sources confirm (without mentioning the cause) that:
“the number of its citizens living in energy poverty could be as high as 125 million” (28% of its total population).
Europe is in Debt Crisis. The Welfare State is being dismantled.
Destabilizing the EU Economy
The EU economy which has relied on cheap energy from Russia is in a shambles, marked by disruptions in the entire fabric of industrial production (manufacturing), transportation and commodity trade.
A string of corporate bankruptcies resulting in lay-offs and unemployment is unfolding across the European Union. Small and medium sized enterprises are slated to be wiped of map:
“Rocketing energy costs are savaging German industry”…
“Germany’s manufacturing industry — which accounts for more than one fifth of the country’s economic output — is worried some of its companies won’t see the crisis through. …”
“Industry behemoths like Volkswagen (VLKAF) and Siemens (SIEGY) are grappling with supply chain bottlenecks too, but it is Germany’s roughly 200,000 small and medium-sized manufacturers who are less able to withstand the shock [of rising energy prices]
These companies are a vital part of the “Mittelstand,” the 2.6 million small- and medium-sized enterprises that account for more than half of German economic output and nearly two-thirds of the country’s jobs. Many are family-owned and deeply integrated into rural communities”
https://rumble.com/v291ufc-michel-chossudovsky-american-is-at-war-with-europe.html