W. Niederhut

NSAM 263 was an obvious culprit-- suspiciously reversed by LBJ, McGeorge Bundy, et.al., within a few days of JFK's murder, by NSAM 273. And let's not forget about Allen Dulles and Indonesia. Destiny Betrayed describes that history quite cogently. James DiEugenio, Fletcher Prouty, John Newman, Peter Dale Scott, et.al., have made a very clear case for foreign policy reversals resulting from 11/22/63. What's truly amazing to contemplate is the highly successful, multi-year cover up of the truth about those post-JFK foreign policy reversals by LBJ and the Mockingbird mainstream media-- involving everyone from David Halberstam to Ken Burns.

C'mon, Ben! Stop kidding yourself, and others. Study the history of the U.S. national debt and U.S. income distribution since 1980 (e.g., Thomas Piketty's Capitalism in the 21st Century.) There have been substantial differences between Democratic and Republican (Trickle Down) tax policies since 1980. Bill Clinton and the Democrats raised the top tax rate in 1993, and dramatically reduced the growth rate of our Reaganomic national debt from 1993-2001. Then Bush and Cheney mushroomed the national debt by lowering top tax rates in 2001 and 2003. Trump and the Koch/GOP Congress did the same thing in 2017. There was nothing in the 2017 Trump/GOP tax cut bill that incentivized investment in U.S. jobs. Similarly, the Koch/GOP has had a longstanding policy goal of de-funding Medicare and Social Security. Paul Ryan and the Tea Party House quietly passed two budget bills after 2010 that would have effectively ended Medicare for retirees born after 1956! Rick Scott and RoJo have spilled the beans about this most recently. The Republicans in Congress have also repeatedly voted to abolish and/or sabotage the Affordable Care Act. They have also stacked the courts with pro-corporate, plutocratic judges. Republicans have also repeatedly sabotaged the EPA and climate change mitigation efforts. Obviously, international trade and globalization are important issues, but they do not nullify the substantial policy differences between the Koch GOP and the progressive half of the Democratic Party.

Reality check, Ben. There's nothing "misleading" about focusing on the crucial policy differences between Democrats and Republicans in the upcoming U.S. mid-term elections. In fact, a great deal is at stake with regard to control of both chambers of Congress. Perhaps most crucially, the future of American democracy is at stake. Our democracy has been threatened most directly by Trump's fascist/white supremacist cult, but also by systematic, multi-year Koch/GOP efforts to control the SCOTUS, suppress voting, and uphold dark money funding of elections per Citizens United. There are also substantive policy differences between Democrats and Republicans about tax rates, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA, gun control, immigration, and abortion. The argument that issues related to globalization and the power of multinational corporations nullifies the significance of policy differences between Democrats and Republicans is, frankly, absurd.

And, again, it makes me wonder if Ben's latest (non sequitur) dispatch last night about Biden and China was another pre-emptive counter-narrative from the Faux MAGA-verse -- a calculated attempt to deflect attention from today's story (above) about Trump and China. This kind of pre-emptive counter-narrative technique has been standard practice in the Faux MAGA-verse. If we had a breaking news story about Trump copulating with chickens, Fox would probably broadcast a pre-emptive story about Biden visiting a chicken coop under suspicious circumstances.

Helicopter hog hunting, eh? 🤥 It reminds me of that scene in Somalia from the movie Black Hawk Down.

Reading this Taylor interview transcript brings something to mind for me. I'm currently reading Stephen Kinzer's book, The Brothers, about Allen and John Foster Dulles, and I recently read Kinzer's account of the successful CIA op to oust Jacob Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. What caught my eye was the report that the CIA op in Guatemala was actually failing until Eisenhower agreed at the last minute to send in additional bombers. And, needless to say, Eisenhower was quite pleased with the success of Allen Dulles's low-budget covert ops to oust Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala. Dulles must have expected the same thing to happen at the Bay of Pigs invasion that had salvaged his op in Guatemala-- supplemental bombing. But JFK didn't share Eisenhower's conviction that you have to win the thing if you intend to start shooting.

Interesting. It sounds like Jean Stafford may have been paid by Operation Mockingbird to publish A Mother in History. FWIW, her second husband, Oliver Jensen, (after her first marriage to poet Robert Lowell) was a staff writer for Skull & Bones man Henry Luce's Life magazine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Stafford

In light of the newly revealed evidence about Mark Meadows' J6 texts, it's probably no coincidence that Ben Cole recently posted these MAGA-verse tropes about "no texts" implicating Trump's White House in the J6 coup plot. Oops... Riggleman: Meadows' text trove revealed a "roadmap to an attempted coup" - 60 Minutes - CBS News It looks like another example of the Trumplicon propagandists trying to get out in front of the damning J6 evidence with a Faux counter-narrative-- shortly before the final J6 Congressional hearing. We owe a Ben a thank you for keeping us continually up-to-date on these Faux MAGA-verse counter-narratives about almost everything -- e.g., the Deep State's J6 "Patriot Purge," the Deep State's "Russia Hoax," and the Donks' failure to respond appropriately to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The moral of Ben's nightly dispatches from the MAGA-verse is, "Ignore the facts, never trust a Donk, and don't drink the blue kool aid." 🤥

Ben, obviously, remains the Trumplican canary in the J6 coal mine. When he finally stops singing in defense of Trump's J6 coup attempt, we'll know the gig is up. As for Ben's oft-repeated trope about needing to discern the truth about J6 through the courts, Trump's cabal of attorneys is working overtime to prevent that from happening. Trump fighting a 'secret war' in the courts to keep witnesses from testifying (dailykos.com)

Ben, At this point, there's simply no excuse for your persistent, willful ignorance about January 6th. You have chosen to ignore the evidence. No conspiracy? C'mon, man. What was the Eastman Memo? The Willard Hotel "war room?" What did Rudy Giuliani say to Cassidy Hutchinson about the impending J6 fireworks? What was Trump's response to reports that his J6 mob was armed? Why did Chris Miller and Charles Flynn block National Guard deployments to protect Congress? Why did Mike Pence refuse to get in the limo? Your claims about the lack of phone evidence are especially annoying in light of what we know about the illegal Secret Service and DHS text deletions and the blanks in Trump's J6 phone log.

John, I'm no apologist for post-WWII U.S. imperialism, and I understand your point about Manicheanism in U.S. foreign policy-- going back to the Cold War era of Allen and John Foster Dulles-- but I also think that some people are overlooking what is truly evil about Vladimir Putin and his totalitarian police state in the modern Russian Federation. We all wanted to believe that Putin was some sort of enlightened despot, and even a "convert" from atheistic Stalinism to Russian Orthodoxy. I first realized that it was all a facade in 2007, after Putin and the FSB seized our ROCOR in Western Europe and the U.S.-- through an internal political coup, not entirely bloodless -- in order to use what was left of the Russian Orthodox Church (after 1917) as a mere tool of Putin's police state. How cynical was that? It was the same thing that the Bolsheviks had done to the ROC in Russia after 1917. At the time (2007) Putin even told ITASS that "religion is one of Russia's most important weapons of self defense!" IMO, Putin is a KGB apparatchik at heart. He's, obviously, not a communist, but he has certainly admired and used Stalin's methods to transform the Russian Federation from a nascent democracy (in the 1990s) into a brutally repressive totalitarian state. He controls the media, and murders and/or incarcerates his critics. Now he is committing mass murder of civilians in Ukraine, and even exfiltrating Ukrainian civilians to Russian prison camps-- as Stalin did in the era of the Gulags. How can such conduct be acceptable to Jeff Carter or anyone else on the planet?

Got it, Ben. So, you've now changed your previous position about Biden and NATO needing to intervene more aggressively to counter Putin's military invasion of Ukraine? You repeatedly claimed that Biden and the Donks weren't doing enough to help Ukraine militarily, remember? Now you're saying that Biden and the Donks are doing too much in Ukraine -- even likening them to Allen Dulles? As for JFK, do you seriously doubt that he would have intervened to assist the Ukrainians after they were invaded by Russia? Think of Berlin.

John, I'm interested in hearing from our European colleagues on this subject, because Americans of my generation were reared in a society that was steeped in Cold War paranoia about the U.S.S.R. We had a reflexive, duck-and-cover fear of Soviet era nukes. That said, I've always been a cultural Russophile, and even a convert to the (White) Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) during the past quarter century. One of my older siblings is fluent in Russian, and was one of the first college-level American exchange students permitted to study in the U.S.S.R. in the early 70s era of detente. What is your take on Ukrainian threats and aggression toward the Russian Federation-- prior to Putin's invasion of Ukraine this year? From my perspective, it seems rather that Putin has been the aggressor toward Ukraine-- e.g., seizing the Crimea in 2014, and initiating militant separatist movements in the Donbas region. He has also aggressively pursued control of the Ukrainian government with Kremlin puppets like Yanukovych. It is true that there have been Ukrainian Orthodox Churches seeking independence from the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, (including my own Metropolitan in Odessa) but that has more to do with the fact that the MP has been infiltrated and controlled by the KGB since 1920. (The Estonian Orthodox Church also pursued autonomy from the MP following the break up of the U.S.S.R.-- going under the omophorion of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholmew.) Isn't the current conflict in Ukraine really a struggle between Ukraine's aspirations for self-determination and liberal democracy vs. subjugation by Putin's totalitarian Russian police state? And isn't NATO expansion in Eastern Europe also driven chiefly by former Soviet Bloc nations wanting freedom and democracy rather than Russian totalitarianism? Serious, non-rhetorical question. I don't presume to know the correct answer.

It looks like yet another Putin ally has fallen from grace-- dying of tall building syndrome. Putin Ally Dies After Falling Down Stairs on Day of Russia Mobilization (newsweek.com)

Ben, I've had some direct, personal experience with Putin's agenda and modus operandi during the past 20 years, in the old ROCOR-- Russan Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. IMO, his long-term FSB plan since the late 90s has been to establish totalitarian control over the Russian Federation, and to then re-establish the former Soviet empire. He has expressed open contempt for liberal Western democracy. His decision to invade Ukraine this year was simply the latest step in his long-term totalitarian, imperialist agenda. He thought it would work out as it did in Chechnya. But his Ukraine invasion was based on bad intelligence and miscalculation. As I said earlier, he underestimated Ukrainian resistance, and he underestimated Joe Biden. Trump had nothing to do with it. He was Putin's asset, offering no resistance to Putin's agenda in Ukraine, and even facilitating it by withholding support from Kyiv. Meanwhile, you began this year by criticizing Biden for not doing more to support Ukraine. Now you're criticizing Biden for doing too much to support Ukraine? It's a difficult predicament, but I think Biden and Blinken have played a bad hand, dealt by Putin, reasonably well. Of course, Putin is capable of doing almost anything-- if only to spite the Ukrainians. He has repeatedly bombed civilian targets, and even bombed areas around the Zhaporizhia nuclear facility.

Trump "handled Putin on Ukraine," Ben? On what planet? That's like claiming that Neville Chamberlain "handled Hitler on Czechoslovakia." Trump was Putin's puppet. I'd say that Putin "handled Trump" rather deftly from 2017-21. As for the invasion of Ukraine, you've been all over the map on the issue this year, perhaps echoing the misleading Faux polemics of Glenn Greenwald.

Ben, You're someone who repeatedly criticized Biden and NATO for not intervening more aggressively in Ukraine after Putin's invasion earlier this year, so I'm a bit puzzled to hear that you are now advocating less belligerence. The only consistency in your opinions about U.S. policy in Ukraine seems to be that Biden and the Donks are making a big mistake if they pursue war or peace. As for Afghanistan, it's not a matter of opinion that Trump and Pompeo surrendered to the Taliban at Doha in February of 2020. It's a fact.

Trump Demands Special Master Be Fired and Replaced with Extra-Special Master Satire from The Borowitz Report https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-demands-special-master-be-fired-and-replaced-with-extra-special-master

I'll be damned. A front page article at WaPo today today about Pentagon psy ops! Of course, the focus is on Twitter and Face Book, not the M$M. I can't imagine WaPo publishing an article about U.S. government psy ops in our mainstream media. To quote John Wayne, "That'd be the day..." 🤥 Pentagon reviews psychological operations amid Facebook, Twitter complaints - The Washington Post

Very interesting discussion here. A related question, aside from Oswald's Polish accent is, "Where did Oswald acquire sufficient Russian fluency and literary sensibility to read lengthy, sophisticated Russian novels by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, et.al.?" Is there a more comprehensive, scholarly review of the data on this subject than the one written by James Norwood? Oswald’s Proficiency in the Russian Language Oswald's Russian Language Proficiency (harveyandlee.net)

Matt, Doesn't Cannon's bizarre ruling block DOJ access to Trump's stolen records? And, if so, how can the DOJ investigate him? I don't understand that one.

Well, Trump has always appreciated golden showers... 🤪

Apropos of this discussion about MK-Ultra, drug experimentation, and hypnosis, one thing I noticed when I studied John Mark's landmark 1975 book about MK-Ultra, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate, is that there were very few extant CIA records about the MK-Ultra hypnosis research. For example, there were no extant references to George Estabrooks, William Joseph Bryan, or Jolyon West. Yet we know from other sources that all three of these psychiatrists/hypnotists were involved in some way with the U.S. military and/or CIA in the 1950s and 60s. Jolyon West even corresponded, enthusiastically, with Gottlieb. Bryan bragged about knowing Sirhan. Estabrooks bragged about his work for the U.S. military establishment. Richard Helms must have destroyed (or concealed) those "Manchurian candidate" hypnosis files. Then Sidney Gottlieb told the world that the CIA had had no success with their "mind control" experiments. I don't buy it. IMO, Sirhan is living proof of Estabrooks' claims (from the 1940s) that suitable candidates could be hypnotically programmed as assassins.

I agree that the Afghanistan war was a boondoggle from the beginning. My point is that most people tend to blame Biden for the abrupt collapse of the Afghan Army in 2021, without acknowledging that Trump's surrender to the Taliban at Doha in 2020 set the stage for that collapse.

Newsflash, Ben. Trump and Pompeo surrendered to the Taliban at Doha in February of 2020. Trump's surrender to the Taliban stipulated that U.S. troops would be out of Afghanistan by May of 2021. Then Trump withdrew all but 2,500 U.S. troops from Afghanistan in January of 2021, before Biden was even inaugurated-- while refusing to share military intelligence with Biden's transition team. Top US general says Afghan collapse can be traced to Trump-Taliban deal | US military | The Guardian