Paul Rigby
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I can only attest that I saw Mark Lane host a presentation at Niagara University c. 1974, and that the print his researcher showed and lectured on was not different from the one that we all came to know from TV in that decade. I can postulate that this was the only version Lane ever saw, or that he accepted this version as accurate, but would I be right?
Intelligent question, to which the answer is demonstrably no:
From Mark Lane’s original article on the case, “Lane’s Defense Brief for Oswald,” published by the National Guardian, 19 December 1963:
”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 show exactly the same situation.”http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/The_critics/L...l_Guardian.html
As I've pointed out before, this was not an isolated instance of Lane "tweaking" the evidence, not least of his own work.
Mark Lane and the “quiet transformation” of evidence
The strange case of the vanishing sentence (and left turn)
If all else failed, the Warren Commissioners could rely on an eminent critic to help them perpetuate the cover up!
In Mark Lane’s Citizen’s Dissent: Mark Lane Replies (Fawcett Crest, April 1969), he resurrects a line from Hugh Trevor-Roper’s verdict on the efforts of the Warren Commission (1), as to be found in the British historian’s Introduction to Lane’s own Rush To Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald (2).
“It is fascinating, for instance, to watch the quiet transformation of the medical evidence,”No less fascinating, I can’t help feeling, is the handling of the Zapruder film in the works of Mark Lane. Not so much “quiet” as stealthy:
1) Mark Lane. Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966), p.66, footnote 2:
The Commission explained the method it used to designate the individual frames of the film for purposes of reference: “The pictures or frames in the Zapruder film were marked by the agents, with the number ‘1’ given to the first frame where the motorcycles leading the motorcade came into view on Houston Street. The numbers continue in sequence as Zapruder filmed the Presidential limousine as it came around the corner and proceeded down Elm,” (223).Note 223 to chapter 3 is to be found on p.423 – it cites WCR at 98. On p.418, Lane explains that the version of the WCR he used was the one published by the “U.S. Government Printing Office (1964).”
So far, then, so clear: Zapruder filmed the turn from Houston onto Elm, precisely as attested by the former on November 22, 1963. Now, two years on, look what happens to the left turn at Lane’s hands: A source is conveniently truncated!
2) Mark Lane’s Citizen’s Dissent: Mark Lane Replies (Fawcett Crest, April 1969), p. 244:
“The frames of the Zapruder film were numbered, as the Report noted, “with the number ‘1’ given to the first frame where the motorcycles leading the motorcade came into view on Houston Street.” (44)(44) p.307: WCR98
Notes:
(1) Mark Lane’s Citizen’s Dissent: Mark Lane Replies (Fawcett Crest, April 1969), p.91 n9, detailed on p.293: “RTJ, 12.”
(2) Rush To Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald (London: Bodley Head Ltd., 1966), p.12.
The Z-film might have existed in other versions for other audiences and other occasions, including the occasion of the WC investigation.The first version of the Z-fraud was shown on US TV on the evening/early morning of November 25/26. It included the left turn from Houston onto Elm; the first impact to Kennedy was not obscured by a street sign; and the wound to Connolly's chest was clearly visible.
Paul
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The Valley Independent, (Monessen, Pennsylvania), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Page 5
Film Showing Assassination Is Released
NEW YORK (UPI) — United Press International Newsfilm early today was first on the air with exclusive film showing the assassination of President Kennedy.
The film is 16mm enlarged from 8mm. It was shown on a New York City television station.
The sequence, shot by an amateur photographer in Dallas Friday, begins with motorcycle police coming around the corner followed by the Kennedy motorcade.
The President is then seen leaning over when the bullets strike. Mrs. Kennedy puts her right arm around the President and he slumps out of view. The film then shows a Secret Service agent running toward the car.
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.
Copies have been rushed to United Press Newsfilm clients all over the world.
http://home.earthlink.net/~joejd/jfk/zapho...pson-proof.html
Proof that the Zapruder Film is Authentic by Josiah Thompson
Next, the problem of other photographers.At the same time that copies of the Zapruder film were being made in Washington, New York and Chicago, other photographers were having their film developed. Fetzer has claimed that the government laid a security net over photo development in the Dallas area, posting individual FBI agents to photo developing locations. This, of course, is nonsense. All the FBI did was ask photo developers to include a note in packets of developed film asking customers to contact the FBI if their photos showed anything relevant to the assassination. Many of the most important films of the assassination were still in their owners’ cameras when the proliferation of Zarpruder copies started. The FBI first learned of the Muchmore film, for example, when it was shown on the New York City station WNEW-TV just after midday on Tuesday, November 26th.
The FBI must have been very puzzled by Thompson's claim. Not merely was the organisation confronted with a camerawoman who didn't know she'd taken any film of the presidential limo on Elm, but also by a film with a sequence - the presidential limo turning the corner from Houston onto Elm - that has never been observed on any known copy of the Muchmore film.
Another Thompsonian claim falls apart under scrutiny. What a surprise.
Paul
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The most impressive case of amnesia, however, belonged to UPI itself.
In early October 1964, UPI execs took their seats in Keith’s Theatre – “a short block from the White House” – to witness the debut of David Wolper’s “Four Days in November,” a documentary made “in cooperation with United Press International,” and boasting a “narrative script” which “was read for accuracy by [the] Warren Commission counsel,” no less.
In the highlighted sentences of the report below, we find that UPI had neglected to tell Wolper that in the early hours of November 26 (EST), WNEW-TV, NY, using a film supplied by the same UPI, had shown footage of the presidential limousine turning the corner from Houston on to Elm.
The omission permitted the introduction of a shot sound effect which just happened to dovetail with the print campaign, waged in late November and early December 1963 (see earlier posts in this thread), designed to suggest a shot at or just beyond the taking of the Houston/Elm turn.
http://www.kennedyassassinationarchive.com...esult=5¤tPage=0
Kingsport News (Tennessee), 8 October 1964, p.19
JFK Assassination Film Holds Guests Spellbound
Marlyn E. Aycock (UPI)
WASHINGTON (UPI) – Four days in November numbed an unbelieving world last year.Tuesday night, the premiere of a film on President John F. Kennedy's assassination had almost the same hypnotic effect on 1,600 invited guests.
The first showing of "Four Days in November" was at Keith's Theater here, a short block from the While House which figured so prominently in the two-hour documentary. Producer David L. Wolper combined a skillful blend of newsfilm, still photographs, amateur movies and recreated scenes into a searing record of those four days.
The United States and much of the world lived those days as they unfolded on television and in print. Wolper's production, in cooperation with United Press International, brought those tragic events back in a chronological, cohesive account for the first time.
Drama Increased
The assassination came near the midway point. For an hour, the drama built up until the presidential car turned a Dallas street corner and a shot rang out. The screen went blank for several seconds, symbolizing the inability of the mind to grasp what had happened. Then the camera recaptured the frenzy in the Dallas streets — Mrs. Kennedy pulling the Secret Service agent onto the rear of the car, the dash to Parkland Hospital, the blind man’s buff search for a culprit. And then the grief.
The following days of nation al sorrow in Washington were interrupted by sudden switches to the confusion in the halls of the Dallas police station and the incredible murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. The film made no attempt to interpret Oswald's motives. It assumed his guilt on the evidence available just as the Warren Commission did 10 days ago in concluding that Oswald acted for reasons known to him alone and without help.
Audible Effect
The affect of reliving those four days was clearly audible among the guests from the White House staff, executive UPI Editors and Conference here. None of the Kennedy family was present although a number of the late President's friends accepted invitations. The film was being released today for world-wide exhibition. Wolper and his associates edited some 2 million feet of film, much of it not shown publicly before, into the 120-minute final product. The narrative script was read for accuracy by the Warren Commission counsel. And in spite of the emotional drain the film creates it surely must rank among the most valuable historical documents ever put together.
Wolper had "previous" as a propagandist for the spooks - at least 32 episodes of it, apparently:
David Wolper and OSS TV series, 1954
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The name of the film-taker was totally irrelevant. UPI wanted to blow its own horn...
It certainly did on the morning of Tuesday, 26 November, as noted elsewhere in this thread. Thereafter, however, a politic reticence took hold. Unsurprising if the film shown in the early hours on WNEW-TV was the first version of the Z fraud – and no sooner broadcast than withdrawn for reworking - rather less so if it was Muchmore’s, which, of course, it plainly wasn’t.*
How did this volte-face manifest itself?
Like many other US news-gatherers, UPI hastened, post-assassination, to commemorate and memorialise both the tragedy and its response to it. The booklet which issued, almost certainly published in December 1963, featured the front pages of a wide selection of UPI newspaper-clients. Many of those selected were of the small town variety, precisely the kind which we now rediscover had published UPI’s breathless despatch of early on Tuesday, 26 November, proudly boasting that “United Press International Newsfilm early today was first on the air with exclusive film showing the assassination of President Kennedy.” And even though the period covered by the booklet was, in conformity to the official ring-fence, from 22 to 25 November, the final nine front pages featured in the booklet were all published on Tuesday, 26 November.
Not one featured UPI’s despatch heralding the Newsfilm division’s triumph in being the first to get on air film of the assassination itself, a claim which stood regardless of the taker’s identity, of course, and which had been the subject of a full page ad in the December 2, 1963, edition of Broadcasting: The Businessweekly of Television and Radio (Vol 65, No 23), p.69.
Like Life magazine, UPI had suddenly ceased to behave as a large commercial media-enterprise should.
We now know why, in both cases.
* UPI (New York), “Film Showing Assassination Is Released,” The Valley Independent, (Monessen, Pennsylvania), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Page 5: “The sequence, shot by an amateur photographer in Dallas Friday, begins with motorcycle police coming around the corner followed by the Kennedy motorcade.”
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The video was based on strawmen no wonder the maker didn’t allow comments on his blog or Youtube
Perhaps he's taken a leaf out of NIST's playbook - you know, the one that says "thou shalt not release your modelling data for fear of public humiliation..."
Sunder and Gross certainly aren’t very good public speakers but the same could be said about lots of people, perhaps there is a large degree of truth in the stereotype of most scientists being geeky."Geeky"? You mean shifty, hesitant, and very, very obviously embarrassed? I wonder why. Could it be something to do with the manifest pack of porkies they were obliged to improvise?
For connossieurs of the shifty in the service of an on-going cover-up, here's parts 2 and 3:
Part 2:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=XtKLtUiww80
Part 3:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz43hcKYBm4
NIST: “pseudo-science in the service of an on-going cover-up,”
David Chandler.
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John - I reluctantly have to agree. I think this must be a UN-backed, all-African force. Part of this, however, must be a clear plan for a post-Mugabe government... one that is democratic and free of any taint of being a "puppet".
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11548
Understanding the Crisis in Zimbabwe: Cynicism as a substitute for scholarship
by Stephen Gowans
Global Research, December 31, 2008
Mahmood Mamdani’s largely sympathetic analysis of the Mugabe government, “Lessons of Zimbabwe,” published in the December 4, 2008 London Review of Books, has been met with a spate of replies from progressive scholars who are incensed at the Ugandan academic throwing out the rule book to present an argument based on rigor and analysis, rather than on the accustomed elaboration of comfortable slogans and prejudices that has marked much progressive scholarship on Zimbabwe. Their criticism of Mamdani has been characterized by ad hominem assaults, arguments that either lack substance or sense, and the substitution of cynicism for scholarship.At the heart of what might be called the anti-Mugabe ideology lays the idea that the Zimbabwean leadership clings to power through crude anti-imperialist rhetoric used to divert blame for problems of its own making. This is an elaboration of elite theory -- the idea that a small group seeks power for power’s sake, and manipulates the public through lies and rhetoric to stay on top. For example, one group of progressive scholars [1] complains about “Mugabe’s rhetoric of imperialist victimization,” while Horace Campbell argues that,
”The Zimbabwe government is very aware of the anti-imperialist and anti-racist sentiments among oppressed peoples and thus has deployed a range of propagandists inside and outside the country in a bid to link every problem in Zimbabwe to international sanctions by the EU and USA.” [2]
Contrary to the empty rhetoric school of thought, Mugabe’s anti-imperialist rhetoric is not unattended by anti-imperialist action, but in some extreme versions of anti-Mugabe thought, (for example, that put forward by Patrick Bond), Mugabe is an errand boy for Western capital. [3] The Zimbabwean leader’s anti-imperialist reputation is, according to this view, smoke and mirrors, an illusion conjured by a deft magician.
The Mugabe government’s anti-imperialist and anti-neo-colonial credentials rest on the following:
o In the late 1990s, intervening militarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo on the side of the young government of Laurent Kabila, to counter an invasion by Rwandan and Ugandan forces backed by the US and Britain.
o Rejecting a pro-foreign investment economic restructuring program established by the IMF as a condition for balance of payment support (after initially accepting it.)
o Expropriating farms owned by settlers of European origin as part of a program of land redistribution aimed at benefiting the historically disadvantaged African population.
o Establishing foreign investment controls and other measures to increase black Zimbabwean ownership of the country’s natural resources and enterprises.
Progressive scholars typically avoid mention of these anti-imperialist actions, for to do so would clash violently with the idea that Harare’s anti-imperialism is based on empty rhetoric. A few, however, do acknowledge these actions, but insist they were undertaken to enrich Mugabe and, aping US State Department and New York Times rhetoric, “his cronies.” Zimbabwe is said to have intervened militarily in the DRC to profit from the Congo’s rich mineral resources. Land is said to have been redistributed to reward Mugabe’s lieutenants (in which case, with 400,000 previously landless families resettled, Mugabe’s lieutenants comprise a sizeable part of the rural population). And measures to increase black Zimbabwean ownership in Zimbabwe’s economy are said to have no other aim than to enrich Mugabe’s friends.
This substitutes cynicism for analysis. Has there been corruption in the land resettlement program? Asbolutely. But what human enterprise is free from corruption? What’s more, is the presence of corruption in a program, proof the program was undertaken for corrupt reasons? Measures to increase black Zimbabwean ownership in the economy are scorned by progressive scholars for being capitalist. Fine, but a failure to be anti-capitalist is not equal to a failure to be anti-imperialist; nor is it proof of being pro-imperialist.
The foreign policy of capitalist governments is based in large measure on protecting their nationals’ ownership rights to foreign productive assets and promoting their access to foreign investment and export opportunities. Under the Mugabe government, ownership rights have not been safeguarded and foreign investment and export opportunities have been limited by tariff policies, foreign investment controls, subsidies and discrimination against foreign investors. Absent in the analyses of progressive scholars is the understanding of the Mugabe government’s policies from the point of view of the banks and corporations of the imperialist center. One key US ruling class foundation, The Heritage Foundation, complains that Zimbabwe’s “average tariff rate is high” and that “non-tariff barriers are embedded in the labyrinthine customs service;” that “state influence in most areas is stifling, and expropriation is common as the executive pushes forward its economic plan of resource distribution”; that Zimbabwe has “burdensome tax rates” and that “privatization has stalled”…”with slightly over 10 percent of targeted concerns privatized”…”and the government remains highly interventionist.” Of equal concern is Harare’s practice of setting “price ceilings for essential commodities,” “controls (on) the prices of basic goods and food staples,” and influence over “prices through subsidies and state-owned enterprises and utilities” – odd practices for what we’re to believe is a group of errand boys for Western capital. But perhaps of greatest concern to Western corporations and banks is Harare’s investment policies. “The government will consider foreign investment up to 100 percent in high-priority projects but applies pressure for eventual majority ownership by Zimbabweans and stresses the importance of investment from Asian countries, especially China and Malaysia, rather than Western countries.” [4] This paints a picture of the Mugabe government, not as a facilitator of Western economic penetration, but as economically nationalist, pursuing a program aimed at placing control of Zimbabwe’s land, natural resources and enterprises in the hands of black Zimbabweans. It is, in short, a black nationalist government. Clearly, Western investors don’t think Mugabe is working on their behalf. The only people who do are progressive scholars.
The Mugabe government’s pursuit of black nationalist interests, which clashes in important ways with the interests of Western banks and corporations as well as with the minority population of settlers of European origin, has been met by a strong, multi-faceted response from the US, Britain and the EU. This has included the denial of balance of payment support and development aid, the building up of civil society as a pole of opposition to the Mugabe government, the creation of and subsequent direction of an opposition party, and an international campaign of vilification aimed at discrediting the Mugabe government. [5] Progressive scholars barely acknowledge the Western response, treating it more as an invention of the Mugabe government, used to manipulate the population and to deflect attention from its failings, than as a reality – a bowing to elite theory, rather than to the facts.
Campbell, for example, complains that,
“The Mugabe government blames all of its problems on the economic war launched by the USA and Britain. For the Mugabe regime, at the core of this economic war, are the targeted sanctions against Mugabe’s top lieutenants under its Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA), passed by the Bush administration in 2001.” [6]
Campbell confuses targeted sanctions aimed at senior members of the Mugabe government, with ZDERA, an act which blocks Zimbabwe’s access to international credit, and, therefore, affects all Zimbabweans, not just Zanu-PF grandees. According to the act,
The Secretary of the Treasury shall instruct the United States executive director to each international financial institution to oppose and vote against--
(1) any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit, or guarantee to the Government of Zimbabwe; or
(2) any cancellation or reduction of indebtedness owed by the Government of Zimbabwe to the United States or any international financial institution.” [7]
Zimbabwe’s economy, like that of any other Third World country, was never robust to begin with, and inasmuch as it has always relied heavily on Western inputs and access to Western exports, was never too difficult to push into crisis by Western governments intent on making a point. To pretend Washington, London and Brussels haven’t sought to sabotage Zimbabwe’s economy, or are incapable of it, is absurd. ZDERA effectively reduces Zimbabwe’s access to the foreign exchange it needs to import necessities from abroad, including chemicals to treat drinking water, a significant point in the recent cholera outbreak. Development aid from the World Bank is also cut off, denying the country access to funds to build and repair the infrastructure needed to run a modern economy. Rather than banning the export of goods to Zimbabwe (the popular understanding of sanctions), the US has made importing goods a challenge. This doesn’t mean that Zimbabwe can’t import goods, or that there is no outside investment. What it does mean, however, is that Zimbabwe is denied access to the kind of financial support poor countries depend on to get by. The intended effect is to make Zimbabwe’s economy scream, and it has. Campbell, who, based on his equating ZDERA with targeted sanctions on individuals, doesn’t understand it, or hasn’t read it, dismisses the idea that the West’s economic warfare accounts for Zimbabwe’s economic troubles. He writes that,
“What has been clear from the hundreds of millions of dollars of investments by British, Chinese, Malaysian, South African and other capitalists in the Zimbabwe economy since 2003 is that the problems in Zimbabwe haven’t been caused by an economic war against the country.” [8]
This is like saying anyone exposed to an influenza virus couldn’t possibly be ill because he has received mega-doses of vitamins. Investment from non-Western sources may mitigate some of the problems created by ZDERA, but it doesn’t eliminate them. Chinese investment in platinum mines, for example, will not eliminate a balance of payment problem.
Understating the effects of ZDERA is not the only area in which progressive scholars go wrong; their failure to acknowledge Western efforts to build up a civil society with a mandate to destabilize Zimbabwe is another. This is inexcusable, since the efforts of Western governments to create, nurture, support, direct, and mentor opposition to the Mugabe government, including overthrow movements, is well documented [9] – mainly because these governments have been open about it -- and is hardly new. It has been used elsewhere, famously in Chile, and recently in Venezuela, Belarus, and the former Yugoslavia.
One reason for the failure of progressive scholars to acknowledge the role played by Western governments and ruling class foundations in destabilizing Zimbabwe may be because they too benefit from the same sources of funding. Campbell’s critique of Mamdani, for example, was published at Pambazuka News. Pambazuka News is a project of the US ruling class Ford Foundation [10], a vehicle to promote color-coded revolutions, in countries whose governments have been less than open to Western exports and investments. Pambazuka News is also sponsored by Fahamu [11]. While Fahamu no longer lists Western governments as funders, it has, in the past, been funded by the US State Department through USAID, by the British Parliament through the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, by the British government through the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the British Department of International Development, and by the European Union. The US, Britain and EU are on record as seeking the overthrow of the Mugabe government. They fund the organizations that disseminate anti-Mugabe analyses and sloganeering. They do so with one aim: to overthrow the Mugabe government. Campbell’s protesting that he is opposed to imperialist interventions is a bit like buying crack on the street while professing opposition to drug dealing, or placing a Think Green sticker on the bumper of your new SUV. Similarly, progressive scholar Patrick Bond, whose anti-Mugabe diatribes can also be found at Pambazuka News, describes the overthrow movement Sokwanele as an independent left, seemingly unaware it is on the US government payroll. [12]
Not only do progressive scholars ignore the links of Zimbabwe’s opposition to imperialist governments and foundations, they celebrate the opposition. Campbell refers to members of Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) as “brave fighters.” [13] Brave fighters they may be, but Campbell does not let on (or know) what Woza is fighting for. The group’s leader, Jenni Williams, won the US State Department’s 2007 International Woman of Courage Award for Africa, a plaudit presented to Williams by Condoleezza Rice in a March, 2007 ceremony in Washington. [14] It shouldn’t have to be pointed out that the US State Department’s priority is to secure the interests of US corporations and banks abroad, not the interests of the women of Zimbabwe. So why is the US State Department recognizing Williams? Not for her service to women’s rights, but because her activities help to destabilize Zimbabwe and bring closer the day the black nationalist program of the Mugabe government can be swept aside to clear the way for the unfettered pursuit of US corporate and banking interests. A US government report on the activities in 2007 of its mission to Zimbabwe reveals that the “US Government continued its assistance to Women of Zimbabwe Arise.” [15] US government assistance to Woza and other civil society organizations is channelled through Freedom House and PACT. Freedom House is interlocked with the CIA and is a “virtual propaganda arm of the (US) government and international right wing,” according to Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. [16] It is headed by Peter Ackerman. Ackerman runs the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, of which Stephen Zunes, another progressive scholar, is chair of the board of academic advisors. Ackerman’s wife, Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, is a former director of the Albert Einstein Institute, an organization which trained activists in popular insurrection techniques to overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, and has consulted with members of Zimbabwe’s civil society opposition on how to use non-violence to overthrow the Mugabe government. [17] Woza supports two US State Department propaganda vehicles: SW Radio Africa, a US State Department funded short-wave radio station that beams anti-Mugabe propaganda into Zimbabwe, and the Voice of America’s Studio 7, also funded by the US State Department to broadcast US foreign policy positions into Zimbabwe. [18] Zunes says Woza can by no means be considered American agents [19], echoing the progressive scholars’ line that there are no Western efforts to overthrow the Mugabe government; it’s all part of the anti-imperialist rhetoric Mugabe uses to stay in power.
One of the biggest problems for progressive scholars is that their wish to see the Mugabe government brought down inevitably means its replacement by the Morgan Tsvangirai-led faction of the MDC. If Zanu-PF is deplored by some progressive scholars and demonized from the left for being capitalist, the MDC should have two strikes against it: it’s not only capitalist, it is unquestionably the errand boy of the imperialist center, a point one doesn’t have to twist oneself into knots to make, as is done whenever progressive scholars claim Mugabe, despite being sanctioned and vilified by the West, is kept afloat by and works on behalf of Western capital. The MDC’s subservience to Western corporate and banking interests is amply evidenced in its origins (Britain and British wealth provided the seed money), policy platform (decidedly pro-foreign investment), [20] and its advisors (the John McCain-led international arm of the Republican Party, the IRI [21]). Under an MDC government, the stalled privatization program the Heritage Foundation complains about will quickly be restarted. Foreign investment controls, subsidies, tariffs, and price controls will be terminated. Reversal of land reform, while it may come slowly, will inevitably happen, as a condition of ending ZDERA. IMF and World Bank loans will be extended, and the pro-foreign investment measures which are the inevitable condition of these loans will gladly be acceded to.
So, what do progressive scholars like Campbell offer as an antidote? “That Zimbabweans…oppose the neoliberal forces within the MDC to ensure that the suffering of working people does not continue after the ultimate departure of Robert Mugabe.” [22] There is more naiveté in this single sentence than there is in the average five year old. Please! Neoliberal forces have controlled the MDC from day one [22], and they’ve controlled the party because they hold its purse strings. Their control won’t disappear the moment Mugabe is gone; on the contrary, it is at that moment it will be strongest. But suppose, for a moment, that Campbell’s naive fantasy comes true, and that the forces that provide the funding that is the lifeblood of the MDC, yield to pressure from Zimbabweans, who, at one moment, vote the MDC into power, despite its neo-liberal platform, and at the next, ask the MDC to abandon the platform it was elected on. Were the MDC to yield to this pressure, it would face exactly the same response the Mugabe government faced when it backed away from neo-liberal policies: sanctions, destabilization, demonization and the threat of military intervention. The failure of Campbell to understand this evinces an unsophisticated understanding of the foreign policies of Western countries.
How droll, then, is the pairing of this breathtaking naiveté with the utter arrogance of progressive scholars. They dismiss Mamdani for failing “to look more deeply at the crisis” and for being “fooled by Mugabe’s rhetoric of imperialist victimization,” and then moan that preventing non-experts from falling for Mugabe’s rhetoric is “one of the more difficult tasks for scholars working on Zimbabwe.” And yet a far more difficult task, it would seem, is for the same scholars to acquaint themselves with the basics: what ZDERA is; why the West is waging economic warfare; what the policies of ZANU-PF are compared to the MDC’s and how these policies align, or fail to align, with the interests of Western banks and corporations; and who created and guides the opposition. Indeed, it could be said that one of the most difficult tasks for anti-imperialists working on Zimbabwe is to persuade progressive scholars to look more deeply into the crisis and not be fooled by imperialist rhetoric.
1. Timothy Scarnecchia, Jocelyn Alexander et al, “Lessons of Zimbabwe,” Letters, London Review of Books, Volume 31, No. 1, January, 2009.
2. Horace Campbell, “Mamdani, Mugabe and the African scholarly community,” Pambazuka News, December 18, 2008. http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/52845
3. Bond, Patrick, “Mugabe: Talks Radical, Acts Like a Reactionary: Zimbabwe’s Descent,” Counterpucnh.org, March 27, 2007, http://www.counterpunch.org/bond03272007.html
4. Heritage Foundation, Index of Economic Freedom, 2008, http://www.heritage.org/research/features/...fm?ID=Zimbabwe)
5. Stephen Gowans, “Zimbabwe at War,” What’s Left, June 24, 2008. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/zimbabwe-at-war/
6. Campbell.
7. US Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001. http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/ge...s494enr.txt.pdf
8. Campbell.
9. See the section titled “Regime Change Agenda” in Stephen Gowans, “Zimbabwe at War,” What’s Left, June 24, 2008. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/zimbabwe-at-war/
10. Look under funders at Pambazuka News’ “About” page at http://www.pambazuka.org/en/about.php .
11. Ibid.
12. See Stephen Gowans, “Grassroot Lieutenants of Imperialism,” What’s Left, April 2, 2007, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/04/02/gra...of-imperialism/ and Stephen Gowans, “Talk Left, Funded Right,” What’s Left, April 7, 2007, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/04/07/tal...t-funded-right/.
13. Campbell.
14. Jim Fisher-Thompson, “Zimbabwean receives International Woman of Courage Award,” USINFO, March 7, 2007. http://www.america.gov/st/hr-english/2007/...F0.7266962.html
15. http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDACL121.pdf . See also Stephen Gowans, “Stephen Zunes’ false statements on Zimbabwe and Woza,” What’s Left, September 30, 2008. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/ste...babwe-and-woza/
16. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon Books, New York, 1988, p. 28
17. Michael Barker, “Sharp Reflection Warranted: Non-violence in the Service of Imperialism,” Swans, June 30, 2008. http://www.swans.com/library/art14/barker01.html
18. See Woza’s website, http://wozazimbabwe.org/?page_id=29 ; “Studio 7, launched in 2003, is the Zimbabwe program of Voice of America, which is funded by the United States. The program is broadcast in Shona, Ndebele and English, and is beamed into Zimbabwe from a transmitter in Botswana on the AM signal and by shortwave.” Globe and Mail, March 26, 2005. In an April 5, 2007 report, the US Department of State revealed that it had worked to expand the listener base of Voice of America’s Studio 7 radio station. On SW Radio Africa see http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=SW_Radio_Africa .
19. See Stephen Gowans, “Stephen Zunes’ false statements on Zimbabwe and Woza,” What’s Left, September 30, 2008. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/ste...babwe-and-woza/
20. In 2000, the (British Parliament’s Westminster Foundation for Democracy) provided the MDC with $10 million. Herald (Zimbabwe), September 4, 2001 cited in Gregory Elich, Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit, Llumina Press, 2006; “WFD has been involved in over 80 projects aiding the MDC, and helped plan election strategy. It also provides funding to the party's youth and women's groups.” Herald (Zimbabwe), January 2, 2001, cited in Gregory Elich, Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit, Llumina Press, 2006; “In a clandestinely filmed interview, screened in Australia on February 2002 on the SBS Dateline program, MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai was caught on camera admitting that his organization was financed by European governments and corporations, the money being channelled through a British firm of political consultants, BSMG.” Rob Gowland, “Zimbabwe: The struggle for land, the struggle for independence,” Communist Party of Australia; Civil society groups “and the Movement for Democratic Change…have broad Western support, and, often, financing.” New York Times, December 24, 2004; The International Republican Institute, the international arm of the Republican Party, “is using (the US State Department’s) USAID and the US embassy in Harare to channel support to the MDC, circumventing restrictions of Zimbabwe’s Political Parties Finance Act. Herald (Zimbabwe) August 12, 2005; USAID bankrolls sixteen civil society organizations in Zimbabwe, with emphasis on supporting the MDC’s parliamentary activities. "Zimbabwe Program Data Sheet," U.S. Agency for International Development, cited in Gregory Elich, Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit, Llumina Press, 2006; “USAID has a long and successful history of working with Zimbabwe's civil society, democratic political parties, the Parliament and local government.” Testimony of Katherine Almquist, USAID Assistant Administrator for Africa, The Crisis in Zimbabwe and Prospects for Resolution. Subcommittee on African Affairs, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, July 15, 2008.
From the MDC’s 2008 policy platform: The MDC does not believe that government should be involved in running businesses and it will restore title in full to all companies; Private enterprise in general, and industry in particular, will be the engine of economic growth in a new Zimbabwe; The MDC government will remove price controls and reverse the coercive indigenization proposals recently adopted; (An MDC government will show) an unwavering commitment to:
* The safety and security of individual and corporate property rights.
* Opening industry to foreign direct investment and the unfettered repatriation of dividends.
* The repeal of all statutes that inhibit the establishment and maintenance of a socio-economic environment conducive to the sustained growth and development of the industrial sector.
The MDC will…(open)…up private sector participation in postal and telecommunication services; (The MDC believes) the private sector is in a better position to finance new development and respond to customer needs (in telecommunications); (An MDC government will) look into…the full privatization of the electronic media.
According to progressive scholar Patrick Bond: “…very quickly, what had begun as a working-class party … was hijacked by international geopolitical forces, domestic (white) business and farming interests, and the black petite bourgeoisie.” Noah Tucker, “In the Shadow of Empire,” 21st Century Socialism, August 3, 2008, http://21stcenturysocialism.com/article/in...pire_01694.html
21. The “IRI held a workshop for Tsvangirai’s shadow government at which each shadow minister presented and defended his/her policy positions. A panel of technical experts grilled presenters on the technical content of their policies.” US State Department report. See Stephen Gowans, “US government report undermines Zimbabwe opposition’s claim of independence,” What’s Left, October 4, 2008. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/us-...f-independence/
22. Campbell.
23. That Campbell thinks there’s any possibility of the MDC being budged from its neo-liberal position shows that he should spend less time worrying about whether others are falling for Mugabe’s anti-imperialist rhetoric and more time worrying about whether he has fallen for the rhetoric of the MDC and its imperialist backers. The nascent MDC appointed an official of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries, Eddie Cross, as its Secretary of Economic Affairs. In a speech delivered shortly after his appointment, Cross articulated the MDC economic plan. "First of all, we believe in the free market. We do not support price control. We do not support government interfering in the way people manage their lives. We are in favor of reduced levels of taxation. We are going to fast track privatization. All fifty government parastatals will be privatized within a two-year frame, but we are going far beyond that. We are going to privatize many of the functions of government. We are going to privatize the Central Statistics Office. We are going to privatize virtually the entire school delivery system. And you know, we have looked at the numbers and we think we can get government employment down from about 300,000 at the present time to about 75,000 in five years." Patrick Bond and Masimba Manyanya, Zimbabwe's Plunge - Exhausted Nationalism, Neoliberalism and the Search for Social Justice, Merlin Press, 2002.
A policy paper issued by the party in 2000 spelled out its plans to attract “foreign direct investment…on a substantial scale." The party planned to: “Appoint a "fund manager to dispose of government-owned shares in publicly quoted companies"; “Privatize all designated parastatals [public companies] within two years"; Encourage “foreign strategic investors … to bid for a majority stake in the enterprises being privatized."
"Social and Economic Policies for a New Millennium," MDC policy paper, May 26, 2000.
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http://visibility911.com/blog/?p=781
The incoherent in defence of the preposterous.
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Your biting sarcasm has left me undone. I am no more!
Did you fall into your own footprint? Just for the record...
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I'll give that person kudos for at least attempting to reproduce the conditions they claim are possible. Most will make a claim, and fail to back it with any solid evidence whatsoever.
A quite devastating critique of NIST! Well done, Evan, I didn't think you had it in you.
Paul
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The New York World-Telegram & Sun, Thursday, 21 November 1963 p.25
CIA and Decay
By Richard Starnes
All this, in the Orwellian language of Washington's CIA stiffs, will be cited as more evidence of the sad truth that the spooks get lumps every time the United States takes a licking, but never get credit for its mysterious, unknown feats of derring-do. The CIA remains above the battle of agencies which have to account for themselves. Only from time to time (and at times like this), its well-bred murmur is heard in the expense clubs in the nation's capital, explaining why it cannot be held accountable to democratic processes, as all our other great organs of government, secret and overt, are.
How little has changed - the sound of the well-bred murmur once more:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/12/08/cia/
The CIA and its reporter friends: Anatomy of a backlash
The coordinated, successful effort to implant false story lines about John Brennan illustrates the power the intelligence community wields over political debates.
Glenn Greenwald
Dec. 08, 2008
The backlash from the "intelligence community" over John Brennan's withdrawal -- which pro-Brennan sources are now claiming was actually forced on Brennan by the Obama team -- continues to intensify. Just marvel at how coordinated (and patently inaccurate) their messaging is, and -- more significantly -- how easily they can implant their message into establishment media outlets far and wide, which uncritically publish what they're told from their cherished "intelligence sources" and without even the pretense of verifying whether any of it is true and/or hearing any divergent views:
Jeff Stein, Congressional Quarterly, 12/5/2008:
Anyone connected to post-Sept. 11 “enhanced interrogation measures,” no matter at arm’s length, is apparently disqualified to run Barack Obama ’s spy agency.
Hence the immolation of former National Counterterrorism Center chief John Brennan, the president-elect’s closest intelligence adviser, as the lead candidate to run the spy agency.
The left-wing hit job on Brennan showed that liberals may have a taste for covert action after all, the spooks chuckle. . . .
Can anybody who could do the job, get the job?
“Beats me,” said a well-wired former senior intelligence official. “Brennan’s hands were not very dirty at all. He was apparently thrown under the bus because some ill-informed bloggers thought they were [dirty] and the transition folks didn’t have the will to explain that they were wrong.”
A former national security official and friend of Brennan, who asked not to be identified, is disgusted by what happened.
“Ninety-nine percent of” what the CIA has been doing since Sept. 11 “is not related to torture, but now everybody is tarred with this brush,” he said.
Diane Rehm Show, NPR, 12/5/2008:
Tom Gjelten, NPR: I understand that it was the Obama team who pulled the plug on John Brennan.
Diane Rehm: Why?
Gjelten: I don't know why. But Brennan had become a real target of criticisms of all those sectors -- largely on the left -- who were very concerned about interrogation and rendition and other such --
Rehm: And it was lots of bloggers who apparently pointed out that he had somehow been involved in the decisions --
Michael Hirsh, Newsweek: Without any direct evidence, of course -- as is so often the case in the blogging world (chuckles). . . . The people with the most experience in the intelligence world, like Brennan -- Brennan was a first-class professional -- are getting sidelined because of these controversial issues surrounding detention, interrogation, Guantanamo Bay and so forth -- and the risk remains that you have someone there who really isn't the best candidate.
Shane Harris, National Journal, 12/6/2008 (sub. req.):
(Image available from Salon link.)
Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, New York Times, 12/2/2008:
Last week, John O. Brennan, a C.I.A. veteran who was widely seen as Mr. Obama’s likeliest choice to head the intelligence agency, withdrew his name from consideration after liberal critics attacked his alleged role in the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Mr. Brennan protested that he had been a “strong opponent” within the agency of harsh interrogation tactics, yet Mr. Obama evidently decided that nominating Mr. Brennan was not worth a battle with some of his most ardent supporters on the left.
Mr. Obama’s search for someone else and his future relationship with the agency are complicated by the tension between his apparent desire to make a clean break with Bush administration policies he has condemned and concern about alienating an agency with a central role in the campaign against Al Qaeda.
Mark M. Lowenthal, an intelligence veteran who left a senior post at the C.I.A. in 2005, said Mr. Obama’s decision to exclude Mr. Brennan from contention for the top job had sent a message that “if you worked in the C.I.A. during the war on terror, you are now tainted,” and had created anxiety in the ranks of the agency’s clandestine service.
Tom Gelten, NPR, 12/3/2008:
Brennan's withdrawal, offered in a Nov. 25 letter to Obama, came after liberal bloggers mounted an opposition campaign against his possible appointment. They said he was tainted by his service in the CIA at a time when the agency was employing coercive interrogation methods, including "waterboarding," on detainees.
Mark Mazzetti, The New York Times, 11/25/2008:
The opposition to Mr. Brennan had been largely confined to liberal blogs, and there was not an expectation he would face a particularly difficult confirmation process. Still, the episode shows that the C.I.A.’s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base, making it difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone for a top intelligence post who has played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks.
This is why I went through that long, arduous exercise with NPR's Gjelten the other day -- culminating in his admission that he should have reported the Brennan story more accurately ("Okay. That would be fair. That's how I should have said it. You're absolutely right. I should have said it that way"): it's because these inaccurate themes, along with the coordinated planting of these storylines and the shoddy reporting which enables them, are everywhere. And this matters for reasons far beyond the specific controversy over John Brennan.
All of this illustrates the unparalleled power which the "intelligence community" exerts over our political debates, how easy it is for them to manipulate intelligence reporters who depend on cooperation with their intelligence sources and who thus identify with them and happily amplify whatever they are fed, and -- most of all -- how profoundly unrealistic is the expectation that, now that Democrats are "in control," they're just going to blithely proceed to impose all sorts of new restrictions on the CIA and the rest of the Surveillance State -- let alone launch probing investigations and impose accountability for past crimes -- without much of a major fight.
Just consider what all of this "reporting" has in common:
(1) All of these reports rely exclusively on pro-Brennan sources, allies and friends of his in the CIA who have fanned out to plant their storyline with their favorite reporters. This truly excellent and amply documented critique by Columbia Journalism Review's Charles Kaiser of The New York Times' reporting on these matters is applicable to all of these reports, not just the ones in the NYT:
If you’ve only been reading The New York Times, you’re probably aware of these battles — but almost everyone you have seen quoted about them has similar points of view. Most of the Times’s sources don’t think that anyone who formulated or acquiesced in the current administration’s torture policies should be excluded as a candidate for CIA director, or prosecuted for possible violations of criminal law.
The story, by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, noted that John O. Brennan had withdrawn his name from consideration for CIA director after liberal critics attacked his role in the agency’s interrogation program, even though Brennan characterized himself as a “strong opponent” within the agency of harsh interrogation techniques. Brennan’s characterization was not disputed by anyone else in the story, even though most experts on this subject agree that Brennan acquiesced in everything that the CIA did in this area while he served there.
“I was aghast reading this,” said Scott Horton, a professor of human rights law at Hofstra and a contributing editor at Harper’s, whose blog was instrumental in framing the opposition to Brennan’s appointment. “The Times doesn’t even do a reasonable job of presenting the conflicts — their principal source today was John O. Brennan. They have not reached out to the other side. It looks like Mark and Scott have decided that it’s payback time for a couple of their sources at the agency.”
In all of these accounts, Brennan's false claims of unfair persecution -- that he was attacked simply because he happened to be at the CIA -- are fully amplified in detail through his CIA allies, most of whom are quoted at length (though typically behind a generous wall of anonymity). But Brennan's critics are almost never quoted or named (of all of the above-cited reports, only the National Journal article includes a quote from a named Brennan critic: a couple vague snippets from one of the pieces I wrote about Brennan). The "reporting" is all from the perspective of Brennan and his CIA supporters. None of these journalists even entertain the idea of disputing or challenging the pro-Brennan version.
(2) None of this reporting even alludes to, let alone conveys, the central arguments against Brennan and the evidence for those arguments. Unmentioned are his emphatic advocacy for rendition and "enhanced interrogation tactics." None of the lengthy Brennan quotes defending these programs are acknowledged, despite the fact that not only bloggers, but also the much-cited psychologists' letter, emphasized those defenses (that letter complained that Brennan "supported Tenet's policies, including 'enhanced interrogations' as well as 'renditions' to torturing countries"). The seminal article on these CIA programs by The New Yorker's Jane Mayer -- who interviewed Brennan and identified him as a "supporter" of these programs despite "the moral, ethical, and legal issues" -- does not exist in the journalists' world.
What instead pervades these stories is the patently deceitful claim typified by Newsweek's Michael Hirsh, who asserted that the case against Brennan was made "with no direct evidence" and then chuckled that this is "common for the blogging world" -- an ironic observations given that Hirsh himself is either completely ignorant of the ample evidence that was offered or is purposely pretending it doesn't exist in order to defend the CIA official Hirsh lauded as "the first-class professional." That's how the persecution tale against Brennan is built -- by relying on mindless reporters to distort (when they weren't actively suppressing) the evidence against him.
(3) In these accounts, Brennan is described in reverent terms ("first-class professional"; a "natural candidate"; "the guy who's most qualified for the job") while his critics remain unnamed and unseen though dismissed with derogatory, demonizing terms ("some ill-informed bloggers"; "ill-informed but powerful activists"; "a few obscure blogs"; "bloggers" who don't "have that familiarity").
(4) Concerns over torture and rendition -- despite being widespread among countless military officials and intelligence professionals -- are uniformly depicted as nothing more than ideological idiosyncrasies from the dreaded Left ("left-wing hit job on Brennan"; "largely on the left"; "left-leaning bloggers and columnists"; "Obama's liberal base"; Obama's "most ardent supporters on the left"; "liberal critics"; "liberal bloggers"; "confined to liberal blogs"; "the Democratic base").
Thus: non-ideological, pragmatic, Serious centrists (which, as everyone knows, is what we need now) are free of this nattering fixation on all this "torture" talk. Serious adults know that it's time to move on and not hold grudges. It's only the shrill ideologues on the Left who care about such things and want to hold it against those who defended these programs. Depicting one's critics as confined to "the Left" is a time-honored Beltway method for rendering the criticisms unserious, and it's in full force here (and, as Digby ironically notes, it is the Right, far more than the Left, that has waged war against the CIA in recent years; the Left has largely defended the CIA against manipulation and abuse by the Bush White House).
(5) What all of this is -- more than anything else -- is a clear warning to Obama from the CIA about the dangers of paying heed to anti-torture and pro-civil-liberties factions, and they're not really even hiding that. They're explicitly expressing the message as a warning: "the President-elect risks sending a troubling signal to the intelligence community." As Mazzetti and Shane put it after speaking with their favorite sources: Obama risks "alienating an agency with a central role in the campaign against Al Qaeda."
Those warnings are issued with an eye towards the events they know full well are imminent: debates over how legally restrained the CIA should be in its interrogation and detention powers; demands that light be shined on what the CIA spent the last eight years doing at the behest of Dick Cheney and with the legal imprimatur of David Addington's cabal; and, most of all, efforts to hold those who committed war crimes accountable (efforts which would and should be directed at high-level Bush policy makers and legal advisers who enabled those crimes, not lower-level intelligence agents, but which the CIA nonetheless fears).
What happened with John Brennan is very straightforward and ought not be particularly controversial. This is someone who explicitly defended some of the most controversial Bush interrogation and detention policies. Everything that Obama said about such policies, and everything his supporters believe about them, should, for that reason alone, preclude Brennan from being named to any top intelligence post, let alone CIA Director. It's just as simple as that.
But, as has been historically true, many in "the intelligence community" are outraged by what they perceive as outside "interference" -- as though the CIA shouldn't be subjected to the same set of oversight, limitations, and democratic accountability, debate and restrictions as every other part of government. That something as straightforward as the John Brennan controversy can produce this level of backlash from the intelligence community is a very potent sign of the formidible barriers to real reform of our interrogation and detention framework and, especially, to the prospects for meaningful disclosure of, and accountability for, past crimes.
-- Glenn Greenwald
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Lodge appears to have shared JFK's conviction that no military solution, only a political one, was available or desirable in Vietnam. In his characteristically "diplomatic" memoir, The Storm Has Many Eyes (NY: WW Norton, 1973), Lodge wrote...
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/120108a.html
Obama's Risky 'Team of Rivals'By Lisa Pease
December 1, 2008
It’s good to see President-elect Barack Obama studying history. How wonderful to have a President who actually reads book such as Doris Kearns Goodwin’s A Team of Rivals about Abraham Lincoln’s inclusion of political opponents in his war-time Cabinet.
But there’s another “team of rivals” in more recent history that proved disastrous for a President's goals.
If there’s one book Obama should read before he sets any more appointments in stone, it would be James Douglass’s remarkable book JFK and the Unspeakable.
Douglass outlines in clear form how a generous-minded President Kennedy brought his rivals into his inner circle, only to find them banding together against him and working against his stated goals.
While Kennedy brought in some of “the best and the brightest” with the likes of Ted Sorenson, Richard Goodwin and Kenny O’Donnell, he also extended a hand to several political opponents, including conservative Democrats and prominent Republicans.
Evidently Obama, like Kennedy, thinks that by taking the high road he can bring out the best in his opponents. Kennedy tried that, and his plan backfired terribly, no more so than in Vietnam.
Originally, Kennedy had appointed Frederick Nolting to be Ambassador to Vietnam. When Nolting asked to be released in 1963, Kennedy turned to an old friend, Edmund Gullion, who had warned Kennedy in 1951 that it would be folly to follow in France’s path in Vietnam.
Gullion had served as Kennedy’s ambassador to Congo where, as Douglass described, “Kennedy and Gullion promoted [the late UN Secretary Dag] Hammarskjöld’s vision of a united, independent Congo, to the dismay of the multinational corporations working ceaselessly to carve up the country and control its rich resources.”
Kennedy rejected the strong urgings of his State Department and Joint Chiefs to intervene militarily in Congo, even as the CIA had already been arming the secessionist regime in the Katanga province, an extraordinarily mineral-rich region within Congo.
Gullion’s efforts ensured the UN program laid out by Hammarskjöld remained in effect after Hammarskjöld’s death on Sept. 18, 1961, in a mysterious plane crash.
(After Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, the fragile alliances in Congo fell apart, and the CIA’s chosen successor, Mobutu Sese Seko, came to power, ruling by theft, raiding the public coffers for private benefit and jailing any who objected, driving his nation’s per capita income down by nearly two-thirds and planting the seeds for the violence we see there today.)
Gullion, with his less belligerent approach to foreign policy, found himself at odds with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, whom Kennedy had appointed as a gesture to Cold War hardliners within the Democratic Party. Rusk opposed Gullion’s appointment to Saigon.
Enter Lodge
Not wanting to overrule his Secretary of State, Kennedy chose instead to reach out to a former rival and scion of the establishment, Henry Cabot Lodge. In 1952, Kennedy had beat out Lodge, the incumbent, for his Senate seat in Massachusetts. Lodge had been beaten by Kennedy again in 1960, as Lodge was Richard Nixon’s vice presidential pick.
In 1962, Ted Kennedy beat out another member of the Lodge family, deepening the enmity from the Lodges.
Lodge was very close to the CIA as well, having lobbied the UN on behalf of their efforts during the Eisenhower administration, frustrating international opposition to the CIA’s coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.
In 1963, Lodge let it be known he was very interested in becoming ambassador to Vietnam. Why would Lodge want to serve his enemy? Because he was eyeing the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. He had his own agenda to enact in Vietnam, as Kennedy would soon learn in the worst of ways.
Robert Kennedy tried to warn his brother, telling him Lodge could cause the President “a lot of difficulty in six months.” Robert underestimated the timing, as Lodge became a problem almost as soon as he was appointed.
Kennedy let his close associates know that he wanted out of Vietnam at the earliest opportunity. But he felt he could not complete it before reelection, and wouldn’t get the chance if he tipped his hand too soon.
Kennedy tried to create the impression with the military and the CIA that he supported continuing American involvement there. But he told his friends and would-be allies the opposite.
At one point, he pulled one of the most vocal voices calling for American withdrawal from Vietnam, Senator Wayne Morse, out to the White House Rose Garden in the hopes of avoiding being overheard or bugged by the CIA. There, Kennedy told Morse, “Wayne, I’ve decided to get out. Definitely!”
Kennedy even confided in his next-door-neighbor in Hyannis Port, Larry Newman, “This war in Vietnam — it’s never off my mind, it haunts me day and night. … The first thing I do when I’m re-elected, I’m going to get America out of Vietnam.”
Diem Coup
But the CIA, and its ally Lodge, had other plans. Together, they had set in motion plans for a coup to remove Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, without permission from Kennedy.
Kennedy learned that moves were being made behind his back after the fact. For example, he considered cutting off the commodity import program that was helping South Vietnam, as a sign to Diem that he was serious about the need for internal changes.
But Kennedy found to his great chagrin that David Bell, the head of the Agency for International Development (a well-known CIA front), had already cut off that aid.
"Who the hell told you do to that?" asked Kennedy.
"It's an automatic policy," Bell told him. "We do it whenever we have differences with a client government."
The cutting off of aid was also a specific, pre-arranged green light to the coup plotters. In other words, the CIA, not the President, was determining the timeline for the coup.
Kennedy urged Lodge as strongly as he could to negotiate with Diem, to not hold to a list of rigorous demands, but to seek some option that would allow the U.S. to continue to support the Diem government. But Kennedy also stopped short of giving Lodge a direct order.
Lodge stubbornly refused to have any contact with Diem, insisting talks would have no effect. Lodge finally bowed to pressure from the President and his Secretary of State to talk to Diem on Sept. 9, 1963.
However, Lodge dismissed Diem as having a "medieval view of life," and proved an ineffective negotiator. Diem's only choice was to surrender to American interests, or risk being overthrown in a coup.
In addition, Lodge warned Kennedy that if U.S. forces were to withdraw from Vietnam, that would speed up the coup plans. So Kennedy felt trapped. He couldn't talk about his plans for withdrawal without giving further hope to the coup plotters.
Diem needed to make some motion of accommodation to give Kennedy a reason to call off the coup entirely.
Just before the coup began, Diem finally gave Lodge the message Kennedy had been seeking – that he was willing to make accommodations.
Lodge dutifully reported Diem's statement, but not until an hour and a half after the coup started, with the key statement buried near the end of his report, and he sent his cable using the slowest process, when clearly such words deserved more urgency.
According to Maxwell Taylor's account, when Kennedy learned of the coup and the subsequent assassination of Diem and his brother on Nov. 2, 1963, "Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before."
If only Obama could read and learn from this history as well, before he completes his appointments. Bringing enemies into your camp does not guarantee they will serve your agenda.
Lisa Pease is a historian and writer who specializes in the mysteries of the John F. Kennedy era.
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The view of the State v. CIA war in Vietnam embodied in Starnes’ ‘Arrogant’ CIA was to receive powerful corroboration in the pages of The Times, then still the house-organ of the British elite. On Macmillan’s last day in No.10, it offered a succinct summary of the forces in play and what they represented. British historians, it should be noted, have spent over forty years avoiding this and similar meditations on the CIA under Kennedy in the Times 1961-63. More fool them.
The capitalisation follows the original.
The Times, Tuesday, 8 October 1963, p.13:
Second leader
An Elusive Agency
President Kennedy’s failure to control the political activities of the Central Intelligence Agency has been one of the more disappointing and mysterious aspects of his Administration. It is to be hoped that his belated recall of MR. RICHARDSON, the head of the C.I.A. mission in South Vietnam, is a sign of a new determination to exert the full political control which the agency so badly needs. Few things damage a country more than if its representatives on the spot appear to be at odds with each other.
The Cuban fiasco provided a unique opportunity to reassess the role of the C.I.A. The evidence of Laos and South Vietnam is that the opportunity was fumbled. (In Laos two years ago the C.I.A. was still opposing the neutralist coalition some time after PRESIDENT KENNEDY had formally endorsed it.) It is important, however, that the C.I.A. should not become a scapegoat for what are often the sins of the Government. Its involvement with NGO DINH DIEM’S family in Vietnam was encouraged by the absence of clear direction from Washington. The American Government was split over the proper policy for Vietnam, and in the resulting cleavage the State Department went one way and some of the C.I.A., with some of the Pentagon, another. There should have been especially keen vigilance over the C.I.A., for it is well known that many members of its staff are out of sympathy with the basic assumptions of the Administration’s policies, as they were not, on the whole, in the days of MR. DULLES.
The difficulty that has always dogged the C.I.A. is that it is basically inimical to American traditions, and the country has been unable to assimilate it. Born out of the shock of Pearl Harbour, it found its present name in 1947. The original intention was that it should confine itself to the collection and evaluation of information, and many think it should return to this pristine state. It outgrew the restrictions almost by accident. The State Department was weak in staff and funds, and American policy demanded methods that were not compatible with normal diplomacy. Gradually MR. JOHN FOSTER DULLES found that he could sometimes act more effectively through his brother ALLEN, then head of the C.I.A., than through his own department. Repeated attempts to subject the agency to Congressional control stumbled on the obvious need for secrecy. Secrecy would disappear in the open arenas of American political life. At the same time the Dulles fraternity inhibited control by the Executive. The result was a new and secret kingdom which combined the collection of information with the formulation and the execution of policy.
After the Bay of Pigs PRESIDENT KENNEDY tried to restore the making of policy to the State Department, local authority to his ambassadors, and most operational responsibilities to the Pentagon. He has had some success with these reforms, but not enough. The recent troubles have already revived demands for more Congressional control, and some increase may be possible. In the end, however, only one person is in a position to exert full control, and that is the President himself.
As in Vietnam, so in Laos the summer before:
From our own correspondent, “CIA Is Blamed for Laos Crisis: Washington Policy Conflict – Encouragement of General Phoumi,” The Times, Thursday, 24 May 1962, p.14Washington, May 23 – There have been many crises here recently but, engaged as it is in Europe and Asia, the Administration is now grappling with another here at hand. It is a familiar crisis but no less difficult; the Administration is now convinced that the Central Intelligence Agency has been up to its old devices again and must share a large part of the responsibility for the situation in Laos.
It is not easy to acquire all the details in such a murky situation, but apparently the evidence shows that the swarm of CIA agents in Laos deliberately opposed the official American objective of trying to establish a neutral Government. They are believed to have encouraged General Phoumi Nosavan in the concentration of troops that brought about the swift and disastrous response of the Pathet Lao.
SUBSIDY SUSPENDED
It is also officially believed that the heavy pressure brought upon Prince Boun Oum and General Phoumi to accept the political solution of neutrality, including the suspension since February of the monthly subsidy of $3m. (more than £1m.) failed because the agency provided them with some funds from its own capacious budget. The belief is that the agency transferred the money from its operation in Siam, where General Phoumi has family connexions.
It will be recalled that the CIA played a large role in bringing about the downfall of Prince Souvanna Phouma, who was ousted by the General in 1960. Subsequently the danger of a forward and belligerent policy in Laos was clearly seen here, and largely because of the efforts of Mr Averell Harriman, the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, the United States joined with Britain in an effort to create a neutral coalition government under Prince Souvanna Phouma.
DEEP INVOLVEMENT
But changes of staff and policy in the State Department are not always reflected at the other end of diplomatic tables, especially when the CIA is involved. The agents who helped to bring down the Souvanna Phouma ministry remained in the country, and very much on the offensive. They were long suspected of influencing and strengthening the resistance of the right-wing to a political solution, but their involvement has since proved to be deeper.
The result of their clandestine endeavours is the defeat, and perhaps total demoralization, of the Royal Laotian forces; the commitment of American forces on the Asian mainland; and a deterioration of the political situation that could have ended the patient efforts to reach a political solution. Officials here would go further; the fear has been expressed that American intentions are now misunderstood in Laos, and to convince the right wing of the Princes of its determination to establish and support a neutral Laos will be difficult.
GENERAL’S FUTURE
More believe it will be impossible, and accordingly there is a demand here for the removal of General Phoumi. This will not be easy but he will lose most of his American support and the suggestion is to be made that he should drop politics and return to soldiering.
The man problem remains. The reorganization of the CIA has perhaps had too little time to take effect in distant outposts, but clearly agents are still employed whose enthusiasm for right-wing Asian leaders knows no bounds. The unification of American operations in Laos is now regarded as urgent, and a Presidential order is requested.
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Paul must not be getting attention these days. No mention of him contacting Lane or following up with UPI. Good ol' Paul Rigby~
Nor, too, it would appear, of the clipping allegedly lurking in Mack's box. Still looking, Bill, or that another evidentiary promise you can't deliver?
Paul
Nothing for me to deliver, Paul .. the newspaper in question is in the Museum. Like Denis said ... you make up 90% of this thread .. a fraction of that time spent looking for the paper in question, contacting Lane, etc., should keep you busy, but it appears that you aren't interested in doing anything that means doing research.
Everything sourced, much of it new - in summary, the most extensively and best researched thread on the alleged "Muchmore" WNEW-TV debut yet offered by anyone. It thus exposes as false and baseless the various claims advanced for it by Mack, Thompson, and, of course, you.
No wonder you hate it.
Paul
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Paul, I dont wish to sound unkind but doesn't it tell you something when 92 percent of the post's on this tread are from YOU!! GIVE IT UP.
Paul must not be getting attention these days. No mention of him contacting Lane or following up with UPI. Good ol' Paul Rigby~
Nor, too, it would appear, of the clipping allegedly lurking in Mack's box. Still looking, Bill, or that another evidentiary promise you can't deliver?
Paul
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Paul, I dont wish to sound unkind but doesn't it tell you something when 92 percent of the post's on this tread are from YOU!! GIVE IT UP.
Always a pleasure to hear from the Alf Garnett of Warren Commission orthodoxy.
PS More work needed on those percentages: But it does explain the sustained excellence of the thread...
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So, let me see if I have this element of the anti-alterationist story straight: UPI had footage of the actual shooting of President Kennedy but withheld news of its existence from the FBI, the very organisation assigned the lead role in the official investigation, for a period of, what, two to three weeks?
Curious.
In addition, no one at WNEW-TV bothered to mention it to the FBI, nor any viewer.
Curiouser, and curiouser.
It gets stranger.
Here’s an extract from David R. Wrone’s The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination (University Press of Kansas, 2003), pp.150-152:
“At nine o’clock on the morning of November 25, 1963, three days after the murder of President Kennedy – but early on the first working day after the murder – Walter Bent, sales service manager of the Eastman Kodak Company, the same firm that had developed Zapruder’s film, telephoned the Dallas FBI office and spoke to FBI special agent Milton L. Newsom (41). His company had just received film from Charles Bronson to be developed. In his package Bronson had included a note advising Kodak that the film may be of the assassin as he fired the shots. Would the FBI, said Bent, be interested in viewing the film? (42)
Newsom’s memorandum of the conversation reads as follows:
Mr. WALTER BENT, Sales Service Manager, Eastman Kodak Company, Processing Division, 3131 Manor Way, telephone FL 7-4654, Dallas, telephonically advised his company had received two rolls of 8 milimeter [sic] Kodachrome and one roll of 35 milimeter [sic] film in a package from Mr. CHARLES BRONSON, Chief Engineer, Zarel Mfg. Company, 9230 Denton Drive, Dallas, Texas.Mr. BRONSON enclosed a letter with his film, stating that the film had been taken at the instant President KENNEDY was assassinated. BRONSON also advised in the letter that from the position he was stationed when he took the film, he feels quite certain the Texas School Book Depository Building was clearly photographed and he feels that the window from which the shots were fired will be depicted on the film. He stated for this reason he believes he may have a picture of the assassin, as he fired the shots.
Mr. BENT stated Mr. BRONSON’s letter indicated he desired to be cooperative regarding the film with proper authorities and BENT is of the opinion that BRONSON will have no objection to turning the film over to proper authorities in the event it is of value to the investigation.
Mr. BENT stated that he would make arrangements with Mr. BRONSON to view the film at the Kodak Processing Centre and would arrange this so that FBI agents could be present and at the same time interview BRONSON concerning his film of the scene.
Mr. BENT assured his full cooperation regarding all film received of a like nature that may possibly be connected with this matter and arrangements were made with him to immediately notify SA NEWSOM of any film of possible value.
The Eastman Kodak Processing Service Division receives all color film made by 8 milimeter [sic] Kodachrome in this area and also most other film for the area is processed by this division. Mr. BENT explained that his employees have not worked since Saturday and they are due back to work at 11:30 P.M., 11/25/63. When processing of recent film orders begins, he expects other films taken at the approximate time of President’s assassination.
He said that BRONSON’s film should be processed and ready for viewing by 3:00 P.M. He was told that SA NEWSOM would meet him at that time (43).
Bent then phoned Bronson and set up a meeting at the Kodak plant for 3:00 P.M.
At 3:00 Special Agents Milton Newsom and Emory Norton appeared at the plant and together with Bronson watched the films (44). Afterwards they did not ask for copies. When they returned to their office, they wrote up a memorandum on the films...
Notes:(41) See Trask, Pictures of the Pain; George Lardner Jr., “Film in JFK Assassination Reissued,” Washington Post, November 11, 1978; “New Clue in JFK Slaying,” San Francisco Bulletin, November 26, 1978; Wendell Rawls Jr., “New Film Suggests an Oswald Cohort,” New York Times, November 27, 1978; Earl Golz, “JFK Film May Record Two Gunmen,” Dallas Morning News, November 26, 1978.
(42) FBI Agent Milton Newsom to SAC, 11/25/63, serial 62-109060-456.
(43) Ibid.
(44) Trask, Pictures of the Pain, 278-304, is a history of the film.
According to Richard Trask’s Pictures of the Pain (p.205), citing Maurice Schonfeld’s July-August 1975 Columbia Journalism Review piece, “The Shadow of a Gunman,” Muchmore’s film was developed at the same “Eastman Kodak in Dallas” on the same day as Bronson’s – but entirely unbeknownst, it seems, to Mr. Bent, either at 9am, when he rang the FBI, or at 3pm, when he met with the Bureau’s Newsom and Norton.
Schonfeld’s version of how UPI acquired the film which its alleged taker subsequently denied (to the FBI) contained any footage of the assassination, runs as follows. Burt Reinhardt, by way of explanation, was “general manager of UPI’s newsfilm division, who had flown to Dallas to acquire amateur footage of the assassination” (1):
“Miss Muchmore brought her film to UPI’s Dallas bureau on November 25. The deskman promptly telephoned Burt Reinhardt” who “hurried to the office and set about shaking Miss Muchmore’s confidence in the value of her film by asking if she was positive that she was filming at the very moment of the assassination…UPI would be pleased to develop the film and see if it was any good and then make an offer, Reinhardt said, or, if Miss Muchmore preferred to play it safe, UPI would make a blind cash offer. Miss Muchmore chose to play it safe and accepted a check for $1,000. Reinhardt took the film to the Eastman Kodak lab in Dallas” (2).As we have seen from SA Newsom’s report on his exchanges with Walter Bent, Eastman Kodak’s Sales Service Manager, Processing Division, on 25 November, Schonfeld’s claim – that UPI took the film to Eastman Kodak in Dallas - was a retrospective fiction, and of a piece with his insistence that the film shown on WNEW-TV at 12:46 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, 26 November, was the Muchmore film, not the first version of the Zapruder.
Schonfeld was notably coy on the question of when and where this film was first shown. But while evasive on these details, he did at least offer a duration for the sequence seen by, among others, Mark Lane in New York, courtesy of the city’s WNEW-TV, and, in the process, confirmed key details of its presentation, as contained within the UPI despatch of the morning of 26 November:
“At first it seemed that Miss Muchmore had gotten the better of the deal. All we had was a grainy, jerky glimpse of the last seconds of the assassination and the confused aftermath; but back in New York we slowed the picture down, blew it up, zoomed in and stopframed and turned it into two minutes of respectable TV news. By the time we released the edited sequence, however, Jack Ruby had killed Oswald, the president’s funeral had just occurred, and showing the film seemed in such poor taste that most UPI client stations chose not to show it” (3).Of course, as previously demonstrated, the Muchmore film bore no relation to the film shown on WNEW-TV in the first hour of 26 November, as UPI’s own press release on its New York television debut made clear:
United Press International Newsfilm early today was first on the air with exclusive film showing the assassination of President Kennedy.The film is 16mm enlarged from 8mm. It was shown on a New York City television station.
The sequence, shot by an amateur photographer in Dallas Friday, begins with motorcycle police coming around the corner followed by the Kennedy motorcade.
The President is then seen leaning over when the bullets strike. Mrs. Kennedy puts her right arm around the President and he slumps out of view. The film then shows a Secret Service agent running toward the car.
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 (4).
Schonfeld, predictably, omitted mention of the fact that UPI Newsfilm was so concerned by the tastefulness of the assassination sequence in question that it had, according to the UPI’s own despatch of 26 November, “rushed” copies “to United Press Newsfilm clients all over the world” (5).
(1) Maurice W. Schonfeld, “The shadow of a gunman,” Columbia Journalism Review, July-August 1975, p.46.
The CJR, it should be noted, was founded by Edward W. Barrett, ex-OSS and Office of War Information (“Edward W. Barrett dies: Started Columbia Journalism Review,” Washington Post, 26 October 1989). According to Christopher Simpson, “Barrett omitted that information from biographical statements published during his lifetime” (Science of Coercion: Communication Research & Psychological Warfare 1945-1960 [NY: Oxford UP, 1996], p.141, n.39.)
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.
(4) UPI (NY), “Film showing assassination is released,” The Valley Independent, (Monessen, Pennsylvania), 26 November 1963, p.5
(5) Ibid.
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Lane was telling the truth in his original defense brief (aka the newspaper despatch from UPI which Gary Mack doesn't want you to read):The Valley Independent, (Monessen, Pennsylvania), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Page 5
Film Showing Assassination Is Released
NEW YORK (UPI) — United Press International Newsfilm early today was first on the air with exclusive film showing the assassination of President Kennedy.
The film is 16mm enlarged from 8mm. It was shown on a New York City television station.
The sequence, shot by an amateur photographer in Dallas Friday, begins with motorcycle police coming around the corner followed by the Kennedy motorcade.
The President is then seen leaning over when the bullets strike. Mrs. Kennedy puts her right arm around the President and he slumps out of view. The film then shows a Secret Service agent running toward the car.
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.
Copies have been rushed to United Press Newsfilm clients all over the world.
Will the truth set us free? Probably not, but it's always a very useful place to begin.
New Society (1) was a weekly founded in 1962 to cater for the burgeoning – and increasingly advertising-rich – UK bureaucracies of the “social sciences.” It was uniformly regarded as “left of centre,” and thus a potentially perfect vehicle for establishment disinformation.
In its edition of 13 October 1966, it devoted five pages to extracts from a paper delivered to that year’s “meeting of the American Sociological Association” by the somewhat improbably named Ruth Love Leeds, of the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University. Her paper that was “part of a wider study of the topic being undertaken” by her own employer in conjunction with the “Morse Communications Research Centre, Brandeis University” (2).
The New Society extract was grandly entitled “Television and the Kennedy Assassination.” Its great achievement was to omit the minor facts that a) film of the assassination had been shown on US television in the early hours (Eastern Standard Time) of Tuesday, 26 November; and
had drawn complaints on the grounds of taste (3). In lieu of the truth, Britain’s social workers were offered the following, the kind of flannel more normally encountered in a bathroom: “To broadcast material that deviates from expected behaviour, does not accord with prevalent standards of taste and morality, or puts favoured persons in a bad light is to detract from the overall tastefulness and appropriateness of the coverage. Such material would not only be offensive to public sentiment but to professional satisfaction, for the broadcasters pride themselves almost as much on producing tasteful coverage as they do a comprehensive news coverage.”Still, on the bright side, it was doubtless the kind of work undertaken by the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia which merited all those generous CIA grants (4).
Notes
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Society_(magazine)2) Ruth Love Leeds, “Television and the Kennedy Assassination,” New Society, 13 October 1966, pp.567-571.
3) Rick Freedman, “Pictures of Assassination Fall to Amateurs on Street,” Editor & Publisher, November 30, 1963, p.67: “By Tuesday, numerous pictures, both still and movie, were being offered to news media. At least one television station was besieged with protests after it had shown scenes of the President’s motorcade at the moment of the shooting. Many viewers considered them to be too gruesome.”
4) http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-A9zzGX...1&ct=result
It bought other lies, too. According to our awesome researcher Leeds, “Correspondents refrained from describing Kennedy’s wounds…” (Ruth Love Leeds, “Television and the Kennedy Assassination,” New Society, 13 October 1966, p.568).
It was, I think, Sir Lewis Namier who opined that the problem with amateur historians is that they think more about themselves than their subjects. To which a suitably offended amateur might well reply that the problem with the pros is that they go in seach of grants and tenure, not the truth.
The most impressive case of amnesia, however, belonged to UPI itself.
In early October 1964, UPI execs took their seats in Keith’s Theatre – “a short block from the White House” – to witness the debut of David Wolper’s “Four Days in November,” a documentary made “in cooperation with United Press International,” and boasting a “narrative script” which “was read for accuracy by [the] Warren Commission counsel,” no less.
In the highlighted sentences of the report below, we find that UPI had neglected to tell Wolper that in the early hours of November 26 (EST), WNEW-TV, NY, using a film supplied by the same UPI, had shown footage of the presidential limousine turning the corner from Houston on to Elm.
The omission permitted the introduction of a shot sound effect which just happened to dovetail with the print campaign, waged in late November and early December 1963 (see earlier posts in this thread), designed to suggest a shot at or just beyond the taking of the Houston/Elm turn.
http://www.kennedyassassinationarchive.com...esult=5¤tPage=0
Kingsport News (Tennessee), 8 October 1964, p.19
JFK Assassination Film Holds Guests Spellbound
Marlyn E. Aycock (UPI)
WASHINGTON (UPI) – Four days in November numbed an unbelieving world last year.Tuesday night, the premiere of a film on President John F. Kennedy's assassination had almost the same hypnotic effect on 1,600 invited guests.
The first showing of "Four Days in November" was at Keith's Theater here, a short block from the While House which figured so prominently in the two-hour documentary. Producer David L. Wolper combined a skillful blend of newsfilm, still photographs, amateur movies and recreated scenes into a searing record of those four days.
The United States and much of the world lived those days as they unfolded on television and in print. Wolper's production, in cooperation with United Press International, brought those tragic events back in a chronological, cohesive account for the first time.
Drama Increased
The assassination came near the midway point. For an hour, the drama built up until the presidential car turned a Dallas street corner and a shot rang out. The screen went blank for several seconds, symbolizing the inability of the mind to grasp what had happened. Then the camera recaptured the frenzy in the Dallas streets — Mrs. Kennedy pulling the Secret Service agent onto the rear of the car, the dash to Parkland Hospital, the blind man’s buff search for a culprit. And then the grief.
The following days of nation al sorrow in Washington were interrupted by sudden switches to the confusion in the halls of the Dallas police station and the incredible murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. The film made no attempt to interpret Oswald's motives. It assumed his guilt on the evidence available just as the Warren Commission did 10 days ago in concluding that Oswald acted for reasons known to him alone and without help.
Audible Effect
The affect of reliving those four days was clearly audible among the guests from the White House staff, executive UPI Editors and Conference here. None of the Kennedy family was present although a number of the late President's friends accepted invitations. The film was being released today for world-wide exhibition. Wolper and his associates edited some 2 million feet of film, much of it not shown publicly before, into the 120-minute final product. The narrative script was read for accuracy by the Warren Commission counsel. And in spite of the emotional drain the film creates it surely must rank among the most valuable historical documents ever put together.
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In the wake of the US-backed Georgian assault on South Ossetia, BBC 4's evening news flagship, Tonight, served up a Human Rights Watch "independent investigator" who sought to persuade listeners that talk of South Ossetian casualties was so much Russian propaganda. Here's the same outfit at work in Venezuela.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20886.htm
Human Rights Watch in Venezuela
Lies, Crimes and Cover-ups
By James Petras
28/09/08 "ICH " -- - Human Rights Watch, a US-based group claiming to be a non-governmental organization, but which is in fact funded by government-linked quasi-private foundations and a Congressional funded political propaganda organization, the National Endowment for Democracy, has issued a report “A Decade Under Chavez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela” (9/21/2008 hrw.org). The publication of the “Report” directed by Jose Miguel Vivanco and sub-director Daniel Walkinson led to their expulsion from Venezuela for repeated political-partisan intervention in the internal affairs of the country.
A close reading of the “Report” reveals an astonishing number of blatant falsifications and outright fabrications, glaring deletions of essential facts, deliberate omissions of key contextual and comparative considerations and especially a cover-up of systematic long-term, large-scale security threats to Venezuelan democracy posed by Washington.
We will proceed by providing some key background facts about HRW and Vivanco in order to highlight their role and relations to US imperial power. We will then comment on their methods, data collection and exposition. We will analyze each of HRW charges and finally proceed to evaluate their truth and propaganda value.
Background on Vivanco and HRW
Jose Miguel Vivanco served as a diplomatic functionary under the bloody Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet between 1986-1989, serving no less as the butcher’s rabid apologist before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. His behavior was particularly egregious during the regime’s brutal repression of a mass popular uprising in the squatter settlements of Santiago in 1986-1987. With the return of electoral politics (democracy) in Chile, Vivanco took off to Washington where he set up his own NGO, the Center for Justice and International Law, disguising his right-wing affinities and passing himself off as a ‘human rights’ advocate. In 1994 he was recruited by former US federal prosecutor, Kenneth Roth, to head up the ‘Americas Division’ of Human Rights Watch. HRW demonstrated a real capacity to provide a ‘human rights’ gloss to President Clinton’s policy of ‘humanitarian imperialism’. Roth promoted and supported Clinton’s two-month bombing, destruction and dismemberment of Yugoslavia. HRW covered up the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Kosovo by the notorious Albanian terrorists and gangsters of the Kosovo Liberation Army and the unprecedented brutal transfer of over 200,000 ethnic Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia. HRW backed Clinton’s sanctions against Iraq leading to the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children. Nowhere did the word ‘genocide’ ever appear in reference to the US Administrations massive destruction of Iraq causing hundreds of thousands of premature deaths.
HRW supported the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan where Kenneth Roth advised the US generals on how to secure the colonial occupation by avoiding massive civilian deaths. In words and deeds, HRW has played an insidious role as backer and adviser of US imperial intervention, providing the humanitarian ideological cover while issuing harmless and inconsequential reports criticizing ‘ineffective’ excesses, which ‘undermine’ imperial dominance.
HRW most notorious intervention was its claim that Israel’s murderous destruction of the Palestinian city of Jenin was ‘not genocidal’ and thus provided the key argument for the US and Israeli blocking of a UN humanitarian mission and investigative report. As in all of its ‘research’ their report was deeply colored by selective interviews and observations which understated the brutality and killings of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli state – even while the fanatics who run the major pro-Israel organizations accused HRW of bias for even mentioning a single murdered Palestinian.
Method
HRW currently makes a big play of its widespread interviews of a broad cross section of Venezuelan political and civic society government and opposition groups, as well as its consultation of most available documents. Yet the Report on Venezuela does not reflect anything of the sort. There is no careful, straightforward presentation of the government’s elaboration and justification for its actions, no academic critiques of the anti-democratic actions of anti-Chavez mass media; no discussion of the numerous journalists’ accounts which expose systematic US intervention. The Report simply records and reproduces uncritically the claims, arguments and charges of the principle publicists of the opposition while dismissing out of hand any documented counter-claims. In other words, Vivanco and company act as lawyers for the opposition rather than as serious and objective investigators pursuing a balanced and convincing evaluation of the status of democracy in Venezuela.
The political propaganda intent of Vivanco-HRW is evident in the timing of their ‘investigations’ and the publication of their propaganda screeds. Each and every previous HRW hostile ‘report’ has been publicized just prior to major conflicts threatening Venezuelan democratic institutions. In February 2002, barely two months before the US backed military coup against Chavez, HRW joined the chorus of coup planners in condemning the Chavez regimes for undermining the ‘separation of powers’ and calling for the intervention of the Organization of American States. After the coup was defeated through the actions of millions of Venezuelan citizens and loyalists military officers, HRW moved quickly to cover its tracks by denouncing the coup – but subsequently defended the media moguls, trade union bureaucrats and business elites who promoted the coup from prosecution, claiming the coup promoters were merely exercising their ‘human rights’. HRW provides a novel meaning to ‘human rights’ when it includes the right to violently overthrow a democratic government by a military coup d’etat.
Following the military coup in 2002 and the bosses’ lockout of 2003, HRW published a report condemning efforts to impose constitutional constraints on the mass media’s direct involvement in promoting violent actions by opposition groups or terrorists. President Chavez’ “Law for Social Responsibility in Radio and Television” provided greater constitutional guarantee for freedom of speech than most Western European capitalist democracies and was far less restrictive than the measures approved and implemented in Bush’s US Patriot Act, which HRW has never challenged, let alone mounted any campaign against.
Just prior to the political referenda in 2004 and 2007, HRW issued further propaganda broadsides which were almost identical in wording to the opposition (in fact HRW ‘Reports’ were widely published and circulated by all the leading opposition mass media). HRW defended the ‘right’ of the US National Endowment for Democracy to pour millions of dollars to fund opposition ‘NGO’s’, such as SUMATE, accusing the Chavez government of undermining ‘civil society’ organizations. Needless to say, similar activity in the US by an NGO on behalf of any foreign government (with the unique exception of Israel) would require the NGO to register as a foreign agent under very strict US Federal laws; failure to do so would lead to federal prosecution and a jail term of up to 5 years. Apparently, HRW’s self-promoted ‘credibility’ as an international ‘humanitarian’ organization protects it from being invidiously compared to an agent of imperialist propaganda.
HRW: Five Dimensional Propaganda
The HRW Report on Venezuela focuses on five areas of politics and society to make its case that democracy in Venezuela is being undermined by the Presidency of Hugo Chavez: political discrimination, the courts, the media, organized labor and civil society.
1.Political Discrimination
- The Report charges that the government has fired and blacklisted political opponents from some state agencies and from the national oil company.
- Citizen access to social programs is denied based on their political opinions.
- There is discrimination against media outlets, labor unions and civil society in response to legitimate criticism or political activity.
Between December 2002 and 2003, following the failure of the military coup of the previous April, the major business organizations, senior executives of the state oil company and sectors of the trade union bureaucracy organized a political lockout shutting down the oil industry, paralyzing production through sabotage of its computer-run operations and distribution outlets in a publicly stated effort to deny government revenues (80% of which come from oil exports) and overthrow the democratically elected government. After 3 months and over $20 billion dollars in lost revenues and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to machinery, with the aid of the majority of production workers and technicians, the bosses ‘lockout’ was defeated. Those officials and employees engaged in the political lockout and destruction of equipment and computers were fired. The government followed normal procedures backed by the majority of oil workers, who opposed the lockout, and dismissed the executives and their supporters in order to defend the national patrimony and social and investment programs from the self-declared enemies of an elected government. No sane, competent, constitutional lawyer, international human rights lawyer, UN commissioner or the International Court official considered the action of the Venezuelan government in this matter to constitute ‘political discrimination’. Even the US State Department, at that time, did not object to the firing of their allies engaged in economic sabotage. HRW, on the other hand, is more Pope than the Pope.
Nothing captures the ludicrous extremism of the HRW than its charge that citizens are denied access to social programs. Every international organization involved in assessing and developing large social programs, including UNESCO, the World Health Organization and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, have praised the extent and quality of the coverage of the social programs instituted by the Chavez government covering 60% of the population and almost 100% of the poor. Since approximately between 20-30% of the poor still vote for the opposition, it is clear that needy citizens critical of the government have equal access to social programs, including food subsidies, free health care and education. This social safety net is more inclusive than ever before in the history of Venezuela. In fact some of the poor suburbs of Caracas, like Catia, which voted down the 2007 referendum, are major recipients of large-scale, long-term social assistance programs.
Only scoundrels or the ill informed could be convinced of the HRW charge of discrimination against mass media outlets, labor unions and civil society groups. The opposition controls 95% of the newspapers, a majority of the television and radio outlets and frequencies, with the widest national circulation. The government has ‘broken’ the ruling class monopoly on information by funding two major TV stations and a growing number of community based radio stations.
There are more trade union members and greater trade union participation in enterprises, internal debates and free elections than ever before under previous regimes. Rival lists and intense competition for office between pro and anti-government lists are common in the trade unions confederation (UNT). The entire HRW ‘Report’ is based on complaints from the authoritarian CTV(Confederation of Venezuelan Workers/Confederacion de Trabajadores de Venezuela) bureaucrats who have lost most of their supporters and are discredited because of their role in supporting the bloody April 2002 coup. They are universally disdained; militant workers have not forgotten their corruption and gangster tactics when they collaborated with previous rightwing regimes and employers.
2. The Courts
HWR claims that President Chavez has “effectively neutralized the judiciary as an independent branch of government”. The claim that the judiciary was ‘independent’ is a new argument for HRW – because a decade earlier when Chavez’ 1999 constitution was approved by referendum, HRW decried the ‘venality, corruption and bias of the entire judicial system’. After years of releasing the leaders of the 2002 coup, postponing rulings and undermining positive legislation by elected legislative bodies and after revelations of high and lower court bribe taking, the Government finally implemented a series of democratically approved reforms, expanding and renewing the judicial system. The fact that the new court appointees do not follow the past practices of the opposition-appointed judges has evoked hysterical cries by HRW that the new reformed courts ‘threaten fundamental rights’. The most bizarre claim by HRM is that the Supreme Court did not ‘counter’ a 2007 constitutional reform package. In fact the Supreme Court approved the placing of constitutional reforms to a popular referendum in which the Chavez government was narrowly defeated. The Venezuelan Supreme Court subsequently respected the popular verdict – unlike US Supreme Court, which overturned the popular vote in the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections, a constitutional crime against the popular will, which Kenneth Roth, Vivanco and the rest of HRW have yet to condemn.
3. The Media
Every outside media specialist has been highly critical of the advocacy of violent action (leading up to the coup) and gross falsifications and libelous ‘reports’ (including racist epithets against Hugo Chavez) propagated by the ruling class-dominated mass media. A single opposition television network just had one of its many outlets suspended for openly backing the opposition military seizure of power, an action that any Western capitalist democracy would have taken in the wake of a violent uprising. HRW did not, has not and will not condemn the arrest of dozens of US and international journalists, some brutally beaten, covering the Republican and Democratic Presidential Conventions. Nothing even remotely resembling the extraordinary powers of ‘preventive detention’ of journalists by the US Homeland Security/local and state police forces exists in Venezuela. The wanton destruction of journalists’ cameras and tape recorders by the police at the US Republican Party Convention would be un-imaginable in Venezuela today. In contrast the only offense prosecuted in Venezuela against the media is the act of supporting and advocating violence aimed at overthrowing democratic institutions. Like all countries, Venezuela has laws dealing with libel and slander; these are far weaker than any comparable statutes in the countries upholding the tradition of the Magna Carta. HRW blatantly falsifies reality by claiming state control of the print media: All one needs to do is peruse any newsstand in Venezuela to see a multiplicity of lurid anti-government headlines, or tune into the radio or television stations and view news accounts that compete for the worst anti-Chavez propaganda found in the US Fox News or CNN.
4. Organized Labor
HRW claims that the Venezuelan government has violated ‘basic principles of freedom of association’ because it requires state oversight and certification of union elections and that by denying the right to bargain collectively to non-certified unions, it undermines workers’ rights to freely join the union of their choosing and to strike. Practically every government in the West has rules and regulations regarding oversight and certification of union elections, none more onerous than the US starting with the Taft-Hartley Act of the 1940’s and the ‘Right to Work’ Laws current in many states, which have reduced the percentage of unionized workers in the private sector to less than 3%. In contrast, during the Chavez Presidency, the number of unionized workers has more than doubled, in large part because new labor legislation and labor officials have reduced employer prerogatives to arbitrarily fire unionized workers. The only union officials who have been ‘decertified’ are those who were involved in the violent coup of April 2002 and the employers lockout intended to overthrow the government, suspend the constitution and undermine the very existence of free unions. Former Pinochet official Jose Miguel Vivanco delicately overlooks the gangsterism, thuggery and fraudulent election procedures, which ran rampant under the previous rightwing Venezuelan labor confederation, CTV. It was precisely to democratize voting procedures and to break the stranglehold of the old-guard trade union bosses that the government monitors oversaw union elections, many of which had multi-tendency candidates, unfettered debates and free voting for the first time.
I attended union meetings and interviewed high level CTV trade unions officials in 1970, 1976 and 1978 and found high levels of open vote buying, government and employer interference and co-optation, collaboration with the CIA-funded American Institute of Free Labor Development and large-scale pilfering of union pension funds, none of which was denounced by HRW. I attended the founding of the new Venezuelan union confederation, Union Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT) in 2003 and a subsequent national congress. I have witness a totally different unionism, a shift from government-run ‘corporate’ business unionism to independent social movement unionism with a decidedly class oriented approach. The UNT is a multi-tendency confederation in which diverse currents compete, with varying degrees of support and opposition to the Chavez Government. There are few impediments to strikes and there is a high degree of independent political action with no inhibition to workers resorting to strikes in order to demand the ouster of pro-employer labor officials.
For example, this year, steel workers in the Argentine-owned firm SIDOR, went on strike several times protesting private sector firings (HRW, of course never discussed private sector violations of workers rights). Because the Venezuelan Labor Minister tended to take the side of the employers, the steelworkers marched into a meeting where Chavez was speaking and demanded the dismissal of his Minister. After conferring with the workers’ leaders, Chavez fired the Labor Minister, expropriated the steel plant and accepted workers demands for trade union co-management. Never in Venezuelan labor history have workers exercised this degree of labor influence in nationalized plants. There is no doubt that there are government officials who would like to ‘integrate’ labor unions closer to the state; the new unionists do spend too much time in internal debates and internecine struggles instead of organizing the informal and temporary worker sectors. But one fact stands out: Unionized and non-unionized Venezuelan workers have experienced greater social welfare payments, rising living standards, greater job protection and greater free choice in union affiliation than any previous period in their history. It is ironic that Vivanco, who never raised a word against Pinochet’s anti-labor policies, an uncritical apologist of the AFL-CIO (the declining and least effective labor confederation in the industrialized West), should launch a full-scale attack on the fastest growing, independent and militant trade union movement in the Western hemisphere. Needless to say, Vivanco avoids any comparative analysis, least of all between Venezuelan and US labor over the spread of union organizing, internal democracy and labor representation in industry, social benefits and influence over government policy. Nor does HRW refer to the positive assessment by independent international labor organizations regarding union and labor advances under the Chavez Presidency.
5. Civil Society and HRW: The Mother of All Perversities
Jose Miguel Vivanco, who kept quiet during his years as a state functionary serving the Chilean dictator Pinochet, while thousands of protestors were beaten, jailed and even tortured and killed and courageous human rights groups were routinely assaulted, shamelessly claims that President Chavez has adopted “an aggressively adversarial approach to local rights advocates and civil society organization.”
President Chavez has actively promoted a multitude of independent, democratically elected community councils with over 3 million affiliated members, mostly from the poorest half of the population. He has devolved decision-making power to the councils, bypassing the party-dominated municipal and state officials, unlike previous regimes and US AID programs, which channeled funds through loyal local bosses and clients. Never has Venezuela witnessed more intense sustained organization, mobilization and activity of civil society movements. This cuts across the political spectrum, from pro-Chavez to pro-oligarch neighborhood, civic, working class and upper class groups. Nowhere in the world are US-funded groups, engaged in overt extra-parliamentary and even violent confrontations with elected officials, tolerated to the degree that they enjoy freedom of action as in Venezuela. In the US, foreign-funded organizations (with the exception of Israeli-funded groups) are required to register and refrain from engaging in electoral campaigning, let alone in efforts to destabilize legitimately constitutional government agencies. In contrast, Venezuela asked the minimum of foreign government-funded self-styled NGOs in requiring them to register their source of funding and comply with the rules of their constitution, that is, to stay out of virulent partisan political action. Today, as yesterday, all the ‘civil society’ organizations, including these funded by the US, which routinely attack the Chavez government, can operate freely, publish, assemble and demonstrate unimpeded. Their fundamental complaint, echoed by HRW, is that the Chavez government and its supporters criticize them: According to the new HRW definition of civil society freedom,the opposition has the right to attack the government - but not the other way around; some countries can register foreign-funded organizations - but not Venezuela; and some government can jail terrorists and coup-makers and identify and criticize their accomplices – but not Venezuela. The grotesque double-standard, practiced by Human Rights Watch, reveals their political allegiances: Blind to the vices of the US as it descends into a police state and equally blind to the virtues of a growing participatory democracy in Venezuela.
The ‘Report’ contains egregious omissions. It fails to mention that Venezuela, under President Chavez, has experienced twelve internationally supervised and approved elections, including several presidential, congressional and municipal elections, referenda and recall elections. These have been the cleanest elections in Venezuelan history and certainly with more honest vote counting than one would find in the US presidential contests.
The ‘Report’ fails to report on the serious security threats including the recording of phone conversations of active and retired high military officials planning to violently seize power and assassinate President Chavez. Under the extraordinary degree of tolerance in Venezuela, not a single constitutional right has been suspended. In the US, similar terrorist actions and plans would have led to a state of emergency and the probable pre-emptive mass incarceration of thousands of government critics and activists. HRW ignores and downplays security threats to Venezuelan democracy – whether it involves armed incursions from Colombian paramilitary groups allied with the pro-US Venezuelan opposition, the assassination of the chief federal prosecutor Danilo Anderson who was investigating the role of the opposition in the bloody coup of April 2002, the US-backed secessionist movement in the state of Zulia, the collusion of the mass media with violent student mobs in assaulting Chavez supporters on campus or the economic sabotage and panic caused by the private sector’s hoarding of essential food and other commodities in the lead-up to the 2007 referendum.
One of Vivanco’s most glaring omissions is the contrast between Venezuela’s open society approach to the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrant workers from Colombia and the US authoritarian practice of criminalizing its undocumented laborers. While the US Homeland Security and Immigration police have implemented arbitrary mass arrests, assaults and deportation of working heads of immigrant families – leaving their wives and children vulnerable to destitution, Chavez has awarded over a million undocumented Colombian immigrant workers and family members with residency papers and the opportunity for citizenship.
HRW has yet to protest Washington’s brutal denial of human rights to its Latin American and Asian immigrant workers in recent months. HRW did not issue a single protest when US-backed local oligarch politicians, local government officials and racist gangs in Bolivia went on a rampage and slaughtered three dozen unarmed Indian peasant workers. Vivanco’s squalid selective slandering of Venezuela is only exceeded by his systematic silence when there are abuses involving US collaboraters!
Conclusion
The Human Rights Watch Report on Venezuela is a crude propaganda document that, even in its own terms, lacks the minimum veneer of ‘balance’, which the more sophisticated ‘humanitarian’ imperialists have put out in the past. The omissions are monumental: No mention of President Chavez’ programs which have reduced poverty over the past decade from more than 60% to less than 30%; no recognition of the universal health system which has provided health care to 16 million Venezuelan citizens and residents who were previously denied even minimal access; and no acknowledgment of the subsidized state-run grocery stores which supply the needs of 60% of the population who can now purchase food at 40% of the private retail price.
HRW’s systematic failure to mention the advances experienced by the majority of Venezuelan citizens, while peddling outright lies about civic repression , is characteristic of this mouthpiece of Empire. Its gross distortion about labor rights makes this report a model for any high school or college class on political propaganda.
The widespread coverage and uncritical promotion and citation of the ‘Report’ (and the expulsion of its US-based authors for gross intervention on behalf of the opposition) by all the major newspapers from the New York Times, to Le Monde in France, the London Times, La Stampa in Italy and El Pais in Spain gives substance to the charge that the Report was meant to bolster the US effort to isolate Venezuela rather than pursue legitimate humanitarian goals in Venezuela.
The major purpose of the HRW ‘Report’ was to intervene in the forthcoming November municipal and state elections on the side of the far-right opposition. The ‘Report’ echoes verbatim the unfounded charges and hysterical claims of the candidates supported by the far right and the Bush Administration. HRW always manages to pick the right time to issue their propaganda bromides. Their reports mysteriously coincide with US intervention in electoral processes and destabilization campaigns. In Venezuela today the Report has become one of the most widely promoted propaganda documents of the leading rightist anti-Chavez candidates.
For the partisans of democracy, human rights and self-determination, every effort should be made to expose the insidious role of HRW and its Pinochetista propagandist, Vivanco, for what they are – publicists and promoters of US-backed clients who have given ‘human rights’ a
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Lane was telling the truth in his original defense brief (aka the newspaper despatch from UPI which Gary Mack doesn't want you to read):The Valley Independent, (Monessen, Pennsylvania), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Page 5
Film Showing Assassination Is Released
NEW YORK (UPI) — United Press International Newsfilm early today was first on the air with exclusive film showing the assassination of President Kennedy.
The film is 16mm enlarged from 8mm. It was shown on a New York City television station.
The sequence, shot by an amateur photographer in Dallas Friday, begins with motorcycle police coming around the corner followed by the Kennedy motorcade.
The President is then seen leaning over when the bullets strike. Mrs. Kennedy puts her right arm around the President and he slumps out of view. The film then shows a Secret Service agent running toward the car.
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.
Copies have been rushed to United Press Newsfilm clients all over the world.
Will the truth set us free? Probably not, but it's always a very useful place to begin.
New Society (1) was a weekly founded in 1962 to cater for the burgeoning – and increasingly advertising-rich – UK bureaucracies of the “social sciences.” It was uniformly regarded as “left of centre,” and thus a potentially perfect vehicle for establishment disinformation.
In its edition of 13 October 1966, it devoted five pages to extracts from a paper delivered to that year’s “meeting of the American Sociological Association” by the somewhat improbably named Ruth Love Leeds, of the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University. Her paper that was “part of a wider study of the topic being undertaken” by her own employer in conjunction with the “Morse Communications Research Centre, Brandeis University” (2).
The New Society extract was grandly entitled “Television and the Kennedy Assassination.” Its great achievement was to omit the minor facts that a) film of the assassination had been shown on US television in the early hours (Eastern Standard Time) of Tuesday, 26 November; and
had drawn complaints on the grounds of taste (3). In lieu of the truth, Britain’s social workers were offered the following, the kind of flannel more normally encountered in a bathroom: “To broadcast material that deviates from expected behaviour, does not accord with prevalent standards of taste and morality, or puts favoured persons in a bad light is to detract from the overall tastefulness and appropriateness of the coverage. Such material would not only be offensive to public sentiment but to professional satisfaction, for the broadcasters pride themselves almost as much on producing tasteful coverage as they do a comprehensive news coverage.”Still, on the bright side, it was doubtless the kind of work undertaken by the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia which merited all those generous CIA grants (4).
Notes
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Society_(magazine)2) Ruth Love Leeds, “Television and the Kennedy Assassination,” New Society, 13 October 1966, pp.567-571.
3) Rick Freedman, “Pictures of Assassination Fall to Amateurs on Street,” Editor & Publisher, November 30, 1963, p.67: “By Tuesday, numerous pictures, both still and movie, were being offered to news media. At least one television station was besieged with protests after it had shown scenes of the President’s motorcade at the moment of the shooting. Many viewers considered them to be too gruesome.”
4) http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-A9zzGX...1&ct=result
It bought other lies, too. According to our awesome researcher Leeds, “Correspondents refrained from describing Kennedy’s wounds…” (Ruth Love Leeds, “Television and the Kennedy Assassination,” New Society, 13 October 1966, p.568).
It was, I think, Sir Lewis Namier who opined that the problem with amateur historians is that they think more about themselves than their subjects. To which a suitably offended amateur might well reply that the problem with the pros is that they go in seach of grants and tenure, not the truth.
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http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10242
Political Destabilization in South and Central Asia: The Role of the CIA-ISI Terror Network
By Andrew G. Marshall
Global Research, September 17, 2008
Introduction
Recent terror attacks in New Delhi on September 13, 2008, raise the questions of who was responsible and for what reason these attacks occurred. Terror attacks in India are not a new phenomenon, however, in their recent past, they can be largely attributed to the actions, finances, training and resources of one organization: The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). These new bombings bare the same relationship with the ISI as has occurred in the past, and so it must be asked: what is the purpose of the ISI both in Central Asia as well as South Asia?
The ISI appears to play the role of a force for the destabilization of Central Asia, India and the Middle East. It acts as a Central Asian base of operations for the CIA and British Intelligence to carry out Anglo-American imperial aims.
India will be the main focus of this report, due to the escalation of organized terror and violence against it in the past few years. As India is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, after China, its northern neighbor which also borders Central Asian countries, its place in the New World Order is yet to be set in stone. Do western, and particularly Anglo-American elites allow India to grow as China, all the while attempting to co-opt their banking system to the western banking elite, thus, making them controllable? Or, will India be destabilized and dismantled, as is the plan with the Middle East and Central Asia, in order to redraw borders to suit geopolitical imperial ambitions, creating a network of manageable territories feeding the Metropoles of the New World Order, specifically New York (Wall Street) and London (The City of London)?
The September 13, 2008 New Delhi Bombings: 9/13/08
The Bombings
On September 13, 2008, five blasts ripped through New Delhi within 45 minutes of each other, killing 21 people and injuring roughly 100 more. The Indian Mujahedin claimed responsibility for the bombings, sending emails to major Indian news organizations. In July, bombings took place in the western state of Gujarat, which killed 45 people, and in May in the city of Jaipur, which killed 61 people. The Indian Mujahedin also claimed responsibility for those attacks. This new wave of attacks across Indian cities was intended to "sow panic, inflict civilian casualties and, according to Indian officials, inflame tensions between Hindus and Muslims."
National elections are also approaching in India, giving the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party the opportunity to criticize "the coalition government led by the Congress Party for its inability to prevent bombings like those of Saturday," making it a "major point of vulnerability for the incumbent administration."[1]
What is the Indian Mujahedin?
According to Indian police, the Indian Mujahedin (IM) is "an offshoot of the banned Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI)."[2] In fact, it is "the hardline faction of Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) that broke away in 2005 to protest against the diffidence of the moderate faction about declaring a full-scale war on India."[3] Reports also link the IM with the banned organizations, Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami and Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen.[4]
The Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) has reported ties with the Pakistani ISI, in having had cadres of its members being trained by the ISI to launch terror attacks in India. The ISI is also reported to have maintained contacts with SIMI in relation to their operatives traveling around the Middle East, specifically Saudi Arabia, to engage in fund raising. SIMI’s reorganization was also aided by the ISI, which led to the branching out of the hardline element, the Indian Mujahedin.[5]
Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami also has extensive ties with the ISI, as the group carried out terror attacks in Hyderabad in 2007, "at the instance of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence."[6] Many members of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami were trained at ISI camps in Pakistan, and it "receives patronage and support from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence." Significantly, "the group’s anti-India operations are planned by the ISI, mostly from the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka."[7]
Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen, the third terror network with extensive ties to the Indian Mujahedin, used to be known as the Harkat ul-Ansar. Harkat ul-Ansar was created by then-Pakistani General and future President Musharraf in the early 1990s, and was active in recruiting 200 Pakistanis to be trained by the ISI and sent to fight a jihad in Bosnia, "with the full knowledge and complicity of the British and American intelligence agencies." This group also has links to those individuals associated with financing 9/11, as well as being involved with the London 7/7/ bombings.[8]
So all three terrorist groups associated with creating and having links with the Indian Mujahedin (IM) have extensive ties with the Pakistani ISI. Since these three organizations created the IM, it is essentially a creation of the ISI itself.
Who Benefits?
Two days before the bombings took place, the Times of India ran a story discussing US defense corporations seeking major contracts in India, including "the single largest one-time military contract in history," India’s buying 126 multi-role combat aircraft (MRCA). The deal is said to be worth $10 billion, "which would not be concluded in the term of this government but by the next government." Two major US companies vying for this contract are defense giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin. India’s Defense Minister A.K. Antony said that his recent meetings with US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other Washington figures were primarily focused on "Pakistan’s rapid descent into chaos and the stepped up terrorist activity by renegade elements in the country, including provocations on the border and in Kashmir."[9]
Two days later, the attacks within India would confirm the need for a built up defense and military establishment within India. Contracts are sure to be signed.
The bombings also occurred at a time that "India is resisting renewed pressure from the West to send its troops into Afghanistan to boost the coalition troops there." More troops are needed in Afghanistan as the Taliban experience a resurgence, armed and financed by Pakistan’s ISI. However, as the Times of India notes, "India is not about to enter this particular cauldron because its troops would fan the flames in a way that no others would do. They would draw fire from Pakistanis and India would be sucked into a battle, which would have huge implications for its internal security."[10] Perhaps this is the idea?
The attacks also occurred just as "the US Congress is considering the approval of the US-India civil nuclear deal and days before [indian] Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visits Washington."[11]
The ISI-CIA Islamic Terror Networks
The Mujahideen
The ISI has long established ties with terrorist networks in the region. The ISI was used as a conduit by the CIA in 1979 to finance and arm the Afghan Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the Afghan-Soviet War of 1979 to 1989. The Mujahideen then branched off, with the active financing and support of the ISI, into both Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.[12]
During the 1980s, many "officers from the ISI's Covert Action Division received training in the US and many covert action experts of the CIA were attached to the ISI to guide it in its operations against the Soviet troops by using the Afghan Mujahideen, Islamic fundamentalists of Pakistan and Arab volunteers." Further, the "CIA, through the ISI, promoted the smuggling of heroin into Afghanistan in order to make the Soviet troops heroin addicts. Once the Soviet troops were withdrawn in 1988, these heroin smugglers started smuggling the drugs to the West, with the complicity of the ISI."[13]
Al-Qaeda and Yugoslavia
The ISI not only has had close ties to Al-Qaeda, but also to guerillas fighting in the disputed territory of Kashmir between India and Pakistan.[14] The ISI’s connections with Al-Qaeda were so extensive, that even on the night before 9/11, Osama bin Laden was in a hospital in Pakistan protected by Pakistani military and intelligence.[15] The ISI also supported the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia throughout the 1990s, by training and sending militant Islamists into the regions to sow chaos and exacerbate ethnic tensions, leading to the break-up of Yugoslavia. All this was done with the tacit approval, support and complicity of British and American intelligence.[16] The ISI financed its covert terrorist support through the global drug trade, especially important in Afghanistan. The ISI also supported terrorist groups in Chechnya.[17]
The LeT
The Lashkar e Toiba (LeT) terrorist organization also works very closely with the ISI, and they work together in a "coordinated effort" in orchestrating terror attacks in Kashmir.[18] The LeT is "funded, armed and trained by the Inter-Services Intelligence," and is linked up with Al-Qaeda, and is "the most visible manifestation" of Al-Qaeda in India. The LeT "receives considerable financial, material and other forms of assistance from the Pakistan government, routed primarily through the ISI. The ISI is the main source of LeT's funding. Saudi Arabia also provides funds." The LeT also played a part in the ISI organized "Bosnian campaign against the Serbs," which was directed above the ISI by the CIA and British intelligence.[19]
The ISI and 9/11
The ISI may also have played a roll in 9/11 itself, as its General was in Washington in the lead up to and during the 9/11 attacks, meeting with top intelligence, State Department and Congressional officials, including CIA Director George Tenet, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Senator Bob Graham, Representative Porter Goss, who would go on to become CIA director, and Joseph Biden, who is now Barack Obama’s running mate. The ISI’s General, while meeting with all these top US officials in foreign affairs and intelligence, also happened to be the money man behind 9/11, having wired $100,000 to the lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta.[20]
The Liquid Bomb Plot
In August 2006 in the UK, there was a massive roundup of terrorism suspects as the British and Pakistani authorities revealed that they uncovered and prevented a massive terrorist plot to blow up several transatlantic airliners with liquid explosives. This plot is the reason for which people can no longer carry a bottle of water or any liquids through security at airports. However, following the roundups, Pakistan arrested the "lead suspect" who was said to have masterminded the whole operation, Rashid Rauf. Over a year later, Rashid Rauf escaped from Pakistani police custody, however, as it turned out, he was kidnapped by the ISI to prevent him being extradited to the UK.[21]
As Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, wrote shortly after the plot was ‘foiled’, "According to John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor, [bomb plot suspects] Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza, as well as the suspected mastermind of the London bombings Haroon Aswat, were all recruited by MI6 in the mid-1990s to draft up British Muslims to fight in Kosovo. American and French security sources corroborate the revelation."[22]
Covert War Against Iran
It was revealed by the London Telegraph in 2007 that the US, through the CIA, was funding and arming terrorist organizations to "sow chaos" inside Iran.[23] ABC News reported just over a month later that the terrorist group was a Pakistani militant group named Jundullah, which is based in the Baluchistan region of Pakistan, just across the border from Iran.[24] Jundullah also has very close ties with Al-Qaeda.[25] Although the US funds this Al-Qaeda-linked group, the funding is indirect, as it travels through Pakistan’s ISI.[26]
So clearly, the ISI has some troubling connections to Al-Qaeda, various other Islamic extremist groups, and British and American intelligence. Where the ISI is operational, so too, are Anglo-American ambitions.
The 1993 Bombay Bombings: 3/12/93
On March 12, 1993, Bombay (now called Mumbai) experienced 13 explosions in a coordinated attack, of which the most significant target was the Bombay Stock Exchange, which killed roughly 50 people. The total number of dead was 257, with roughly 1,400 other injured. Dawood Ibrahim was believed to have coordinated the attacks. Ibrahim is known for extensive ties to Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda,[27] has financed operations of the Lashkar e Toiba (LeT),[28] and was believed to be hiding out in Pakistan.[29] The 1993 Bombay bombings were "organised by Dawood Ibrahim under pressure from the Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan."[30] In 2007, the ISI was reported to have taken Ibrahim and his top lieutenant into custody from the Pakistan-Afghan border.[31]
The 2006 Mumbai Bombings: 7/11/06
On July 11, 2006, Mumbai experienced another major terrorist attack, as seven bombs went off within 11 minutes of one another on trains. The total deaths reached 209 with roughly 700 others injured.
The blame for the bombings was placed on the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and local Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI),[32] which are closely interlinked with each other and have direct links with the ISI.[33] A few months later, following an investigation, Mumbai police "blamed Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI for masterminding the explosions which were executed by activists of the banned Lashkar-e-Toiba and SIMI." The Mumbai Police Commissioner said that, "the attacks were planned by ISI in Pakistan and carried out by Pakistan-based militant group LeT with the help of banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI)."[34] India even shared evidence of Pakistani ISI involvement in the attacks with the United States.[35]
The bombings led to a postponement of India-Pakistan peace talks, which were set to take place the following week.[36] The Indian Prime Minister had said that, "a peace process with Pakistan was threatened if Islamabad did not curb 'terrorist' violence directed at India."[37] Again, perhaps a peace in the region is not in the interests of the Anglo-Americans.
The 2008 Indian Embassy Bombing in Kabul: 7/7/08
On July 7, 2008, the Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan was bombed, killing 58 people and wounding 141. Two days after, it was reported that, "The Afghanistan government and Indian Intelligence Agencies have confirmed that some elements within the ISI in collaboration with the Taliban/Al Qaeda planned and executed the attack on the Indian embassy." Further, "the ISI Station Head in Kabul, is collaborating with the Taliban to destabilise India's strategic presence in Afghanistan."[38]
The day after the attack, the Afghan Interior Ministry said that, "[it] was carried out in co-ordination and consultation with an active intelligence service in the region," and as the Financial Times reported, "Western diplomats in Islamabad warned that the Kabul bombing was likely to increase the distrust between Pakistan and Afghanistan and undermine Pakistan's relations with India, despite recent signs that a peace process between Islamabad and New Delhi was making some headway."[39]
It was also reported that the Afghan Interior Ministry stated that, "Militants who carried out this week's suicide bomb attack on the Indian embassy in the Afghan capital received their training at camps in Pakistan."[40]
Just weeks earlier, on June 25, 2008, "An Afghan official accused Pakistan's premier spy agency on Wednesday of organizing a recent assassination attempt on Afghan President Hamid Karzai," and that they were "sure and confident" of an ISI connection.[41]
On July 13, "Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) [had] been blamed by India for the bomb attack on Kabul’s Indian embassy."[42] On July 10, "The United States has said there was no evidence suggesting involvement of foreign agents in the suicide bombing on the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan."[43]
However, on August 1, the New York Times reported that, "American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul," and that, "The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack." Interestingly, "American officials said that the communications were intercepted before the July 7 bombing, and that the C.I.A. emissary, Stephen R. Kappes, the agency’s deputy director, had been ordered to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, even before the attack." Further, "a top Central Intelligence Agency official traveled to Pakistan this month to confront senior Pakistani officials with information about support provided by members of the ISI to militant groups."[44]
However, given that this is not new information, and that CIA collaboration with these efforts has been widely documented, what was the real purpose of this top CIA emissary going to Islamabad?
Two days after the New York Times report surfaced, it was reported that, "The United States has accused Pakistan’s main spy agency of deliberately undermining Nato efforts in Afghanistan by helping the Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants they are supposed to be fighting." In January, the Bush administration "sent two senior intelligence officials to Pakistan" over "concerns" that the ISI was supporting militants, and further, "Mike Mc-Connell, the director of national intelligence, and [CIA director] Hayden asked Musharraf to allow the CIA greater freedom to operate in the tribal areas." President Bush also "warned of retaliation if it continues."[45]
Who Benefits?
In 2006, it was reported that as Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, was trying to balance a relationship with Pakistan and India, "Islamabad might be feeling squeezed and do its best to undermine the renewed Afghan-Indian partnership -- at great cost to Afghanistan."[46]
As Time Magazine reported on the day of the Embassy bombing, "The bombing is likely to have regional ramifications, both for India's relations with the neighborhood and those of every other country supporting Afghan President Hamid Karzai." Further, "India and Pakistan have been vying for influence in Kabul for decades, and India — which for years backed the opposition Northern Alliance against the Pakistan-backed Taliban regime — came out on top after the U.S.-led invasion scattered the Taliban and installed President Karzai in power." India has also pledged $850 million in reconstruction aid for Afghanistan.[47]
As the UK Times explained, India is "the only regional power committed to a new democratic Afghanistan. It was no accident that India shouldered part of the cost of the parliamentary and presidential elections. Nor should one ignore the symbolic value of the fact that India is building the new Palace of Democracy to house the Afghan parliament." Further, "The only power likely to offer Afghanistan long-term support is India. Helping Afghanistan would weaken radical Islamism and prevent Pakistan acquiring a hinterland through Afghanistan in Muslim Central Asia."[48]
Historically, the Taliban were financed and armed by the Pakistani ISI, while India had backed the Northern Alliance during the 1990s. After the 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance was put back into power as the Taliban were deposed.[49] This would explain why the ISI and Pakistan has again become the main supporter of the Taliban.[50] However, in most discussion on Pakistan funding the revival of the Taliban, what is left ignored is the ISI’s continued connections to British and American intelligence. For example, with the London 7/7 bombings, the mastermind was an MI6 asset and he had, along with several of the suspected bombers, connections to the Pakistani ISI.[51]
Interestingly, keeping in mind the ISI’s help in the resurgence of the Taliban, in February of 2008, it was reported that, "Britain planned to build a Taliban training camp for 2,000 fighters in southern Afghanistan, as part of a top-secret deal to make them swap sides." Further, "Afghan government officials insist it was bankrolled by the British. UK diplomats, the UN, Western officials and senior Afghan officials have all confirmed the outline of the plan, which they agree is entirely British-led, but all refused to talk about it on the record."[52]
Conclusion
Ultimately, the benefactors of the Indian Embassy bombing in Kabul and other bombings, such as the recent New Delhi bombing in India, is not Pakistan, but is the Anglo-Americans. Pakistan ultimately will collapse as a result of these actions being taken. The ISI has long been referred to as Pakistan’s "secret government" or "shadow state." It’s long-standing ties and reliance upon American and British intelligence have not let up, therefore actions taken by the ISI should be viewed in the context of being a Central Asian outpost of Anglo-American covert intelligence operations. This connection between American and British intelligence and the ISI is also corroborated by their continued cooperation in the covert opium trade in Afghanistan, whose profits are funneled into the banks of Wall Street and the City of London.[53]
The goal in Pakistan is not to maintain stability, just as this is not the goal throughout the region of the Middle East and Central Asia. Recent events in Pakistan, such as the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, which has been linked to the ISI, should be viewed in the context as an active Anglo-American strategy of breaking up Pakistan, which will spread chaos through the region.[54]
Pakistan’s position as a strategic focal point cannot be underestimated. It borders India, Afghanistan, China and Iran. Destabilizing and ultimately breaking Pakistan up into several countries or regions will naturally spread chaos and destabilization into neighboring countries. This is also true of Iraq on the other side of Iran, as the Anglo-American have undertaken, primarily through Iraq, a strategy of balkanizing the entire Middle East in a new imperial project.[55]
One of the main targets in this project is Iran, for which the US and Britain have engaged in massive acts of terror and orchestrating large battles and conflicts from within the already-failed state of Iraq.[56] The Anglo-American role as terrorist supporters and as covertly orchestrating terror attacks within Iraq is amply documented.[57] To imagine that these same Anglo-American intelligence and covert networks are not using their long-time conduit, the ISI, for the same purposes in Central Asia, is a stretch of the imagination and logic. It is not merely the Middle East that is the target, but Central Asia, specifically for its geographical relationship to the rising giants such as India and China. This also follows in line with Anglo-American strategies in destabilizing the Central European region, specifically the former Yugoslavia,[58] and more recently, Georgia, largely in an effort to target Russia.[59]
What we are seeing with Pakistan and India is an effort to drive the region into chaos. The US allowing blame to be placed on the Pakistani ISI for the Embassy bombings in Kabul has provided an excuse and basis for US military intervention in Pakistan, which has already begun,[60] and which threatens to plunge the region into total war and crisis. But then again, that’s the idea.
Endnotes[1] AP, Police detain suspects after 5 blasts in New Delhi. International Herald Tribune: September 14, 2008:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/14/asia/india.php
[2] Reuters, FACTBOX-Indian Mujahideen Islamic militant group. Reuters News Service: September 13, 2008:
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LD514149.htm
[3] Pradeep Thakur & Vishwa Mohan, Indian Mujahideen is just hardline version of SIMI. The Times of India: August 17, 2008: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/I...how/3371985.cms
[4] Vicky Nanjappa, The truth about Indian Mujahideen. Rediff India Abroad: November 23, 2007:
http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/nov/23court15.htm
[5] Animesh Roul, Students Islamic Movement of India: A Profile. Global Terrorism Analysis: April 6, 2006:
http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/ar...ticleid=2369953
[6] PTI, Suspect said ISI behind Hyderabad blasts: cops. Rediff India Abroad: October 6, 2007: http://ia.rediff.com/news/2007/oct/06hydblast.htm
[7] SATP, Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI). South Asia Terrorism Portal: 2001:
http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/in...utfits/HuJI.htm
[8] History Commons, Profile: Harkat ul-Mujahedeen (HUM).
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?e...t_ul-mujahedeen
[9] Chidanand Rajghatta, US defence companies will get level playing field: Antony. The Times of India: September 11, 2008: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/US_defe...how/3472916.cms
[10] ToA, Pressure mounts on India to send troops to Afghanistan. Times of India: September 14, 2008: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/P...how/3480892.cms
[11] James Lamont and Joe Leahy, Five bombs hit New Delhi. The Financial Times: September 13, 2008:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b3aadd2e-8199-11...?nclick_check=1
[12] Rahul Bedi, Vital intelligence on the Taliban may rest with its prime sponsor – Pakistan’s ISI. Jane’s Information Group: October 1, 2001: http://www.janes.com/security/internationa...11001_1_n.shtml
[13] B. Raman, PAKISTAN'S INTER-SERVICES INTELLIGENCE (ISI). South Asia Analysis Group: January 8, 2001:
http://www.acsa.net/isi/index.html
[14] James Risen and Judith Miller, Pakistani Intelligence Had Links to Al Qaeda, U.S. Officials Say. October 29, 2001:
http://civet.berkeley.edu/sohrab/politics/isi_problems.html
[15] Michel Chossudovsky, Where was Osama on September 11, 2001? Global Research: September 11, 2008:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=3194
[16] Michel Chossudovsky, Osamagate. Global Research: October 9, 2001:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...=va&aid=369
[17] Michel Chossudovsky, The Truth behind 9/11: Who Is Osama Bin Laden? Global Research: September 11, 2008:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=3198
[18] Preetam Sohani, Pakistan’s shadow ISI and Lashkar-e-Toiba worked together to create terror in Ayodhya. India Daily: July 16, 2005:
http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/3622.asp
[19] SATP, Lashkar-e-Toiba: 'Army of the Pure'. South Asia Terrorism Portal: 2001:
ttp://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/states/jandk/terrorist_outfits/lashkar_e_toiba.htm
[20] Michel Chossudovsky, Political Deception: The Missing Link behind 9-11. Global Research: June 20, 2002:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...=va&aid=371
[21] Dean Nelson and Ghulam Hasnain, Pakistan agents ‘staged escape’ of terror suspect. The Times Online: December 23, 2007:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...icle3087090.ece
[22] Craig Murray, British Army expert casts doubt on 'liquid explosives' threat, Al Qaeda network in UK Identified. The Raw Story: September 21, 2006:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/200...sh_army_ex.html
[23] William Lowther and Colin Freeman, US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran. The London Telegraph: February 25, 2007:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/...os-in-Iran.html
[24] Brian Ross and Christopher Isham, ABC News Exclusive: The Secret War Against Iran. ABC News: April 3, 2007:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/0...ews_exclus.html
[25] Zahid Hussain, Al-Qaeda's New Face. Newsline: August 2004:
http://www.newsline.com.pk/NewsAug2004/cover1Aug2004.htm
[26] Michel Chossudovsky, "Islamic Terrorists" supported by Uncle Sam: Bush Administration "Black Ops" directed against Iran, Lebanon and Syria. Global Research: May 31, 2007:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid...&context=va
[27] Vishwa Mohan, Interpol sends special notice against Dawood Ibrahim. The Times of India: April 8, 2006:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1483035.cms
[28] Robert Windrem, Possible al-Qaida link to India train attacks. MSNBC: July 11, 2006:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13815413/
[29] PTI, Dawood Ibrahim is a global terrorist: US. Rediff: October 17, 2003:
http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/oct/17daw.htm
[30] Rediff, 'ISI pressured Dawood to carry out Mumbai blasts'. Rediff.com: December 22, 2002:
http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/dec/22isi.htm
[31] S Balakrishnan, Dawood, Tiger Memon in ISI custody. The Times of India: August 7, 2007:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2260818.cms
[32] ToA, LeT, SIMI hand in Mumbai blasts. Time of India: July 12, 2006:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1733318.cms
[33] SATP, Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). South Asia Terrorism Portal: 2001:
http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/in...utfits/simi.htm
[34] ToA, Mumbai Police blames ISI, LeT for 7/11 blasts. The Times of India: September 30, 2006:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2052996.cms
[35] AP, India shares evidence of Pakistan's alleged involvement in Mumbai bombings with US. The International herald Tribune: October 7, 2006: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/10/07/...in_Bombings.php
[36] Sudha Ramachandran, India's soft response to the Mumbai bombings. Asia Times Online: July 19, 2006: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HG19Df03.html
[37] Reuters, Manmohan warns Pak: Stop terror. Express India: July 14, 2006:
http://www.expressindia.com/news/fullstory.php?newsid=71060
[38] V K Shashikumar, ISI, al Qaeda planned Kabul blast: Sources. IBNLive: July 9, 2008:
http://www.ibnlive.com/news/isi-al-qaeda-p...8541-2.html?xml
[39] Aunohita Mojumdar and Farhan Bokhari, Kabul blames spy agency for suicide blast at India embassy. The Financial Times: July 8, 2008:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c122796c-4c88-11...0077b07658.html
[40] Roman Kozhevnikov, Afghanistan says embassy bombers trained in Pakistan. Reuters: July 9, 2008:
http://www.stv.tv/articles/reuters/world/A...Pakistan_125456
[41] AP, Afghanistan blames Pakistan for attempt to kill Karzai. CTV: June 25, 2008:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/stor...O_helmand_08025
[42] Agencies, India blames Pakistan for Kabul embassy attack. Gulf News: July 13, 2008:
http://www.gulfnews.com/world/India/10228506.html
[43] PTI, No foreign hand in Kabul blast: Robert Gates. Rediff: July 10, 2008:
http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/jul/10kabul2.htm
[44] MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT, Pakistanis Aided Attack in Kabul, U.S. Officials Say. The New York Times: August 1, 2008:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/world/as...ef=worldspecial
[45] Christina Lamb, Rogue Pakistan spies aid Taliban in Afghanistan. The Times Online: August 3, 2008:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...icle4449330.ece
[46] Amin Tarzi, Afghanistan: Kabul's India Ties Worry Pakistan. Radio Free Europe: April 16, 2006:
http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1067690.html
[47] Jyoti Thottam, Afghan Bombing Fuels Regional Furor. Time Magazine: July 7, 2008:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8...1820716,00.html
[48] Amir Taheri, A vicious attack on India’s crucial role in Afghanistan. The Times Online: July 9, 2008:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/c...icle4295636.ece
[49] Scott Baldauf, India-Pakistan rivalry reaches into Afghanistan. Christian Science Monitor: September 13, 2003:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0912/p07s01-wosc.html
[50] Ron Moreau and Mark Hosenball, Pakistan’s Dangerous Double Game. Newsweek: September 13, 2008:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/158861
[51] Michel Chossudovsky, London 7/7 Terror Suspect Linked to British Intelligence?. Global research: August 1, 2005:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...p;articleId=782
[52] Jerome Starkey, Revealed: British plan to build training camp for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The Independent: February 4, 2008:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/as...tan-777671.html
[53] Andrew G. Marshall, Afghan heroin & the CIA. Geopolitical Monitor: April 1, 2008:
http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/content...heroin-the-cia/
[54] Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Pakistan. Global Research: December 30, 2007:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...va&aid=7705
[55] Andrew G. Marshall, Divide and Conquer: The Anglo-American Imperial Project. Global Research: July 10, 2008:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...va&aid=9451
[56] Andrew G. Marshall, Breaking Iraq and Blaming Iran. Global Research: July 3, 2008:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...va&aid=9450
[57] Andrew G. Marshall, State-Sponsored Terror: British and American Black Ops in Iraq. Global Research: June 25, 2008:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...va&aid=9447
[58] Andrew G. Marshall, Breaking Yugoslavia. Geopolitical Monitor: July 21, 2008:
http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/content...ing-yugoslavia/
[59] Andrew G. Marshall, The Georgian War. Geopolitical Monitor: August 30, 2008:
http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/content...e-georgian-war/
[60] BBC, Pakistan soldiers 'confront US'. BBC News: September 15, 2008:
Andrew G. Marshall is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/200...sarah-pali.html
Sarah Palin and the man who wanted Robert Kennedy dead
By Daniel Finkelstein
When Sarah Palin used this phrase in her acceptance speech:
We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignityshe attributed it to "a writer". And added:
I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman.I didn't think much more of it. But now the identity of the writer is causing quite a fuss.
The man in question was called Westbrook Pegler. And a nasty piece of work he was too, given to vitriolic attacks on his opponent.
In a strikingly silly piece in the New York Times Frank Rich takes the Governor to task for quoting Pegler. Rich says:
Palin, who lies with ease about her own record, misrepresented Pegler’s too. He decreed America was “done for” after Truman won a full term in 1948. For his part, Truman regarded the columnist as a “guttersnipe,” and with good reason.
Pegler was a rabid Joe McCarthyite who loathed F.D.R. and Ike and tirelessly advanced the theory that American Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (“geese,” he called them) were all likely Communists.
Nonsense.
Palin did not misrepresent Pegler because she didn't talk about him. The one thing she said about Pegler was that his quote had praised Harry Truman. And it did.
That having been said, I don't think Pegler is a person who should be quoted. And Robert Kennedy Jr shows why in a (Huffington) post so short but so devastating that I will simply reproduce it in full:
Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in pubic premises before the snow flies."It might be worth asking Governor Palin for a tally of the other favorites from her reading list.
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Why did Kennedy appoint him as Ambassador in late 1963?
John,
First stab at an answer.
Lodge appears to have shared JFK's conviction that no military solution, only a political one, was available or desirable in Vietnam. In his characteristically "diplomatic" memoir, The Storm Has Many Eyes (NY: WW Norton, 1973), Lodge wrote:
“I thought from the beginning that an exclusively military solution to the Vietnam problem was impossible. To make a long story short…I eventually reached the conclusion that we should withdraw our troops from Vietnam as fast as this could be done in an orderly way and try to negotiate a settlement” (p.206).Second, and relatedly, Lodge, like JFK, was a committed multilateralist: he left the Atlantic Institute, recall, to take the poison chalice that was the Saigon ambassadorship.
Third, Kennedy's most pressing problem was the US press: Lodge was essentially being asked to reprise, only under much less favourable circumstances, the role of presidential shield he had undertaken for Eisenhower at the time of Khrushchev's visit. In both instances, Lodge was tasked with deflecting charges of insufficient presidential anti-communist zeal - the chief charge of Halberstam et al was, after all, that Diem wasn't prosecuting the war with anything like enough enthusiasm - while simultaneously not offending the the distinguished guest/host.
Fourthly, Lodge, like Diem, spoke French.
Sorry this is rushed, but tired and work beckons!
Paul
Henry Cabot Lodge. The Storm Has Many Eyes (NY: WW Norton, 1973), pp.205-213 (no text omitted):
In June 1963 President Kennedy asked me to be ambassador to Vietnam and I accepted. I believed that many mistakes had been made since 1945 and that, in that period, the Indochina question had been wisely handled, the United States need never have gone there. In that sense the American presence there was a mistake. In 1963, however, these were all speculations. The reality was that, regardless of how they got there, Americans were in Vietnam and were in combat. To accept, therefore, was a duty. I was to be involved with Vietnam for some five years thereafter.I appreciate how deep and sincere – and, in many cases, how bitter – are the disagreements over the Vietnam question. This account of my views at that time is therefore submitted with profound respect for many of those who differ and with profound compassion for all those who have suffered so much – American and Vietnamese, military and civilian.
My view was that the people of South Vietnam had a right to exist independently of North Vietnam and that South Vietnamese rights were being threatened by aggression from North Vietnam.
I believed that it was important wherever possible to support the United Nations Charter and its mandate for the “suppression” of “aggression.” I never believed that the Vietnam war was basically a war against communism. It was not an ideological matter. The North wanted to conquer the South. I recognized the demand and need for revolution in both North and South Vietnam to rid the region of the old structures of colonialism and feudalism and to build new structures. The right of the people in the South, however, to build their own structures deserved respect. I thought from the beginning that an exclusively military solution to the Vietnam problem was impossible. To make a long story short and for reasons which will appear, I eventually reached the conclusion that we should withdraw our troops from Vietnam as fast as this could be done in an orderly way and try to negotiate a settlement.
I arrived in Saigon on a rainy night in August 1963. Driving through the hot tropical blackness from the airport to the embassy, the only human beings we saw were soldiers edging the street, but facing the houses, with guns ready to use. Martial law had been declared.
There were excellent people on the embassy staff, headed by the deputy chief of mission, William C. Truehart, whose advice I heard on everything – with great respect. I also made some new friends in Saigon who widened my understanding of Vietnam, thereby increasing the value of my advice to the president. One such friend was Archbishop Salvatore Asta, the apostolic delegate. There were over a million and a half Roman Catholics in Vietnam with a proportional number of priests, virtually all of whom were Vietnamese. These priests were in most instances close to the people. Not only were they officially linked to Archbishop Asta, but by dint of his personal qualities, he had won their confidence and their liking. Another friend was Professor Patrick J. Honey who had been introduced to me by an energetic and brilliant colonel then on duty in the embassy, John M. Dunn. Professor Honey was that rare man – a highly intelligent Westerner who had thoroughly mastered the Vietnamese language and could abstruse subjects in Vietnamese. He had been coming to Vietnam for over two or three months every year for a long time and had the contacts that only years of residence could bring.
Conversations with these men confirmed my impression that, although President Diem had been an effective leader in the past, his rule was clearly entering its terminal phase – regardless of what the United States did. A highly intelligent and well-informed Vietnamese, referring to the reign of terror then under way in Vietnam, had told me in Washington just before my departure that “unless they leave the country there is no power on earth that can prevent the assassination of Diem, of his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, and of his sister-in-law Madam Nhu.” This prediction turned out to tragically accurate.
I called on President Diem soon after my arrival. President Kennedy had instructed me to raise a number of matters with him, notably the practices being used by his brother Nhu which, it was constantly and generally said, involved arbitrary imprisonment, torture, persecution of Buddhists, and other cruel and oppressive measures. I also was instructed to bring up especially the idea of having Nhu leave the country. However, no discussion of these matters took place, as President Diem would answer entirely irrelevantly and continue talking at great length on unrelated subjects, refusing all references to the issues which Washington had asked me to raise.
But he had a most attractive side as well. He was a very gracious host, as my wife and I found when he took us – a week before his death – on an airplane-helicopter-automobile trip to the high plateau, ending the day at the charming hill town of Dalat. He was courageous and loved his country. Although I had only known him for a few weeks, I was deeply grieved by his death and horrified at the form it took.
On August 25 I received the oft-published cable from Washington saying that the United States must “face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.” The cable said that “the United States cannot tolerate a situation in which the power lies in Nhu’s hands” – referring to Diem’s brother – and instructed me to “make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem’s replacement.”
My plans initially involved getting in touch, in person or through others, with the generals believed to interested in overthrowing President Diem so as to learn their intentions, to get details on specific troop movements which are often so crucial, and then wait to see what, if anything, we should do. I was further “authorized to tell the appropriate commanders that we would give direct support in any interim period of breakdown.”
I did my best to carry out my instructions, not realizing at the time that they had not been cleared at the highest levels.
On August 25 I suggested that we tell the generals believed to be hostile to Diem that the United States supported Diem, but had grave reservations about Diem’s brother and sister-in-law.
On August 28 the State Department told me that it approved of this but it continued to believe that Nhu must go and that a “coup will be needed.”
Presumably, these are the words on which was based the accusation, subsequently made so often, that the coup against Diem was, to quote the Pentagon Papers,* “variously authorized, sanctioned and encouraged” by the United States.
On August 30 the telegrams of August 25 and August 28 were canceled. This cancellation in effect removed the basis for the charge that the United States government, under the administration of President Kennedy, had “variously authorized, sanctioned and encouraged a coup.”
The coup of November 1 was essentially a Vietnamese affair. Because of our lack of involvement in the intricacies of Vietnamese political life, we could not have started the coup if we had wanted to. Nor could we have stopped one once it had started. Our policy, under instructions from President Kennedy, was “not to thwart” a coup. We adhered scrupulously to that policy. I have often wondered why those who leaked the Pentagon Papers did not leak the whole story, notably the fact that the August 25 cable was canceled by a message dated August 30. I assume they did not know about it.
My efforts before the cancellation telegram had shown me that there was little enthusiasm in Saigon, in August 1963, for organizing a coup to depose President Diem. One reason for the apparent reluctance may have been the belief that we Americans knew too much about what was being planned. I sensed a lack of trust in our ability to keep our collective American mouths shut; the anti-Diem generals believed that surprise and secrecy were essential to the success of a coup. The common assumption was that the American position was so strong in Saigon that all we had to do was to push the button to set a coup in motion was baseless. Actually, there was no button to push.
There was no doubt that when a certain point was reached in late October, the embassy, in its efforts to be well informed, was in close touch with the coup plotters. We thought that unexpected events might occur which would require a basic new decision by President Kennedy, in which case it would be vital for him to know as much as possible about the circumstances immediately preceding any such developments. Of course, we were not privy to the conspiracy to murder Diem. (To this day we do not know whether the murder was an act of private revenge or arranged by the coup plotters.) And we did not know until the day of the coup just what the precise moment would be. Being tolerably well informed is not the same as “authorizing, sanctioning and encouraging” the coup.
The Pentagon Papers say that I “authorized CIA participation in the tactical planning of the coup.” I well remember that I was specifically ordered by the president not to help in the planning and that I scrupulously obeyed orders. It is hard to believe that this instruction is not in the files.
I did offer President Diem safety under the aegis of the United States and was prepared to give him asylum in my house, to help him enter a new government as a ceremonial figure, or to leave the country.**
The allegation in the Pentagon Papers*** that “in October we cut off aid to Diem” in order to give a “green light to the generals” is wrong. It was done in order to get Diem to strengthen his political position at home by sending his brother Nhu out of the country. Far from trying to overthrow President Diem, President Kennedy was – I thought very properly – engaged in trying to help him get stronger and the government get better.
In fact, in commenting on a suggestion of mine to use our economic aid to bargain for such a better government, the president wired on September 12, ‘Your #478 is a major paper and has stirred a corresponding effort to concert a proper response here. I want you to know that your courageous and searching analysis has already been of great help and that the strength and dignity of your position on the scene are clear.’
We do ourselves a disservice by judging events in East Asia by the same standards which we apply to events in the United States – for example, thinking in terms of a largely nonexistent national “public opinion,” talking about a government being “broadly based” and representing all the various “schools of thought,” or discussing what policy the Vietnamese would “choose.” When I was there, such terms were largely inapplicable in South Vietnam on a nationwide basis.
It is important never to forget that South Vietnam is a land without a Western democratic tradition – indeed, that by our usual way of thinking, it was not a modern nation-state at all. A man in Vietnam would be more likely to say. “I am a Cao Dai or a Hoa Hao” (the names of two Vietnamese sects) than to say “I am Vietnamese.” It did not occur to most Vietnamese that an election was a good way to decide an important problem. The Confucianist tradition, founded on the idea of respect for the ruler, holds that a ruler stays in office and gets respect as long as he deserves it. But when, after eight or nine years, he becomes untrustworthy or lazy or cruel – inefficiently authoritarian – someone gets rid of him and the process starts over again. In their tradition, a coup was for them an acceptable way to get change.
North Vietnam, on the other hand, under Chinese and Russian influence, had become an efficiently authoritarian police state in modern dress, governed with iron control by a small group of determined men. It had created a most effective army. Although North and South Vietnamese are ethnically very similar, it is hard to think of two countries which are more differently organized. About the only thing in common, governmentally speaking, is that neither is a Western democracy.
To conclude this account of my work in Vietnam in 1963 and 1964, I believe the time has come, now that almost ten years have elapsed, to disclose that during the weeks preceding the coup against President Diem, President Kennedy had instructed me not to tell anyone about the cables I was sending to him and the cables he was sending to me, or to reveal any part of their contents. I, of course, fully respected these instructions, which a president has an unquestioned right to give. Clearly senior officials would resent not being in the know and their resentment would be aimed at me. Naturally, I would have liked to have given them these messages, notably to General Paul Harkins, a longtime friend for whose record of distinguished service in war and peace and for whose able career I have the highest admiration. But of course it was my job to carry out President Kennedy’s eminently proper orders.
President Kennedy referred to this state of affairs in the following message (not mentioned in the Pentagon Papers) to me, dated November 7, ending my secret reports to him:
Your message makes a fitting ending to the weekly reports which you have sent in response to our #576 and from now on I think we should be in touch as either feels the need…Your own leadership in pulling together and directing the whole American operation in South Viet Nam in recent months has been of the greatest importance and you should know that this achievement is recognized here throughout the government…I look forward to your own visit to Washington so that you and I can review the whole situation together face to face.
With renewed appreciation for a fine job,
John F. Kennedy.
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If their intent was to boost McCain at Obama's expense it didn't work, it has had no noticeable effect on the poll numbers
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/20...-225.html#polls
Give 'em time, Len, give 'em time. Long way to go to polling day yet. Plenty of opportunity for a false flag atrocity or two!
Does Obama care? We know the circle of establishment Democrat exterminatory imperialists - Holbrooke et al - welcome the prospect of a renewed conflict with the Russians. But what does the great mainstream liberal hope think? Will we ever find out? And does Obama's view matter?
What is almost as interesting is why The Nation, that home of establishment left-gatekeeping, is running a piece such as this:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Tom-Hayde...080823-382.html
August 23, 2008 at 00:26:07
Tom Hayden Warns Netroots to "Recognize the Georgia Conspiracy"
by Randy Abel
Progressive activist and former California Senator Tom Hayden’s recent article in The Nation, Warning to Obama on the New Cold War, argues that “the same Republican neocons who fabricated the reasons for going to war in Iraq are back, and now they have been paid to trigger a new cold war with Russia that benefits John McCain.” Pointing out the lamentable fact that we won’t hear such forthright warnings from Sen. Obama “or anyone in the Democratic hierarchy,” Hayden emphatically cautions that “[t]hese are dangerous, expensive unwinnable games being played with American lives to benefit Republican politicians and their oil company friends.”Haden’s piece provides an excellent overview of the “short-term essentials of the situation,” along with detailed background information regarding McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann, who “was a registered foreign agent for Saakashlivi's government from at least 2004, when Saakashvili came to power.” Scheunemann, having also represented BP America’s oil interests in the Caucasus region, has been at the center of “serious tensions within Republican circles,” according to Hayden, and has as recently as 2006 accused Condoleezza Rice (with her Chevron ties) of appeasing Russia over Georgia. “Now it appears that the Shuenemann-McCain faction has succeeded in pulling the United States into an unwinnable military situation,” Hayden contends, “which is overflowing with political dividends for McCain and the Republicans.”
In terms of progressive actions for combatting what Hayden characterizes as the “conspiracy fact” of the Neo(con)-cold war, he offers that the first step should be for “millions of people to re-educate themselves in the history and perils of the [old] cold war,” and advises persuasion-oriented unity on the activist front:
The initial goal of the principled rank-and-file peace movement should be to devise a persuasive message against the reckless adventurism of the resurgent McCain/neoconservative crusade and bombard the "realist" foreign policy school, from think tanks to editorial boards to senior members of Congress, with questions that widen the current climate of debate.
Hayden’s most imperative recommendation is that those supporting Obama “should step up their criticism of his hawkish mimicry of McCain, and consider lessening their support--though still voting for him--unless he distinguishes himself from McCain on the immediate crisis.”
The pressing need for sending such a signal to the presumptive candidate was made all the more urgent during the past week, when Sen. Joe Biden, “rumored to be very high on Sen. Barack Obama’s list of running mates,” met with the president and prime minister of Georgia. According to Politico, Biden made the trip in the interest of “further burnishing his foreign policy credentials ahead of Obama’s decision.”
Claiming to have seen no evidence supporting Russian assertions “that the Georgian military was engaged in a ‘genocide’ in the region of South Ossetia,” Biden promised $1 billion to "help the people of Georgia to rebuild their country and preserve its democratic institutions." He also used the occasion of his journey as an opportunity to engage in his own “hawkish mimicry” of McCain’s bellicose rhetoric toward the former Soviet Union.
“Russia’s actions in Georgia will have consequences,” Biden warned, as if to illustrate one of the most salient points of Tom Haden’s “Warning to Obama on the New Cold War”:
Because they are still mired in what Obama himself calls "old thinking," the Democratic hierarchy and the mainstream media will have to be challenged by the faithful and clear-headed rank-and-file and the blogosphere to recognize the Georgia Conspiracy.
Tom Hayden is spot-on with this article’s warnings and wise counsul, and I for one plan to take up his challenge. Like Joe Biden , I’m “convinced that Russia's invasion of Georgia may be the one of the most significant event [sic] to occur in Europe since the end of communism.” But the veep hopeful’s oversimplification of the issues and his tough-guy terminology leave me all the more inspired by Hayden’s recognition of the fact that “the peace movement and netroots will have to lead the battle against this attempt to reward the very people who brought us Iraq with another.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080901/hayden2
Warning to Obama on the New Cold War
By Tom Hayden
August 21, 2008
Barack Obama and the Democrats are heading towards trouble in November because of a new cold war with the Russians triggered largely by a top John McCain adviser and the same neoconservative clique who fabricated evidence to lobby for the Iraq war.This is not a conspiracy theory but a conspiracy fact, stated as boldly as possible before it is too late.
Because they are still mired in what Obama himself calls "old thinking," the Democratic hierarchy and the mainstream media will have to be challenged by the faithful and clear-headed rank-and-file and the blogosphere to recognize the Georgia Conspiracy.
Here are the short-term essentials:
• After border skirmishes similar to the 1964 Tonkin Gulf affair, on August 8, Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili invaded the autonomous breakaway region of South Ossetia with his US-trained army. The Russians responded with massive force, quickly routing Saakashvili's forces.
• McCain has traveled to Georgia, nominated his close friend Saakashlivi for a Nobel Prize in 2005, and was the first American leader to blast Russia last April, when Vladimir Putin issued a sharp warning against NATO membership for Georgia and the Ukraine, supported by the United States.
• The Bush Administration was divided along familiar lines, with the foreign policy "realists" around Condoleezza Rice opposite the pro-Georgia hawks centered in Dick Cheney's office and allied with McCain--enthusiasts for spreading "democracy" from Iraq to the Russian border. The Cheney/neoconservative side prevailed, as they did with Chalabi in Iraq.
• Randy Scheunemann, McCain's foreign policy adviser, was a registered foreign agent for Saakashlivi's government from at least 2004, when Saakashvili came to power, until May 15, 2008, when he technically severed his ties to Orion Strategies, his lobbying firm. At that point, Orion had earned at least $800,000 in lobbying fees from Georgia.
• Saakashvili, with Scheuneman advising him, campaigned on a platform of taking back South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
•Schuenemann was Georgia's lobbyist when Saakashvili sent troops to retake two separatist enclaves, Ajaria in 2004 and the upper Kodori Gorge in Abhkazia in 2006, over strong Russian objections.
• Saakashvili tarnished his democratic credentials by sending club-wielding riot police against unarmed demonstrators protesting his abrupt purging of the police, civil servants and universities in 2007, a replay of Paul Bremer's decision to privatize Iraq in 2003.
Until now Scheunemann has been less visible but no less important than any of the top neoconservatives who drove America into Iraq and now are lobbying for a new cold war and a McCain presidency.
He was the full-time executive director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He helped draft the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which authorized $98 million for the "Iraq lobby" led by Ahmad Chalabi, which disseminated bogus intelligence in the lead-up to war. He also worked for Donald Rumsfeld as a consultant on Iraq. He joined the board of the Project for the New American Century.
Scheunemann traveled with McCain to Georgia in 2006. Seeking to repeat his 1998 Iraq jackpot, he lobbied for an unsuccessful measure co-sponsored by McCain that year, the NATO Freedom Consolidation Act, which would have sent $10 million to Georgia.
He claims to have invented the phrase "rogue state rollback" for a 1999 McCain speech, an echo of the right-wing cold war strategy of rolling back the Soviet Union. He has been a paid lobbyist or consultant for such presumed beneficiaries of "rollback" as Latvia, Macedonia and Romania, as well as Georgia. Not to miss another opportunity, his firm has represented the Caspian Alliance, a consortium of oil and gas producers in the region.
It is unclear at this writing what links Scheunemann, as Georgia's lobbyist, may had to the Western oil interests who in 2005 built the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline through Georgia, a project intentionally designed to bypass Russia and implement what a recent New York Times report described as an "American strategy to put a wedge between Russia and the Central American countries that had been Soviet republics." The BTC consortium includes BP, Chevron, Conoco and the state of Azerbejian. As conceived, according to Ha'aretz, the system also would attempt to link eventually with Israel's pipeline system as well. Using the justification of pipeline protection, US Special Forces in 2005 reportedly trained 2,000 Georgian troops in anti-terrorism techniques. Scheunemann has been a lobbyist for BP America; Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, of course, has longstanding ties with Chevron, which even named a super-tanker after her.
But as evidence of the serious tensions within Republican circles, Schuenemann attacked Rice for appeasement of Russia over Georgia as recently as 2006. Now it appears that the Shuenemann-McCain faction has succeeded in pulling the United States into an unwinnable military situation, which is overflowing with political dividends for McCain and the Republicans.
In a nutshell, here is what should be said: the same Republican neocons who fabricated the reasons for going to war in Iraq are back, and now they have been paid to trigger a new cold war with Russia that benefits John McCain. These are dangerous, expensive unwinnable games being played with American lives to benefit Republican politicians and their oil company friends.
These are not words you are going to hear from Barack Obama or anyone in the Democratic hierarchy. Looking back, they agree that the Iraq invasion was a colossal misjudgment. Privately, most of them feel that Georgia's adventurism provoked the current conflict. But politically, they are pledged to be positioned as tough against terrorism and communism, tougher than the Republicans.
This should be a red line for peace movement supporters of Barack Obama. We can live to fight another time on his proposals on Afghanistan and Pakistan. We can learn to set aside his espousals of sending more troops into those quagmires down the road. After all, we cannot play into McCain's game plan, not with the Supreme Court at stake and a stronger-than-Obama Democratic majority poised to take over Congress. But this new cold war is now heating up by the day, and Obama is likely to be its first political victim. It is even possible that McCain, alerted to the danger, will propose a "diplomatic solution"--after he has squeezed as much benefit out of the cold war revival that he can, to be resumed after he becomes President and tries to incorporate the Ukraine into NATO.
Until a leading Democrat summons the courage and vision, the peace movement and netroots will have to lead the battle against this attempt to reward the very people who brought us Iraq with another lease on power.
First, it will be necessary for millions of people to re-educate themselves in the history and perils of the cold war. Fortunately, we don't have to repeat the communism/anti-communism debates that divided America and defeated Democrats for decades. The question is as old as 1917 or 1945: can and should the US attempt to strangle Russia through reckless pro-Western privatization schemes, combined with installing military bases--now including Patriot missiles--on its western and southern borders? And the question is as old as 1967: why was John McCain bombing Vietnam in the belief that it was a pawn of the Soviet Union? Why did our government and a majority of Americans fall for the same misleading pretext for that war?
The Republicans and neoconservatives should be asked this puzzling question: whatever happened to your triumphal claim that Ronald Reagan won the cold war by destroying the "evil empire"? Evidently they were seeking nothing more than Russia's natural resources and complete subjugation by NATO. There was no limit to what their superpower mentality thought possible.
Among those who caused this current debacle were also the Democratic Party's humanitarian hawks, who promoted the NATO military intervention in the Balkans with the dream of creating an independent Kosovo in Russia's historic sphere of influence. That war would have been a disaster if the United States (under Clinton) had sent ground troops. But Russia pulled back its support of Belgrade after three months of US bombing. That was perceived as a sign of Russia's weakness and the birth of a new unipolar world. Then came the giddy enlistment of former Soviet-bloc countries in NATO--the "new Europe," as Rumsfeld hailed them. The Russians were clear in warning that they could recognize places like South Ossetia if the West could carve out Kosovo, but the superpower was deafened by the delirium of success. It was to be the new American century, a resumption of the march to the free-market millennium first announced on the Time cover at the beginning of the cold war.
The initial goal of the principled rank-and-file peace movement should be to devise a persuasive message against the reckless adventurism of the resurgent McCain/neoconservative crusade and bombard the "realist" foreign policy school, from think tanks to editorial boards to senior members of Congress, with questions that widen the current climate of debate.
If Obama had a paid lobbyist for a foreign country on his Senate staff, what would the Republican outcry be?
If John McCain is above the special interest lobbies, why is he harboring Scheunemann? Is it enough to go off the Georgia payroll and over to the McCain campaign payroll during a regional war you helped set off?
Is Scheunemann as reckless as Saakashvili and McCain, in his own way? Besides his work for the Iraq lobby and the Georgia government, Scheunemann was the lobbyist for the National Rifle Association and the Sporting Arms and Ammunitions Manufacturers, and just nutty enough to be arrested for possession of an unregistered shotgun in the US Capitol--after a duck-hunting trip, of course.
Obama supporters should step up their criticism of his hawkish mimicry of McCain, and consider lessening their support--though still voting for him--unless he distinguishes himself from McCain on the immediate crisis.
At the very least, Obama can stop going out of his way to celebrate McCain as a great American war hero, which only reinforces McCain's strongest rationale for victory. And Obama's surrogates might delicately suggest that McCain shoots before he thinks. McCain was the pointman pushing the neoconservative war against "Islamo-fascism," centered in Baghdad, months before the Bush Administration revealed its intentions. While Obama urged caution about a "dumb war," McCain was supporting Ahmad Chalabi's misleading assertions about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq-Al Qaeda ties that didn't exist.
The broad peace movement has to awaken a burning memory from below. Everyone recalls George Bush declaring "Mission Accomplished," but does anyone recall John McCain standing on another aircraft carrier on January 2, 2002, yelling to young Navy pilots like himself during Vietnam, "Next up, Baghdad!"
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The Georgian Peace Committee declares asks World public opinion not to identify the current Georgian leadership with the people of Georgia, with the Georgian nation.
Declaration of the Georgian Peace Committee
Once more Georgia was launched into a situation of chaos and bloodshed. A new fratricidal war exploded with renewed strength on Georgian soil.
To our great disappointment, the alerts of the Georgian Peace Committee and of progressive personalities of Georgia on the pernicious character of the militarization of the country and on the danger of a pro-fascist and nationalist policy had no effect. The authorities of Georgia once again organized a bloody war, feeling the support of some Western countries and of regional and international organizations. It will take decades to cleanse the shame poured by the current holders of the power over the Georgian people.
The Georgian army—armed and trained by U.S. instructors and using also U.S. armaments—subjected the city of Tskhinvali to a barbaric destruction. The bombings killed Ossetian civilians, our brothers and sisters, children, women and elderly people. Over 2,000 inhabitants of Tskhinvali and of its surroundings died.
Hundreds of civilians of Georgian nationality also died, both in the conflict zone as well as in the entire territory of Georgia.
The Georgian Peace Committee expresses its deep condolences to the relatives and friends of those who have perished.
The entire responsibility for this fratricidal war, for thousands of children, women and elderly dead people, for the inhabitants of South Ossetia and of Georgia falls exclusively on the current president, on the Parliament and on the government of Georgia.
The irresponsibility and the adventurism of the Saakashvili regime have no limits. There is no doubt the president of Georgia and his team are criminals and must be held responsible. The Georgian Peace Committee, together with all the progressive parties and social movements of Georgia, will struggle to assure that the organizers of this monstrous genocide have a severe and legitimate punishment.
The Georgian Peace Committee declares and asks broad public opinion not to identify the current Georgian leadership with the people of Georgia, with the Georgian nation, and appeals to all to support the Georgian people in the struggle against the criminal regime of Saakashvili.
We appeal to all the political forces of Georgia, the social movements and the people of Georgia to unite in order to free the country from the Russian-phobic and pro-fascist anti-popular regime of Saakashvili!
The Georgian Peace Committee Tbilisi, Aug. 11, 2008
Just another Harvard-educated war criminal. Arrest him now!
had drawn complaints on the grounds of taste (3). In lieu of the truth, Britain’s social workers were offered the following, the kind of flannel more normally encountered in a bathroom:
The Zapruder Film
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
Lane was not exactly unaware of the related issues of Life's role and the general issue of photographic alteration/forgery. Here he is in a late 1966 interview:
“Playboy Interview: Mark Lane,” Vol 14, No 2, (February 1967), p.64:
Playboy:
What proof do you have for the charge in your book that the famous Life cover photograph of Oswald holding the alleged murder weapon may have been forged?
Lane:
This photograph was the single document most responsible for persuading Americans that Oswald was involved in the assassination….