Steven Gaal

http://www.euractiv.com/sections/social-europe-jobs/millions-europeans-are-poor-despite-having-full-time-job-302189
((SEE LINK FOR ARTICLES BELOW))

Millions of Europeans are poor despite having a full-time job
Millions of Europeans can't make ends meet, even when fully employed.

Thirteen million Europeans fall below the EU's poverty line despite having fulltime jobs, especially in Germany, according to a new analysis by the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI).

At the same time, the number of 'poor' full-time workers has grown over the past five years, the study showed.

Workers can be counted as 'poor' if they earn 50% or less than the average in a specific country.

"The risk of living in poverty has increased in the past years and increased the most among workers in full-time jobs. It's a thought-provoking and worrying development. Previously we saw that if you had a full-time job, you would have a salary which you could live of, but this is no longer the case," Maria Jepsen, research chief at ETUI, told the Danish newspaper Politiken.

The trend is especially visible by Germany, where the economic crisis, jobs moving to Eastern Europe, and workers arriving from new member states has put wages under pressure particularly in the transport, hotel and cleaning industries.

In some sectors the real wage has fallen between 10-18% in only a few years, while growing almost 20% in other sectors.

Lars Andersen, director of the Economic Council of the Labour Market in Denmark, calls the situation in parts of the German labour market, 'the Wild West'.

"The consequence is that the German society will be so skewed that every fifth worker in Germany is low-paid. Even if they work full-time, they don't have a wage to give their family a decent life. It will be difficult to provide housing and food on the table, and they won't be able to afford vacations," Andersen said.

Thomas Rickers, chairman of the German metal workers at the Baltic Coast, told Politiken that the German labour market isn't a role model.

"It sounds good when you hear about the economic development in Germany - low unemployment and surplus in the trade balance. But one forgets that millions of workers have paid and still pay for 'the German model' with falling wages," Rickers said.

•Eurostat: People at risk of poverty or social exclusion
Trade Unions
•European Trade Union Institute (ETUI): Developments in inequality and social protection in Europe

Press articles
•Politiken: Millions of European go home poor from work [in Danish]
Henriette JacobsenSections: Social Europe & Jobs.Locations: Germany.Topics: povertysocial exclusion..

Reading through this thread and especially the part regarding George HW Bush's whereabouts/alibi on November 22, one name jumped out at me: Wendell Cherry.

Is this the Wendell Cherry, who in 1963 was a lawyer/law professor at the University of Louisville, and who in 1961 was a partner with David Jones in a business then called Extendicare...which later became insurance giant Humana? In 1963, this Wendell Cherry would have been 28 years old. But at the time, all his teaching and business concerns were located primarily in Kentucky.

If it's the same Wendell Cherry...what [allegedly] brought him to Tyler, Texas that day?

Dont think so Mark for Cherry a common name.

At Special Forces bases terminal accidents are commonplace thus the elimination of said shooters would not be noticed. Lansdale's secrecy classification would allow him access to the extensive psychological profiles of Special Forces personnel.

Maybe Special Forces people were even given proof/info that JFK was sleeping with a communist spy. Shooting the POTUS would thus be a National Security necessity.

SEE = POST # 35 above

To control JFK British used BLACKMAIL ??

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Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990

Even before his inauguration, Kennedy had access to extensive policy planning studies on Vietnam through unofficial channels; according to one former Harvard classmate (then the State Department desk officer on Vietnam), the president-elect had even reviewed and approved a Saigon embassy "shopping list" for Vietnamese counterinsurgency.¹ Kennedy also received one or more of Edward Lansdale's "think" papers on Vietnam and was roundly impressed by his advocacy of a "nonbureaucratic" approach to counterinsurgency.² Kennedy's prompt approval just ten days after taking office of a new "Counterinsurgency Plan" for Vietnam-a shift away from a prior emphasis on a Korea-style threat to South Vietnam-suggests a more than casual acquaintance with the issues involved. The Vietnam reappraisal had been developed after the I September 1960 appointment of a new American commander there, Lt. Gen. Lionel C. McGarr, who determined to "redirect . . . training and operations emphasis towards a greatly improved counterguerrilla posture."³

Although the means proposed in the Vietnam plan to readjust to insurgency were not particularly innovative, the plan represented a departure from the previous emphasis on assistance in developing a strictly conventional military establishment in Vietnam. Although the Special Forces were assigned for the first time a counterinsurgent role in Vietnam in 1960,), their purpose there was only to provide Ranger training The doctrine with which General McGarr proposed to develop the "counter-guerrilla posture" was essentially traditional, based on the U. S. military's long experience as an occupation or peacekeeping force. Only in 1961, when a presidential demand was made for a purpose-built counterinsurgency establishment, was the Special Forces/Special Warfare Center development of unconventional warfare adopted across the board as the foundation of a military doctrine of counterinsurgency. The military core of unconventional warfare, the organization, tactics and techniques of America's covert CIA and Special Forces "guerrillas," provided a nucleus for the new doctrine of counterinsurgency. The trimmings of economic development, social and political reform, and sophisticated formulations of Ed Lansdale's "decency and brotherhood" approach merely embellished that nucleus of unconventional tactics and techniques.

To the incoming Kennedy administration, there were few Americans more eminently qualified to advise on unconventional warfare and the American role in Indochina than Edward Geary Lansdale. Although Lansdale's reputation as a practical, sensitive counterinsurgent would be tarnished in the 1960s, his public legend would endure. General Lansdale was, in any case, one of the most influential of American counterinsurgents, and important if only because his role as a principal spanned the formative years of the doctrine, from the Philippines of the 1940s to Vietnam in the 1960s.

Lansdale was pulled out of Saigon in 1956, after two years as President Diem's house guest and confidant, and kicked upstairs back in Washington to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 1957, to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Special Operations. Over the next four years Lansdale would quietly participate in both covert operations and military diplomacy. Although he generally operated under an appropriate cover, his reception by cronies and counterparts overseas occasionally made the nature of his activities quite transparent. Through his own flair for publicity, by 1960 he had become a celebrity-particularly in the Pacific. In January-February 1959, for example, Lansdale traveled to Saigon and Manila with the President's Committee on Military Assistance (the Draper Committee). His reception in Manila-where he was universally considered a top CIA officer-was of considerable embarrassment to the committee: A memorandum between his colleagues said he was going "officially" under Draper aegis to his "old-stomping grounds.... Covering points of tourist interests such as Manila, Saigon, etc. of South-East Asia." # 4

As the end of the Eisenhower administration approached, General Lansdale continued to play a part in U.S. policy on Indochina with a series of influential memoranda. Although Lansdale was almost unique in pressing for the development of unconventional warfare capabilities there, his analysis of the nature of the insurgency in Vietnam was not particularly unique. The official army history of the period observes that the military's major 1960 Indochina policy report portrayed the people of Vietnam as "apathetic, pliable, and willing to obey any authority which held superior power"; in the degree to which it ignored political change and the insurgency's revolutionary nature, the report could have been written "by an American consular officer in Indochina during the 1920s and 1930s or by a French colonial administrator."⁵ An 11 August 1960 report by General Lansdale expressed a similar view: "Most farmers, he believed, helped the Viet Cong either because of anger at the government-mostly attributable to the misbehavior of troops on counterinsurgency operations-or because of fear of Viet Cong terrorism."⁶

He still saw a Philippine-style solution for Vietnam-that is, winning over the people merely by ensuring troops behaved decently (although twenty years later he would acknowledge this was easier said than done).

The assessment put forward in Lansdale's memorandum to the Secretary of Defense in January 1961, a few days before the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, reiterated his earlier views: The Vietcong had been imposed on the South Vietnamese; the insurgency depended on sustained support from outside South Vietnam; and President Diem was indispensable to counter the communist threat.⁷ He differed from the military establishment primarily in recognizing that there was indeed a problem of insurgency in Vietnam, and not only the threat of a conventional invasion from the North. Lansdale's memorandum was considered deeply profound by the incoming administration, and it cemented the general's position as an in-house Indochina counterinsurgency expert.

Upon taking office, Kennedy brought Lansdale to the White House for a meeting of top Pentagon, State Department, and National Security Officers, and-apparently to their horror-intimated there that Lansdale could be the next U. S. ambassador in Saigon.⁸ The new administration's Undersecretary of Defense, Roswell Gilpatric, reminiscing on his dealings with Lansdale years later for an archive oral history project, explained that although Lansdale was an outcast with his military peers, and perhaps even less esteemed by the State Department, the White House was impressed with him:

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Lansdale was not in favor . . . during my period, with either the military or with the State Department. He was in the doghouse with both of them. And I was convinced they were wrong. I was convinced he was not a wheeler dealer; he was not an irresponsible swashbuckler, and I finally succeeded in getting him his star as a general-very difficult . . . he was the object of some distrust. I thought and still think he was a very able person.... Anyway, he remained active, both in connection with Southeast Asia and Cuba, up until the time I left in January of '64.⁹

A key to Lansdale's influence, as noted by Gilpatric, was a peculiar ability to relate to policymakers, if not to his own military colleagues:

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[H]e was an unusual military type in that he was completely uninhibited in dealing with politicians and civilians. And he apparently set out on his own to educate the new team. But since he was in my office, the office of deputy secretary, I had the most contact with him. And within a matter of weeks I'd been asked by the president to head up a task force, the first task force on Vietnam, and I made Lansdale my project officer. So he was the one on the military side, other than the uniform people on the Joint Staff and the Joint Chiefs themselves, that we were exposed to.¹⁰

Lansdale's personal experience clearly carried a great deal of weight with both Gilpatric and Kennedy himself: "He'd been out there a great deal. He'd been personal advisor to [Ngo Dinh] Diem. Previous to that, he'd been advisor to the Philippine government in its guerrilla problems.... I may have gotten a somewhat biased view, but I at least got a very concrete, specific one...."¹¹

Lansdale did not get the ambassadorship, but in April 1961, his reputation was such that the Kennedy administration's program to "turn around" the Cuban Revolution in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs was put under his direction. Operation MONGOOSE, which was to become the largest clandestine operation since the Bay of Pigs, was intended to replace the Castro government and included elaborate plans to expedite the operation through Castro's murder. Lansdale later mused to a Harvard researcher about how Kennedy's more ambitious plans for him had been scotched by the bureaucrats of State and Defense: "This 'crazy'

Air Force general with a CIA taint had been for two years safely institutionalized as a special assistant. . . and was about to be retired."¹² Lansdale's eccentricities apparently failed to detract from the appeal his imagination exerted on influential members of the Kennedy circle, even though his views on "practical counterinsurgency," while simple, were rarely practical. Lansdale remained a principal adviser on counterinsurgency during Kennedy's administration and upon his own return to Vietnam in 1965.

General Lansdale's position in the Defense Department made him a natural pole of attraction for the counterinsurgency dignitaries of allied nations and an intermediary through which counterinsurgency innovations were considered and disseminated through the American establishment. Congressmen, journalists, and publishers concerned with the United States' posture in the Cold War naturally gravitated to Lansdale, and their interest occasionally gave resonance to the new concepts of counterinsurgency and special warfare. Publisher Frederick Praeger, already the publisher of military texts used in the military schools, visited General Lansdale in May 1961 to talk counterinsurgency, and expressed his interest in publishing "texts on guerrilla warfare." Over the next years, Lansdale corresponded with Praeger and advised him on "retired U.S. [officers] and officers in foreign armed forces" as likely authors. Praeger, in turn, churned out a virtual counterinsurgency library within a few years.

A proposal to use Israeli trainers to establish strategic "military-economic self-defense" communities in Laos crossed General Lansdale's desk in June 1961; it prompted both an exchange of memoranda on the theme with Walt Rostow and Lansdale's OWTI close examination of Israel's methods. The initial response to the scheme suggested his already considerable familiarity with Israeli counterinsurgency:

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I do want to comment on Sander's premise that Israeli trainers should play a major role in engineering such defense groupings. We must always recognize that the skill of the Israelis in their own program was really secondary to the terrific motivation which drove them onward to success. Lack of this motivation prejudiced the programs in Burma and Algeria.¹³

General Lansdale subsequently met the new Israeli military attache to Washington, Colonel Yehuda Prinhar. In a 30 August memo to Defense Secretary McNamara and Deputy Secretary Gilpatric, Lansdale reported on an initial meeting with Colonel Prihar, and stated his intention to take up an invitation from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to visit Israel to study "antiguerrilla concepts." General Lansdale (and Major J. K. Patchoell) arrived on 15 October 1961: His hand-annotated itinerary records meeting with the IDF intelligence and operations chiefs, the commander of the NAHAL organization and visits to NAHAL outposts, and "a settlement organized for self-defense" under the Territorial Defense system. Training establishments visited included the Gadna (Youth Battalions) Center near Tel Aviv, and the Airborne Center ("the Special Warfare Organ here").

General Lansdale had previously arranged a briefing by Colonel Prihar for top American defense officials in September 1961 in the Defense Secretary's office (to which he invited General Maxwell Taylor and CIA chief Allen Dulles). Memoranda concerning the briefing suggest the respect Israel's counterinsurgency skills were accorded and an awareness of Israel's earlier overseas advisory missions:

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Colonel Prihar was himself a classic transnational counterinsurgent, having served in the British army in World War II, joined the Israel Defense Force in 1948, and subsequently heading the IDF Infantry School and Joint Command and Staff Schools. He had also participated in what may have been one of the first of Israel's overseas advisory missions, the "Israeli Survey Team" to advise "on ways and means to cope" with Burmese insurgency. In his Pentagon lecture, Colonel Prihar discussed

The Israeli [sic] arc real experts at unconventional warfare. Colonel Prihar himself is one of the best, and was an advisor to the Burmese army in its counter-insurgency campaign. I had hoped to arrange a seminar session for him at the Counter-guerrilla School at Fort Bragg, but Lebanese officers in the class might have proved embarrassing and there was no diplomatic way of eliminating them. I am now arranging a seminar for Colonel Prihar in the Pentagon. We will tape this, so that we can produce a case study similar to the "Anti-Huk[balahap] Campaign in the Philippines ... and then disseminate a written version.... [T]his should prove of value to the U. S. military.¹⁴

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General Lansdale's scope also extended to the Americas, with visits to both the U. S. Caribbean Command and Venezuela in March 1963.¹⁶ The Bolivan Special Forces were the next to host General Lansdale in May 1963 (four years before their duel with Che Guevara). On 28 May, General Lansdale accompanied Caribbean Command chief General Andrew O'Meara to the inauguration of the Bolivian's new Counterinsurgency Center-Centro de Instrucción de Tropas Especiales (CITE) at La Chimba.¹⁷ Lansdale's first assignment in the Americas, however, was to complete the task that the Bay of Pigs invasion had begun-Operation MONGOOSE.

Israeli concepts of the military's role in nation building, with emphasis on the methods the Israeli Government has developed to protect national borders from infiltration (the so-called "strong village" concept) and other measures of strengthening rural areas from inroads by hostile guerrilla and other paramilitary forces.¹⁵

Both the president and his brother Robert made it clear to the CIA and the military that "they wanted Castro out of there, "¹⁸ and that "no time, effort or manpower" was to be spared in removing Cuba's revolutionary government. The ClA's response was the largest of its clandestine operations of the time. From 1961 to 1964, MONGOOSE pitted the covert forces of the United States against Cuba, until President Lyndon Johnson reportedly called it quits.

The Special Group Augmented (SGA) was established under McGeorge Bundy's chairmanship in November 1961 to supervise the operation. At Kennedy's request, the group appointed General Edward Lansdale as operations chief. Lansdale chose the code name MONGOOSE for the Cuba campaign. His initial plan was in keeping with his reputation for imaginative counterinsurgency, and as such was utterly unrealistic: He "drew up an elaborate scenario with a precise timetable calling for a march on Havana and the overthrow of Castro in October 1962. It was all worked out on paper."¹⁹ Although the CIA rapidly learned (or knew all along) that there were no tangible prospects of a general uprising in Cuba, it proceeded with a program of covert operations similar to the harrying raids conducted against Nicaragua in 19811983: "Mongoose gradually shifted its emphasis from resistance-building toward sabotage, paramilitary raids, efforts to disrupt the Cuban economy by contaminating sugar exports, circulating counterfeit money and ration books, and the like. 'We want boom-and-bang on the island,' Lansdale said." ²¹

Lansdale's own role was to be both coordinator and idea man, although, as Thomas Powers recalls, "He was uneven in judgment. Nutty ideas sometimes seemed to strike him as imaginative and plausible."²¹ One such idea was to exploit the alleged Cuban wont for "superstition":

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Lansdale himself may have been prepared to ride a donkey into Havana as the climax to the show. In 1950, a Lansdale scheme to dress a U.S. submarine in Soviet livery in order to lure Philippine guerrillas into an ambush was scuttled by higher-ups; Lansdale later complained that the request "seemed only to arouse their suspicions that I had gone insane."²

Cuba was to be flooded with rumors that the Second Coming was imminent, that Christ had picked Cuba for His arrival, and that He wanted the Cubans to act rid of Castro first. Then, on the night foretold, a U. S. submarine would surface off the coast of Cuba and litter the sky with star shells, which would convince the Cubans that The Hour was at hand.²²

As Lansdale dreamed up new scenarios for Cuba, a considerable proportion of the operation was directed toward a single objective: the assassination of Fidel Castro. The plot to murder Castro had apparently been initiated in 1960, and involved the now-familiar recruitment of organized crime figures as contract killers, and the development of poisons by the CIA's Technical Services Division. Efforts were reportedly redoubled in the fall of 1961 after covert action chief Richard Bissell (Deputy Director for Plans) "was chewed out [for] sitting on his ass and not doing anything about getting rid of Castro and the Castro regime."²⁴ The CIA subsequently organized a unit with its Task Force W, the ZR/ RIFLE group, to carry out "Executive Action"-that is, assassinations-and on 16 November 1961 discussed its use for killing Castro.²⁵ Assassination teams, again linking the CIA with organized crime, went into Cuba in 1962, while more bizarre schemes continued until shortly after ['resident Kennedy's own murder: Among them were attempts to eliminate Castro with such devices as exploding giant clams (while he was skin-diving) and poisoned cigars."

Colonel Lansdale may have been deliberately kept in the dark, but not because of any particular squeamishness on his part. Thomas Powers discusses Lansdale's role in the light of the CIA's silence regarding assassination in both interdepartmental meetings and memoranda, and describes the reaction of William Harvey, head of Task Force W, to a Lansdale memorandum on assassinations:

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Ten years later Lyndon Johnson bluntly assessed the whole affair: "We had been operating a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean."²⁸

Harvey was doubly astonished . . . on August 13 [1962], when he got an official memo from Edward G. Lansdale. . . which explicitly requested Harvey to prepare papers on various anti- Castro programs "including liquidation of leaders." Harvey . . . told Lansdale in plain terms what he thought of the "stupidity of putting this type of comment in writing in such a document."²⁷

Rather more important than the colorful eccentricities of Lansdale and the Technical Services Division was the significance of Operation MONGOOSE as a prototype destabilization or "bleeding" campaign. If the United States could not remove and replace the Cuban government, it would make the Cuban people suffer-by destroying its sugar economy, power plants, its peace of mind. Gilpatric recalls:

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MONGOOSE involved both American agents and Cuban exiles, although the latter comprised the bulk of the forces sent in on raids and sabotage missions. According to Gilpatric, forces sent in "varied from teams of four or five individuals put in to sometimes several times that, " with every detail of each operation closely monitored by the Special Group Augmented (which Gilpatric refers to as the 54-12 group).³⁰ Gilpatric also suggests that Cuban exile terrorist groups, like Alpha 66, which were allegedly renegades beyond CIA control at the time (and gunning for the president himself after the "betrayal" at the Bay of Pigs), were in fact a part of the ongoing

The agency was allowed to put agents into Cuba for purposes of sabotage, for purposes of trying to disrupt the strengthening of the regime's control [and] of keeping the Castro regime so off stride and unsettled that it couldn't concentrate its activities to harmful ends elsewhere. And so the agency . . . was very aggressive in coming forward with schemes, some of which were really quite fantastic and never got off the ground. Others made a lot of sense, some of which did prove to be effective and successful.²⁹

after the "betrayal" at the Bay of Pigs), were in fact a part of the ongoing American government effort to harass Cuba.³¹

A thread of continuity runs from the covert American programs against Cuba in the 1960s into the covert operations in Africa in the 1970s and in Nicaragua in the 1980s, in the persons of Cuban exiles recruited for the Bay of Pigs and subsequent MONGOOSE offensives. As in the 1950s, when the Lodge bill facilitated the recruitment of East European emigres for the army's new Special Forces, legislation in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs permitted the regularization of America's Cuban "paramilitary assets" as U.S. government personnel.

Details on the careers of some Bay of Pigs veterans have emerged as a consequence of both the October 1986 downing of American flyer Eugene Hasenfus in Nicaragua and the "Contra-gate" investigations. Hasenfus and Nicaraguan authorities claimed that two of the link men in the contra resupply operation in El Salvador were Cuban exiles, already well known for their service with the CIA; these allegations were subsequently investigated and confirmed by the news media and congressional aides. Among these link men were the apparent head of the operation at San Salvador's military airport, Illopango, Felix Martinez (under the pseudonym Max Gomez), and another Bay of Pigs veteran, Luis Posada Carriles (under the name Ramon Medina).³² Congressional aides were particularly outraged at the discovery-just as American counterterrorism proposals were taken to Congress-that one of the resupply officers had previously been detained in Venezuela as an international terrorist. Posada Carriles had escaped from a Venezuelan jail on 17 August 1985, after nearly ten years' imprisonment for the bombing of a Cuban civil airliner.

The 1976 bombing killed all seventy-three people aboard, including most of Cuba's 1976 Pan American Games team-a slaughter as terrible as that of the Munich Olympics (this was to date the only terrorist bombing of its kind of a Latin American airliner). Subsequent inquiries confirmed that Posada Carriles had served in the Bay of Pigs invasion as an explosives expert and was later commissioned in the U.S. Army. The State Department reported to Congress that

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The CIA, in turn, could not-or would not-provide information on Posada Carriles (or Ramon Medina), and stated that "it did not provide any assistance, direct or indirect, to facilitate the escape of Luis Posada from jail in Venezuela, or his entry into El Salvador."³⁴

[Luis Clemente] Posada-Carriles was appointed as a 2Lt [second Lieutenant] in the US Army in March 1963 under the Cuban exile voluIlteer program. He served in the US Army until September 1966. Records of the Department of Army reflect that an extensive investigative file exists on Posada- Carnles subsequent to his entry on active duty. The investigation was predicated on information . . . pertaining to his alleged involvement in Cuban exile activities in Florida and elsewhere in the Americas which reportedly included possible violations of US federal statutes.... Posada-Carriles' Army investigative file was requested (by name) and was furnished to the House Select Committee on Assassination in 1978.³³

The Kennedy administration's Operation MONGOOSE began to fade soon after the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. At the height of the crisis, an order went down to halt the raids on Cuba, but it was disregarded: A raid led by Eugenio Martínez (later of Watergate renown) was in progress on 21 October as Kennedy announced a blockade of Cuba.³⁵ In the following months, the Special Group Augmented was disbanded, General Lansdale moved on to other projects, and the CIA's own professionals were left to get on with the Cuban unconventional warfare campaign of sabotage and assassination. Major operations continued to be mounted throughout 1963 and into the next year. But with the assassination of John F. Kennedy on 22 November, the heart went out of the offensive; Lyndon Johnson, never a fan of unconventional warfare, ordered a halt to the Cuba campaign on 7 April 1964.³⁶

In the 1960s, Lansdale was also an enthusiastic advocate of the political side of counterinsurgency. His writings are replete with advice to aspiring counterinsurgents on the need to understand the potentially insurgent people and to win their sympathy with decency and principles of fair play. American advisers-presumably decent by nature-are counseled to impart their own fair but firm principles to their foreign Counterparts so that troops in the field will cease their age-old practices of plunder and casual brutality and get on with the job of counterinsurgency. Magsaysay's ostensible reform of the Philippine army was commonly cited as a model for moderation and civic action in counterinsurgency Lansdale pointed out in a 1957 War College discussion that the policy was only common sense:

The means to achieve the prescribed change in behavior, however, remained elusive. In a 1979 letter, he acknowledged the failure of the effort in Vietnam:

If the people fear and hate the army, they will fear and hate the government . . Col. Lansdale cited communist military occupation policy to emphasize communist understanding of the above point. When a communist army or guerrilla unit initially enters a village . . . individual soldiers . . . lay aside their arms and offer their help ill chopping wood plowing, etc. They scrupulously respect property . . . and take nothing by force.... This is in marked contrast with the normal performance of governmental soldiery.... [in] the Philippines before 1950, government troopers probably killed more civilians unnecessarily than the Huk[balahap] did, despite the accusation that Huks obtained civilian support only through coercion and terrorism.³⁷

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Although Lansdale encouraged humane treatment of civilians by the military, he insisted at the same time that "anything goes" in the field of psychological warfare-a contradiction in which, more often than not, the latter notion prevailed.

Civic action was essentially brotherly behavior of troops along lines taught by Mao and [Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen] Giap to their troops. Admittedly the Americans never succeeded in teaching this to the Vietnamese Army. Up to the very end of the Vietnam war the army was still stealing from the population. # 38

Lansdale's reputation as a sensitive counterinsurgent, concerned with the nonmilitary aspects of reform and development, is belied by his actual record as well as his unpublished speeches and writings. Psychological warfare was his particular metier, and he was fascinated with its possibilities: "Psychological warfare is probably man's oldest weapon, aside from bare hands. In using it in today's dirty, secretive wars, or in the future, the important thing to remember is that it is a weapon-and that a weapon has its own unique use and its own effect." ^#39 Lansdale was a prime example of the counterinsurgent who convinced himself that he understood the people he was working with and that, as a consequence, he could outthink and manipulate them. Psy-war, in Lansdale's view, was trickery; and trickery was to be employed even in so- called political reforms-for example, the Philippines' largely bogus program of land grants for guerrilla surrenderees.

Lansdale embraced the role of trickster, and it emerged as a prime tenet of psy-war in his lectures at the military service schools. He clearly relished the use of "dirty" tactics, especially those that contained an element of humor:

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The Lansdale "trickster" approach to psy-war had a lasting influence on the American military, not least through the inclusion of his exuberant accounts in military training materials long after his retirement. The Department of the Army's two-volume reference tome on psychological warfare published in April 1976 (Army Pamphlet 525-7-1) reproduced several Lansdale texts on the theme. "Practical Jokes, " an article excerpted from Lansdale's autobiography In the Midst of Wars, concerns a "whole new approach" to psy-war, including such examples as the distribution of free hot chocolate and coffee to demonstrators "laced generously with a powerful laxative." Lansdale ignores the long-term political effects of such a prank, as well as the possibility of detection by the victims. (Similar anonymous "pranks" were played in 1969 against demonstrators in the March on Washington, when hot drinks laced with LSD were distributed: The rumor-perhaps false-that the villains were from army intelligence rapidly spread.)⁴¹ A free rein in devising and implementing such schemes, of course, is another aspect of the Lansdale approach. Other Lansdale psy-war pranks cited in Army Pamphlet 5257-1 and other army training manuals involve exemplary criminal violence-the murder and mutilation of captives and the display of their bodies.

As a footnote . . . remember humor-even if it is a grim practical joke that only you can afford to smile at. Humor is often the test of a good psychological operation, since humor is constructed on the frailties of mankind-and skilled playing on these frailties increases the effectiveness of the psychological weapon. Those of you who know of Admiral Miles' operations in China should recall the risks his Chinese agents took to wall-paint slogans poking fun at the Japanese. In some instances, the main motivation of volunteers who risked death doing this was the appeal of playing a prank.⁴⁴

Lansdale's method for confronting Third World insurgencies was based exclusively on his success in the Philippines. It revolved around small elite teams of Americans placed in close and influential contact with indigenous personalities who would make the best puppet leaders. In the Philippines, the chosen instrument was Ramón Magsaysay, a soldier shepherded from the defense ministry to the presidency by Lansdalets elite team. In Vietnam, the instrument was Ngo Dinh Diem, sustained in power through his troubled first two years under the protective shield of another elite team. 42 Lansdale continued to put forward formal proposals to continue to pursue this approach in Vietnam well into the late 1960s.

Although Lansdale's view that problems of insurgency were resolvable by small teams and Machiavellian intrigue was most frequently expressed in his papers on the Philippine experience, a more comprehensive approach appears in an 18 June 1963 memorandum to McGeorge Bundy from adviser Gordon Chase.⁴³ The paper, "A High-Level Look at the Cold War, " summarizes yet another Lansdale "think" piece calling on "the need for a precise strategy which will give the U.S. the win it seeks in the cold war," and proposing as the way to do this the creation of a small strategy group (to be headed by Bundy). Of the seven topics to be discussed by such a group, two are of particular relevance.

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To propose "simple" solutions, of course, is far easier than to bring about simple solutions; and despite his access to information, General Lansdale, surprisingly, took relatively little interest in the practical details of counterinsurgency beyond his own experience. Lansdale was better known among the Kennedy circle for his "expertise" on "the political aspect" of the Cold War. As Gilpatric recalls, "Lansdale was fascinated by the political scene.... And he didn't take the same degree of interest or concern in what his military colleagues were doing on the counterinsurgency training program and development of new techniques, equipment, weapons, and so forth with guerrilla-type activities." ^{# 44} The Human Factor-The group may want to study the feasibility of forming and deploying a super-elite (under 100 persons) in such a way as to bring about a decisive change in the outcome of the cold war. One method of deployment would be to send some of the elite into a critical area, as a replacement for a complete Country Team and with simple orders to win U. S. goals. When the elite had won, it would leave behind a blueprint for follow-up actions and return home for deployment elsewhere or for splitting up into cadres.

School for Political Action-The group may want to study the feasibility of setting up a school for political action which would create skilled free world leadership capable of competing with graduates of the Lenin and Sun Yat Sen Schools and of completely defeating Communism. However, with or without such a school . . . there is a need for a good political textbook-a modern case history text of democratic leadership in the Free World, for use at leadership levels as a sort of U. S. version of "The Prince."

In a rather garbled paper drafted in April 1954, Lansdale described his endeavors as directed toward a political object, one that smacked of neocolonialism-a "Pax Americana. " However, the U. S. empire would impose not "thugs" on its satellites but such decent people as Ramón Magsaysay (and Ngo Dinh Diem):

Fade-Out in Saigon

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The U. S. political warrior is actually extending the Pax Americana when he works effectively. In his basic plan of operation, then, he must consider the historic nature of world leadership by one nation, including the Pax Romana with its legion and the Pax Britannica with its navy, plus the social and economic factors, in comparison with the power plays of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane or Hitler (which some of our warriors are tempted to imitate when they give power to unprincipled thugs merely because they are anti-Communist). Thus, the skilled U.S. political warrior does not picture himself as a lone gladiator. He understands that he is part of a team that has other members, even if the other members do not understand this as clearly as he....⁴⁵

In June 1964, Lansdale proposed in a twenty-two-page paper, "Concept for Victory in Vietnam," to reunite his old Philippines team-"The Force." In his inimitably chipper style, Lansdale reiterated his fundamental belief in the power of a few individuals to influence events: "This is a concept for victory in Vietnam, a victory won by the free Vietnamese with American help . . . a 'first team' of men who have proven their ability to defeat Asian Communist subversive insurgents, before it is altogether too late."⁴⁶

As in the comprehensive guerre révolutionnaire approach of the French theorists (but without their depth), Lansdale's "concept for victory" begins with measures to influence the people at home, to mobilize "the great 'will to win' of the American people [which is] still largely missing."⁴⁷ His concept for the conduct of the war, however, is one of vast generalities, and peripheral-or downright harebrained-schemes: expanding minority counterguerrilla forces ("montagnards, the sects and the ethnic Khmers"); bringing in "voluntary" forces from neighboring countries in private enterprise "Freedom Companies"; and organizing battalions exclusively for night-fighting ("changing reveille to evening and the duty day to the hours of the night"). Lansdale's proposed "Command Action" to implement pacification, guaranteeing "aggressive action against the Viet Cong, and positive action to help the people" (however the two are distinguished), typifies his approach to counterinsurgency:

Although General Lansdale's boundless self-confidence that a small nucleus of bold, brave, brilliant Americans led by himself could "turn around" a subversive insurgency survived the long decline of his protege Ngo Dinh Diem, Lansdale would not return to Vietnam until the Johnson administration's buildup of U. S. ground forces was well underway. Although publicly acclaimed for his counterinsurgency savvy, by 1964 the military's professional counterinsurgents began to tire of Lansdale's simplistic approach. General Maxwell Taylor, who had replaced Henry Cabot Lodge as ambassador in dune 1964, shared McGeorge Bundy's low opinion of Lansdale's schemes, and together they refused to have Lansdale in a position of authority in Saigon.⁴⁹ In 1961, Taylor had been asked by President Kennedy to pick up the pieces after the Bay of Pigs invasion, and he chaired a committee of inquiry that was brutally critical of CIA incompetence. Lansdale's handling of his post-Bay of Pigs assignment to kill Castro, in the same gung ho spirit as the invasion, may have been perhaps too much for Taylor to stomach.

Order, simultaneously issued by GVN [government of South Vietnam] and U.S. commands, military and civilian: The armed forces, and the civilian personnel of government, have a primary mission to protect the people of South Vietnam; their secondary mission is to help them. Failure to accomplish these missions will be punished by death, or such other punishment as the court- martial may direct.⁴⁸

In September 1965, Henry Cabot Lodge-no doubt mercifully unaware of MONGOOSE-returned as ambassador to the Saigon embassy. At his request, General Lansdale followed shortly afterward with his handpicked "team"-most of whom had worked with him before. Lansdale's stint as chief adviser to the pacification effort then underway-"Revolutionary Development"-was, however, short-lived. The consensus, as enunciated by Frances FitzGerald, is that Lansdale was simply adrift in this last posting to Vietnam: The Saigon bureaucracy "effectively cut him off from the mission command and from all work except that of a symbolic nature." "Living in his grand villa," Lansdale would until 1968 "spend most of his time in talk with Vietnamese intellectuals, a few ex-Viet Minh officers, and his own American devotees." Lansdale would become "a hero to idealistic young American officials who saw the failure of American policy as a failure of tactics."⁵

As a believer in the potential of the individual leader or operator, the isolated surgical action, the showcase project, and above all the power of psychological warfare, Lansdale was prototypical of the counterinsurgency era. He had neither the patience nor the wisdom to contemplate comprehensive programs of undramatic police work or in-depth development or reform; his vocation was for the spectacular, the theatrical. In the Philippines, Lansdale's advisory effort was seen as relatively successful: There, psychological warfare had indeed made a contribution to the defeat of an insurgent movement, although skeptics could attribute the defeat to the insurgency's own inherent weaknesses. Moreover, the psy-war tricks of terror and manipulation, which he emphasized in his lectures, do not appear to have played a significant part in defeating the Huks. Lansdale's advocacy of special operations, "practical jokes," and individual initiative was, however, shared by the creative counterinsurgents of the 1960s and continues to inform the doctrine of low-intensity conflict in the 1990s.

1. David E. Brown, "The Politics of Counterinsurgency" (unpublished course paper, Harvard University, Spring 1970), p. 6, citing his interview with Chalmers B. Wood, 24 April 1970.

2. Arthur J. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (London: André Deutsch, 1965), p. 320, recounts Rostow's delivery of Lansdale's 17 January 1963 memorandum on 2 February, and Kennedy's response on the situation in Vietnam: "This [situation] is the worst yet"; "You know Ikc never briefed me on Vietnam." The memorandum is summarized in the Pentagon Papers (Senator Gravel edition), 2, pp. 440-42.

3. Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U. S. Army in Vietnam, 1941- 1960 (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. 361-73, discusses the "U.S. Plan for Counterinsurgency in South Vietnam," 4 January 1961, extensively. General McGarr's statement is from Spector, p. 365, citing "First Twelve-Month Report of Chief MASAG, Vietnam, September 1961."

4. U.S. Government Memorandum, to Bo [Charles Bohannan], from Frank, 26 January 1959, Subject: Public Relations/Personal Prestige Program Promotions, Inc. (Bohannan Papers, Box 17, Hoover Institution Archive, Stanford). The memo informs "Bo" of the departure on 21 January of "our mutual friend Ed," and discusses Bohannan's own assigmnent to the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg for a six-week psychological warfare course.

5. Spector, Advice and Support, p. 361, citing Memo, CINCPAC for JCS, 27 April 1960, "Counterinsurgency Operations in South Vietnam and Laos."

6. Ibid., paraphrasing Memo, Lansdale for Lt. Gen. Lionel C. McGarr, 11 August [19]60, sub: Vietnam.

7. Edward G. Lansdale, Memorandum, "Vietnam," 17 January 1961, cited in Larry E. Cablc, Conflict of Myths: The Development of Counter-lnsursgency Doctrine and the Vietnam War (New York: New York University Press, 1986), pp. 186-87. In a 13 September 1960 memorandum, not long before the 11 November paratroop COUp attempt nearly toppled Diem, Lansdale had derided suggestions that popular opposition to Diem required a reappraisal of U. S. support. Lansdale persisted in maintaining that Diem was the only answer, and as such should be assured "of our intent to provide material assistance and of our unswerving support to him in this time of crisis" (Spector, Advice and Support, p. 368, citing memo, Lansdale for Regional Director, Far East, ISA, 13 September 1960, Possible Course of Action in Vietnam).

8. Brown, "The Politics of Counterinsurgency, " p. 7, citing Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 148.

9. Roswell Gilpatric, First Oral History Interview, New York, 1970, by Dennis J. O'Brien for the John F. Kennedy Library, Oral History Series, pp. 8-9.

10. Ibid., p. 8.

11. Ibid.

12. Brown, "The Politics of Counterinsurgency," p. 8, citing interview with Edward Lansdale, 21 April 1970.

13. Memorandum for Walt Rostow, From Ed Lansdale, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 7 June 1961. Kennedy Library, NSF, Box 316, Rostow, Staff Memoranda, 6/1/61-6/13/61.

14. Memorandum for Secretary McNamara, Deputy Secretary Gilpatric, From: Brig. Gen. Lansdale, Subject: Israeli. cc. Adam Yarmolinsky. 30 August 1961 (Lansdale Papers, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Subject File, Israel, 1961, Box 46). The tape of Colonel Prihar's lecture is also held with the Lansdale Papers. Other invitees included Walt Rostow and R. W. Komer.

15. Ibid.

16. Letter, General Lansdale to General Breitweiser, 21 March 1963. Lansdale Papers, Box 48.

17. Memoranda and personal notes, May 1963, Lansdale Papers, Office of Secretary of Defense, Subject File, Trip to Bolivia (Box 48). The Bolivian commander of the center was Lt. Col. Hector Aranda C.

18. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York: Pocket Books, 1979), pp.167, 174, citing a 19 January 1962 meeting in Robert Kennedy's office.

19. Ibid., p. 172.

20. Ibid., p. 175.

21. Ibid., p. 176.

22. Ibid. The idea was not pursued. Powers cites a CIA official who dubbed the idea "elimination by illumination."

23. Edward Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars: An American's Mission to Southeast Asia (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 62; Lansdale's second-in-command, Charles Bohannan, was also keen on the enterprise ("Bohannan and I started practicing Russian phrases, so we could pose as Soviet deck officers . . .").

24. Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, p. 187, citing the 1975 report of the Senate hearings on assassination plots, Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Washington, D. C.: GPO, 20 November 1975). Jim Hougan, Spooks (New York: Bantam Books, 1978), pp. 329-47, deals in a rather jazzier style with the assassination plots, emphasizing the role of organized crime figures and Cuban exiles (sometimes the same people) in the affair.

25. Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, p. 188.

26. Ibid., pp. 188-93. The most serious threat appears to have been the provision of equipment, including sniper rifles, to Cubans inside Cuba.

27. Ibid., pp. 162-63.

28. Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Dell, 1974), p. 290n, citing Leo Janos, "The Last Days of the President," Atlantic (July 1973). The article recounts a 1971 conversation between Johnson and Janos, a former aid. "Janos elaborated, 'A year or so before Kennedy's death a CIA-backed assassination team had been picked up in Havana. Johnson speculated that Dallas had been a retaliation for this thwarted attempt...." The reference is also made in Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, p. 199; Powers (p. 181) adds that the assassination program was quietly phased out in the first months of the Johnson administration, and that on 7 April 1964 Johnson had ordered a halt to all sabotage operations.

29. Gilpatric, Second Oral History, p. 41.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. The identification of Medina as Posada was confirmed by UPI journalists in San Salvador who obtained copies of his telephone bills, found records of repeated calls to Luis Posada's wife in Miami, and his family doctor, who when asked confirmed the calls had been made by Posada. The Department of State maintained it had "no information-beyond what has appeared in media reports-that the individual allegedly named Ramon Medina is the same as Luis Posada Carriles." See Julia Preston, "Managua Links Plane Figure to '76 Bombing," Washington Post, 16 October 1986; Douglas Farah, "Contra ring leader could be bomber of Cuban plane, " UPI cable, 1 November 1986, AP cables of 2 and 3 November 1986. A seven-page memorandum of "Congressional Questions about Ramon Medina and Luis Posada," with State Department responses (date semilegible, but probably 20 April 1987), provides a detailed look at the matter. Photocopies of the San Salvador phone bills of Ramon Medina and associated documentation were made available to the author by congressional aides.

33. "Congressional Questions about Ramon Medina and Luis Posada," pp. 1-2.

34. Ibid., p. 7.

35. Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, pp. 180-XI.

36. Ibid., p. 181.

37. Captain William W. Whitson, Department of Social Sciences, War College, Memorandum for the Record: Subject: Informal Discussion with Col. Lansdale, USAF, and Col. Valeriano, Philippine Military Attaché, on 22 February 1957 (27 February) Lansdale Papers, Box 12 (Collected Speeches and Writings), Hoover Archive, p. 3. In his comment, Colonel Lansdale said, "I don't recall stating that government troops might have killed more folks unnecessarily than the Huks. Perhaps Valeriano did.... "

38. Letter from Lansdale to Chief of Military History, 6 June 1979, in Spector, Advice and Support p. 243n

39. Col. Edward G. Lansdale, "Military Psychological Operations: Part 11," lecture delivered at the Armed Forces Staff College, Norfolk, Virginia, in March 1960, typescript, pp. 5-6. Lansdale Papers, Box 7, Collected Speeches.

40. Ibid., p. 30.

41. Edward Geary Lansdalc, "Practical Jokes," in U.S. Department of the Army, Psychological Operations (Army Pamphlet 525-7-1), (Washington, D.C.: GPO, April 1976), p. 768.

42. Memorandum from Edward Lansdale to the Secretary of Defense, "Vietnam, " 17 January 1961, cited in Cable, Conflict of Myths, pp. 187-88. Cable points out that Lansdale's Vietnam report held that support of President Diem was indispensable for American policies. Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 87, notes however, that Lansdale had "vainly tried to mobilize American opposition" to Diem's police state policies in the middle fifties; Lansdale appears to have distinguished between the policies and the man.

43. Memorandum for Mr. Bundy, The White House, from Gordon Chase, Subject: "A High- Level Look at the Cold War," 18 June 1963. "Sanitized" copy declassified 12/84, Declassified Documents Series (1985:001434).

44. Roswell Gilpatric, Second Oral History Interview, with Dennis J. O'Brien, John F. Kennedy Oral History Series, 27 May 1970, p. 36.

45. Edward G. Lansdale, Colonel USAF, "A Political Warfare Lesson " Typescript, Lansdale Papers, Box 12.

46. Edward G. Lansdale, "Concept for Victory in Vietnam" ("Team Working Paper"), 8 June 1964, p. 1. Typescript, Lansdale Papers (Speeches and Writings).

47. Ibid. Proposals include the creation of congressional "Cold War" committees that would meet jointly with the National Security Council and ensure congressional support for Cold War activities, as well as a scheme in which American towns could "adopt a hamlet."

48. Ibid., p. 12.

49. Cablc, Conflict of Myths, p. 59n; Cable cites memoranda in the Johnson Library on this "less flattering opinion of Lansdale. " Cable himself characterizes Lansdale as "a minor public relations genius whose promotional talents were in no way lessened when dealing with himself as the subject; who was quite capable of cheerfully gathering to his OWtl harvests the fruits of other men's vineyards"-possible by dint of the semiclandestine nature of most of the operations. (Who was to gainsay the Quiet American?)

50. Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 358.

Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990

© 2002 Michael McClintock

Many of the other points you made, Steven, were circumstantial -- the sort of evidence used to convict Lee Harvey Oswald. You've shown loose connections -- and even a plethora of loose connections -- but still no smoking gun. // Paul Trejo

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Yes Paul I dont have the CIA kill JFK memo,however, I do have the weight of the evidence showing it was CIA TOP level and not rouge.

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16 May 2014

Umbrella Man’s companion, possibly Orlando Bosch (CIA) [NOTE: or Filipe Vidal Santiago], was not talking on his radio as limousine passed the Stemmons Freeway sign and the Umbrella man pumped his umbrella up and down, which appears to have been a signal to “keep firing” because the target was still alive. [NOTE: It was at a location that was visible from all of the shooting locations that I have identified above.] Chauncey Holt (CIA), the oldest of the tramps, said he had a CIA supplied radio, concealed in his brown paper bag that kept him updated on events even from inside the Rock Island Railroad boxcar. Holt had delivered 15 sets of fake Secret Service ID and left them in a red pick-up truck parked in the lot behind the grassy knoll, which was used by the Dallas Police Department, earlier that morning, facilitating the escape of the grassy knoll shooters. And Lee Bowers, the railway tower switchman, also testified to the Warren Commission that he observed strange people driving behind the picket fence and noticed one using a walkie-talkie.

The White House’s Nazis

(4) Finally, Larry, you say that DPD politics would show up in investigations. Normally that would be true -- but Dallas could be a major exception in the USA in 1963. William Turner describes the normal DPD officer in 1963 as radically right-wing. Gerry Patrick Hemming agreed when he said that elements in the DPD would "assassinate at a whisper." // Paul Trejo

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Front-runner Poroshenko regrets Ukraine's surrender of nuclear arsenal, noncommittal on foreign alliances

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= (MI 6 asset ??,GAAL)

Evan Ostryzniuk

Evan Ostryzniuk is a long-serving ex-pat in Ukraine, having arrived from the UK after doing a PhD from Cambridge University. A Canadian citizen, Evan has worked in the journalistic, academic and financial fields for more than 15 years..

Ethnic Russians Are People, Too

May 13, 2014

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Exclusive: There’s an odor of prejudice in how the mainstream U.S. news media treats the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, as if they are mindless beings, easily duped “minions” of Vladimir Putin. But this bias reflects more negatively on the U.S. press than on the people who are being insulted, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

So what does the New York Times have against Ukraine’s ethnic Russians? While the newspaper has fallen over itself insisting on the “legitimacy” of the coup regime in Kiev, despite its collaboration with neo-Nazis who spearheaded the Feb. 22 ouster of elected President Viktor Yanukovych, the Times editors can’t hurl enough insults at the ethnic Russians in the east who have resisted the regime’s authority.

For weeks, the Times has called the eastern Ukrainian rebel leaders “self-declared” and ridiculed the idea that there was any significant backing for the rejection of the Kiev-appointed regional leaders; all the trouble was simply stirred up by Vladimir Putin. Now, however, the referenda in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk have demonstrated what even a Times reporter acknowledged was “substantial popular support for the pro-Russian separatists in some areas.”

A Ukrainian woman voting in the May 11, 2014 referendum on independence for sections of eastern Ukraine. (Screen shot from RT video)

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But the Times editors still won’t give up their prejudices. For instance, Tuesday’s lead editorial begins: “If there were questions about the legitimacy of the separatist referendums in eastern Ukraine, the farcical names of the entities on which people were asked to vote — the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk or Luhansk — surely answered them.”

So, the votes – and the desires – of eastern Ukrainians shouldn’t matter because the Times disapproves of “the farcical names of the entities” that people voted for.

The Times then suggests that violence that marred the referenda was the fault of the rebels, not the Kiev regime’s National Guard, which includes the neo-Nazi militias that threw fire bombs at police during the Maidan protests in February and are now carrying out the most lethal attacks against protesters in cities in the east and south.

Of course, according to the Times’ narrative, these neo-Nazis from western Ukraine don’t exist, so the violence must be palmed off on others or be treated like the natural occurrence of a spring thunderstorm. In Tuesday’s editorial, the Times wrote: “But the gathering rumble of violence accompanying the votes is serious and is driving the Ukrainian crisis in a direction that before long no one — not President Vladimir Putin of Russia, not authorities in Kiev, not the West — will be able to control.”

However, even the Times’ own field reporter noted that the violence during the referenda on Sunday was provoked by those new National Guard forces that attacked some polling places. The Times’ editors must assume that most of the newspaper’s readers aren’t paying close attention to the details.

The other part of the Times’ Ukraine narrative is that Putin provoked the unrest in Ukraine so he could seize territory, although no less an authority on power politics than former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger says that notion “isn’t possible,” adding that Putin simply was reacting to events that caught him off-guard as he was coming out of the Winter Olympics at Sochi.

Yet, the Times ignores this more realistic scenario – of a Western-pushed destabilization of the Yanukovych government that involved demands that Ukraine accept a harsh austerity plan from the International Monetary Fund and that spiraled into a violent “regime change” – and instead puts the blame on Putin, who – the Times says – must be told to get “his minions in southeastern Ukraine in line.”

Otherwise, the Times blusters “the European Union and the United States will impose sanctions that will cut Russia off for a long time from Western sources of technology, arms and finance.”

While the Times editorial accurately reflects the swaggering belligerence of Official Washington, the editors still refuse to see the Ukraine crisis in objective terms, in which both the western Ukrainians who favor closer ties with Europe and the eastern Ukrainians whose economy is dependent on trade with Russia have legitimate concerns.

The ethnic Russians in the east are not simply dupes who fall for clumsy propaganda and mindlessly follow the dictates of Vladimir Putin. They are human beings who have their own legitimate view of their political situation and who can make judgments about what course of action is best for their interests. As difficult as life in Ukraine is, it is sure to be worse once the IMF’s harsh austerity is imposed on the country’s population.

The Times and many others in the Western media insult these ethnic Russians with a disdainful treatment that treats them as lesser beings and assumes that only the pro-European Ukrainians in the west deserve respect for their opinions.

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Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

I take it by your global political analysis that you agree with Jim Phelps to a significant degree. // Paul Trejo

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No Paul the Masons are a umbrella group that draw in the ambitious-obsequent for recruitment to elite plans.

The assasination started with Dulles a few moments after he learned he was fired. (thought LBJ may of thought of it even before JFKs nomination) Top of Plans and parts of JMWave did the deed. Because JFK touched the Central Banking system the ultra-Bankers were worried about JFK's future and those intelligent assets associated with Empire Trust assisted. If you read my interview with William Weston you will get a better idea on my thoughts. OF NOTE Besides the sabotaging of the BAY OF PIGS by Bundy/Bissell , I feel Lansky was in touch with elites in the transnationally protected narcotics traffis BEFORE WWII (to help KMT). THE WWII ONI-Lansky story is the cover for a deeper relationship. A few oddball low level people connected to LANSKY associates assisted in DP but had a super low level role (compartmentalized out of main loop) Like the trucking man behind the TSBD (parking lot) eating his lunch (while President goes in front (yeah thats a little rich)) saying nothing happened behind GK fence area or the trucking man (with the hat ,very short ) who was with the group of very short (shoot over) women near the freeway sign in the "Z" film. This man by the sign gave small tours in DP which was ,per him, approved of by the local government . He said to me the, " limosine didnt slow down or stop at all....". He also said the tattered worn hat he was now wearing was the same one he wore on 11/22. Now that one I believed.

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http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6017 (SEE FIRST POST AND my work post # 50 beyond)

‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/may/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/

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Rick Bowmer/AP Photo

The National Security Agency’s $1.5 billion data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, June 2013

Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called “metadata”—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading.

Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”

It is precisely this power to collect our metadata that has prompted one of Congress’s most bipartisan initiatives in recent years. On May 7, the House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 to adopt an amended form of the USA Freedom Act, a bill to rein in NSA spying on Americans, initially proposed by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner. On May 8, the House Intelligence Committee, which has until now opposed any real reform of the NSA, also unanimously approved the same bill. And the Obama administration has welcomed the development.

For some, no doubt, the very fact that this bill has attracted such broad bipartisan approval will be grounds for suspicion. After all, this is the same Congress that repeatedly reauthorized the 2001 USA Patriot Act, a law that was also proposed by Sensenbrenner and on which the bulk collection of metadata was said to rest—even if many members of Congress were not aware of how the NSA was using (or abusing) it. And this is the same administration that retained the NSA’s data collection program, inherited from its predecessor, as long as it was a secret, and only called for reform when the American people learned from the disclosures of NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the government was routinely collecting phone and Internet records on all of us. So, one might well ask, if Congress and the White House, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, all now agree on reform, how meaningful can the reform be?

This is a reasonable question. This compromise bill addresses only one part of the NSA’s surveillance activities, and does not do nearly enough to address the many other privacy-invasive practices that we now know the NSA has undertaken. But it’s nonetheless an important first step, and would introduce several crucial reforms affecting all Americans.

First, and most importantly, it would significantly limit the collection of phone metadata and other “business records.” Until now, the NSA and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court have aggressively interpreted a USA Patriot Act provision that authorized collection of business records “relevant” to a counterterrorism investigation. The NSA convinced the court that because it might be useful in the future to search through anyone’s calling history to see if that person had been in contact with a suspected terrorist, the agency should be able to collect everyone’s records and store them for five years.

The NSA has said it only searched its vast database of our calling records when it had reasonable suspicion that a phone number was connected to terrorism. But it did not have to demonstrate the basis for this suspicion to a judge. Moreover, it was authorized to collect data on all callers one, two, or three steps removed from the suspect number—an authority that can quickly generate more than one million phone numbers of innocent Americans from a single suspect source number. The fact that you may have called someone (say, your aunt) who in turn called someone (say, the Pizza Hut delivery guy) who was in turn once called by a suspected terrorist says nothing about whether you’ve engaged in wrongdoing. But it will land you in the NSA’s database of suspected terrorist contacts.

Under the USA Freedom Act, the NSA would be prohibited from collecting phone and Internet data en masse. Instead, such records would remain with the telephone and Internet companies, and the NSA would only be authorized to approach those companies on an individual, case-by-case basis, and only when it could first satisfy the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there is reasonable suspicion that a particular person, entity, or account is linked to an international terrorist or a representative of a foreign government or political organization. This is much closer to the specific kind of suspicion that the Fourth Amendment generally requires for intrusions on privacy. At that point, the court could order phone companies to produce phone calling records of all numbers that communicated with the suspect number (the first “hop”), as well as all numbers with which those numbers in turn communicated (the second “hop”).

Further restrictions are necessary. Through these authorized searches the NSA would still be able to collect large amounts of metadata on persons whose only “sin” was that they called or were called by someone who called or was called by a suspected terrorist or foreign agent. At a minimum, “back-end” limits on how the NSA searches its storehouse of phone numbers are still needed. But the bill would at least end the practice of collecting everyone’s calling records.

Second, the new House bill imposes similar limits on other USA Patriot Act provisions that were susceptible to being used, or had been used, to authorize collection of data in bulk. These include a provision empowering the government to obtain information by “national security letters,” a kind of administrative subpoena issued without judicial oversight, and “pen registers,” which intercept Internet and phone trafficking data. All of these powers would now be limited by the same requirement that the government seek case-by-case warrants based on suspicion about a particular person or group. The point is to end bulk collection of data across the board, and return the agency to the more targeted searches and inquiries that US laws have historically deemed reasonable.

Third, the bill would establish a panel of legal experts, appointed by the presiding judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, who would participate in proceedings before the court when it addresses “a novel or significant interpretation of law,” and in any other proceedings at the court’s discretion. They would appear as amicus curiae, or “friends of the court,” but their purpose would be to add an independent assessment of the legal issues involved, ensuring that the court is not hearing only from the government. Such a panel would increase the likelihood that difficult legal issues get a full and fair consideration, and would likely shore up the public legitimacy of the secret court, which as of now is dismissed by many, rightly or wrongly, as a “rubber stamp.”

Finally, the bill contains a number of measures designed to increase transparency and oversight. It would require the attorney general to request the declassification of opinions of the FISA court, permit private Internet and telephone companies to report semiannually on the volume of records they were required to produce, and require the Inspectors General of the Justice Department and the Intelligence Community to report on the numbers of records requested and the effectiveness of the program. Had Verizon been permitted to report, for example, that it was being compelled to turn over hundreds of millions of phone records on its customers to the NSA, and had the Inspector General informed us that the program had stopped not a single terrorist act, it is likely that bulk collection would have been cut short long ago.

Even with all these reforms, however, the USA Freedom Act only skims the surface. It does not address, for example, the NSA’s guerilla-like tactics of inserting vulnerabilities into computer software and drivers, to be exploited later to surreptitiously intercept private communications. It also focuses exclusively on reining in the NSA’s direct spying on Americans. As Snowden’s disclosures have shown, the NSA collects far more private information on foreigners—including the content as well as the metadata of e-mails, online chats, social media, and phone calls—than on US citizens.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 permits the NSA to intercept the content of communications when it can demonstrate nothing more than reason to believe that its targets are foreign nationals living abroad, and that the information might relate to “foreign intelligence.” “Foreign intelligence” is in turn defined to include any information that might inform our foreign affairs, which is no restriction at all. Under this authority, the NSA established the PRISM program, which collects both content and metadata from e-mail, Internet, and phone communications by millions of users worldwide. It is probably under this authority that, according to The Washington Post, the NSA is recording “every single” phone call from a particular, unnamed country. Documents leaked by Snowden demonstrate that the NSA also collects, again by the millions and billions, foreign nationals’ e-mail contact lists, cell phone location data, and texts. This is the very definition of dragnet surveillance.

Congress is far less motivated to do anything about the NSA’s abuse of the rights of foreign nationals. They are “them,” not “us.” They don’t vote. But they have human rights, too; the right to privacy, recognized in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the US has signed and ratified, does not limit protections to Americans. Snowden’s revelations have justifiably led to protests from many of our closest allies; they don’t want their privacy invaded by the NSA any more than we do, and they have more to complain about than we do, as they have suffered far greater intrusions.

In the Internet era, it is increasingly common that everyone’s communications cross national boundaries. That makes all of us vulnerable, for when the government collects data in bulk from people it believes are foreign nationals, it is almost certain to sweep up lots of communications in which Americans are involved. The initial version of the USA Freedom Act accordingly sought to limit the NSA’s ability to conduct so-called “back door” searches of content collected from foreigners for communications with Americans citizens. But that provision was stripped in committee, leaving the back door wide open.

Defense hawks will argue that even these reforms go too far, and that we may be risking our security by tying the NSA’s hands. But as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found, there is little evidence that the metadata program has made us safer. Moreover, if we want to preserve the liberties that define us as a democratic society, we have to learn to live with risk. It is the insistence on preemptively eliminating all terrorist threats—an unattainable goal—that led the NSA to collect so much information so expansively in the first place.

The fact that the USA Freedom Act has achieved such wide-ranging support may be less an indication of its compromises than of a fundamental shift in American views. In July 2013, following the Snowden revelations, the Pew Research Center reported that for the first time since it started asking the question in 2004, more Americans expressed concern that counter-terrorism measures were infringing their civil liberties than worried that the government was not doing enough to keep them safe.

Congress is responsive to such shifts in popular opinion. The question now is whether that new attitude can be translated into more systemic reform, or whether enactment of this bill will placate enough people that the demand for further reform fizzles. If the Senate can pass or even strengthen the USA Freedom Act, as Senator Leahy has said he intends to do, it will be a significant achievement for civil liberties. But the biggest mistake any of us could make would be to conclude that this bill solves the problem.

==========

May 10, 2014, 10:12 a.m.

• 

  Hard Times review – a penetrating study of the divisions created by ... (link)

  The Guardian‎ - 4 hours ago
  Focusing predominantly on the UK and US, the authors ... the number of Americans below the official poverty line had already been edging up ...

(((GEE NOTHING WRONG IN JAPAN ? ,GAAL)))

=====================

Main dread of the British Foreign Office // AMERICAN ISOLATIONISM //
solution communist Cuba // There were many opinions about sending arms to Castro but arms were sent by the British. If the British would threaten JFK not to help ****when British Guiana might go communist when the British were asking for Polaris technology,then why then is it a stretch to think that the BAY OF PIGS OPERATION WAS sabotaged on purpose for British interests ??

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ((( Skull & Bones = British )))

Richard M. Bissell, Jr. was a very important man to the denizens of Jupiter Island.

He graduated from Yale in 1932, the year after the Harrimanites bought the island. Though not in Skull and Bones, Bissell was the younger brother of William Truesdale Bissell, a Bonesman from the class of 1925. Their father, Connecticut insurance executive Richard M. Bissell, Sr., had put the U.S. insurance industry's inside knowledge of all fire-insured industrial plants at the disposal of government planners during World War I.

The senior Bissell, a powerful Yale alumnus, was also the director of the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute of the Hartford Retreat for the Insane; there, in 1904, Yale graduate Clifford Beers underwent mind-destroying treatment which led this mental patient to found the Mental Hygiene Society, a major Yale-based Skull and Bones project. This would evolve into the CIA's cultural engineering effort of the 1950s, the drugs and brainwashing adventure known as ``MK-Ultra.''

Richard M. Bissell, Jr. studied at the London School of Economics in 1932 and 1933, and taught at Yale from 1935 to 1941. He then joined Harriman's entourage in the U.S. government. Bissell was an economist for the Combined Shipping Adjustment Board in 1942-43, while Averell Harriman was the U.S. leader of that board in London.

In 1947 and 1948, Bissell was executive secretary of the ``Harriman Commission,'' otherwise known as the President's Commission on Foreign Aid. When Harriman was the administrator of the Marshall Plan, Bissell was assistant administrator.

Harriman was director of Mutual Security (1951-53), while Bissell was consultant to the director of Mutual Security 1952.

Bissell then joined F. Trubee Davison at the Central Intelligence Agency. When Allen Dulles became CIA Director, Bissell was one of his three aides.

Why could this be of interest to our Floridians? We saw in Chapter 4, that the great anti-Castro covert initiative of 1959-61 was supervised by an awesome array of Harriman agents. We need now add to that assessment only the fact that the detailed management of the invasion of Cuba, and of the assassination planning, and the training of the squads for these jobs, was given into the hands of Richard M. Bissell, Jr.

This 1961 invasion failed. Fidel Castro survived the widely-discussed assassination plots against him. But the initiative succeeded in what was probably its core purpose: to organize a force of multi-use professional assassins. (AND CREATED LOCAL COMMUNIST THREAT TO USA FOREVER CHANGING FOREIGN POLICY AS AGGESSIVELY NON ISOLATIONALIST,GAAL)

The Florida-trained killers stayed in business under the leadership of Ted Shackley. They were all around the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. They kept going with the Operation Phoenix mass murder of Vietnamese civilians, with Middle East drug and terrorist programs, and with George Bush's Contra wars in Central America.
Harvey Hollister Bundy (S&B 1909) was Henry L. Stimson's Assistant Secretary of State (1931-33); then he was Stimson's Special Assistant Secretary of War, alongside Assistant Secretary Robert Lovett of Skull and Bones and Brown Brothers Harriman.

Harvey's son William P. Bundy (S&B 1939) was a CIA officer from 1951 to 1961; as a 1960s defense official, he pushed the Harriman-Dulles scheme for a Vietnam war. Harvey's other son, McGeorge Bundy (S&B 1940), co-authored Stimson's memoirs in 1948. As President John Kennedy's Director of National Security, McGeorge Bundy organized the whitewash of the Kennedy assassination, and immediately switched the U.S. policy away from the Kennedy pullout and back toward war in Vietnam.

+++++++++++++++

****as I stated in my posted interview with William Weston

Mariupol being shelled

crystal ball crystal ball crystal ball

How evil is our system.......why a city can be picked out which is not in total submission !!

=======

http://thefallujahproject.org/home/

========================

justice for Mariupol .....crystal ball crystal ball crystal ball

punishment punishment punishment

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

BLUM (above post # 282)

My dear, and recently departed, Washington friend, John Judge, liked to say that if you want to call him a “conspiracy theorist” you have to call others “coincidence theorists”. Thus it was by the most remarkable of coincidences that Arseniy Yatsenuk did indeed become the new prime minister. He could very soon be found in private meetings and public press conferences with the president of the United States and the Secretary-General of NATO, as well as meeting with the soon-to-be new owners of Ukraine, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, preparing to impose their standard financial shock therapy. The current protestors in Ukraine don’t need PHDs in economics to know what this portends. They know about the impoverishment of Greece, Spain, et al. They also despise the new regime for its overthrow of their democratically-elected government, whatever its shortcomings. But the American media obscures these motivations by almost always referring to them simply as “pro-Russian”.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Alfred Mendez (above post # 271)

(1) The BIS occupies a central role within the global/European financial scene - to the extent that such institutions as the G-10 and ECB (among others) play a surrogate role.

(2) The goal of the corporations is precisely the same today as it was at the end of the Great War. This is inevitable, inasmuch as inherent within the capitalist system is its obligation to the aggrandisement of profit.

(3) As a consequence, sovereignty - in the sense of a country's or organisation's political independence - can be ignored and overridden. This is happening today. The signs are there for all to see: Is America really in the Gulf Region for the benefit of its inhabitants ('ragheads' in American parlance)? Ask any oilman.

Are the two terms 'NATO' and the "International Community' really synonymous? Ask any country not in the Alliance.

Is the 'Cold War' really dead? Ask NATO why it is still in existence. ??????????????????

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

(from link at above post # 271)

Carrol Quigley - the bankers' plan

Carrol Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966 - [bill Clinton's mentor and Georgetown University professor] "The Power of financial capitalism had [a] far reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.

This system was to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences.

The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks, which were themselves private corporations.

Each central bank sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence co-operative politicians by subsequent rewards in the business world."

#############################

SEE POST # 271 above

punishment punishment punishment

How evil is our system....... ????? Answer Mariupol & Fallujah, just see whats there......you dont need a crystal ball to know which way the winds blow.......

THE NETWORK

Alfred Mendez <alfred.mendes@virgin.net>-

See also Alfred Mendez' article AN UNCOMMON VIEW OF THE BIRTH OF AN UNCOMMON MARKET on my Bilderberg History page

http://www.spectrezine.org

The wealth of the country flees the land
Like cottonseed on a wind
Blown by the fetid breath
Of money-pimps in Bedlam
Pursuing the creed of masters
Who worship a market freed
Of all restraints on greed -
While politicians posture
And feed on delusions of power

The above graph [couldn't reproduce it here, see below ed.] was created in order to bestow meaning in simplistic, delineated form to such terms as 'free market', 'new world order' and 'globalisation' - terms that have dominated political/economic terminology over the past two decades-or-so, and the fact that it focusses on banks and bankers (a profession endowed with the aura of authority in the eyes of the public) is quite simply because, without money, those terms are meaningless. Indeed, the title itself emphasises the role of money: After all, what is a banker if he's not a trader in money? Similarly, 'globalisation' would be equally meaningless if such politically omnipotent groups as the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission were not taken into account when assessing it's (globalisation's) significance. Moreover, how is it possible to disassociate banker from politician from businessman when, at times, one individual is all three - and, in any case, they are constituent parts of a single entity: the corporate establishment? Hence the inclusion of these two groups withinthe graph.

The Bilderberg (or BB from now on) was formed in 1954 out of the need of corporate America to ensure cohesion of purpose on the part of its European partners in the recently formed North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) - the twin aim being to facilitate the flow of American capital into the region, and to bring Germany into the Alliance (against, it should be noted, the wishes of many of its partners). That it is a group endowed with enormous political clout can be attested to by: (1) examination of the lists of committee members and conference attendees over the years - together with the gravity and importance of the subjects discussed at these conferences (NATO, understandably, being repeatedly a key subject); and (2) these conferences take place under very strict security cover supplied by the respective host countries - even though implicit within the structure of this cabal is its unaccountable, secretive nature.

The Trilateral Commission (or TRI from now on) was formed in 1973, its agenda determined by the corporate-funded Brookings Institute and the Kettering Foundation - with not-a-little-help from David Rockefeller of the Chase/Manhattan Bank. That its projected formation should have been so enthusiastically acclaimed by the BB Conference in Knokke (Belgium) in 1972 should cause no surprise. Both corporate-controlled organisations, with linked membership, they shared the same aim: increasing globalisation of their wealth and power. Certainly, the BB with its total lack of any 'democratic accountability', must be in agreement with the TRI's declaration (published in their "The crisis of Democracy") that what the West needs most "is a greater degree of moderation in democracy". Though, on second thoughts, the former probably thinks the 'the degree of moderation' somewht understated!

A further examination of both graph and list of bankers' names reveals that, of the banking organisations, the Banks for International Settlements (or BIS from now on) is self-evidently of prime importance on the international scene - not only because of its prestigious membership (embracing as it does the head bankers of the leading industrial nations) - but also because of the significance of its links with other groups. This article will focus on it, at the expense of the other better-known banking institutions, for two reasons: (1) its prime ranking in the international hierarchy; and (2) so little knowledge of it is in the public domain.

The BIS is the world's oldest international financial institution, having been set up in 1930 with the twin aim of (1) coping with reparations/loans from/to a very unstable post-World War one Germany; and (2) more importantly, to act as a forum for central bankers in the future. As such, it was the epitome of supranationality - able to circumvent all those orthodox ideals that had, over the years, become synonymous with the concept of the 'nation state' - such as 'love of country', 'patriotism' etc., - the danger, of course, being that, in certain circumstances (such as a state of war), such circumvention of patriotism by any of its board members could lead to them being accused of treasonable offences.

In order to appreciate what followed, it is essential to offer a brief resumé of the political/economic situation at the turn of the century: the Industrial Revolution, having fostered the rapid growth of a capitalist economy, inevitably gave birth to an ideal/dogma exposing the socio-political discord inherent within that same system which was based on the concept of one comparatively small group of people garnering profit from the wealth created by the labor of a much larger group. Thus was Marxism born - leading to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.The USSR, now perceived by the industrial nations as representing the very antithesis of capitalism, was henceforth 'the enemy'. The 'cold war' had begun, and its most blatant expression was the birth of fascism in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution - a birth both induced and nurtured by corporations such as I.G.Farben, SKF, Ford, ITT and Du Pont - corporation which were fast becoming multi-national in nature..Enter BIS. Set up in 1930 (see above),it consisted, initially, of a group of 6 central banks and a 'financial institution of the USA'. Granted a constitution charter by Switzerland, it was henceforth based in that country. That America was by then a financial force to be reckoned with on the international scene is borne out by the fact that the first President appointed to the BIS was Gates W. McGarrah (ex-Chase National Bank & Federal Reserve Bank).

By the late 1930's the BIS had assumed an openly pro-Nazi bias - much of it disclosed by Charles Higham in his book "Trading With the Enemy", and years later corroborated by a BBC Timewatch film "Banking With Hitler" (broadcast in late '98). Two examples of such bias (there were many more) were: (1) The BIS had arranged transfers into the account of the German's Reichbank of $378 million of what was, in effect, gold looted from the coffers of the invaded countries of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Holland and Belgium; and (2) in the summer of 1942, plans for the projected American invasion of Algeria were leaked to the governor of the French National Bank, who immediately contacted his German colleague in the BIS, SS Gruppenfuehrer Baron Kurt von Schroder (of the Stein Bank of Cologne), and by transferring 9 billion gold francs to Algiers - via the BIS - the Germans and their French subsidiaries made a killing of some $175 million in this dollar-exchange scam. Given the membership of the BIS at that time, this was hardly surprising. On the board were the following high-profile representatives of the Axis powers (there were 4 others): Walther Funk (Pres. of the Reichbank); Kurt von Schroder (above); Dr. Hermann Schmitz (Jt.Chm. of I.G.Farben); Emil Puhl (V/Pres. of the Reichbank); Yoneji Yamamoto; and Dr. V. Azzolini (Gov. Bank of Italy). It should be added that, of the non-Axis members on the board, many - such as Montagu Norman (Gov. of the Bank of England) were Nazi sympathisers, and that the President of the BIS from 1939 to 1946 was Thomas McKittrick, an American corporate lawyer who had been both Director of Lee, Higginson & Co. (a company which had made substantial loans to the Third Reich) and Chairman of the British-American Chamber of Commerce in London. His continued presidency of the BIS after America's entry into the war in December1941 was approved by Germany and Italy with this significant addendum to their note of authorisation: "McKittrick's opinions are safely known to us".

With the above noted disclosures in mind, the policy of appeasement pursued by Britain and France towards Germany in the pre-war period can now be more readily understood. By concluding a pact with Hitler, Britain and France - in effect - gave him the green light to advance eastwards (ref. "Mein Kampf"). Furthermore, the fact that they shared his endemic anti-communism blinded them to the risk that they were running by negotiating from a position of comparative military weakness - of which Hitler was perfectly aware - and for which they paid a heavy price. It should also be added that the architect of this act of appeasement, Prime Minister Chamberlain, was a shareholder in ICI, which had ties with I.G.Farben.

In the late '30's, and more particularly during World War 2, given America's great wealth - as opposed to Europe's straitened circumstances - it was inevitable that the trade between the two would be of a one-way nature, from the former to the latter. And not surprisingly, in view of the close relationship between American and German corporations (as noted above), a substantial portion of supplies went to Germany - often via fascist Spain - by ship and tanker under flags of neutrality. Many of the financial arrangements covering such trade were handled by BIS in neutral Basle. As an example of how substantial this trade was: in mid-'44 Am,erica was supplying Germany with 48 thousand tons of oil, and 11 hundred tons of much-needed wolfram (tungsten) per month! The fact that this trade was illegal in the USA for much of this period - and particularly after America's entry into the war in December '41 - did little to stop such trade. The large corporations, such as Standard Oil and ITT, saw to that. After all, then - as now - the US Administration was effectively under corporate control (as it has been since 1933, during FDR's term of office). Even the Secretary of Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, and his Assistant, Harry Dexter White, aware as they well were of the part played by BIS in this, could do little about it. In July '44, 730 delegates from 44 countries met at Bretton Woods to plan a framework for post-war international trade, payments and investments - a conference which subsequently resulted in the setting up in'47 of both the International Bank for Reconstruction & Development (IBRD, or World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The apparent inviolability of the BIS referred to above was perhaps best illustrated by the fact that Resolution 5, calling for the dissolution of BIS, was subsequently ignored and proven ineffective. The corporate establishment had seen to that - as indeed, it had seen to all such previous attempts.

With war's end now calling for a clearing of conscience, BIS's method of achieving this was by stressing its somewhat euphemistic neutrality, while playing down its less palatable, but quintessential supranationality. Their annual report of 1946 - as quoted in the Times - stated: "It is noted that the Bank has continued to supply the principles of strict neutrality, but that circumstances have caused a further decline in the volume of its business". Further: "Wars are the worst cause of monetary convulsions, and the first condition for enjoying the benefits of an ordinary monetary system is to establish and maintain a reign of peace". In view of their recent previous history, the term 'irony' hardly does justice to the above statements!. This report was, incidentally, the last to be signed by its President, Thomas McKittrick: in June 1946 he was appointedVice/Chairman of the Chase National Bank by its owners, the Rockefellers - presumably as a mark of gratitude for the assistance rendered to them by the BIS during his presidency.

In view of the somewhat puzzling fact that this now meant that there were in this post-war period three international financial/banking institutions - all with the self-evidently similar aim of resolving the world's serious economic problems - a brief, close look is called for in order to clarify the situation. The first (and intriguing) fact to be noted here is that, whereas the IMF and The World Bank have been frequently and conspicuously in the public eye from birth, the BIS has adopted a low profile and remained uncommunicative. This was an expedient tactic for the latter to adopt - for two reasons: (1) it thus eluded any investigation into its previous financial dealings with the Third Reich; and (2) more importantly, by so diassociating itself from the IMF and World Bank, the latter would henceforth be widely (though erroneously) regarded as the sole guardians of the worldwide economy, thus allowing the BIS more latitude to follow the agenda set by the corporate establishment - to whom, it must be recalled, they owed their survival.

This ambivalent relationship between the IMF/World Bank vis-a-vis the BIS/commercial banks in the 70's is epitomised by Anthony Sampson in his book "The Money Lenders": "The commercial banks in the meantime had created a very different perspective, for the IMF now controlled much less of the world's money. In 1966, the quotas which made up its capital amounted to 10% of the total world imports; but by '76 they made up only 4%"..."by '76 world annual deficits had reached $75 billion : of this, 7% financed by the IMF; 18% by other official international bodies (governments and World Bank) - remaining three-quarters financed by banks (commercial)". (Today, some two-and-a-half decades later, the board members of BIS, between them, control 95% of the money in circulation). The reason for this apparent taking over of such responsibility by the BIS from the IMF/World Bank is twofold: (1) the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of exchange convertibility in the early seventies exposed the irrelevance of the latter as agents for European reconstruction; and (2) the latter being statutorily-appointed agents of the UN, were therefore - ostensibly - accountable to a much wider constituency than the BIS, and therefore politically less manageable by the corporate establishment, whose primary aim in the aftermath of World War 2 was to ensure the unrestricted flow of American capital into Europe. A flow considerably eased by subsequent European integration, in which both NATO and the Bilderberg played a crucial role. This aim was furthered by means of the US Congressionally-authorised European Cooperation Act (ECA) of 1948, and implemented by its subsidiary, the European Payments Union (EPU) of 1950 - both under the aegis of the Marshall Plan of 1947. Predictably, the BIS was the institution chosen by the EPU to oversee this movement of capital (a point worthy of note here is that the head of the EPU at that time was one Richard Bissell, an economist who, years later, was to be the CIA Deputy Director of Planning overseeing the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April '61!).The BIS was now firmly ensconced in the heart of European integration, and was subsequently to play a critical role in the events leading to its (Europe's) eventual evolvement into the European Union, a bureaucratic politico-economic body occupying a position of crucial importance within the wider global hierarchy envisaged by the corporate establishment.

The significance of the American's key central role in this sequence of events is underscored by the fact that, in the aftermath of World War 2, they (the Americans) set up the Bundesbank in Frankfurt (in their zone of control), ensuring that the bank would be independent of government and follow a strict monetary policy - in effect, another Federal Reserve System. In 1948 they replaced the existing Reichmarks with approximately 11 billion Deutschmarks, and Germany's subsequent conduct vis-a-vis European integration must be viewed with this in mind. In any case, the fact remains that Germany's subsequent frequent delaying tactics enabled the dollar to consolidate its dominance.

In their published précis entitled "Profile of an International Organisation", the BIS states that its "predominant tasks are summed up most succintly in part of Article 3 of its original Statutes. They are 'to promote the co-operation of central banks and to provide additional facilities for international financial operations'". To achieve this aim it has 3 administrative bodies: (1) a Board of Directors, comprising the Governors of the central banks of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the USA, each of whom appoints another member of the same nationality - plus the central bank Governors of Canada, Japan,Holland, Sweden and Switzerland: a total of 17. (2) A Management Board; and (3) An annual General Meeting in June of each year.

That this is an organisation carrying enormous clout is readily confirmed by a closer look at said synopsis, pertinent quotes from which follow (italics are BIS's):

(A) "Since September 1994, the eleven countries from which the members of the Bank's Board of Directors are drawn have been identical with the countries which comprise the Group of Ten (G-10), with which the BIS has had a long and close association".

( "As well as making resources available to the IMF under the GAB (General Arrangements to Borrow) the G-10 has, since 1963, been a principal forum for discussion of international monetary questions. From the outset, the BIS has been a participant in G-10 Meetings, above all because the Governors of the G-10 central banks meet regularly on the occasion of the Basle monthly meetings. The G-10 meetings have, over time, become the pivotal forum in which much wider activities have been set in motion by the G-10 central banks in the pursuit of financial stability". (Meetings, it should be noted, hosted by the BIS in their high-rise office block in Basle).

© "As early as 1971 concern among central banks about the evolution of the Eurocurrency markets led to the establishment of a Standing Committee of the Group of Ten central banks which has met periodically in Basle ever since"

(D) In December 1994 the G-10 Governors set up "The Basle Committee on Banking Supervision, the secretariat for which is provided by the BIS".

(E) "The BIS hosts meeting of, and provides the secretariat for, the Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems and its various working parties".

(F) "..the BIS in a joint initiative with the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision is establishing an Institute for Financial Stability ahich is expected to commence its activities sometime in the second half of this year" (1998).

(G) " From 1964 until the end of 1993 the BIS hosted the Secretariat of the Committee of Governors of the Central Banks of the Member States of the European Economic Community (theCommittee of Governors). From 1st of June 1973 until the end of 1993 the Secretariat of the Committee of Governors also served the Board of Governors of the European Monetary Co-operation Fund (EMCF) and the Bank (BIS) acted as EMCF agent. Until they were replaced by the European Monetary Institute on 1st January 1994, the Committee of Governors and the EMCF were the Community bodies which provided the institutional framework for monetary co-operation in the European Community".

(It should be added that the above quotes are by no means a comprehensive listing in the synopsis of the BIS's activities on the global scene).

Three news items concerning the role played by the BIS are worthy of note:

(1) In 1994 the Belgian banker, Baron Alexandre Lamfalussy resigned from his post as General Manager of the BIS in order to become Head of the European Monetary Institute (EMI) - forerunner of the European Central Bank (ECB). As reported in the Times of 10/11/'93: Andrew Crockett (Executive Director of the Bank of England), who was replacing Lamfalussy as General Manager of the BIS,.."said he did not foresee the ENI..impinging on the work of the Basle-based BIS which is widely regarded as the central banker's central bank"..and adding that.."The EMI would enable the BIS to re-focus on global issues, and develop its role as a forum for collaboration between central banks in the monetary and regulatory fields".

(2) C.Fred Bergsten, Head of the Institute for International Economics, told the Washington Post on the 3rd of January '99 "The adoption of a common currency is by far the boldest chapter of European integration. Money traditionally has been an integral element of national sovereignty"..and the decision by Germany and France to give up their mark and franc "..represents the most dramatic voluntary surrender of sovereignty in recorded history. The European Central Bank that will manage the euro is a truly supranational institution".

(3) In the Independent On Sunday of the 21st February '99 it was reported that Andrew Crockett (see above) has been appointed Chairman of a newly-established 'Stability Forum' (see quote 'F' above), whose aim is to monitor global markets (this was the idea of Hans Tietmeyer, President of the Bundesbank).

Certain conclusions can be drawn from a recapitulation of the facts noted above:

(1) The BIS occupies a central role within the global/European financial scene - to the extent that such institutions as the G-10 and ECB (among others) play a surrogate role.

(2) The goal of the corporations is precisely the same today as it was at the end of the Great War. This is inevitable, inasmuch as inherent within the capitalist system is its obligation to the aggrandisement of profit.

(3) As a consequence, sovereignty - in the sense of a country's or organisation's political independence - can be ignored and overridden. This is happening today. The signs are there for all to see: Is America really in the Gulf Region for the benefit of its inhabitants ('ragheads' in American parlance)? Ask any oilman.

Are the two terms 'NATO' and the "International Community' really synonymous? Ask any country not in the Alliance.

Is the 'Cold War' really dead? Ask NATO why it is still in existence.

Is it not clear that NATO's primary role in Europe is to act as corporate America's anti-Marxist enforcer (even though the Marxism in question may be of a purely nominal nature)? Ask the head formulator of NATO, George Kennan (he may be dead, but his disclosure of the real reason for NATO's birth is on record in the BBC's Lord Reith Lecture of 1957).

Has not the UN's sovereignty been by-passed time-and-time again over the years? Ask its main debtor - America.

And finally, why is so little of the BIS in the public domain? Ask the owners/controllers of the means of communication - the media.

Alfred Mendez' Bankers' Network chart proved impossible to transfer to a web page so it is available here as a Microsoft Word 6 file - a Rich Text file - and an Adobe Acrobat file - so you can print it out. BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAVIES, Glyn "A History of Money" (University of Wales '94)

DEDMAN, Martin "The Origins & Development of the European Union - '45 to '95 (Routledge '96)

HIGHAM, Charles "Trading With The Enemy" (Robert Hale '83)

MARSHALL, Matt "The Bank" (Random House '99)

SAMPSON, Anthony "The Money Lenders" (Hodder & Stoughton '81)

BIS Précis '98

INTERNET (Membership lists, etc.)

Alfred Mendez <alfred.mendes@virgin.net> http://www.spectrezine.org