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I Fear Globalists more than Terrorists.
USA and Planet Earth should, too.
The worst thing a terrorist can do is kill a person. The globalists are working to kill democracy.
Greg Palast outlined the financial part of the process:
Larry Summers and the Secret "End-Game" Memo
Greg Palast
Thursday, August 22, 2013
EXCERPT...
The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak's fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3% unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.
SNIP…
The answer conceived by the Big Bank Five: eliminate controls on banks [font color="green"]in every nation on the planet – in one single move.[/font color] It was as brilliant as it was insanely dangerous.
How could they pull off this mad caper? The bankers' and Summers' game was to use the Financial Services Agreement, an abstruse and benign addendum to the international trade agreements policed by the World Trade Organization.
Until the bankers began their play, the WTO agreements dealt simply with trade in goods–that is, my cars for your bananas. The new rules ginned-up by Summers and the banks would force all nations to accept trade in "bads" – toxic assets like financial derivatives.
Until the bankers' re-draft of the FSA, each nation controlled and chartered the banks within their own borders. The new rules of the game would force every nation to open their markets to Citibank, JP Morgan and their derivatives "products."
[font color="green"]And all 156 nations in the WTO would have to smash down their own Glass-Steagall divisions between commercial savings banks and the investment banks that gamble with derivatives.[/font color]
The job of turning the FSA into the bankers' battering ram was given to Geithner, who was named Ambassador to the World Trade Organization.
CONTINUED...
http://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo/
In other words, turn us taxpaying mopes into slaves continually bailing out crooks. No wonder they love TPP and all the rest over the horizon!
But that's not the biggest reason why we should fear the Globalists. It's how they make a killing: Off War. Which, thanks to modern spycraft cough ELINT means inside trading, er information. Sad that in the process 99-percent of the American people have to cut back so the wealthiest and most corrupt people on the planet can make themselves even wealthier through the most evil system of all, one where "Money Trumps Peace" and secret government works to carry out that process 24/7/366.
Behind the Curtain: Booz Allen Hamilton and its Owner, The Carlyle Group
Written by Bob Adelmann
The New American; June 13, 2013
According to writers Thomas Heath and Marjorie Censer at the Washington Post, The Carlyle Group and its errant child, Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), have a public relations problem, thanks to NSA leaker and former BAH employee Edward Snowden. By the time top management at BAH learned that one of their top level agents had gone rogue, and terminated his employment, it was too late.
For years Carlyle had, according to the Post, “nurtured a reputation as a financially sophisticated asset manager that buys and sells everything from railroads to oil refineries”; but now the light from the Snowden revelations has revealed nothing more than two companies, parent and child, “bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits.”
And have they ever. When The Carlyle Group bought BAH back in 2008, it was totally dependent upon government contracts in the fields of information technology (IT) and systems engineering for its bread and butter. But there wasn't much butter: After two years the company’s gross revenues were $5.1 billion but net profits were a minuscule $25 million, close to a rounding error on the company’s financial statement. In 2012, however, BAH grossed $5.8 billion and showed earnings of $219 million, nearly a nine-fold increase in net revenues and a nice gain in value for Carlyle.
Unwittingly, the Post authors exposed the real reason for the jump in profitability: close ties and interconnected relationships between top people at Carlyle and BAH, and the agencies with which they are working. The authors quoted George Price, an equity analyst at BB&T Capital: "[Booz Allen has] got a great brand, they've focused over time on hiring top people, including bringing on people who have a lot of senior government experience." (Emphasis added.)
For instance, James Clapper had a stint at BAH before becoming the current Director of National Intelligence; George Little consulted with BAH before taking a position at the Central Intelligence Agency; John McConnell, now vice chairman at BAH, was director of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the ‘90s before moving up to director of national intelligence in 2007; Todd Park began his career with BAH and now serves as the country's chief technology officer; James Woolsey, currently a senior vice president at BAH, served in the past as director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and so on.
BAH has had more than a little problem with self-dealing and conflicts of interest over the years. For instance in 2006 the European Commission asked the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Privacy International (PI) to investigate BAH’s involvement with President George Bush’s SWIFT surveillance program, which was viewed by that administration as “just another tool” in its so-called “War on Terror.” The only problem is that it was illegal, as it violated U.S., Belgian, and European privacy laws. BAH was right in the middle of it. According to the ACLU/PI report,
[font color="green"]Though Booz Allen’s role is to verify that the access to the SWIFT data is not abused, its relationship with the U.S. Government calls its objectivity significantly into question. (Emphasis added.)
Among Booz Allen’s senior consulting staff are several former members of the intelligence community, including a former Director of the CIA and a former director of the NSA.[/font color]
As noted by Barry Steinhardt, an ACLU director, “It’s bad enough that the (Bush) administration is trying to hold out a private company as a substitute for genuine checks and balances on its surveillance activities. But of all companies to perform audits on a secret surveillance program, it would be difficult to find one less objective and more intertwined with the U.S. government security establishment.” (Emphasis added.)
CONTINUED w Links n Privatized INTEL...
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15696-behind-the-curtain-booz-allen-hamilton-and-its-owner-the-carlyle-group
Do you believe that this information is used for public good or private gain?
The answer is found in what we can see above-ground: The "Who Benefits?" part, that is Who controls that information which translates into political power and physical wealth and their , uh, un-democratic distribution.
For much of the 35 years, it's been politicians on the Trickle Down side of life. Their record is that of the latter: Wars without end for profits without cease. And, so far, they have cared who got killed in the process.
It also explains the common thinking of the benefits of keeping that same War Spy Apparatus turned and focused on the American people.
Jeb Bush: 'I don't understand' why anyone is upset about the NSA
The Week, February 19, 2015
Likely GOP presidential candidate Gov. Jeb Bush is eager to distinguish between himself and his ex-president father and brother. But comments he made on Wednesday about the creepy spying practices of the NSA suggest he shares their support for a robust surveillance state:
(T)he NSA metadata program... contributes to awareness of potential terrorist cells and interdiction efforts on a global scale. For the life of me, I don't understand [how] the debate has gotten off track, where we're not understanding and protecting — we do protect our civil liberties, but this is a hugely important program to use these technologies to keep us safe. (National Journal)
Despite Bush's confident assessment of the effectiveness of the NSA, reports suggest the mass surveillance program "ha(s) no discernible impact" in preventing terrorism. Bonnie Kristian
SOURCE: http://theweek.com/speedreads/540090/jeb-bush-dont-understand-anyone-upset-about-nsa
Jebthro and the BFEE have served to create the fusion of state power and private wealth Mussolini described. Doubt that, consider how national priorities have changed. President Kennedy used every minute in office to keep the peace. Today, academics are getting with the program for wars without end for profit without cease. And to make sure that money flow continues uninterrupted, the moneyed class have corrupted the government of the United States and governments the planet over to continue their reign themselves the wealthiest -- and now that money is speech-n-all -- the most POWERFUL people to ever live.
Unfortunately, with all that secret government oaths and pledges and courts-martial under the UCMJ leading to prison and worse, it becomes easy to see why this stays out of the Mighty Wurlitzer. The people who can tell us about it are under an oath of secrecy and will lose their pensions if they talk about who benefits from all the secret government power.
Finally, because they never are held to account for their corruption -- by justice, government, press, or academia – the Bushes and the War Party for whom they front continues to prey on America and the planet. Looting the planet’s riches and the People’s futures through war and empire, they are killing Democracy along the way. By defunding and impoverishing public education, hiding news by catapaulting propaganda, loyalty oaths to secret government and corporations rather than to the Constitution, government officials and a cowed press corps in fear of speaking out and blowing the whistle, they also are killing our ability to even know about what they do. Perhaps one day soon, that will be the new normal we "move on" to -- the tragic day when no one remains who remembers when the United States and planet were any different.
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Nationalism is not an invention of the right ...
I did not say that it was. I said "nationalism that is integral to the far-right's mentality ..."
One ideological doctrine unites the far-right worldview, it is that of nationalism.
Nations are nothing more than logical units of government, just as states are ...
True. And just as states function as units of government within nations, nations can function as units of government within larger groups, as in Europe. Many countries there are smaller than our states.
The more we coalesce into one globalist blob, the more we are prey to the wealthy vultures.
Our history is filled with eras when elites ("vultures"
ran roughshod over people with little in the way of trade or 'globalism'. And in modern times, Europe has proven that a large continental 'blob' with many nations contained within can be quite progressive.
Now, as globalism spreads, it works less all the time, as the economies of the world compete for and cater mostly to, not their own populations, but the small percentage of affluent consumers in all countries.
Most of the income gains of the past 25 years have gone to the world's poorest 70%. That is not something that liberals would usually oppose. The top global 1% have also gained while the while those in the 80-90% group, the Western middle class for the most part, have suffered. Rather than punishing the 70% to regain middle class prosperity here, I think we should go after the 1% and redistribute their ill-gotten gains to our middle class.
In Scandanavian countries which are 'globalized' much more than the US is:
OECD study: Income gains to top 1% last 30 years - US worst (by far), Europe best (by far).
Canada is second only to the U.S. in its growing inequality. In the U.S., about 47 per cent of total growth went to the wealthiest one per cent between 1975 and 2007, compared to 37 per cent in Canada, while in Australia and the U.K., about 20 per cent of growth went to the wealthiest.
In Nordic countries ... about 90 per cent of growth went to the 99 per cent of middle and low-income earners in the same period.
OECD study: Income gains to top 1% last 30 years - US worst (by far), Europe best (by far).
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/top-1-taking-lion-s-share-of-global-growth-oecd-says-1.2627154
some liberals do not have so much of a "we're all in this together" mentality as they like to think ...
Probably true, but liberals are certainly much more likely than conservatives to care about "THEM" and not just "US".
Last edited Tue Feb 24, 2015, 02:12 AM - Edit history (1)
Socrates: "Please assume, then, for the sake of argument, that there is in our souls a block of wax, in one case larger, in another smaller, in one case the wax is purer, in another more impure and harder, in some cases softer."
Theaetetus: "I assume all that."
Socrates: Let us, then, say that this is the gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses, and that whenever we wish to remember anything we see or hear or think of in our own minds, we hold this wax under the perceptions and thoughts and imprint them upon it, just as we make impressions from seal rings; and whatever is imprinted we remember and know as long as its image lasts, but whatever is rubbed out or (191e) cannot be imprinted we forget and do not know."
Theaetetus: "Let us assume that."
Socrates: "Now take a man who knows the things which he sees and hears, and is considering some one of them; observe whether he may not gain a false opinion in the following manner.
Theaetetus: In what manner?
Socrates: By thinking that the things which he knows are sometimes things which he knows and sometimes things which he does not know. For we were wrong before in agreeing that this is impossible."
Theaetetus: "What do you say about it now?" (Plato, Theaetetus Offsite Link, 191c-e)
Plato's complete discussion in the Theaetetus of false judgment as the inappropriate linkage of a perception to a memory – the mind as a wax tablet– appears in lines 191a–196c of the dialogue.
SOURCE: http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=3993
Then, there's the hard truth: NSA bosses feared releasing Gulf of Tonkin intel would draw ''uncomfortable comparisons'' with Iraq.
One of the reasons to be wary when Washington uses secret intelligence as a basis for war.
Tonkin Gulf Intelligence "Skewed"
According to Official History and Intercepts
Newly Declassified National Security Agency Documents Show Analysts Made "SIGINT fit the claim" of North Vietnamese Attack
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 132 - Update
John Prados
National Security Archive
EXCERPT...
New York Times reporter Scott Shane wrote that higher-level officials at the NSA were "fearful that (declassification) might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq."
CONTINUED...
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/press20051201.htm
Anyone ever hear OPLAN 34-A mentioned on tee vee or in history class?
Caro’s Flawed Tale of LBJ’s Rise
Exclusive: Author Robert Caro has labored through decades of his multi-volume study of Lyndon Johnson’s life, only now reaching LBJ’s presidency in The Passage of Power. But the much-praised book misses – or misrepresents – many of the key events, writes Jim DiEugenio.
By Jim DiEugenio
ConsortiumNews July 28, 2012
EXCERPT...
Caro mentions OPLAN 34A, the plan for covert operations against North Vietnam. The seed for this plan was approved by Johnson as part of NSAM 273 in late November of 1963. Caro actually calls it a “reaffirmation.” (Caro, p. 403) If what he means is a reaffirmation of Kennedy’s policies, then this is just wrong.
CONTINUED...
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/07/28/caros-flawed-tale-of-lbjs-rise/
Me, I'm all for war if it's to defend the United States and the Constitution from any and all enemies, foreign and domestic. Other than that, I'll try peace first.
Last edited Tue Feb 24, 2015, 06:21 PM - Edit history (1)
George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of ‘Counter-Terrorism’
By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58
A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.
During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.
Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.
The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.
SNIP...
Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.
SNIP...
NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985
The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.
[font color="red"]The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.
The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.
Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified.[/font color] The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.
CONTINUED...
CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.
Most importantly: You are most welcome, Zorra. Thank you for standing up for Democracy.
If you’ve read Ayn Rand, you might recognize Judge Laurence H. Silberman as the Fountainhead for the American Police State. In her novel by that name, the lead character personifies architectural genius who radiates the inspiration that drives the individual to succeed past superhuman heights.
If you haven’t read Ayn Rand's novel, nor ever heard of the former senior federal appellate judge (Thanks, Ronnie!) and ambassador to Yugoslavia (Thanks, Jerry!), in addition to being in good company, you’re not alone. Judge Silberman’s flown under the media radar, as in scrutiny, for decades.
Those interested in the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy, the part of being well-informed and aware of what the government does in their name and with their money, especially, will want to know what the media leave out of “history as it happens.” The reason is what Michelle Goldberg and Salon.com found: “Whenever there's a vast right-wing conspiracy, Judge Laurence Silberman keeps turning up.” They are not kidding.
Judge Silberman made headlines this week with an Opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal. He was shocked to discover that AP reporter Ron Fournier had the temerity to express out loud and in public that George W. Bush lied the United States of America into war with Iraq.
How disgusting is that? Not as disgusting as what Judge Silberman believes, evidently.
Didn't the AP review the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Silberman asked? Didn't Fournier hear CIA director George Tenet "famously" tell the president that the notion (Democratic word) or proposition (Republican word) that Iraq possessed WMD was “a slam dunk"? It’s a good bet a lot of WSJ readers and their employees have been phoning, texting, emailing and stalking Mr. Fournier this week to ask.
The Dangerous Lie That ‘Bush Lied’
Some journalists still peddle this canard as if it were fact. This is defamatory and could end up hurting the country.
By LAURENCE H. SILBERMAN
Wall Street Journal, Opinion, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2015
In recent weeks, I have heard former Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier on Fox News twice asserting, quite offhandedly, that President George W. Bush “lied us into war in Iraq.”
I found this shocking....
SNIP…
The charge is dangerous because it can take on the air of historical fact—with potentially dire consequences. I am reminded of a similarly baseless accusation that helped the Nazis come to power in Germany: that the German army had not really lost World War I, that the soldiers instead had been “stabbed in the back” by politicians.
Sometime in the future, perhaps long after most of us are gone, an American president may need to rely publicly on intelligence reports to support military action. It would be tragic if, at such a critical moment, the president’s credibility were undermined by memories of a false charge peddled by the likes of Ron Fournier.
Mr. Silberman, a senior federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, was co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/laurence-h-silberman-the-dangerous-lie-that-bush-lied-1423437950
[font color="purple"]Judge Silberman wants you to believe that even thinking "Bush lied" is tantamount to the treason that gave rise to Hitler and the NAZIs.[/font color] Now that is Rovian: Blame your opponent for what you're actually doing. And if you believe the truth, you're not just a liar or a conspiracy nut, you're a traitor.
So, when Judge Silberman compares people who call George W Bush out on his lies leading America into war, "NAZIs," it shows he knows of what he speaks. He was there for the BFEE -- the Bush Family Evil Empire, the War Party, the banksters and warmongers and traitors who go by the motto "Money trumps peace," the undemocratically, if not self-appointed, guardians of the Military Industrial Complex.
Details on the Judge's walk on the Dark Side from Michelle Goldberg, the author of "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism" and Salon.com:
The partisan “mastermind” in charge of Bush’s intel probe
Whenever there's a vast right-wing conspiracy, Judge Laurence Silberman keeps turning up.
MICHELLE GOLDBERG
Salon.com, TUESDAY, FEB 10, 2004 03:06 PM EST
Judge Laurence Silberman, George Bush’s nominee to co-chair the commission investigating U.S. intelligence on Iraq, knows quite a bit about the murky intersection between facts and ideology. The senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington has been near the febrile center of the largest political scandals of the past two decades, from the rumored “October surprise” of 1980 and the Iran-contra trials to the character assassination of Anita Hill and the impeachment of President Clinton. Whenever right-wing conspiracies swing into action, Silberman is there.
A veteran of the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan administrations who is close to Vice President Dick Cheney, Silberman has a reputation as a fierce ideologue who doesn’t let his judicial responsibilities get in the way of his Republican activism. David Brock, the repentant former right-wing journalist and Silberman protégé, describes his former mentor as “an extreme partisan” who seems to relish “the political wars.” Kevin Phillips, the former Nixon staffer who authored the recent “The Bush Dynasty,” said on NPR on Monday, “In the past, Silberman has been more involved with coverups in the Middle East than with any attempts to unravel them.” Ralph Neas, president of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way, calls him “the most partisan and most political federal judge in the country” and says his appointment is “stunning and disgraceful.”
Silberman’s panel, which is supposed to investigate U.S. intelligence on Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya and Afghanistan, won’t report its findings until March 2005, long after the presidential election. Silberman will be balanced on it by other more moderate or more independent figures, including co-chair Charles Robb, a former Democratic senator and Virginia governor; Republican Sen. John McCain; and Judge Patricia Wald, Silberman’s colleague on D.C. Circuit Court, a woman he is said to hate.
Yet Silberman’s place at the head of the commission has already raised doubts about its credibility, given that Silberman has often behaved as if his paramount role as a federal judge is to protect Republicans, persecute Democrats and slander anyone who disagrees.
SNIP...
After working for Reagan’s election, Silberman was rewarded with an appointment to the D.C. Court of Appeals, the second most powerful court in the country. After the Iran-contra scandal, he was part of a three-judge panel that voted 2-to-1 to reverse Oliver North’s felony conviction. Voting with him was David Sentelle, a protégé of Jesse Helms who according to Brock named his daughter “Reagan” after the president who put him on the bench.
In his book “Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up,” Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, a Republican who served as deputy attorney general during the Dwight Eisenhower administration, described Silberman as “aggressively hostile” during oral arguments. Walsh wrote that he regretted not moving to disqualify him.
The year after he ruled North innocent, Silberman joined in the right-wing campaign to defame Anita Hill, who had accused Clarence Thomas, George H.W. Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court, of sexual harassment. It was during the attack on Hill that the Silbermans took Brock under their wing.
Brock met Silberman through his wife, Ricky Silberman, who had worked under Thomas at the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission and served as a source for a story Brock wrote about Thomas’ confirmation hearings.
In 1992, after Thomas had been confirmed, Brock began researching “The Real Anita Hill,” a savage assault on Hill’s character that Brock later apologized for. Laurence Silberman was a source for the book, feeding Brock gossip. “Judge Silberman speculated that Hill was a lesbian, ‘acting out,’” Brock wrote in “Blinded by the Right.” “Besides, Silberman confided, Thomas would never have asked Hill for a date: Did I know she had bad breath?”
Brock’s Anita Hill book portrayed Judge Patricia Wald, Silberman’s colleague on the D.C. Circuit Court, as a “conspirator in the campaign against Thomas,” as he wrote in “Blinded by the Right.” “Of course it was none other than Judge Silberman who gave me the false information on his colleague Pat Wald, whom he hated with a passion,” Brock wrote.
CONTINUED...
http://www.salon.com/2004/02/10/silberman/
Silberman was present to help Bush Jr Team steal Florida in 2000 in the form of 5-4 Clarence Thomas, whose Supreme Court nomination he helped steer past Anita Hill and the many people who said exactly what kind of crook the guy is. Silberman was present and accounted for helping Poppy Bush and Company escape justice during the Iran Contra Affair, as documented by Judge Lawrence Walsh. From the federal bench, he helped secure the NSA domestic spying op and made the torture at Abu Ghraib legal-like via his protégé John Yoo. So, it's almost understandable how he now wants to stop any talk by JOURNALISTS that Baby Doc Bush lied America into war on Iraq.
The guy symbolizes everything that's happened to destroy democracy and justice in America since 1980. Then “former Ambassador Silberman” participated in "the October Surprise" as an emissary of the Reagan camp in discussions with Iranian representatives at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington DC.
Here's what Robert Parry observed on Judge Silberman, in its entirety, thanks to DU's special arrangement with the author:
Neocon Judge's History of Cover-ups
Laurence Silberman, a U.S. Appeals Court judge and a longtime neoconservative operative – part of what the Iran-Contra special prosecutor called “the strategic reserves” for convicted Reagan administration operatives in the 1980s – is back playing a similar role for the Bush-43 administration.
by Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews.com, September 23, 2009
On Sept. 11, the eighth anniversary of the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Silberman issued a 2-to-1 opinion dismissing a lawsuit against the private security firm, CACI International, brought by Iraqi victims of torture and other abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.
Silberman declared that CACI was immune from prosecution because its employees were responding to U.S. military commands. The immunity ruling blocked legal efforts by 212 Iraqis, who suffered directly at Abu Ghraib or were the widows of men who died, to exact some accountability from CACI employees who allegedly assisted in the torture of prisoners.
"During wartime, where a private service contractor is integrated into combatant activities over which the military retains command authority, a tort claim arising out of the contractor's engagement in such activities shall be preempted," Silberman wrote.
[font color="red"]But Silberman is not a dispassionate judge when it comes to the crimes of Republicans committed to advance the neocon cause.
In the 1980s, Silberman played behind-the-scenes roles in helping Ronald Reagan gain the White House; he helped formulate hard-line intelligence policies; he encouraged right-wing media attacks on liberals; and he protected the flanks of Reagan’s operatives who were caught breaking the law.
Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, a Republican himself, counted Silberman as one of "a powerful band of Republican (judicial) appointees (who) waited like the strategic reserves of an embattled army," determined to prevent any judgments against Reagan’s operatives who broke the law in the arms-for-hostage scandal.
In his 1997 memoir, Firewall, Walsh depicted Silberman as a leader of that partisan band, even recalling how Silberman had berated Judge George MacKinnon, also a Republican, who led the panel which had picked Walsh to be the special prosecutor.
"At a D.C. circuit conference, he (Silberman) had gotten into a shouting match about independent counsel with Judge George MacKinnon," Walsh wrote. "Silberman not only had hostile views but seemed to hold them in anger."
In 1990, after Walsh had secured a difficult conviction of former White House aide Oliver North for offenses stemming from the Iran-Contra scandal, Silberman teamed up with another right-wing judge, David Sentelle, to overturn North’s conviction in a sudden outburst of sympathy for defendant rights.[/font color]
Trashing Anita Hill
Less publicly, in 1991, Silberman also went to bat for the U.S. Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas, working with right-wing operatives to destroy the reputation of Anita Hill, a former Thomas employee who testified about his crude sexual harassment.
Author David Brock, then a well-paid right-wing hatchet man who published what he later admitted were scurrilous attacks on Hill, described the support and encouragement he received from Silberman and Silberman’s wife, Ricky. Even after Thomas had won Senate confirmation, Silberman still was pushing attack lines against Hill, Brock wrote in his book, Blinded by the Right.
While George H.W. Bush’s White House slipped Brock a psychiatric opinion that Hill suffered from “erotomania,” Silberman met with Brock to suggest even more colorful criticism of Hill.
“Silberman speculated that Hill was a lesbian ‘acting out’,” Brock wrote. “Besides, Silberman confided, Thomas would never have asked Hill for dates: She had bad breath.”
After Brock published a book-length assault on Hill, called The Real Anita Hill, the Silbermans and other prominent conservatives joined a celebration at the Embassy Row Ritz-Carlton, Brock wrote, noting that also in attendance was Judge Sentelle.
But Silberman’s anything-goes approach to promoting – and protecting – right-wing control of the government dated back even further, to his key role as a foreign-policy and intelligence adviser to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign.
During Campaign 1980, Silberman was a senior figure in what was then a fast-rising neoconservative faction that saw Reagan’s victory – and the defeat of President Jimmy Carter – as vital to expand U.S. military power, to confront the Soviet Union aggressively and to relieve pressure on Israel for a peace deal with the Palestinians.
More than a decade later, congressional investigators discovered that Silberman was assigned to secretive Reagan campaign operations collecting intelligence on what President Carter was doing to secure the release of 52 American hostages then held in Iran.
On April 20, 1980, the Reagan campaign created a group of foreign policy experts known as the Iran Working Group. The operation was run by Richard Allen, Fred Ikle and Silberman, the congressional investigators discovered.
After Reagan’s nomination in July, his campaign merged with that of his vice presidential running mate, George H.W. Bush, who had enlisted many ex-CIA officers who were loyal to Bush as a former CIA director.
October Surprise Obsession
The general election campaign assembled a strategy team, known as the “October Surprise Group,” which was ordered to prepare for “any last-minute foreign policy or defense-related event, including the release of the hostages, that might favorably impact President Carter in the November election,” according to a House Task Force that in 1992 investigated allegations of Republican interference in Carter’s hostage negotiations.
“Originally referred to as the ‘Gang of Ten,’” the Task Force report said the “October Surprise Group” consisted of Allen, Ikle, Charles M. Kupperman, Thomas H. Moorer, Eugene V. Rostow, William R. Van Cleave, John R. Lehman Jr., Robert G. Neumann, Seymour Weiss – and Silberman.
While that reference made it into the Task Force’s final report in January 1993, another part was deleted, which said: “According to members of the ‘October Surprise’ group, the following individuals also participated in meetings although they were not considered ‘members’ of the group: Michael Ledeen, Richard Stillwell, William Middendorf, Richard Perle, General Louis Walt and Admiral James Holloway.”
Deleted from the final report also was a section of the draft describing how the ex-CIA personnel who had worked for Bush’s campaign became the nucleus of the Republican intelligence operation that monitored Carter’s Iran-hostage negotiations for the Reagan-Bush team.
“The Reagan-Bush campaign maintained a 24-hour Operations Center, which monitored press wires and reports, gave daily press briefings and maintained telephone and telefax contact with the candidate’s plane,” the draft report read. “Many of the staff members were former CIA employees who had previously worked on the Bush campaign or were otherwise loyal to George Bush.” (I discovered the unpublished portions of Task Force’s report when I gain access to its files in late 1994.)
Another deletion involved a Sept. 16, 1980, meeting ordered by Reagan’s campaign director William Casey, who had become obsessed over the possibility of Carter pulling off an October Surprise release of the hostages.
On that date, Casey met with senior campaign officials Edwin Meese, Bill Timmons and Richard Allen about the “Persian Gulf Project,” according to an unpublished section of the House Task Force report and Allen’s notes. Two other participants at the meeting, according to Allen’s notes, were Michael Ledeen and Noel Koch.
That same day, Iran’s acting foreign minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh was quoted as citing Republican interference on the hostages. “Reagan, supported by [former Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger and others, has no intention of resolving the problem,” Ghotbzadeh said. “They will do everything in their power to block it.”
Exactly what the Reagan-Bush “October Surprise” team did remains something of a historical mystery.
About two dozen witnesses – including former Iranian officials and international intelligence figures – have claimed the Republican contacts undercut Carter’s hostage negotiations, though others insist that the initiatives were simply ways to gather information about Carter’s desperate bid to free the hostages before the election. (For the most thorough account of the “October Surprise” case, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.)
The L’Enfant Plaza Mystery
One of the many unanswered questions about the October Surprise mystery revolved around a meeting involving Laurence Silberman and an Iranian emissary at the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington in September or early October 1980.
Years later, an Iranian arms dealer named Houshang Lavi claimed to be the emissary who met with Silberman, Allen and Robert McFarlane, who was then an aide to Sen. John Tower, R-Texas. Lavi said the meeting on Oct. 2 dealt with the possibility of trading arms to Iran for release of the hostages – and was arranged by Silberman.
Silberman, Allen and McFarlane acknowledged that a meeting happened, but they insisted they had no recollection of the emissary’s name nor who he was.
In 1990, I interviewed a testy Richard Allen about the meeting for a PBS Frontline documentary. Allen said he reluctantly went to the meeting, which he said was proposed by McFarlane. Allen said he took along Silberman as a witness.
“So Larry Silberman and I got on the subway and we went down to the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel where I met McFarlane and there were many people milling about. We sat at a table in the lobby. It was around the lunch hour. I was introduced to this very obscure character whose name I cannot recall. …
“The individual who was either an Egyptian or an Iranian or could have been an Iranian living in Egypt – and his idea was that he had the capacity to intervene, to deliver the hostages to the Reagan forces. Now, I took that at first to mean that he was able to deliver the hostages to Ronald Reagan, candidate for the presidency of the United States, which was absolutely lunatic. And I said so. I believe I said, or Larry did, ‘we have one President at a time. That’s the way it is.’
“So this fellow continued with his conversation. I was incredulous that McFarlane would have ever brought a guy like this or placed any credibility in a guy like this. Just absolutely incredulous, and so was Larry Silberman. This meeting lasted maybe 20 minutes, 25 minutes. So that’s it. There’s no need to continue this meeting. …
“Larry and I walked out. And I remember Larry saying, ‘Boy, you better write a memorandum about this. This is really spaceship stuff.’ And it, of course, set my opinion very firmly about Bud McFarlane for having brought this person to me in the first place.”
‘Swarthy’ Emissary
Allen described the emissary as “stocky and swarthy, dark-complected,” but otherwise “non-descript.” Allen added that the man looked like a “person from somewhere on the Mediterranean littoral. How about that?”
Allen said this Egyptian or Iranian “must have given a name at the time, must have.” But Allen couldn’t recall it. He also said he made no effort to check out the man’s position or background before agreeing to the meeting.
“Did you ask McFarlane, who is this guy?” I asked Allen.
“I don’t recall having asked him, no,” Allen responded.
“I guess I don’t understand why you wouldn’t say, ‘Is this guy an Iranian, is he someone you’ve known for a while?’” I pressed.
“Well, gee, I’m sorry that you don’t understand,” Allen lashed back. “I really feel badly for you. It’s really too bad you don’t understand. But that’s your problem, not mine.”
“But wouldn’t you normally ask that kind of background question?”
“Not necessarily,” Allen said. “McFarlane wanted me to meet a guy and this guy was going to talk about the hostages. I met plenty of people during that period of time who wanted to talk to me about the hostages. … This was no different from anybody else I would meet on this subject.”
“It obviously turned out to be different from most people you’ve met on the subject,” I interjected.
“”Oh, it turned out to be because this guy is the centerpiece of some sort of great conspiracy web that has been spun,” Allen snapped.
“Well, were there many people who offered to deliver the hostages to Ronald Reagan?” I asked.
“No, this one was particularly different, but I didn’t know that before I went to the meeting, you understand.”
“Did you ask McFarlane what on earth this guy was going to propose?”
“I don’t think I did in advance, no.”
What also was unusual about this meeting was what Allen and Silberman did not do afterwards. Though Allen said that he and Silberman recognized the sensitivity of the approach, neither of Reagan’s foreign policy advisers contacted the Carter administration or reported the offer to law enforcement.
Defying Logic
It also defied logic that seasoned operatives like Allen and Silberman would have agreed to a meeting with an emissary from a hostile power without having done some due-diligence about who the person was and what his bona fides were.
Iranian arms dealer Lavi later claimed to be the mysterious emissary. And government documents revealed that Lavi made a similar approach to the independent presidential campaign of John Anderson, although Anderson’s campaign – unlike Allen and Silberman – promptly informed the CIA and State Department.
For his part, Silberman denied any substantive discussion with the mysterious emissary but refused to discuss the meeting in any detail. He did insist that he was out of town on Oct. 2, the date cited by Lavi, but Silberman wouldn’t provide a list of dates when he was in Washington during the fall of 1980.
Though purportedly having arranged the meeting, McFarlare also insisted that he couldn’t recall the identity of the emissary.
Later, when a Senate panel conducted a brief inquiry into whether the Republicans interfered with Carter’s hostage negotiations, a truculent Allen testified – and brought along a memo that he claimed represented his contemporaneous recollections of the L’Enfant Plaza meeting.
However, the memo, dated Sept. 10, 1980, flatly contradicted the previous accounts from Allen, Silberman and McFarlane. It described a meeting arranged by Mike Butler, another Tower aide, with McFarlane only joining in later as the pair told Allen about a meeting they had had with a Mr. A.A. Mohammed, a Malaysian who operated out of Singapore.
“This afternoon, by mutual agreement, I met with Messrs. Mohammed, Butler and McFarlane. I also took Larry Silberman along to the meeting,” Allen wrote in the memo.
According to the memo, Mohammed presented a scheme for returning the Shah of Iran’s son to the country as “a figurehead monarch” which would be accompanied by a release of the U.S. hostages. Though skeptical of the plan, “both Larry and I indicated that we would be pleased to hear whatever additional news Mr. Mohammed might be able to turn up, and I suggested that that information be communicated via a secure channel,” the memo read.
Nearly every important detail was different both in how the meeting was arranged and its contents. Gone was the proposal to release the hostages to candidate Reagan, gone was the abrupt cutoff, gone was the Iranian or Egyptian – some guy from the “Mediterranean littoral” – replaced by a Malaysian businessman whose comments were welcomed along with future contacts “via a secure channel.” The memo didn’t even mention the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel, nor was McFarlane the organizer.
A reasonable conclusion might be that Allen’s memo was about an entirely different meeting, which would suggest that Republican contacts with Iranian emissaries were more numerous than previously admitted and that Silberman was more of a regular player.
Also, Silberman, McFarlane and Butler – when questioned by the House Task Force investigating the issue in 1992 – disputed Allen’s new version of the L’Enfant Plaza tale. They claimed no recollection of the A.A. Mohammed discussion.
Nevertheless, the House Task Force, in its determination to turn the page on the complex October Surprise issue, accepted Allen’s memo as the final answer to the L’Enfant Plaza question and pressed ahead with a broader rejection of any wrongdoing by Republicans – even though that required concealing a host of incriminating documents. [See Secrecy & Privilege.]
Tantalizing Clue
The House Task Force also turned a blind eye to another tantalizing clue related to the L’Enfant Plaza mystery. Lavi’s lawyer, former CIA counsel Mitchell Rogovin, provided me a page of his notes from that time period.
Rogovin, who was an adviser to the John Anderson campaign, wrote on his calendar entry for Sept. 29, 1980, a summary of Lavi’s plan to trade weapons for the hostages. After that, Rogovin recorded a telephone contact with senior CIA official John McMahon to discuss Lavi’s plan and to schedule a face-to-face meeting with a CIA representative on Oct. 2.
The next entry, however, was stunning. It read, “Larry Silberman – still very nervous/will recommend … against us this P.M. I said $250,000 – he said why even bother.”
When I called Rogovin about this notation, he said it related to a loan that the Anderson campaign was seeking from Crocker National Bank where Silberman served as legal counsel. The note meant that Silberman was planning to advise the bank officers against the loan, Rogovin said.
I asked Rogovin if he might have mentioned Lavi’s hostage plan to Silberman, who was in the curious position of being a senior Reagan adviser and weighing in on a loan to an independent campaign that was viewed as siphoning off votes from Carter. (Crocker did extend a line of credit to Anderson.)
“There was no discussion of the Lavi proposal,” Rogovin insisted. But Rogovin acknowledged that Silberman was a friend from the Ford administration where both men had worked on intelligence issues, Rogovin from the CIA and Silberman at the Justice Department. Later, Rogovin and Silberman became next-door neighbors and bought a boat together.
In a normal investigation, such coincidences would strain credulity, especially given Lavi’s claim that he took part in a meeting with Republicans at the L’Enfant Plaza on Oct. 2, the same day that he talked with a CIA representative. Lavi also claimed that Silberman had arranged the meeting, which would make sense given Rogovin’s personal ties to Silberman.
However, as on a host of other compelling leads, the House Task Force chose to look the other way.
Reagan’s Victory
On Nov. 4, 1980, with Carter unable to free the hostages and Americans humiliated by the year-long ordeal with Iran, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide.
For his loyal service in the campaign, the neoconservative Silberman was put in charge of the transition team’s intelligence section. The team prepared a report attacking the CIA’s analytical division for noting growing weaknesses in the Soviet Union, a position despised by the neocons because it undercut their case for a costly expansion of the Pentagon’s budget.
Silberman’s transition team accused the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence of “an abject failure” to foresee a supposedly massive Soviet buildup of strategic weapons and “the wholesale failure” to comprehend the sophistication of Soviet propaganda.
“These failures are of such enormity,” the transition report said, “that they cannot help but suggest to any objective observer that the agency itself is compromised to an unprecedented extent and that its paralysis is attributable to causes more sinister than incompetence.”
In other words, Silberman’s transition team was implying that CIA analysts who didn’t toe the neoconservative line must be Soviet agents. Even anti-Soviet hardliners like the CIA’s Robert Gates recognized the impact that the incoming administration’s hostility had on the CIA analysts.
“That the Reaganites saw their arrival as a hostile takeover was apparent in the most extraordinary transition period of my career,” Gates wrote in his memoir, From the Shadows. “The reaction inside the Agency to this litany of failure and incompetence” from the transition team “was a mix of resentment and anger, dread and personal insecurity.”
Amid rumors that the transition team wanted to purge several hundred top analysts, career officials feared for their jobs, especially those considered responsible for assessing the Soviet Union as a declining power rapidly falling behind the West in technology and economics.
According to some intelligence sources, Silberman expected to get the job of CIA director and flew into a rage when Reagan gave the job to his campaign director William Casey, who also was tied to the October Surprise operations. (The U.S. hostages in Iran were released immediately upon Ronald Reagan taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 1981.)
Silberman’s consolation prize was to be named a judge on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, where he helped frustrate the Iran-Contra investigation by overturning Oliver North’s conviction in 1990 and to this day is a defender of the neocons’ foreign policy -- as witnessed by his Sept. 11, 2009, ruling blocking civil lawsuits against U.S. government contractors implicated in torturing Iraqis.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here.
SOURCE w.links: https://consortiumnews.com/2009/092209.html
The BFEE was infuriated by reporting that exposed their criminality. Can’t have that come out, especially if one is part of the Secret Government doing all that illegal stuff. So, they found a reporter who was more in tune with their thinking, one Steven Emerson.
After promptly printing the same crapola in every rightwing rag that would touch it, Emerson managed to smear Robert Parry, Capt. Gary Sick, USN (ret.), Barbara Honegger and a whole bunch more good people who told the truth about what we now know was way past happenstance and coincidence and in the realm of enemy action cough Secret Government.
Like an amateur, though, Emerson didn’t count on Parry holding the trump card in the Journalism game. It’s called the truth.
October Reprisals
Investigators of alleged Iran deal face smears, legal threats
By John Canham-Clyne
FAIR.org, Nov. 1, 1993
The debate over the "October Surprise" has embroiled some of the country's most prominent journalists--none more deeply then Robert Parry and Steve Emerson. In the latest skirmish, Emerson has threatened to sue Parry--and Parry has produced documents showing that Emerson made false statements in his efforts to discredit Parry's reporting.
As previously reported in Extra!, Emerson for nearly two years has vigorously tried to debunk the "October Surprise," the allegation that the 1980 Reagan campaign cut a deal with Iran to keep U.S. hostages until after the election. Following publication of a House Foreign Affairs Committee Task Force report on the allegations, Emerson picked up the assault in an 8-page article for the inaugural issue (3/93) of the American Journalism Review (formerly Washington Journalism Review).
Assuming the role of media critic, Emerson covered much the same ground he had covered in an earlier New Republic article (11/18/91) and several Wall Street Journal op-eds. Essentially, Emerson repeated the Task Force's (and his own) conclusion that all the sources for the October Surprise are "fabricators."
Like his earlier work, Emerson's AJR piece was filled with personal slams against Parry, former Carter administration official Gary Sick and reporters Craig Unger and Martin Killian. In AJR, Emerson used a quote from former CIA officer and Village Voice reporter Frank Snepp to accuse Parry and Killian of "massaging sources to manufacture information." In the Wall Street Journal (1/14/93), Emerson even suggested that Congress confiscate the earnings from Sick's book October Surprise, to help defray the cost of the Task Force investigation.
According to Bob Parry and the Secret Service, however, it is Emerson who manufactures information.
SNIP...
Emerson has made similarly undocumented attacks on the work of Gary Sick. When Sick wrote to the New Republic (12/31/91) to complain that Emerson and Jesse Furman attacked his book without reading it, even though it was due to be published the next week, he was mocked in response: "As for telling the truth, we have counted at least 300 flat assertions that are factually incorrect (in Sick's book)." Sick's repeated requests to both Emerson and to the New Republic to produce this list have been met with silence.
SNIP...
But consider if Emerson applied the standards he uses for October Surprise sources to himself. What would he say about someone who proffered false information, threatened to sue someone who challenged that information, and when presented with incontrovertible proof, refused to apologize, instead resorting to further smears?
CONTINUED...
http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/october-reprisals/
Still, those who know me realize I don’t think everyone named “Bush” is in the BFEE, nor is every crony benefitting from the BFEE “all-bad.” Same holds for Judge Silberman. He is a complicated fellow who does what he does out of patriotism, it is said by his those who know him personally. What I’m questioning are his associations with people who trample the Constitution (called “Traitors” by Adlai Stevenson, Jr.) and actions on behalf of the Military Industrial Complex.
Here’s why I say Silberman’s not all bad: He was called on to read through J Edgar Hoover’s secret and confidential files after the FBI director went to become part of the Great Fingerprint File in the Sky. His verdict? Take the Hoov's name off the FBI Headquarters building:
Removing J. Edgar's Name
By Robert Novak
December 1, 2005
WASHINGTON -- On Halloween night, crusty conservative Judge Laurence H. Silberman had a scary tale to tell fellow right-wingers gathered for dinner at Washington's University Club. He told in more detail than ever before how J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director "allowed -- even offered -- the Bureau to be used by presidents for nakedly political purposes." He called for the director's name to be removed from the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington.
"In my view," Silberman said, "it is as if the Defense Department were named for Aaron Burr. Liberals and conservatives should unite to support legislation to accomplish this repudiation of a very sad chapter in American history." That concluded his speech, but it was not followed by overwhelming applause. Nor was there volunteered support for his mission.
SNIP…
Instructed by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 to report on secret files kept by Hoover (who died in 1972), Silberman told the Irregulars: "It was the single worst experience of my long governmental service." He said Hoover ordered special agents to report "privately to him any bits of dirt on political figures such as Martin Luther King and their families." Silberman said Hoover used this as "subtle blackmail to ensure his and the Bureau's power," adding: "I intend to take to my grave nasty bits of information on various political figures -- some still active."
Even worse than "dirt collection," Silberman continued, was Hoover's offering of Bureau files to presidents. He exempted only Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower from this use of FBI files, but said, "Lyndon Johnson was the most demanding."
SNIP…
During the 1968 campaign, Silberman said Johnson ordered FBI surveillance on Republican vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew, not about the bribery that eventually drove him out of office but to check whether he was in contact with South Vietnam's government. He said LBJ also used the FBI to spy on Democrats, including his aide Richard Goodwin, whom he inherited from President John F. Kennedy but suspected was too close to Robert F. Kennedy.
"I think it would be appropriate to introduce all new [FBI] recruits to the nature of the secret and confidential files of J. Edgar Hoover," Silberman concluded. "And in that connection this country -- and the Bureau -- would be well served if Hoover's name was removed from the Bureau's building."
CONTINUED…
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-12_1_05_RN.html
It’s almost understandable to see why Silberman is mad at those odd people like me who say “Bush lied America into war.” He’s good at the “Inventing Reality” game and thinks others are, too. But, we’re not. We really are angry because we can think for ourselves. And we can remember, no matter how much rot Corporate McPravda spews out via the airwaves or prints by the forestfull.
One important bit of "Lost History" that I remember quite vividly is that while Donald Regan, David Stockman, James Baker, Ed Meese and their chums were shepherding Trickle Down through Congress; Silberman, Richard “Diamonds” Allen, Bill Casey, and George Herbert Walker Bush were busy working behind the scenes to get America going whole-hog into a new Cold War with the USSR, picking up Brzezinski’s Holy War on the Soviets occupying Afghanistan and taking coughing up Ronnie Regan and Edwdard Teller's Star Wars program.
The Team-B (cough Cap Weinberger cough Robert Gates) approach was so good at it and the assorted requisite bribery of Congress (cough Duke Cunningham), corruption of the military procurement process (cough for whistleblower Bunnatine Greenhouse), and seret government agencies (cough Dusty Foggo) that it’s become accepted belief that the only way for America’s economy to prosper is through war (cough Tyler Cowen).
Mainstream media and the tee vee show punditry were not amused, however. So, the American people and those who care about Justice and Democracy and the Republic were left in the dark. And that’s exactly where Silberman and the War Party want us.
OP: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=edit&forum=1002&thread=6219026
Sorry about the book length, mmonk. I havenahad no time to make it short, let alone letter perfect. I very much appreciate you understanding.
