Calvin Ye

Biden just signed the bill that would ban Tiktok

What is the release date for John Newman's book Volume V ARMAGEDDON

4 hours ago, Matt Cloud said:

Studies in Intelligence Vol. 48 No. 3 (2004) The Pond: Running Agents for State, War, and the CIA The Hazards of Private Spy Operations Mark Stout

 

See the the thread on "The Pond."

This is from the website:

"In a memorandum to Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that his department wants to withhold two types of documents.

The first are 11 records that discussed “a joint intelligence program” of the State Department and the CIA that the two are still operating to this day.

“Release of the details of that program, as found in these 11 records, would greatly harm the CIA’s intelligence capabilities and cause extreme difficulties in the Department’s conduct of relations with other documents,” Blinken wrote.

The remaining 20 documents are “not believed relevant” to the assassination but detail a joint program between the State Department and the FBI that was terminated in 1974."

4 hours ago, Matt Cloud said:

Studies in Intelligence Vol. 48 No. 3 (2004) The Pond: Running Agents for State, War, and the CIA The Hazards of Private Spy Operations Mark Stout

 

See the the thread on "The Pond."

4 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Stu:

Treitz and Hansen turned down an opportunity to debate me.

Kind of telling I think.

What interested me is how they dismissed any of the following investigations into the INSLAW case.

So I read them, plus some other stuff.  I just conclude that their whole approach is flawed.  To leave out the later investigations is just not being candid with the viewer. 

That Netflix let it all slide is another question.

James,

Covertactionmagazine.com accuses Netflix of continuing the coverup

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/03/11/netflix-series-on-the-octopus-murders-continues-cover-up-of-reporters-death-and-cia-crimes-he-threatened-to-expose/

According to WhoWhatWhy.org, Blinken mentioned the existence of an joint intelligence program between US State Department and FBI but deny the link to the JFK assassination. Is he really telling the truth?

https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/government-integrity/newly-released-jfk-documents-raise-an-important-question-whats-left/

On 3/5/2024 at 7:36 AM, Robert Burrows said:

Do you have an opinion on whether the same forces that assassinated JFK were involved in the  assassinations of Malcom X, MLK and RFK?

Robert, there is an book called Why The CIA Killed JFK and Malcolm X: The Secret Drug Trade in Laos by John Koerner that implicated the CIA in the death of Malcolm X, MLK and RFK

A former magician named Jack Diamond aka Mega Genius claimed to have discover the secrets behind JFK Assassination and recorded this on MP3. Did anyone go on his website to check out his claims and buy the product?

https://www.megagenius.com/lectures/boost-knowledge-level-ii-uncommon-sense-series/

I want to know what Allen Dulles plan to do with all the gold that he discover in Indonesia

I search Project DICIRCUIT but couldn't find anything

Angleton and the Nazis has ties to drugs

Both the Nazis  and CIA were involved in drugs. There is also the Operation Valkyrie

16 minutes ago, Ron Bulman said:

He wasn't.  IF he was involved in the JFKA it was through Dulles, Angleton and Harvey in particular.  He, COS Berlin in the early 1950's, put in charge of ZRifle, his notes about foreign assassins, which the Cuban refugees were not at that point as part of Operation 40.  From WWII they all dealt with both east and west Germans, The Black Prince, Rat lines, Paperclip and more. 

Is what some have mentioned before, a piggybacked operation, in a different context, plausible?  Cubans roused up about assassinating JFK, a few used for various purposes (keeping Oswald busy?), maybe a shooter from the swamp group?  Ultimately used as scape goats.  IDK. Nothing sticks to the wall?  Preposterous, I guess.

Both the Nazis  and CIA were involved in drugs

All politicians is untrustworthy

My contribution is  fact-checking and focusing on the little discussed subjects

On 7/13/2023 at 1:34 PM, Mark Knight said:

[Redacted by Request] was not banned from the Education Forum by the forum administrators.

Thanks for correcting me

1 minute ago, Sean Coleman said:

Errrr……not controversial? and why the exposé? 
Should I be wringing my hands, recoiling in shock horror?

 

People were asking about the identity of the guest

2 hours ago, Pamela Brown said:

Care to provide a page number for this?

https://archive.org/details/john-loftus-mark-aarons-the-secret-war-against-the-jews-how-western-espionage-be_202012/page/300/mode/2up?q=reputation

The guest who post the controversial subject of Jews and Kennedy Assassination is actually [Redacted by Request], an former member. [Redacted] deleted his account

The identity of this guest is actually Chris Barnard, an former member of this forum. Chris deleted his account

2 hours ago, Pamela Brown said:

I am also among those wondering just who is this 'guest' who is posting a thread in the EF?  And on a topic that tends to be controversial?

Pamela, the guest is actually Chris Barnard, an former member who deleted his account

29 minutes ago, Michael Griffith said:

If you are unwilling to read anything that disagrees with what you want to believe on the subject, then there is no point in discussing it with you. Personally, I would never get on a public board and make sweeping, adamant statements on a controversial historical subject unless I had read at least two books and/or several articles on both sides of the issue. And I would certainly not dismiss a book published by a major publishing house and written by a qualified scholar unless I had read the book. But that's just me.

I only commented because the members failed to include an certain aspect

14 minutes ago, Michael Griffith said:

Based on what? You might want to read Moyar's book and all the evidence he presents before you reach a conclusion, if you are interested in making an informed judgment. A basic tenet of critical thinking is to consider both sides of an argument before drawing a conclusion about it.

For starters, Moyar's version is based on the new information from North Vietnamese sources. Chapman did not even try to address a single item of this historic evidence. Let me summarize some of the things the North Vietnamese sources document:

-- The Communist war effort was going badly in 1962 and 1963 but began to improve a few months after Diem's death.

-- The Communist war effort went very badly throughout 1967, and this development was the reason the Hanoi regime decided to launch the Tet Offensive in January 1968.

-- The Viet Cong were tightly controlled by Hanoi and relied on Hanoi for most of their arms and supplies.

-- South Vietnam's army, aka ARVN (ar-vin), was a formidable fighting force in the majority of cases. ARVN usually defeated the Viet Cong during 1962 and 1963 and performed well during the Tet Offensive.

-- The Hanoi regime was unpleasantly surprised by the performance of ARVN during the Tet Offensive. Most of the Communists' attacks were aimed at ARVN units, since Hanoi believed they could be easily defeated. Hanoi's leaders were surprised when this failed to occur.

-- Hanoi's leaders were stunned by the refusal of the South Vietnamese to rise up against the Saigon government at the start of the Tet Offensive. The Hanoi Politburo firmly believed that once their forces attacked, most South Vietnamese would welcome them as liberators. 

-- After the Tet Offensive, the Communists lost control of most of the areas they had held in South Vietnam before the offensive. They had lost control of a number of areas in 1967, but they lost control over even more areas after the offensive.

-- From 1967 through early 1972, the Saigon government and MACV steadily increased their control of the countryside.

-- The Viet Cong's ranks were so decimated during the Tet Offensive, and recruiting became so difficult after the offensive, that from that point onward, most of the Viet Cong's soldiers were North Vietnamese.

-- The 1967-1968 bombing of North Vietnam did even more damage than MACV and the Pentagon estimated it did at the time, even when the bombing did not include targets near and around Hanoi.  

-- The Operation Linebacker I and II bombing campaigns and the mining of Haiphong Harbor in 1972 brought North Vietnam to the verge of collapse. 

-- Hanoi's leaders had no intention of honoring the Paris Peace Accords.

-- The Hanoi regime launched a propaganda campaign to blame South Vietnam for violating the Accords in an attempt to draw attention away from Hanoi's egregious violations of the Accords. 

-- Even with American aid slashed, ARVN often put up stiff, sometimes "ferocious," resistance in 1974 and 1975. 

I have no interested in reading Moyer's book

6 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

I think it is time to share segments from Dr. Mark Moyar’s 14-page reply to the roundtable reviews of his book Triumph Forsaken. We have people in this thread who are stridently condemning Moyar’s book even though they have not read it, and even though their research on the Vietnam War has obviously been very limited and one sided. Rejecting a book and attacking its author before you have even read any of his books violates the most basic principles of critical thinking and credible scholarship.

Below are some portions from Moyar’s reply to the roundtable reviews. The quoted portions focus on Chapman’s review, since it is the most negative of the reviews. As you will see, there is reason to wonder if Chapman actually read Moyar’s book or if she merely skimmed through it. For those who want to read Moyar’s reply in its entirety, here is a link to it:

https://issforum.org/roundtables/PDF/TriumphForsaken-Moyar.pdf

From Moyar’s reply:

          I will address the reviews one at a time, starting with Jessica Chapman’s, which contains the greatest number of accusations. Near the beginning of the review, Chapman states that “the literature on the Vietnam Wars is vastly more complex and nuanced than [Moyar’s] liberal orthodox/conservative revisionist dichotomy implies.” I should begin by noting first, that this dichotomy is not something I created. David Anderson, Marc Jason Gilbert, Stephen Vlastos, and many other well-known scholars have accepted and analyzed this dichotomy. In Triumph Forsaken, moreover, I note that not every book fits into one category or the other. (xii) (All subsequent page references are from Triumph Forsaken) All of the major works that address the war’s biggest questions—such as the merits of U.S. intervention and the viability of alternative American strategies—clearly can be placed within either the orthodox or revisionist groupings. . . .

          According to Chapman, “Moyar contributes little of substance to what he has termed the revisionist perspective.” The review by James McAllister, which calls Triumph Forsaken “an original work of scholarship that can rightfully claim to be the most consequential revisionist book ever produced on the Vietnam War,” does much to undermine Chapman’s assertion by enumerating some of the major original points in the book. Later, Chapman states, “rather than bringing up new veins of argument, [Moyar] revived a number of old debates that most scholars were all too happy to replace years ago with more sophisticated lines of inquiry.” She appears to believe that old debates are off limits. Chapman does not mention the military history in the book, which, as McAllister notes, provides a significant portion of the book’s original conclusions. As I pointed out in a recent journal article (“The Current State of Military History,” The Historical Journal, vol. 50, no. 1, March 2007), military history can be far more complex than the uninitiated often believe. Some of the other sophisticated lines of inquiry that Chapman missed are the nature of conflict in Vietnamese history, Vietnamese political culture, the impact of the militant Buddhist movement, North Vietnamese strategy, American intelligence, and international opinion about Vietnam. . . .

          Chapman next states, “Despite his claim to have rooted his work in Vietnamese sources, he does not appear to read Vietnamese, and makes only limited use of Vietnamese materials in translation.” The suggestion that the book does not rely extensively on Vietnamese sources is untenable. In the endnotes can be found over two hundred citations of Vietnamese[1]language sources, many of which have never before been cited. I am not aware of any general history of the war that contains so many references to Vietnamese-language sources.

          Chapman also appears to fault me for not having spent time in archives in Vietnam. She is correct in noting that she, Edward Miller, Philip Catton, and Matthew Masur have done research in Vietnamese archives for extended periods of time. They have produced noteworthy works from this research, as I mention in Triumph Forsaken. What she fails to say is that most of the information presently available to foreign researchers in Vietnam is not relevant to the big questions of the Vietnam War, though this fact may be inferred from the absence of any statement from Chapman about specific information that would contradict my interpretations. As my endnotes attest, the works of Miller, Catton, and Masur (Chapman had not published any of her research by the time I finished Triumph Forsaken) contain only a handful of sources from the archives of Vietnam that illuminate the big picture in ways that other sources do not.

          Chapman, and another reviewer, criticize me for relying on a translator in using Vietnamese sources. I do not see how reading voluminous translations from a world-class translator, Merle Pribbenow, is less effective than reading Vietnamese sources when the Vietnamese of many scholars is inferior to that of Pribbenow. A substantial number of other scholars of the Vietnam War, including some who read Vietnamese, have employed Mr. Pribbenow’s translations because of their reliability, though I am not aware that any of them has been criticized for it as I have. No one has offered any evidence that the numerous translations Mr. Pribbenow provided me were inaccurate in any way.

          One might expect a historian with Chapman’s interests to welcome the introduction of so many new Vietnamese sources into the history of the Vietnam War, particularly since my Vietnamese sources offer many new insights into the thoughts and actions of the war’s Vietnamese participants, which in turn help us evaluate American policy and strategy much more effectively. Most previous historians who have covered policy and strategy during the war have not used any such sources—for example, David Anderson, Larry Berman, Robert Buzzanco, George Herring, Michael Hunt, Seth Jacobs, Howard Jones, David Kaiser, Jeffrey Kimball, Fredrik Logevall (Chapman’s dissertation advisor), Andrew Preston, and Robert Schulzinger. These historians have seldom been criticized for the absence of Vietnamese sources. They have received excellent book reviews and coveted prizes, and some have been rewarded with jobs at top universities. It is therefore very curious that Chapman tries to turn my use of Vietnamese sources into something negative.

          Chapman alleges that I am guilty of “fragmentary and often questionable use of evidence,” and charges that there is “a disturbing lack of critical analysis throughout the book.” Those are serious charges, not to be made lightly. Yet Chapman provides little evidence to support them. She provides only five specific supporting points, and all are incorrect.

          Chapman states the first of the five points as follows: “I would certainly welcome clarification from Moyar on why Vietnam was of such vital strategic importance to the United States in 1954.” In Triumph Forsaken I do not state that Vietnam was of vital strategic importance in 1954. I note that Eisenhower did not consider Vietnam to be strategically vital in 1954. (27-8) Eisenhower had changed his views on the subject by 1961 (125), and later in 1961 Kennedy concluded that Vietnam was strategically vital (137-42), a conclusion that had considerable merit in my estimation.

          Second, Chapman accuses me of inconsistency for accepting Ho Chi Minh’s supplications to the Chinese as evidence that he was pro-Chinese while not accepting his entreaties to the United States as evidence of pro-American sentiments. Contrary to how Chapman expressed it, I did not rely primarily on Ho Chi Minh’s overtures to China and the United States in analyzing his true sentiments. Rather, I studied Ho Chi Minh’s actions, beliefs, and circumstances in depth to assess how he viewed the two powers.

          On many occasions, Ho Chi Minh professed that he had been inspired by Lenin, and his ideological writings and his actions as a national leader all show the influence of Lenin’s ideology, including Lenin’s internationalism. (8-10, 14) Ho repeatedly advocated temporary alliances with non-Communists against other non-Communists followed by destruction of the surviving non-Communists. (10, 14, 104) He never advocated destruction of other Communists (save for Trotskyites), whether foreign or domestic, and on numerous occasions he urged his followers to remember that they were not just fighting for their own country but for their fellow Communists across the world. (11, 83, 359) Ho lived in China for many years, serving in both the Comintern and the Chinese Communist Army. (9-11, 14-15) He never lived in the United States and never served in the U.S. government or army. During the Franco-Viet Minh War, Ho let Chinese leaders dictate strategy and revolutionary policy (22- 3) and during that war and the war against the Americans, he invited Chinese troops onto Vietnamese soil. (27, 362-3) In the Sino-Soviet dispute, Ho usually stayed closer to the Chinese position while trying to get the two sides to patch up their differences in the spirit of international Communist solidarity. (60-61, 102, 138)

          Third, Chapman contends that I depict “total unity” between the Chinese and North Vietnamese prior to 1963, and in this context asserts that I overlooked the works of Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ilya Gaiduk, Qiang Zhai, and Chen Jian. Chapman does not state specifically what pre-1963 problems between the Chinese and North Vietnamese I missed. If she is referring to the end of the Franco-Viet Minh War in 1954, that subject is addressed below. As far as the period between 1954 and 1963, I do spend considerable time describing amicable relations between China and North Vietnam and offer supporting evidence from a variety of sources. But disagreements also receive mention. I note that the land reform debacle caused the Vietnamese Communists to lose their veneration for radical Chinese policies (62), that in 1958 the Chinese refused a Vietnamese request to begin the armed insurrection (79), that the Chinese told the Vietnamese to limit the scale of the insurgency in 1960 (101-2) and again in 1961 (146). Concerning the contention that I overlooked Judge, Gaiduk, Zhai, and Jian, a quick look at the endnotes will show that I refer repeatedly to all four of these historians, frequently with respect to relations among the Communist countries. . . .

          Fifth, Chapman contends that I did not produce compelling evidence that Diem was an effective leader. I find it hard to understand how she arrived at this conclusion, because the book is packed with information about Diem’s effectiveness. The early chapters show how Diem consolidated control over a badly fractured country and defeated the underground Communists. The middle chapters show how Diem, after initial problems in countering the insurgency, led a very effective counterinsurgency effort in 1962 and 1963. The latter chapters show how the removal of Diem crippled South Vietnam’s ability to fight the Communists. I provided an enormous amount of new information on the war in 1962 and 1963, much of it from Communist sources, showing how the South Vietnamese were winning the war. Chapman does nothing to show that any of this information is untrustworthy.

These paragraphs are only a small part of Moyar's reply. I encourage interested readers to read the entire reply. 

 

I agree with Chapman about Moyar's version of events