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First they came for ConsortiumNews, and I did not speak out—
Because I did not read ConsortiumNews.
Then they came for CounterPunch, and I did not speak out—
Because I did not read CounterPunch.
Then they came for Alternet, and I did not speak out—
Because I did not read Alternet.
Then they came for DU—and there was no one left to speak for Democracy.
With apologies to Rev. Niemöller.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a prominent Protestant pastor who emerged as an outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler and spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in concentration camps.
SOURCE: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392
544 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Response to uhnope (Reply #102)
Good writing is good editing. For instance:
How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations
By Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept, 24 Feb 2014
One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.
Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”
SNIP...
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. Here is one illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ document we’re publishing today:
SNIP...
No matter your views on Anonymous, “hacktivists” or garden-variety criminals, it is not difficult to see how dangerous it is to have secret government agencies being able to target any individuals they want – who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes – with these sorts of online, deception-based tactics of reputation destruction and disruption. There is a strong argument to make, as Jay Leiderman demonstrated in the Guardian in the context of the Paypal 14 hacktivist persecution, that the “denial of service” tactics used by hacktivists result in (at most) trivial damage (far less than the cyber-warfare tactics favored by the US and UK) and are far more akin to the type of political protest protected by the First Amendment.
CONTINUED w/links, sources, details...
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
Most importantly: Thank you for standing up for the good fight, Ghost in the Machine.
Response to Ghost in the Machine (Reply #148)
As Tim Minchin so aptly put it, the OP:
Keeps firing off clichés with startling precision
Like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition
Like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition
Sid
Sid
Sid
Sid
Sid
Response to SidDithers (Reply #254)
Welcome back.
Sid
like this I guess
Which was the point.
Get it?
From Consortium News...
Bush's Conspiracy to Riot
Miami 'Riot' Squad: Where Are They Now?
Those sulfurous turds and assholes acting in concert magnified their effect and helped sway an election.
Thank you for an outstanding handle on who gets served in the U.S. information environment. For those actually interested in the subject of the warmongering right wing tax avoiding media ownership and its impact on Democracy: Corporate McPravda owns the airwaves.
And Corporate Tee Vee is still where most Americans get most of their information, including their ideas about these two statues. Wonder what people would think were they to learn from the tee vee what pater and fils have really done with their power?
The Propaganda System That Has Helped Create a Permanent Overclass Is Over a Century in the Making
Pulling back the curtain on how intent the wealthiest Americans have been on establishing a propaganda tool to subvert democracy.
Wednesday, 17 April 2013 00:00
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, AlterNet | News Analysis
Where there is the possibility of democracy, there is the inevitability of elite insecurity. All through its history, democracy has been under a sustained attack by elite interests, political, economic, and cultural. There is a simple reason for this: democracy – as in true democracy – places power with people. In such circumstances, the few who hold power become threatened. With technological changes in modern history, with literacy and education, mass communication, organization and activism, elites have had to react to the changing nature of society – locally and globally.
From the late 19th century on, the “threats” to elite interests from the possibility of true democracy mobilized institutions, ideologies, and individuals in support of power. What began was a massive social engineering project with one objective: control. Through educational institutions, the social sciences, philanthropic foundations, public relations and advertising agencies, corporations, banks, and states, powerful interests sought to reform and protect their power from the potential of popular democracy.
SNIP...
The development of psychology, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines increasingly portrayed the “public” and the population as irrational beings incapable of making their own decisions. The premise was simple: if the population was driven by dangerous, irrational emotions, they needed to be kept out of power and ruled over by those who were driven by reason and rationality, naturally, those who were already in power.
The Princeton Radio Project, which began in the 1930s with Rockefeller Foundation funding, brought together many psychologists, social scientists, and “experts” armed with an interest in social control, mass communication, and propaganda. The Princeton Radio Project had a profound influence upon the development of a modern "democratic propaganda" in the United States and elsewhere in the industrialized world. It helped in establishing and nurturing the ideas, institutions, and individuals who would come to shape America’s “democratic propaganda” throughout the Cold War, a program fostered between the private corporations which own the media, advertising, marketing, and public relations industries, and the state itself.
CONTINUED...
http://truth-out.org/news/item/15784-the-propaganda-system-that-has-helped-create-a-permanent-overclass-is-over-a-century-in-the-making
Thankfully, to help spread light when the protectors of the First Amendment won't, Maria Galardin's TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) Radio. The podcast helps explain how we got here and what we need to do to move forward, starting with putting the "Public" into Airwaves again:
Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda
The Attack on Democracy
The 20th century, said Carey, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. Carey wrote that the people of the US have been subjected to an unparalleled, expensive, 3/4 century long propaganda effort designed to expand corporate rights by undermining democracy and destroying the unions. And, in his manuscript, unpublished during his life time, he described that history, going back to World War I and ending with the Reagan era. Carey covers the little known role of the US Chamber of Commerce in the McCarthy witch hunts of post WWII and shows how the continued campaign against "Big Government" plays an important role in bringing Reagan to power.
John Pilger called Carey "a second Orwell", Noam Chomsky dedicated his book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. And even though TUC Radio runs our documentary based on Carey's manuscript at least every two years and draws a huge response each time, Alex Carey is still unknown.
Given today's spotlight on corporations that may change. It is not only the Occupy movement that inspired me to present this program again at this time. By an amazing historic coincidence Bill Moyers and Charlie Cray of Greenpeace have just added the missing chapter to Carey's analysis. Carey's manuscript ends in 1988 when he committed suicide. Moyers and Cray begin with 1971 and bring the corporate propaganda project up to date.
This is a fairly complex production with many voices, historic sound clips, and source material. The program has been used by writers and students of history and propaganda. Alex Carey: Taking the Risk out of Democracy, Corporate Propaganda VS Freedom and Liberty with a foreword by Noam Chomsky was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1995.
SOURCE: http://tucradio.org/new.html
If one finds a moment, here's the first part (scroll down at the link for the second part) on Carey.
http://tucradio.org/AlexCarey_ONE.mp3
If you want Democracy and the Republic to flourish, it is vital for there to be more than a handful of companies providing "news." Democracy depends on it.
A media outlet owned and operated by the 1%?

I spent time on the Fukushima incident when it first happened and the snark distraction and diminishing was amazing. Fukushima and the industry is everything it's been "leaked" to be. Pun intended. Please try to ignore the ones where your valuable insight is derided. They make a hobby out of rudeness.
Just in case, a PSA:
DOE-STD-1128-98
Guide of Good Practices for Occupational Radiological Protection in Plutonium Facilities
EXCERPT...
4.2.3 Characteristics of Plutonium Contamination
There are few characteristics of plutonium contamination that are unique. Plutonium
contamination may be in many physical and chemical forms. (See Section 2.0 for the many
potential sources of plutonium contamination from combustion products of a plutonium fire
to radiolytic products from long-term storage.) [font color="blue"]The one characteristic that many believe is
unique to plutonium is its ability to migrate with no apparent motive force. Whether from
alpha recoil or some other mechanism, plutonium contamination, if not contained or
removed, will spread relatively rapidly throughout an area. [/font color]
SOURCE (PDF file format): http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/07/f2/doe-std-1128-98_cn2.pdf
Some scientists recently reported plutonium is interesting, magnets-wise.
Neutrons Find 'Missing' Magnetism Of Plutonium
By News Staff Science20.com | July 19th 2015 02:52 PM
New research has confirmed plutonium's magnetism, which scientists have long theorized but have never been able to experimentally observe.
Plutonium was first produced in 1940 and its unstable nucleus allows it to undergo fission, making it useful for nuclear fuels as well as for nuclear weapons. Much less known, however, is that the electronic cloud surrounding the plutonium nucleus is equally unstable and makes plutonium the most electronically complex element in the periodic table, with intriguingly intricate properties for a simple elemental metal.
While conventional theories have successfully explained plutonium's complex structural properties, they also predict that plutonium should order magnetically. This is in stark contrast with experiments, which had found no evidence for magnetic order in plutonium.
Finally, after seven decades, this scientific mystery on plutonium's "missing" magnetism has been resolved. Using neutron scattering, researchers from the Department of Energy's Los Alamos and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories have made the first direct measurements of a unique characteristic of plutonium's fluctuating magnetism. In a recent paper in the journal Science Advances, Marc Janoschek from Los Alamos, the paper's lead scientist, explains that plutonium is not devoid of magnetism, but in fact its magnetism is just in a constant state of flux, making it nearly impossible to detect.
"Plutonium sort of exists between two extremes in its electronic configuration--in what we call a quantum mechanical superposition," Janoschek said. "Think of the one extreme where the electrons are completely localized around the plutonium ion, which leads to a magnetic moment. But then the electrons go to the other extreme where they become delocalized and are no longer associated with the same ion anymore."
Using neutron measurements made on the ARCS instrument at ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, Janoschek and his team determined that the fluctuations have different numbers of electrons in plutonium's outer valence shell--an observation that also explains abnormal changes in plutonium's volume in its different phases.
CONTINUED...
http://www.science20.com/news_articles/neutrons_find_missing_magnetism_of_plutonium-156505
I didn't learn any of that from television, that's for sure. I learned about it online, like reading "coal ash adds vastly more environmental radioactivity than nuclear waste." I think that's bullshit, which the story you linked to alluded:
*Editor's Note (posted 12/30/08): In response to some concerns raised by readers, a change has been made to this story. The sentence marked with an asterisk was changed from "In fact, fly ash—a by-product from burning coal for power—and other coal waste contains up to 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste" to "In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy." Our source for this statistic is Dana Christensen, an associate lab director for energy and engineering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as 1978 paper in Science authored by J.P. McBride and colleagues, also of ORNL.
As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
There were books and warnings written about that plant for decades. Nothing was done because the cry-wolf behavior on every single nuclear plant everywhere by luddites have made people inured to actual concerns, along with the Japanese "fall in line" culture, and a manifest cheapness on the part of Tokyo Electric.
The very statement that you're making "Nukes" indicates that mentally you're equating nuclear power with bombs. It's absurd.
And of course there are people still professing the truth. Modern nuclear power generation plant designs are self-stopping. And the worse nuclear "disaster" in the U.S. exposed people to 80μSv of radiation around 3 mile island - the equivalent of a round trip flight from San Francisco to New York.
But... ooooh boogie boogie boogie. Let's breathe in that coal ash instead. That'll be healthy, I'm sure. 
- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community
To the genocide of 6 million people either.
Or maybe you don't know?
Next thing ya know, we'll learn all about Batboy hiding out with Hitler clones inside a secret passage at Confederate bastion Stone Mountain....
Show where I'm wrong if you disagree. Here's a quick example for you to use and refute my "case" from 2007:
Know your BFEE: Spawn of Wall Street and the Third Reich
Members of the Bush Family Evil Empire -- the public face of the War Party that has hijacked America -- embody the spawn of the Fourth Reich and Wall Street.
[font size="2"]Warmonger by John Carroll.[/font size]
Like the NAZI gangster warmongers they are, the BFEE's "work" serves only to enrich their cronies and their "actions" penure, enslave and kill innocent people.
How they got that way:
Allen Dulles, the NAZIs, and the CIA
By Cory Panshin
March 2005
Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg once stated that "The Dulles brothers were traitors." Some historians believe that Allen Dulles became head of the newly formed CIA in large part to cover up his treasonous behavior and that of his clients.
-- Christian Dewar, Making a Killing
Just before his death, James Jesus Angleton, the legendary chief of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, was a bitter man. He felt betrayed by the people he had worked for all his life. In the end, he had come to realize that they were never really interested in American ideals of "freedom" and "democracy." They really only wanted "absolute power."
Angleton told author Joseph Trento that the reason he had gotten the counterintelligence job in the first place was by agreeing not to submit "sixty of Allen Dulles' closest friends" to a polygraph test concerning their business deals with the Nazis. In his end-of-life despair, Angleton assumed that he would see all his old companions again "in hell."
-- Michael Hasty, Paranoid Shift
EXCERPT…
Allen Welsh Dulles was born to privilege and a tradition of public service. He was the grandson of one secretary of state and the nephew of another. But by the time he graduated from Princeton in 1914, the robber baron era of American history was coming to an an end, ushered out by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act -- which had been used in 1911 to break up Standard Oil -- and by the institution of the progressive income tax in 1913. The ruling elite was starting to view government less as their own private preserve and more as an unwanted intrusion on their ability to conduct business as usual. That shift of loyalties in itself may account for many of the paradoxical aspects of Dulles's career.
Dulles entered the diplomatic service after college and served as a State Department delegate to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which brought a formal end to World War I. The Versailles Treaty which came out of this conference included a provision making it illegal to sell arms to Germany. This displeased the powerful DuPont family, and they put pressure on the delegates to allow them to opt out. It was Allen Dulles who finally gave them the assurances they wanted that their transactions with Germany would be "winked at."
Dulles remained a diplomat through the early 1920's, spending part of that time in Berlin. However, he left government service in 1926 for the greener pastures of private business, becoming a Wall Street lawyer with the same firm as his older brother, John Foster Dulles.
By the middle 20's, Germany had started recovering from the effects of the war and its postwar economic collapse, and the great German industrial firms were looking like attractive investment opportunities for wealthy Americans. W.A. Harriman & Co., formed in 1919 by Averell Harriman (son of railroad baron E.H. Hariman) and George Herbert Walker, had led the way in directing American money to German companies and had opened a Berlin branch as early as 1922, when Germany was still in chaos. At that time, Averell Harriman traveled to Europe and made contact with the powerful Thyssen family of steel magnates. It was to be a long-lasting and fateful partnership.
CONTINUED…
http://www.enter.net/~torve/trogholm/secret/rightroots/...
How they stay that way:
The CIA and Nazi War Criminals
National Security Archive Posts Secret CIA History
Released Under Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 146
Edited by Tamara Feinstein
February 4, 2005
Washington D.C., February 4, 2005 - Today the National Security Archive posted the CIA's secret documentary history of the U.S government's relationship with General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army's intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II. At the end of the war, Gehlen established a close relationship with the U.S. and successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals. The use of Gehlen's group, according to the CIA history, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, was a "double edged sword" that "boosted the Warsaw Pact's propaganda efforts" and "suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB."
The declassified "SECRET RelGER" two-volume history was compiled by CIA historian Kevin Ruffner and presented in 1999 by CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jack Downing to the German intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) in remembrance of "the new and close ties" formed during post-war Germany to mark the fiftieth year of CIA-West German cooperation. This history was declassified in 2002 as a result of the work of The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) and contains 97 key documents from various agencies.
This posting comes in the wake of public grievances lodged by members of the IWG that the CIA has not fully complied with the mandate of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and is continuing to withhold hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation related to their work. (Note 1) In interviews with the New York Times, three public members of the IWG said:
• "I think that the CIA has defied the law, and in so doing has also trivialized the Holocaust, thumbed its nose at the survivors of the Holocaust and also at the Americans who gave their lives in the effort to defeat the Nazis in World War II." - Former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman
• "I can only say that the posture the CIA has taken differs from all the other agencies that have been involved, and that's not a position we can accept." - Washington lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste
• "Too much has been secret for too long. The CIA has not complied with the statute." - Former federal prosecutor Thomas H. Baer
The IWG was established in January 11, 1999 and has overseen the declassification of about eight million pages of documents from multiple government agencies. Its mandate expires at the end of March 2005.
CONTINUED w LINKS…
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB146/index.htm
Who would want that NAZI records law to be ignored?
Here’s where the Bush Crime Family comes in:
Nazis and Bush family history:
Government investigated Bush family's financing of Hitler
By Carla Binion
December 21, 2000
This article on Nazis in the Republican party was originally published in Online Journal on 1/28/00. However, the following includes additional information regarding George H. W. Bush's father, Prescott, and his maternal grandfather, George Herbert (Bert) Walker, and the fact that the U. S. government investigated their financing of Adolf Hitler.
One book referenced here, Christopher Simpson's "Blowback," was praised by journalist Seymour Hersh as "the ultimate book about the worst kind of cold war thinking." Nora Levin, Director, Holocaust Archive, Gratz College, said "The full story of this country's shameful, cynical collaboration with Nazi criminals has not been told until now with the publication of Simpson's book." Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman said, 'Blowback' is a must read for anyone who wants to understand postwar policy on Nazi war criminals and the cold war."
In another Simpson book, "The Splendid Blonde Beast," the author wrote about George H. W. Bush's father, Prescott, and his maternal grandfather, George Herbert Walker. Both Bert Walker and Prescott Bush were powerful financial supporters of Adolf Hitler.
Walker was president of Union Banking Corporation, a firm that traded with Germany and helped German industrialists consolidate Hitler's political power. Simpson says Union Banking became a Nazi money-laundering machine.
Walker helped take over North American operations of Hamburg-Amerika Line, a shipping line and cover for I. G. Farben's Nazi espionage unit in the U. S. Hamburg-Amerika smuggled in German agents, and brought in money for bribing American politicians to support Hitler. A 1934 congressional investigation showed Hamburg-Amerika subsidized Nazi propaganda efforts in the U. S.
CONTINUED…
http://www.govsux.com/nazisandbushfamilyhistory.html
Gee. A certain class of people seem to benefit most from war. Here's a treasure trove of treason history:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/nazi.html
The class Allen Dulles and Prescott Bush worked for. And the Bushes worked for THEM.
In answer to a question during his press conference of Feb. 14, 2007, Gov. George W Bush said: “Money trumps peace.”
Q: A lot of our allies in Europe do a lot of business with Iran. So I wonder what your thoughts are about how you further tighten the financial pressure on Iran, in particular, if it also means economic pain for a lot of our allies.
BUSH: It's an interesting question. One of the problems, not specifically on this issue, just in general, that - let's put it this way: Money trumps peace, sometimes.
In other words, commercial interests are very powerful interests throughout the world. And part of the issue in convincing people to put sanctions on a specific country is to convince them that it's in the world's interest that they forego their own financial interest.
And that's why sometimes it's tough to get tough economic sanctions on countries, and I'm not making any comment about any particular country, but you touched on a very interesting point.
You know - so, therefore, we're constantly working with nations to convince them that what really matters in the long run is to have the environment so peace can flourish.
In the Iranian case, I firmly believe that, if they were to have a weapon, it would make it difficult for peace to flourish, and therefore I am working with people to make sure that that concern trumps whatever commercial interests may be preventing governments from acting.
I make no specific accusation with that statement. It's a broad statement. But it's an accurate assessment of what sometimes can halt multilateral diplomacy from working.
SOURCE:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/stor ...
[font color="red"][font size="6"]“Money trumps peace.”[/font size][/font color]
That does explain a lot. “Money trumps peace.”
In fact, that explains everything about everything in regards to the BFEE and their cronies in the War Party.
To them, money and power are everything.
Isn’t that the definition of a warmonger?
It also is the spirit of a NAZI.
The only thing that can stop them from becoming the Fourth Reich is...
... the Truth and We the People.
So, besides ignoring "Godwin's Law," where am I wrong, MADem?
Response to zappaman (Reply #7)
I don't have no damned fleas!
To defend the use of them?
Last edited Sat Jul 25, 2015, 12:04 PM - Edit history (1)
Putting words into people's mouths.
So honest of you.
Is there a threat?
Now I can exhale! 
It's what this disgusting OP needs.
Sid
Last edited Fri Jul 24, 2015, 12:13 PM - Edit history (1)
Sid
if i knew how to make that accent mark, i'd type touche!
Before he went to the seminary, he was in the Imperial German Navy, not to be confused with the Kriegsmarine:
MARTIN NIEMÖLLER: BIOGRAPHY
EXCERPT...
The son of Lutheran pastor Heinrich Niemöller, Martin Niemöller was born in the Westphalian town of Lippstadt, Germany, on January 14, 1892. In 1910 he became a cadet in the Imperial German Navy. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Niemöller was assigned to a U-Boat, of which he was eventually appointed the commander. Under the stipulations of the armistice of November 11, 1918, that ended hostilities in World War I, Niemöller and other commanders were ordered to turn over their U-Boats to England. Along with many others, Niemöller refused to obey this order, and was, as a consequence, discharged from the Navy.
In 1920, he decided to follow the path of his father and began seminary training at the University of Münster. He married Else Bruner on April 20, 1919. The couple had 6 children.
Niemöller's pro-monarchist convictions and nationalism made him critical of the Weimar Republic, which he perceived to be weak and vulnerable to a Communist uprising. Because he believed that the Republic, led by those who signed the Treaty of Versailles, had crippled Germany, he supported the unsuccessful Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch that aimed to overthrow the government in 1920. At this time Niemöller had been a member of an organization of right-wing students called the Academic Defense Corps (Freikorps), which was disbanded and disarmed on April 23, 1920, after the failure of the Kapp putsch.
As inflation and economic and political turmoil increased in Germany during 1922, Niemöller took a part-time job laying tracks for the railroads while continuing his seminary studies. In 1923, Niemöller began working with the Lutheran Home Mission of Westphalia, an organization which oversaw the social welfare activities of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Westphalia. In 1931, he resigned from this position and became the junior pastor of Saint Anne's Church, located in a wealthy and much sought-after parish in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem.
Niemöller's sermons reflected his strong nationalist sentiment. He felt that reparations, democracy, and foreign influence had led to damaging social fragmentation and an overemphasis on the individual in German society. Niemöller believed that Germany needed a strong leader to promote national unity and honor. When Hitler and the National Socialist Party emerged, touting nationalist slogans and advocating autonomy for private worship of the Christian faith, Niemöller voted for the Nazis—both in the 1924 Prussian state elections and in the final national parliamentary elections of March 1933.
Hitler espoused the importance of Christianity to German nationality and Christianity's role in a renewal of national morality and ethics, leading Niemöller to enthusiastically welcome the Third Reich. Niemöller later confessed that even Hitler's antisemitism reflected a more extreme version of his own prejudice at that time.
Niemöller's conflicts with National Socialism emerged out of his opposition to the German Christians, a pro-Nazi faction within the German Protestant Church that sought to apply Nazi racial dogma to church membership in such a way as to bar so-called non-Aryans (people considered Jewish under Nazi racial laws) from the ministry and from religious teaching positions.
The ideology of the German Christians was expressed in the speech of one of their leaders, Dr. Reinhold Krause, at the 1933 Sports Palace Rally. Depicting Martin Luther as a militant symbol for the preservation of German race and culture, the German Christians embraced Nazi racial ideology and demanded that all Jewish elements, including the Old Testament, be excluded from Christian theology. This rally was seen as blasphemous and led to a radical drop in support for the German Christians. But attacks on “non-Aryan” church members had already led Niemöller and others to establish the Pastors Emergency League (PEL) in September 1933. The PEL opposed the introduction of racialized criteria for clergy and combated the German Christian agenda.
CONTINUED...
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007391
Like somebody said, it's complicated.
I'm tempted to rec it myself. 
Original DU Thread from July 1, 2006:
Mexicans aren’t America’s immigration problem. NAZIs are.
And that taboo forms the evil heart of our nation’s secret government—the fact Nazis helped form the modern national security state. This fundamental secret has been kept from America’s people for nearly 60 years. Isn't it about time you (not you, DU) learned the Truth?
America has been influenced by Nazis, Nazi sympathizers and worse since the CIA allowed enabled them to escape justice after World War II.
CIA-Nazi Link Grows Clearer as More Documents Come to Light
Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann stands trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Apparently, the CIA knew of his whereabouts as early as 1958.
Ron Kampeas
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
WASHINGTON
A former Nazi rose to the highest ranks of a Western intelligence agency - and was a Soviet mole. A lead to Adolf Eichmann was ignored. A spy whose pathological lies made him useless, but who still escaped prosecution for war crimes.
These are among the revelations found among some 8 million pages of documents released here Tuesday that deal with German and Japanese war crimes, including 27,000 pages that detail the relationship after World War II between U.S. government agencies and suspected Nazis war criminals.
The message threading the documents was clear: The price one pays for consorting with evil men far outweighs the return.
"Using very bad people can have very bad consequences," Elizabeth Holtzman, a former U.S. congresswoman and a member of the Interagency Working Group that released the documents, said at a news conference last Tuesday at the National Archives. The group was established in 1999 to declassify rooms full of documents related to Nazi war crimes.
The mandate was later extended to Japanese war crimes.
CONTINUED…
https://web.archive.org/web/20060621170601/http://www.jewishexponent.com/ViewArticle.asp?ArtID=3617
This guy helped murder MILLIONS and people in the CIA helped him escape justice:
Read more from the records just released from the CIA’s files to the National Archives.
This big declassification of America’s darkest secret—CIA files kept hidden for 60 years—chronicle the CIA’s dependence on the NAZI war criminals, enlisted to fight Godless Communism. Gee. We became Satan’s bedfellows to fight the commies.
Please consider: The Nazis knew what awaited them at the hands of the Soviets. So, they cooked up plans to surrender to the United States. If they promised to help in the fight against the Soviets, they knew they would be welcomed by the West, find shelter and sooner rather than later, and in direct contradiction to the orders of President Harry S Truman, the Nazis would be welcomed in the West, or at least in High Society, as “ex-Nazis.”
The CIA's History Problem is Our History Problem
By David Wallace
Fri Jun 16, 9:22 PM ET
The author David Lowenthal once noted that the "past is a foreign country." The past might be better described as being more like a moving target - always in transition and susceptible (and vulnerable) to becoming unrecognizable to what we once believed. And more often than not new revelations are disorientating and troubling.
EXCERPT…
Such is the case with recent news accounts in the Washington Post and the New York Times that in the late 1950s the CIA knew that Adolf Eichmann was living in Argentina and had a pretty close pseudonym for him (Clemens instead of the actual alias of Klement), but did nothing to bring him to justice. That the CIA sought the cooperation and protection of Nazis, even those guilty of war crimes, after World War Two to serve its Cold War struggles is not news. But the extent of these relationships and the depths the CIA went through to protect them is news. These disclosures have been made possible through the ongoing efforts of the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), launched over eight years ago by the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (Public Law 105-246). The key that unlocked this unsavory history has been the unparalleled access granted to the IWG into formerly secret government records and archives.
Concern over these disclosures extend beyond the sad facts surfaced by the IWG: such as official protection of Nazis residing in the United States and the CIA's post-war use of top Eichmann aides. They also include the entirely unconscionable fact that it has taken generations for the CIA to disclose this information, and only did so after a special act of Congress supplemented by years long battles to protect them from public knowledge. IWG member Thomas H. Baer pointed to such battles when he thanked the CIA for finally coming clean this past week. However, coming clean occurred only after "reversal of policy of thinly veiled noncompliance" with the IWG's legal mandate and the ongoing efforts of members of Congress and (some) IWG members and staff in making an "ironclad case decrying CIAs misinterpretation of its obligations."
Why has the CIA taken so long to open such records and archives? And do the excuses proffered around protecting national security really hold any credible value? I think the answer to the second question must be no, of course not. As to the first question, that is a trickier one, but one must look beyond the legal loopholes that protect secret information for such inordinate periods and look to see what agendas are at play. Clearly one agenda is to provide a simplistic and comforting (and at times woefully inaccurate) past as a means of enabling an ignorant, but strongly held, patriotism as a form of social glue that (kind of) holds society together. But a simplistic and comforting and inaccurate past can only be realized through the unreasonable, though legal, controls granted to the CIA over its historical records and archives. And it is in these seemingly rationally derived controls that the past itself can be held hostage.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-wallace/the-cias-history-problem-_b_23206.html
A good overview of the historical record from the Federation of American Scientists shows the CIA protected Adolf Eichmann by not revealing where he was to Allied investigators searching for war criminals and mass murderers. For those unfamiliar with Eichmann, he was one of the architects of the Holocaust, playing a major role in the deaths of millions of people.
Allowing Eichmann to escape justice and head to a safe haven in Bolivia was in direct contradiction to President Harry S Truman’s orders that no amnesty would be given to NAZI war criminals. Later on, our spies wouild not just be pals with NAZIs, our spies work for them. For proof, look around.
What’s worse. A bunch of the NAZIs were Commie spies. We were shafted, to put it mildly, by the same Satan.
Former longtime CIA director of counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton told author Joseph Trento his greatest regret in his job was not giving lie-detector tests to "Allen Dulles and 60 of his closest friends." He said he thought more than a few were traitors and expected to see them all in hell one day.
Within the confines of (Angleton’s) remarkable life were most of America’s secrets. “You know how I got to be in charge of counterintelligence? I agreed not to polygraph or require detailed background checks on Allen Dulles and 60 of his closest friends... They were afraid that their own business dealings with Hitler’s pals would come out. They were too arrogant to believe that the Russians would discover it all. . . . You know, the CIA got tens of thousands of brave people killed. . . We played with lives as if we owned them. We gave false hope. We - I - so misjudged what happened."
CONTINUED...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SSangleton.htm
Writers like Mae Brussell, Christopher Simpson, Martin Lee, Linda Hunt, Carla Binion and Robert Parry and all people who are familiar with Operation PAPERCLIP have known this for decades, but most Americans are just beginning to learn about the close relationship between post-World War II United States Government and the Third Reich.
Principal among these agencies was the newborn CIA. Here’s what the agency and your government did to help war criminals, murderers of Americans and the architects of the Holocaust escape Justice, according to this month’s release of official CIA documents that had been kept classified for 60 years:
Allen Dulles, the NAZIs, and the CIA
Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg once stated that "The Dulles brothers were traitors." Some historians believe that Allen Dulles became head of the newly formed CIA in large part to cover up his treasonous behavior and that of his clients.
-- Christian Dewar, Making a Killing
Just before his death, James Jesus Angleton, the legendary chief of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, was a bitter man. He felt betrayed by the people he had worked for all his life. In the end, he had come to realize that they were never really interested in American ideals of "freedom" and "democracy." They really only wanted "absolute power."
Angleton told author Joseph Trento that the reason he had gotten the counterintelligence job in the first place was by agreeing not to submit "sixty of Allen Dulles' closest friends" to a polygraph test concerning their business deals with the Nazis. In his end-of-life despair, Angleton assumed that he would see all his old companions again "in hell."
-- Michael Hasty, Paranoid Shift
EXCERPT…
Allen Welsh Dulles was born to privilege and a tradition of public service. He was the grandson of one secretary of state and the nephew of another. But by the time he graduated from Princeton in 1914, the robber baron era of American history was coming to an an end, ushered out by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act -- which had been used in 1911 to break up Standard Oil -- and by the institution of the progressive income tax in 1913. The ruling elite was starting to view government less as their own private preserve and more as an unwanted intrusion on their ability to conduct business as usual. That shift of loyalties in itself may account for many of the paradoxical aspects of Dulles's career.
Dulles entered the diplomatic service after college and served as a State Department delegate to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which brought a formal end to World War I. The Versailles Treaty which came out of this conference included a provision making it illegal to sell arms to Germany. This displeased the powerful DuPont family, and they put pressure on the delegates to allow them to opt out. It was Allen Dulles who finally gave them the assurances they wanted that their transactions with Germany would be "winked at."
Dulles remained a diplomat through the early 1920's, spending part of that time in Berlin. However, he left government service in 1926 for the greener pastures of private business, becoming a Wall Street lawyer with the same firm as his older brother, John Foster Dulles.
By the middle 20's, Germany had started recovering from the effects of the war and its postwar economic collapse, and the great German industrial firms were looking like attractive investment opportunities for wealthy Americans. W.A. Harriman & Co., formed in 1919 by Averell Harriman (son of railroad baron E.H. Hariman) and George Herbert Walker, had led the way in directing American money to German companies and had opened a Berlin branch as early as 1922, when Germany was still in chaos. At that time, Averell Harriman traveled to Europe and made contact with the powerful Thyssen family of steel magnates. It was to be a long-lasting and fateful partnership.
CONTINUED…
http://www.enter.net/~torve/trogholm/secret/rightroots/...
These are the ties that bind. They go from Allen Dulle’s business ties to Prescott Bush and on through later to his CIA ties to George Herbert Walker Bush and from there to the Smirkelgrüber.
By extension, these records also show the fundamental secret of our nation’s government is the close alliance formed between the Nazis of World War 2 days and their partners in the CIA and other U.S. and Western intelligence agencies today still form the core of the nation’s clandestine national security apparatus.
So. The Nazis couldn’t beat the United States and the Allies in World War II. They surrendered to the USA and promised to work for us. Instead, they influenced, if not took over, key offices of the national security state.
Today, we see the fruits of their labor: The United States makes war on an innocent country for power and profit. The Constitution of the United States is trampled and redacted. And for most of the people of the United States, they haven’t got a clue.
Please tell me, who really won World War ?
The fact is: No one has done more to destroy America—the country, the Constitution, the We the People—than George W. Bush. Certainly not the Commies, in the form of the bloated and evil Soviet and Red Chinese threats and not even the Nazis of World War II with all their evil, have come anywhere near close to conquering the red, white and blue.
And George W Bush is the personification of the convergence of Post World War II Pro War Forces, from Wall Street to Reichstagfeuer to Cold War to BCCI to 911. And while Bush may be the incarnation of all things treasonous, he is just the visible face of the monster.
[font size="6"][font color="green"]Lot there for one to chew on, with links and sources identified so readers can learn even more. So, show where I'm wrong, SidDithers of DU. I'll be glad to apologize and correct my mistake. So, show.[/font color][/font size]
Mexicans aren’t America’s immigration problem. NAZIs are.
And that taboo forms the evil heart of our nation’s secret government—the fact Nazis helped form the modern national security state. This fundamental secret has been kept from America’s people for nearly 60 years. Isn't it about time you (not you, DU) learned the Truth?
America has been influenced by Nazis, Nazi sympathizers and worse since the CIA allowed enabled them to escape justice after World War II.
CIA-Nazi Link Grows Clearer as More Documents Come to Light
Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann stands trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Apparently, the CIA knew of his whereabouts as early as 1958.
Ron Kampeas
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
WASHINGTON
A former Nazi rose to the highest ranks of a Western intelligence agency - and was a Soviet mole. A lead to Adolf Eichmann was ignored. A spy whose pathological lies made him useless, but who still escaped prosecution for war crimes.
These are among the revelations found among some 8 million pages of documents released here Tuesday that deal with German and Japanese war crimes, including 27,000 pages that detail the relationship after World War II between U.S. government agencies and suspected Nazis war criminals.
The message threading the documents was clear: The price one pays for consorting with evil men far outweighs the return.
"Using very bad people can have very bad consequences," Elizabeth Holtzman, a former U.S. congresswoman and a member of the Interagency Working Group that released the documents, said at a news conference last Tuesday at the National Archives. The group was established in 1999 to declassify rooms full of documents related to Nazi war crimes.
The mandate was later extended to Japanese war crimes.
CONTINUED…
https://web.archive.org/web/20060621170601/http://www.jewishexponent.com/ViewArticle.asp?ArtID=3617
This guy helped murder MILLIONS and people in the CIA helped him escape justice:
Read more from the records just released from the CIA’s files to the National Archives.
This big declassification of America’s darkest secret—CIA files kept hidden for 60 years—chronicle the CIA’s dependence on the NAZI war criminals, enlisted to fight Godless Communism. Gee. We became Satan’s bedfellows to fight the commies.
Please consider: The Nazis knew what awaited them at the hands of the Soviets. So, they cooked up plans to surrender to the United States. If they promised to help in the fight against the Soviets, they knew they would be welcomed by the West, find shelter and sooner rather than later, and in direct contradiction to the orders of President Harry S Truman, the Nazis would be welcomed in the West, or at least in High Society, as “ex-Nazis.”
The CIA's History Problem is Our History Problem
By David Wallace
Fri Jun 16, 9:22 PM ET
The author David Lowenthal once noted that the "past is a foreign country." The past might be better described as being more like a moving target - always in transition and susceptible (and vulnerable) to becoming unrecognizable to what we once believed. And more often than not new revelations are disorientating and troubling.
EXCERPT…
Such is the case with recent news accounts in the Washington Post and the New York Times that in the late 1950s the CIA knew that Adolf Eichmann was living in Argentina and had a pretty close pseudonym for him (Clemens instead of the actual alias of Klement), but did nothing to bring him to justice. That the CIA sought the cooperation and protection of Nazis, even those guilty of war crimes, after World War Two to serve its Cold War struggles is not news. But the extent of these relationships and the depths the CIA went through to protect them is news. These disclosures have been made possible through the ongoing efforts of the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), launched over eight years ago by the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (Public Law 105-246). The key that unlocked this unsavory history has been the unparalleled access granted to the IWG into formerly secret government records and archives.
Concern over these disclosures extend beyond the sad facts surfaced by the IWG: such as official protection of Nazis residing in the United States and the CIA's post-war use of top Eichmann aides. They also include the entirely unconscionable fact that it has taken generations for the CIA to disclose this information, and only did so after a special act of Congress supplemented by years long battles to protect them from public knowledge. IWG member Thomas H. Baer pointed to such battles when he thanked the CIA for finally coming clean this past week. However, coming clean occurred only after "reversal of policy of thinly veiled noncompliance" with the IWG's legal mandate and the ongoing efforts of members of Congress and (some) IWG members and staff in making an "ironclad case decrying CIAs misinterpretation of its obligations."
Why has the CIA taken so long to open such records and archives? And do the excuses proffered around protecting national security really hold any credible value? I think the answer to the second question must be no, of course not. As to the first question, that is a trickier one, but one must look beyond the legal loopholes that protect secret information for such inordinate periods and look to see what agendas are at play. Clearly one agenda is to provide a simplistic and comforting (and at times woefully inaccurate) past as a means of enabling an ignorant, but strongly held, patriotism as a form of social glue that (kind of) holds society together. But a simplistic and comforting and inaccurate past can only be realized through the unreasonable, though legal, controls granted to the CIA over its historical records and archives. And it is in these seemingly rationally derived controls that the past itself can be held hostage.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-wallace/the-cias-history-problem-_b_23206.html
A good overview of the historical record from the Federation of American Scientists shows the CIA protected Adolf Eichmann by not revealing where he was to Allied investigators searching for war criminals and mass murderers. For those unfamiliar with Eichmann, he was one of the architects of the Holocaust, playing a major role in the deaths of millions of people.
Allowing Eichmann to escape justice and head to a safe haven in Bolivia was in direct contradiction to President Harry S Truman’s orders that no amnesty would be given to NAZI war criminals. Later on, our spies wouild not just be pals with NAZIs, our spies work for them. For proof, look around.
What’s worse. A bunch of the NAZIs were Commie spies. We were shafted, to put it mildly, by the same Satan.
Former longtime CIA director of counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton told author Joseph Trento his greatest regret in his job was not giving lie-detector tests to "Allen Dulles and 60 of his closest friends." He said he thought more than a few were traitors and expected to see them all in hell one day.
Within the confines of (Angleton’s) remarkable life were most of America’s secrets. “You know how I got to be in charge of counterintelligence? I agreed not to polygraph or require detailed background checks on Allen Dulles and 60 of his closest friends... They were afraid that their own business dealings with Hitler’s pals would come out. They were too arrogant to believe that the Russians would discover it all. . . . You know, the CIA got tens of thousands of brave people killed. . . We played with lives as if we owned them. We gave false hope. We - I - so misjudged what happened."
CONTINUED...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SSangleton.htm
Writers like Mae Brussell, Christopher Simpson, Martin Lee, Linda Hunt, Carla Binion and Robert Parry and all people who are familiar with Operation PAPERCLIP have known this for decades, but most Americans are just beginning to learn about the close relationship between post-World War II United States Government and the Third Reich.
Principal among these agencies was the newborn CIA. Here’s what the agency and your government did to help war criminals, murderers of Americans and the architects of the Holocaust escape Justice, according to this month’s release of official CIA documents that had been kept classified for 60 years:
Allen Dulles, the NAZIs, and the CIA
Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg once stated that "The Dulles brothers were traitors." Some historians believe that Allen Dulles became head of the newly formed CIA in large part to cover up his treasonous behavior and that of his clients.
-- Christian Dewar, Making a Killing
Just before his death, James Jesus Angleton, the legendary chief of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, was a bitter man. He felt betrayed by the people he had worked for all his life. In the end, he had come to realize that they were never really interested in American ideals of "freedom" and "democracy." They really only wanted "absolute power."
Angleton told author Joseph Trento that the reason he had gotten the counterintelligence job in the first place was by agreeing not to submit "sixty of Allen Dulles' closest friends" to a polygraph test concerning their business deals with the Nazis. In his end-of-life despair, Angleton assumed that he would see all his old companions again "in hell."
-- Michael Hasty, Paranoid Shift
EXCERPT…
Allen Welsh Dulles was born to privilege and a tradition of public service. He was the grandson of one secretary of state and the nephew of another. But by the time he graduated from Princeton in 1914, the robber baron era of American history was coming to an an end, ushered out by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act -- which had been used in 1911 to break up Standard Oil -- and by the institution of the progressive income tax in 1913. The ruling elite was starting to view government less as their own private preserve and more as an unwanted intrusion on their ability to conduct business as usual. That shift of loyalties in itself may account for many of the paradoxical aspects of Dulles's career.
Dulles entered the diplomatic service after college and served as a State Department delegate to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which brought a formal end to World War I. The Versailles Treaty which came out of this conference included a provision making it illegal to sell arms to Germany. This displeased the powerful DuPont family, and they put pressure on the delegates to allow them to opt out. It was Allen Dulles who finally gave them the assurances they wanted that their transactions with Germany would be "winked at."
Dulles remained a diplomat through the early 1920's, spending part of that time in Berlin. However, he left government service in 1926 for the greener pastures of private business, becoming a Wall Street lawyer with the same firm as his older brother, John Foster Dulles.
By the middle 20's, Germany had started recovering from the effects of the war and its postwar economic collapse, and the great German industrial firms were looking like attractive investment opportunities for wealthy Americans. W.A. Harriman & Co., formed in 1919 by Averell Harriman (son of railroad baron E.H. Hariman) and George Herbert Walker, had led the way in directing American money to German companies and had opened a Berlin branch as early as 1922, when Germany was still in chaos. At that time, Averell Harriman traveled to Europe and made contact with the powerful Thyssen family of steel magnates. It was to be a long-lasting and fateful partnership.
CONTINUED…
http://www.enter.net/~torve/trogholm/secret/rightroots/...
These are the ties that bind. They go from Allen Dulle’s business ties to Prescott Bush and on through later to his CIA ties to George Herbert Walker Bush and from there to the Smirkelgrüber.
By extension, these records also show the fundamental secret of our nation’s government is the close alliance formed between the Nazis of World War 2 days and their partners in the CIA and other U.S. and Western intelligence agencies today still form the core of the nation’s clandestine national security apparatus.
So. The Nazis couldn’t beat the United States and the Allies in World War II. They surrendered to the USA and promised to work for us. Instead, they influenced, if not took over, key offices of the national security state.
Today, we see the fruits of their labor: The United States makes war on an innocent country for power and profit. The Constitution of the United States is trampled and redacted. And for most of the people of the United States, they haven’t got a clue.
Please tell me, who really won World War ?
The fact is: No one has done more to destroy America—the country, the Constitution, the We the People—than George W. Bush. Certainly not the Commies, in the form of the bloated and evil Soviet and Red Chinese threats and not even the Nazis of World War II with all their evil, have come anywhere near close to conquering the red, white and blue.
And George W Bush is the personification of the convergence of Post World War II Pro War Forces, from Wall Street to Reichstagfeuer to Cold War to BCCI to 911. And while Bush may be the incarnation of all things treasonous, he is just the visible face of the monster.
[font size="6"][font color="green"]Lot there for one to chew on, with links and sources identified so readers can learn even more. So, show where I'm wrong, SidDithers of DU. I'll be glad to apologize and correct my mistake. So, show.[/font color][/font size]
Especially, if you disagreed with me.
Otherwise, how can I learn anything new?
Misguided Honor for Condi Rice
U.S. officials lecture others about respecting international law and punishing human rights crimes, but those principles are ignored when the violators are U.S. officials. Offenders like ex-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice even get honors, as Coleen Rowley and Todd E. Pierce note.
By Coleen Rowley and Todd E. Pierce
CounterPunch, April 3, 2014
Some of us predicted when Condi Rice left office that she would become intent on revising history. Faustian bargains don’t end that quickly!
It’s now come to pass that universities around the country, including Rutgers and the University of Minnesota, are willing to heap praise upon Rice and pay her huge speaking fees to hear her talk about her struggle for civil rights.
Her speech is not entitled what she usually likes to talk about: why war is good, but rather “Keeping Faith with a Legacy of Justice: the 50th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Does it sound like she’s hit upon another “noble cause” rationale for why she helped launch war on Iraq and initiate torture policies?
The University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute officials who arranged for Rice’s appearance cleverly framed their invitation as promoting academic freedom and free speech. But it’s not about free speech. A student group, which saw through this red herring, responded as follows:
“First, by rescinding her invitation, the university would not be limiting Dr. Rice’s free speech (ironically named, as she will be receiving $150,000 for the talk). We understand that university campuses are meant to be places where multiple viewpoints are heard, where students can be exposed to many opposing viewpoints. We firmly believe in this tradition.
“As you can imagine, given her prominent former positions as both the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Dr. Rice will have no shortage of platforms on which to express herself. Rescinding her invitation has nothing to do with limiting Dr. Rice’s right to free speech. Instead, it is about the University of Minnesota, continuously seeking to be perceived as a global university, tying itself to Dr. Rice’s abhorrent conduct on behalf of the American people.
“By extending this invitation, the University has condoned Dr. Rice’s authorization of so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ and her using the threat of a mushroom cloud to push the United States into war with Iraq. The only appropriate action regarding Dr. Rice’s invitation is to rescind it. Only this would send the correct message: that the University of Minnesota stands with the people of the world against torture and unjustified war.”
A few weeks ago, the Faculty Councils at two Rutgers University campuses voted in support of a resolution to rescind Dr. Rice’s invitation to deliver the commencement address there.
Anyway we have sent the following letter on Wednesday in an effort to educate and inform some of the faculty, students and administration at the University of Minnesota who have invited Condi Rice to give their “Distinguished Northrop Lecture” on April 17.
Some of the faculty and students will be voting Thursday afternoon on a resolution asking that Rice be disinvited and we thought it important that the facts about her involvement in planning and ordering torture, at least what is currently known, be shared. Our letter reads:
“Dear Humphrey School Faculty, Fellows, Staff and PASA members: Former Vice President Mondale is on record as saying there should be some form of accountability for government officials’ use of torture in the so-called ‘war on terror.’ He said that otherwise it’s like laying a ‘loaded gun’ on the table that in the future could be picked up and used again.
“Unfortunately by inviting Condi Rice to give a distinguished Northrop lecture, the University of Minnesota just reached over the table and cocked that loaded gun. Strong reasons exist to oppose University officials’ decision to give the distinguished podium to someone, albeit a former high official, so credibly accused of serious war crimes. Planning and ordering of torture is a jus cogens crime of the highest magnitude under both domestic and international law, not protected by the First Amendment or even academic freedom.
“This is not about politics. This is not about facilitating an educational discussion via controversial speakers. This IS about criminality and whether our country is willing to follow the rule of law or make exceptions for past (or in fact, future) leaders’ actions.
“Despite efforts to keep the facts secret, enough truth has come out to establish that beginning in 2002, Rice convened dozens of top secret meetings of the National Security Council’s ‘Principals Committee’ (whose members also included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet and John Ashcroft). The ‘Principals’ planned and approved the use of various tortures, even choreographing some, to include near drowning (waterboarding), sleep deprivation, physical assault, subjection to extremely cold temperatures to cause hypothermia and use of stress positions.
“At one point Attorney General Ashcroft even questioned the group, ‘Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.’
“It was Rice herself who personally conveyed this White House group’s order to the CIA to commence waterboarding of prisoners, telling the CIA: ‘Go do it. It’s your baby’ in July of 2002, even before [Bush administration] lawyer John Yoo was tasked with writing his famously faulty ‘torture memo’ to ‘legalize’ what they were doing. The torture memos were an attempt to provide what a later Department of Justice lawyer would label a ‘golden shield’ from future criminal accountability for everyone involved. Other lawyers aptly describe Yoo’s memos as a kind of ‘get out of jail free’ card.
“After photos leaked depicting horrible inhumane abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Major General Antonio Taguba was assigned to investigate, he called the ‘interrogation program’ that Rice and other officials had devised a ‘systemic regime of torture.’ The list of approved tortures for the CIA had migrated down the military chain of command via Donald Rumsfeld, one of the main ‘Principals’ at the White House meetings.
“In 2008, the top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial, retired Judge Susan J. Crawford, was forced to dismiss war crime charges against an important 9-11 suspect when she concluded that the U.S. military tortured the Saudi national by interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a ‘life-threatening condition.’
“The difficulty University officials experience in understanding these facts about Condi Rice’s sordid history probably stems from a political decision, however, the one made by Obama when he took office to ‘not look backward, only look forward.’ That decision was not based on adherence to the law, as all accountability for crime inherently requires examining past actions.
“As a result, infighting still persists between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee which has spent over $40 million of taxpayers’ money on a nearly five-year-long investigation that reviewed millions of government documents. The Senate investigation, launched after it was discovered the CIA illegally destroyed 92 videotapes of its waterboarding torture sessions, produced a 6,300 page report a year ago. It’s expected that a summary of that torture investigation will finally be released in the near future.
“In fact a declassification vote on the torture report will now likely occur on April 3 –coincidentally the very same day the University of Minnesota Faculty Senate votes whether to disinvite Condi Rice. But in the meantime, Senate Chair Diane Feinstein accused the CIA of having illegally removed documents from her Committee’s computers, apparently attempting to thwart legislative oversight. The torture investigation has thus reached a zenith in producing a constitutional crisis. Clearly these issues are contentious and the full truth has not yet emerged but that’s because such serious crimes are implicated!
“Unfortunately the legal artifice of the torture memos has worked thus far to protect Ms. Rice so she remains unrepentant and even continues to publicly shill for more pre-emptive wars. But University and Carlson Foundation officials should not be endorsing her past actions. They shouldn’t help her bury the truth and revise history.
“Since in fact there has been almost no accountability on the use of torture whether through congressional investigation, appointed commission or independent prosecutor and the courts, perhaps the state of Minnesota can provide at least a small measure of accountability by withdrawing its invitation.”
Coleen Rowley is a retired FBI agent and former Minneapolis Division legal counsel who writes on ethical and legal issues. Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in 2012. He was assigned as Defense Counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions from 2008-2012. (This article was written for Coleen Rowley’s blog at HuffingtonPost.)
https://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/03/misguided-honor-for-condi-rice/
Thank you, Octafish. 
Gary Webb and Media Manipulation
Many Americans still count on the mainstream media to define reality for them, but too often the MSM spins false narratives that protect the powerful and diminish democracy, as happened in the long-running denial of cocaine trafficking by President Reagan’s beloved Nicaraguan Contra rebels, writes Beverly Bandler.
By Beverly Bandler
ConsortiumNews, November 2, 2014
The sad tale of the mainstream U.S. media’s destruction of journalist Gary Webb for reviving the Contra-cocaine scandal in the 1990s – a story recounted in the movie “Kill the Messenger” – is important not only because of Webb’s tragic demise but because the case goes to the central question of whether the American people are getting information and facts to which we are entitled in a free society, or whether we are being manipulated with half-truths, propaganda and straight-out lies.
What is ironic about the recent patronizing anti-Webb commentary by the Washington Post’s Jeff Leen – claiming that “an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof” – is that the Post was a prime salesman for the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003. And just what “proof” did the Post require for the “extraordinary claim” about Iraq hiding stockpiles of WMD, the chief selling point to the American people? Apparently nothing more than “jingoism,” the beating of war drums and empty assurances from the Bush administration’s neocons.
As journalist Michael Massing pointed out in February 2004 – after the U.S. invasion force failed to find the promised stockpiles – “‘Iraq’s Arsenal Was Only on Paper,’ declared a recent headline in The Washington Post.”
But Leen’s commentary in response to “Kill the Messenger” was just the latest example of the mainstream press covering its own tracks for its failure to pursue the Contra-cocaine scandal and for its complicity in destroying Gary Webb.
It’s now clear that the CIA has long been trying to fend off the reality of the Contra-cocaine scandal, often with the help of what a newly released CIA report described as its “productive relations with journalists.”
Americans need to know about such “dark alliances,” the title that Webb gave his original series at the San Jose Mercury News and later his book. This posting is about two such “dark alliances”: 1) The Contra-cocaine scandal that surfaced in 1985 when then Associated Press colleagues Robert Parry and Brian Barger first broke the news. 2) The concerted effort by U.S. major news media — specifically, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post – to not only disparage the scandal but also discredit investigative reporter Gary Webb who, in 1996, revived the story by explaining the Contra cocaine’s impact on U.S. cities in the 1980s.
‘Just Say No’
Webb’s revelations, of course, flew in the face of the conventional wisdom that President Ronald Reagan was a stern enemy of drugs and a fierce threat to drug traffickers. On Oct. 27, 1986, Reagan budgeted $1.7 billion for the drug war and federalized Rockefeller law-style mandatory-minimum sentences. The message was: “Just say no.”
It also turned out that the CIA’s “productive relations with journalists” proved so strong that it didn’t even seem to matter when official government investigations confirmed key facts about the Contra-cocaine scandal.
For instance, Sen. John Kerry chaired a 2 ½-year investigation of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations that reported in 1989: “It is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking … and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers.”
Commenting on Kerry’s investigation and the major U.S. media’s response, journalism professor Jeff Cohen wrote: “Contra drug dealing was tolerated in the U.S. frenzy to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftwing Sandinista government. Kerry’s work was ignored or attacked in big media — Newsweek labeled him a ‘randy conspiracy buff.’ ”
With Kerry and his investigation dismissed as irrelevant by the big newspapers, the scandal remained largely suppressed for the next seven years until Webb revived it in 1996.
Webb (1955-2004) was an investigative journalist whose awards included a Pulitzer in 1990, as part of a team at the San Jose Mercury News, and at least four other major prizes for his solo work. Webb tried to reveal the impact that some of the cocaine that came through the Nicaraguan Contra pipeline had on American cities, saying:
“It’s not a situation where the government or the CIA sat down and said okay, let’s invent crack and sell it in black neighborhoods and let’s decimate black America. It was a situation where we need money for a covert operation. The quickest way to raise it is to sell cocaine and you guys go sell it somewhere. We don’t want to know anything about it. And you had this bad luck of them doing it right around the time people were figuring out how to make crack.”
A Sad But True Tale
“This, sadly, is a true story,” Webb wrote in his 1999 book, Dark Alliance. It is a story now told in the Hollywood film, “Kill the Messenger,” based on the book of the same name by Nick Schou and Webb’s Dark Alliance.
The story begins with Webb’s 1996 series “Dark Alliance” in California’s San Jose Mercury News. Webb investigated and told how for a better part of a decade, in a “wildly successful conspiracy,” a San Francisco Bay area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions of dollars in drug profits from those sales to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras.
For his investigation, Webb drew from newly declassified documents, newly released undercover DEA audio and videotapes, federal court testimony, and interviews, and he demonstrated how the federal government knowingly allowed massive amounts of drugs and money to change hands at the expense of U.S. communities.
The “Dark Alliance” Mercury News series “might have vanished without a trace had the paper not chosen this story to create a splash for its website, complete with graphics and links to original source documents,” wrote Dan Simon, editor of Webb’s book and publisher of Seven Stories Press.
“It became, arguably, the first big Internet news story, with as many as 1.3 million hits on a single day. Talk radio picked it up off the Internet, and citizens’ groups and media watchdogs soon followed. The CIA launched its own internal investigation. Gary’s star had never shone more brightly…
“The mainstream print media was ominously silent until October and November 1996,” Simon continued, “when The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times all finally picked up the story. But instead of launching their own investigations into whether the CIA had shielded drug traffickers, these papers went after Gary’s reporting, although they ‘could not find a single significant factual error,’ as Gary’s then-editor at The Mercury News, Jerry Ceppos, would write in an internal memo.
“But after that, the series was described frequently as ‘discredited.’ Soon the story and Gary himself were spoiled goods. Gary’s editor switched sides and penned an apologia distancing the paper from the series. Gary was forced out of his job, even though the body of evidence supporting Gary’s account was actually growing. Two years later, the CIA’s internal investigation would prove to be a vindication of Gary’s work.”
African-American Outrage
There was also an important social and political dimension to Webb’s revelations. “The investigative series sparked protests in African-American and congressional probes,” noted Democracy Now! “It also provoked a fierce reaction from the media establishment, which denounced the series. The Los Angeles Times alone assigned 17 reporters to probe Webb’s report and his personal life.
“Recently declassified CIA files show the agency used a ‘a ground base of already productive relations with journalists [at other newspapers]’ to counter what it called ‘a genuine public relations crisis.’ …
“Following the controversy, the San Jose Mercury News demoted Webb. He then resigned and pushed his investigation even further in his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.
“The CIA’s inspector general later corroborated Webb’s key findings, but, by then, his career was wrecked. The newspapers that denounced Webb largely ignored the CIA’s own report — it was released in 1998 amid the scandal over President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.”
“The second CIA report not only vindicates me,” wrote Gary Webb to a fellow journalist in July 24, 1998, “but all the other reporters and activists who have been trying to bring this to the public’s attention for the last 13 years. It also proves that, once again, the CIA lied to the American public and was assisted in this effort by our national news media, which denigrated anyone who challenged the official denials.”
Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, an outspoken member of the Congressional Black Caucus, recalled that “The night that I read [Webb’s] ‘Dark Alliance’ series, I was so alarmed, that I literally sat straight up in bed, poring over every word. I reflected on the many meetings I attended throughout South Central Los Angeles during the 1980s, when I constantly asked, ‘Where are all the drugs coming from?’ I asked myself that night whether it was possible for such a vast amount of drugs to be smuggled into any district under the noses of the community leaders, police, sheriff’s department, FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies…
“The time I spent investigating the allegations of the ‘Dark Alliance’ series led me to the undeniable conclusion that the CIA, DEA, DIA, and FBI knew about drug trafficking in South Central Los Angeles. They were either part of the trafficking or turned a blind eye to it, an effort to fund the Contra war and that the drug money was used by both sides…
“It may take time, but I am convinced that history is going to record that Gary Webb wrote the truth. The establishment refused to give Gary Webb the credit that he deserved. They teamed up in an effort to destroy the story — and very nearly succeeded. … We will not let this story end until the naysayers and opponents are forced to apologize for their reckless and irresponsible attacks on Gary Webb.”
A Disgraceful Episode
Charles P. Pierce, a political writer for Esquire.com, said: “Of all the disgraceful episodes regarding the press and the Reagan administration, the discrediting of Gary Webb was probably the worst, given the fact that so much of the elite press was complicit in what was done to him.”
But Webb’s brave reporting had a lasting historical impact because it finally forced the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct a serious investigation of the Contra-cocaine problem and what the CIA knew about the scandal and what actions the agency took or didn’t take.
“[CIA Inspector General Frederick] Hitz completed his investigation in mid-1998 and the second volume of his two-volume investigation was published on Oct. 8, 1998. In the report, Hitz identified more than 50 Contras and Contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations throughout the 1980s,” reported journalist Robert Parry.
Andrew Hehir of Salon.com wrote: “Here’s the important thing to say about Webb’s big story: In general terms, and in most of its specifics, it was true. Virtually no one would deny that today; congressional commissions, internal CIA investigations and scholarly articles by historians have reached similar conclusions, shrouded in more lawyerly or diplomatic language.
“You can say that the CIA was apparently complicit in drug-dealing but not directly involved; you can say that the agency ‘turned a blind eye’ to evidence that smuggling revenue was being used to fund the Contras; you can say that ‘the CIA knew or should have known that some of its allies were accused of being in the drug business,’ in the exceedingly careful phrasing of New York Times media reporter David Carr.
“If the tone of Webb’s reporting was sometimes inflammatory, what he said happened pretty much happened. Webb never stated or implied that the CIA had deliberately imported crack cocaine into African-American neighborhoods; that construction or interpretation came later, from other people.”
Filmmaker Marc Levin noted at HuffingtonPost, “The idea that the CIA works with drug traffickers and other criminals and sometimes facilitates their operations and protects them as assets in return for their help in defeating our enemies (i.e. Communists during the Cold War and now Islamic fundamentalists) is not ‘an extraordinary claim.’ It’s a fact.”
See the Movie
I believe each one of us can do something of value: we can go see the film, “Kill the Messenger,” encourage others to do so, read and share the references in the “recommended reading” list below among others and come to our own conclusions.
This issue is not only about a movie and what it reveals, but it is about what Alternet’s Don Hazen states has become a basic tenet of American politics: “that corporate power rules the roost. Nothing significant that will become law in America if corporate power, profits, global competitive advantage, military might, national security and privatization are in any significant way threatened.”
DemocracyNow’s Amy Goodman added: “That’s really what will save us, is when we really know what’s going on, not filtered through the lens or the microphone of the corporation.”
In 2004, rejected by his profession, essentially unemployable, impoverished, divorced, alone, and facing eviction, the 49-year-old Webb prepared for his own cremation and sent suicide notes to family members. He was found dead at his Sacramento County, California home with two gunshot wounds to his head, an apparent suicide.
“Now when I reread the opening sentence of the ‘Dark Alliance’ series,” writes book editor Dan Simon, “I realize Gary had found the big story, the one about the betrayal of a people by its own government. A monumental sadness remains.”
Simon added, “The alternative media, to its credit, honored Gary. But the community of his peers in corporate journalism never again embraced him. He could never quite get over their betrayal. When you are an investigative reporter armed with the truth, the gun often fires backwards.”
America is not what we think it is.
Beverly Bandler’s public affairs career spans some 40 years. Her credentials include serving as president of the state-level League of Women Voters of the Virgin Islands and extensive public education efforts in the Washington, D.C. area for 16 years. She writes from Mexico.
VIDEOS
“Kill the Messenger” Resurrects Gary Webb, Journalist Maligned for Exposing CIA Ties to Crack Trade” on Democracy Now! The video includes an extended clip from the 2012 documentary “Shadows of Liberty” that talks about how freedom of the press in the United States is eroding under increasing corporate control.
“Gary Webb: In his own words.” Anthony Lappé and Stephen Marshal. Guerrilla News Network, 2004. https://archive.org/details/Gary_Webb
“Kill the Messenger.” http://www.focusfeatures.com/kill_the_messenger/
“Shadows of Liberty.” Jean-Philippe Tremblay, director. http://shadowsofliberty.org/ http://shadowsofliberty.org/the-film/
“CIA: America’s Secret Warriors.” (1997). Directed by Marc Levin. The series included a brief history examining the allegations that the agency worked with drug traffickers at the end of World War 2 in Sicily, the KMT in China, the Hmong tribesmen using Air America during the Vietnam war, the various anti-communist insurgents in Latin America and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the late ’70s and ’80s.
“Freeway: Crack in the System.” Documentary by Marc Levin. October 2014. Trailer:
Sources and Recommended Reading
Baldwin, Sam and Daniel Luzer. “The Altered States of America.” What a long, strange trip it’s been: a drug war timeline.” MotherJones, 2009-07. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/07/altered-states-america
Bowden, Charles. “The Pariah.” Esquire, 2012-09-12. http://www.esquire.com/features/pariah-gary-webb-0998
Brian Barger and Robert Parry. “Reports Link Nicaraguan Rebels to Cocaine Trafficking.” Associated Press, 1985-12-20. http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1985/Reports-Link-Nicaraguan-Rebels-to-Cocaine-Trafficking/id-c69eaf370de9884f907a39efd90337d3
Bernstein, Carl. “The CIA and the Media.” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977. http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
Blum, William. “The Real Drug Lords: A brief history of CIA involvement in the Drug Trade.” Global Research, 2008-08-31. http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-real-drug-lords-a-brief-history-of-cia-involvement-in-the-drug-trade/10013
Blum, William and Peter Scott. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Common Courage Press (July 1995).
Central Intelligence Agency. Directorate of Intelligence. “CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story.” Managing a Nightmare. “In the world of public relations, as in war avoiding a rout in the face of hostile multitudes can be considered a success.” 2014-07-29. www.foia.cia.gov/…/DOC_0001372115.pdf
Cockburn, Alexander and Jeffrey St. Clair. Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. Verso (November 17, 1999). “On March 16, 1998, the CIA’s Inspector General, Fred Hitz, finally let the cat out of the bag in an aside at a Congressional Hearing. Hitz told the US Reps that the CIA had maintained relationships with companies and individuals the Agency knew to be involved in the drug business. Even more astonishingly, Hitz revealed that back in 1982 the CIA had requested and received from Reagan’s Justice Department clearance not to report any knowledge it might have of drug-dealing by CIA assets. “With these two admissions, Hitz definitively sank decades of CIA denials, many of them under oath to Congress. Hitz’s admissions also made fools of some of the most prominent names in US journalism, and vindicated investigators andcritics of the Agency, ranging from Al McCoy to Senator John Kerry.”
Cohen, Jeff. “The Resurrection of Gary Webb: Will Hollywood Give Journalist Last Word Against CIA’s Media Apologists?” CommonDreams, 2014-10-06. http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/10/06/resurrection-gary-webb-will-hollywood-give-journalist-last-word-against-cias-media_______“R.I.P. Gary Webb — Unembedded Reporter.” CommonDreams, 2004-12-13. http://www.commondreams.org/views/2004/12/13/rip-gary-webb-unembedded-reporter
Davidson, Lawrence. “How the US Propaganda System Works.” ConsortiumNews, 2014-05-09. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/05/09/how-the-us-propaganda-system-works/
Democracy Now! Amy Goodman. “Inside the Dark Alliance: Gary Webb on the CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.” 2014-10-06. http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/10/6/inside_the_dark_alliance_gary_webb
Gilson, Dave, Michael Mechanic, Alex Park and AJ Vicens. “10 Fascinating Articles from the CIA’s Secret Employee Magazine.” MotherJones, 2014-09-19. http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/09/10-declassified-articles-cia-intelligence-journal
Grandin, Greg. “The New York Times Wants Gary Webb to Stay Dead.” The Nation, 2014-10-10. http://www.thenation.com/blog/181940/new-york-times-wants-gary-webb-stay-dead#
Grim, Ryan. “Kill The Messenger: How The Media Destroyed Gary Webb.” Huffington Post, 2014-10-10. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/10/kill-the-messenger_n_5962708.html
Grim, Ryan, Matt Sledge and Bart Ferner. “Key Figures in CIA–Crack Cocaine Scandal Begin to Come Forward. HuffingtonPost, 2014-10-10. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/10/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748.html
Hart, Peter. “A ‘Worthless and Whiny’ Attack on a Genuine Journalistic Hero.” Fair, 2014-10-21. http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/10/21/wash-post-webb/
Hazen. Don. “Apocalypse Now: Seriously, It Is Time for a Major Rethink About Liberal and Progressive Politics.” Alternet, 2014-10-25. http:/www.alternet.org/activism/apocalypse-now-seriously-it-time-major-rethink-about-liberal-and-progressive-politics
Hedges, Chris. The Movie that Completely Exposes the Myth of the ‘Free Press.” Kill the Messenger reveals the media’s subservience to power. Alternet, 2014-10-27. http://www.alternet.org/media/movie-completely-exposes-myth-free-press
_______“The Myth of the Free Press.” TruthDig, 2014-10-26. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_myth_of_the_free_press_20141026
Hehir, Andrew. “From Gary Webb to James Risen: The struggle for the soul of journalism.” Two courageous reporters dug up dark government secrets. Only one was betrayed by his peers. Why did it happen? Salon, 2014-10-25. http://www.salon.com/2014/10/25/from_gary_webb_to_james_risen_the_struggle_for_the_soul_of_journalism/
Kornbluh, Peter. “The Storm over ‘Dark Alliance.’ ” Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 1997. http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/storm.htm
Kurtz, Howard. “The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story. Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn’t Make Front Page.” Washington Post, 2004-08-12. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58127-2004Aug11_4.html
Lee, Martin A. and Norman Solomon. Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media. 1st ed. 1990. LGLA (January 13, 2013).
Leen, Jeff. “Gary Webb was no journalism hero, despite what ‘Kill the Messenger’ says.” Washington Post, 2014-10-17. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gary-webb-was-no-journalism-hero-despite-what-kill-the-messenger-says/2014/10/17/026b7560-53c9-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html See Hart 10-21 and Parry 10-18.
Lippmann, Walter and Charles Merz. “A Test of the News.” The New Republic, August 1920. “Their study came out as a forty-two page supplement to the New Republic in August 1920 and demonstrated that the Times’ coverage was neither unbiased nor accurate. They concluded that the paper’s news stories were not based on facts, but were “dominated by the hopes of the men who composed the news organizations.” The paper cited events that did not happen, atrocities that never took place, and reported no fewer than ninety-one times that theBolshevik regime was on the verge of collapse. “The news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see,” Lippmann and Merz charged. ‘The chief censor and the chief propagandist were hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors.’ ”
Mackenzie, Angus. Secrets: The CIA’s War at Home.University of California Press; New Ed edition (April 22, 1999).
Marcy, William L. The politics of cocaine: how U.S. policy has created a thriving drug industry in Central and South America. Chicago Review Press. (2010).
Mackenzie, Angus. Secrets: The CIA’s War at Home. University of California Press; New Ed edition (April 22, 1999).
Massing, Michael. “Now They Tell Us.” New York Review of Books, 2004-02-26. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/feb/26/now-they-tell-us/
McCoy, Alfred W. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Chicago Review Press; Revised edition (May 1, 2003). “The first book to prove CIA and U.S. government complicity in global drug trafficking…” Amazon reviewer: “A historical study of the opium and heroin trade and its political context, based on primary and secondary sources, including interviews with some of the key players of the developments in Indochina in the 1950s through 1970s.”
McGovern, Ray. “Truman’s True Warning on the CIA.” ConsortiumNews, 2013-12-22. http://consortiumnews.com/2013/12/22/trumans-true-warning-on-the-cia/
_______ “Break the CIA in Two.” ConsortiumNews, 2009-12-22. http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/122209a.html
New York Times. Featured Subject: “The Dark Alliance Expose.” With Articles From the Archives of The New York Times. (9-21-1996 to 1-30-1998). http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/cia.html
Parry, Robert. “How the Washington Press Turned Bad.” ConsortiumNews, 2014-10-28. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/10/28/how-the-washington-press-turned-bad/
_______“WPost’s Slimy Assault on Gary Webb.” Consortium News, 2014-10-18. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/10/18/wposts-slimy-assault-on-gary-webb/
_______“The Sordid Contra-Cocaine Saga.” ConsortiumNews, 2014-10-09. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/10/09/the-sordid-contra-cocaine-saga/ “If you ever wondered how the mainstream U.S. mediachanged from the hard-nosed Watergate press of the 1970s into the brown-nose MSM that swallowed the Iraq War lies, a key middle point was the Contra-cocaine scandal of the 1980s/1990s.”
_______ “NYT’s Belated Admission on Contra-Cocaine.” ConsortiumNews, 2014-10-04. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/10/04/nyts-belated-admission-on-contra-cocaine/
_______ “The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up ConsortiumNews, 2014-09-26. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/09/26/the-ciamsm-contra-cocaine-cover-up/
_______ Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’ Media Consortium; 1 edition (July 1, 1999). Amazon reviewer: “This book is a real gem. It outlines a tale of both corruption and ideological mendacity within the White House, and of ignorance and unprofessionalism with the Directorate of Operations in the Central Intelligence Agency….The editors of the history of the Department of State have on several occasions complained, both publicly and privately, that an accurate history of the foreign relations of the United States of America cannot be written without more complete disclosure of our various covert operations.”
Pew Research Center. “Who Owns the News Media Database.” Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2012-06-26. http://www.journalism.org/commentary_backgrounder/who_owns_news_media_database_summary_findings?src=pp-footer
Pincus, Walter “Inspector: CIA kept Ties With Alleged Traffickers.” The Washington Post, 1998-03-17 A12.
Prouty, L. Fletcher (author). Jesse Ventura (foreword). The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World. Skyhorse Publishing; Second Edition edition (April 1, 2011). Prouty is controversial but it is a fact that he “was a retired colonel of the U.S. Air Force, served as the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years, and was directly in charge of the global system designed to provide military support for the clandestine activities of the CIA.” One Amazon reviewer writes: “This is an extremely important book. The proof of it is that even the official copy in the Library of Congress disappeared (!). Moreover, even after his death, the author continues to be the object of a smear campaign.”
Risen, James. Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. War corrupts. Endless war corrupts absolutely. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (October 14, 2014).
______State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. Free Press; First Edition edition (January 5, 2006)
_____ “C.I.A. Says It Used Nicaraguan Rebels Accused of Drug Tie.” New York Times, 1998-07-17. http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/17/world/cia-says-it-used-nicaraguan-rebels-accused-of-drug-tie.html
Schou, Nick. Kill the Messenger (Movie Tie-In Edition): How the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb. Nation Books; Revised Edition edition (September 9, 2014).
_______“The truth in ’Dark Alliance.’ ” Los Angeles Times, 2006-08-18. http://articles.latimes.com/2006/aug/18/opinion/oe-schou18
Scott, Peter Dale. American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (War and Peace Library). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; 1St Edition edition (November 16, 2010).
Solomon, Norman. War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. Wiley (June 1, 2006).
Spartacus Educational. “Walter Pincus.” http://spartacus-educational.com/MDpincus.htm “Walter Pincus also led the attack on Gary Webb when he published his series of articles on CIA involvement with the Contras and the drug industry. After Dark Alliance was published Pincus wrote: “‘Washington Post investigation into Ross, Blandon, Meneses, and the U.S. cocaine market in the 1980s found the available information does not support the conclusion that the CIA-backed contras – or Nicaraguans in general – played a major role in the emergence of crack as anarcotic in widespread use across the United States. “The Washington Post refused to publish Webb’s letters when he attempted to defend his views on the CIA. This included information that Pincus had been recruited by the CIA when he was at Yale University in order to spy on student groups at several international youth conferences in the 1950s. Later, Geneva Overholser, the Washington Post ombudsman, criticized Pincus and other reporters working for the newspaper: ‘A principal responsibility of the press is to protect the people from government excesses. The Washington Post (among others) showed more energy for protecting the CIA from someone else’s journalistic excesses.’ “When Gary Webb committed suicide, French journalist, Paul Moreira, made a television documentary for France’s Canal Plus. He interviewed Pincus and asked him why in October, 1998, he had not reported on the CIA’sinspector general report admitting the agency worked with drug dealers throughout the 1980s. Pincus was unable to explain why he and other mainstream journalists completely ignored this report that helped to support Webb’s case against the CIA.”
Umansky, Eric. “Total Coverage: The CIA, Contras, and Drugs.” The CIA-coke connection was detailed long before Dark Alliance — and the evidence keepscoming. Mother Jones, 1998-08-25. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1998/08/total-coverage-cia-contras-and-drugs
Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: Movie Tie-In Edition: The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press; Reprint edition (September 30, 2014). 1st ed. June 1999.
Wikipedia. “CIA and Contras cocaine trafficking in the US.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_trafficking_in_the_US _______“Gary Webb.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb _______Kerry Committee Report. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerry_Committee_report#cite_note-white-2
SOURCE: https://consortiumnews.com/2014/11/02/gary-webb-and-media-manipulation/
Thank goodness for ConsortiumNews, wot?
Many Americans still count on the mainstream media to define reality for them, but too often the MSM spins false narratives that protect the powerful and diminish democracy, as happened in the long-running denial of cocaine trafficking by President Reagan’s beloved Nicaraguan Contra rebels, writes Beverly Bandler.
By Beverly Bandler
ConsortiumNews, November 2, 2014
The sad tale of the mainstream U.S. media’s destruction of journalist Gary Webb for reviving the Contra-cocaine scandal in the 1990s – a story recounted in the movie “Kill the Messenger” – is important not only because of Webb’s tragic demise but because the case goes to the central question of whether the American people are getting information and facts to which we are entitled in a free society, or whether we are being manipulated with half-truths, propaganda and straight-out lies.
What is ironic about the recent patronizing anti-Webb commentary by the Washington Post’s Jeff Leen – claiming that “an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof” – is that the Post was a prime salesman for the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003. And just what “proof” did the Post require for the “extraordinary claim” about Iraq hiding stockpiles of WMD, the chief selling point to the American people? Apparently nothing more than “jingoism,” the beating of war drums and empty assurances from the Bush administration’s neocons.
As journalist Michael Massing pointed out in February 2004 – after the U.S. invasion force failed to find the promised stockpiles – “‘Iraq’s Arsenal Was Only on Paper,’ declared a recent headline in The Washington Post.”
But Leen’s commentary in response to “Kill the Messenger” was just the latest example of the mainstream press covering its own tracks for its failure to pursue the Contra-cocaine scandal and for its complicity in destroying Gary Webb.
It’s now clear that the CIA has long been trying to fend off the reality of the Contra-cocaine scandal, often with the help of what a newly released CIA report described as its “productive relations with journalists.”
Americans need to know about such “dark alliances,” the title that Webb gave his original series at the San Jose Mercury News and later his book. This posting is about two such “dark alliances”: 1) The Contra-cocaine scandal that surfaced in 1985 when then Associated Press colleagues Robert Parry and Brian Barger first broke the news. 2) The concerted effort by U.S. major news media — specifically, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post – to not only disparage the scandal but also discredit investigative reporter Gary Webb who, in 1996, revived the story by explaining the Contra cocaine’s impact on U.S. cities in the 1980s.
‘Just Say No’
Webb’s revelations, of course, flew in the face of the conventional wisdom that President Ronald Reagan was a stern enemy of drugs and a fierce threat to drug traffickers. On Oct. 27, 1986, Reagan budgeted $1.7 billion for the drug war and federalized Rockefeller law-style mandatory-minimum sentences. The message was: “Just say no.”
It also turned out that the CIA’s “productive relations with journalists” proved so strong that it didn’t even seem to matter when official government investigations confirmed key facts about the Contra-cocaine scandal.
For instance, Sen. John Kerry chaired a 2 ½-year investigation of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations that reported in 1989: “It is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking … and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers.”
Commenting on Kerry’s investigation and the major U.S. media’s response, journalism professor Jeff Cohen wrote: “Contra drug dealing was tolerated in the U.S. frenzy to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftwing Sandinista government. Kerry’s work was ignored or attacked in big media — Newsweek labeled him a ‘randy conspiracy buff.’ ”
With Kerry and his investigation dismissed as irrelevant by the big newspapers, the scandal remained largely suppressed for the next seven years until Webb revived it in 1996.
Webb (1955-2004) was an investigative journalist whose awards included a Pulitzer in 1990, as part of a team at the San Jose Mercury News, and at least four other major prizes for his solo work. Webb tried to reveal the impact that some of the cocaine that came through the Nicaraguan Contra pipeline had on American cities, saying:
“It’s not a situation where the government or the CIA sat down and said okay, let’s invent crack and sell it in black neighborhoods and let’s decimate black America. It was a situation where we need money for a covert operation. The quickest way to raise it is to sell cocaine and you guys go sell it somewhere. We don’t want to know anything about it. And you had this bad luck of them doing it right around the time people were figuring out how to make crack.”
A Sad But True Tale
“This, sadly, is a true story,” Webb wrote in his 1999 book, Dark Alliance. It is a story now told in the Hollywood film, “Kill the Messenger,” based on the book of the same name by Nick Schou and Webb’s Dark Alliance.
The story begins with Webb’s 1996 series “Dark Alliance” in California’s San Jose Mercury News. Webb investigated and told how for a better part of a decade, in a “wildly successful conspiracy,” a San Francisco Bay area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions of dollars in drug profits from those sales to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras.
For his investigation, Webb drew from newly declassified documents, newly released undercover DEA audio and videotapes, federal court testimony, and interviews, and he demonstrated how the federal government knowingly allowed massive amounts of drugs and money to change hands at the expense of U.S. communities.
The “Dark Alliance” Mercury News series “might have vanished without a trace had the paper not chosen this story to create a splash for its website, complete with graphics and links to original source documents,” wrote Dan Simon, editor of Webb’s book and publisher of Seven Stories Press.
“It became, arguably, the first big Internet news story, with as many as 1.3 million hits on a single day. Talk radio picked it up off the Internet, and citizens’ groups and media watchdogs soon followed. The CIA launched its own internal investigation. Gary’s star had never shone more brightly…
“The mainstream print media was ominously silent until October and November 1996,” Simon continued, “when The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times all finally picked up the story. But instead of launching their own investigations into whether the CIA had shielded drug traffickers, these papers went after Gary’s reporting, although they ‘could not find a single significant factual error,’ as Gary’s then-editor at The Mercury News, Jerry Ceppos, would write in an internal memo.
“But after that, the series was described frequently as ‘discredited.’ Soon the story and Gary himself were spoiled goods. Gary’s editor switched sides and penned an apologia distancing the paper from the series. Gary was forced out of his job, even though the body of evidence supporting Gary’s account was actually growing. Two years later, the CIA’s internal investigation would prove to be a vindication of Gary’s work.”
African-American Outrage
There was also an important social and political dimension to Webb’s revelations. “The investigative series sparked protests in African-American and congressional probes,” noted Democracy Now! “It also provoked a fierce reaction from the media establishment, which denounced the series. The Los Angeles Times alone assigned 17 reporters to probe Webb’s report and his personal life.
“Recently declassified CIA files show the agency used a ‘a ground base of already productive relations with journalists [at other newspapers]’ to counter what it called ‘a genuine public relations crisis.’ …
“Following the controversy, the San Jose Mercury News demoted Webb. He then resigned and pushed his investigation even further in his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.
“The CIA’s inspector general later corroborated Webb’s key findings, but, by then, his career was wrecked. The newspapers that denounced Webb largely ignored the CIA’s own report — it was released in 1998 amid the scandal over President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.”
“The second CIA report not only vindicates me,” wrote Gary Webb to a fellow journalist in July 24, 1998, “but all the other reporters and activists who have been trying to bring this to the public’s attention for the last 13 years. It also proves that, once again, the CIA lied to the American public and was assisted in this effort by our national news media, which denigrated anyone who challenged the official denials.”
Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, an outspoken member of the Congressional Black Caucus, recalled that “The night that I read [Webb’s] ‘Dark Alliance’ series, I was so alarmed, that I literally sat straight up in bed, poring over every word. I reflected on the many meetings I attended throughout South Central Los Angeles during the 1980s, when I constantly asked, ‘Where are all the drugs coming from?’ I asked myself that night whether it was possible for such a vast amount of drugs to be smuggled into any district under the noses of the community leaders, police, sheriff’s department, FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies…
“The time I spent investigating the allegations of the ‘Dark Alliance’ series led me to the undeniable conclusion that the CIA, DEA, DIA, and FBI knew about drug trafficking in South Central Los Angeles. They were either part of the trafficking or turned a blind eye to it, an effort to fund the Contra war and that the drug money was used by both sides…
“It may take time, but I am convinced that history is going to record that Gary Webb wrote the truth. The establishment refused to give Gary Webb the credit that he deserved. They teamed up in an effort to destroy the story — and very nearly succeeded. … We will not let this story end until the naysayers and opponents are forced to apologize for their reckless and irresponsible attacks on Gary Webb.”
A Disgraceful Episode
Charles P. Pierce, a political writer for Esquire.com, said: “Of all the disgraceful episodes regarding the press and the Reagan administration, the discrediting of Gary Webb was probably the worst, given the fact that so much of the elite press was complicit in what was done to him.”
But Webb’s brave reporting had a lasting historical impact because it finally forced the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct a serious investigation of the Contra-cocaine problem and what the CIA knew about the scandal and what actions the agency took or didn’t take.
“[CIA Inspector General Frederick] Hitz completed his investigation in mid-1998 and the second volume of his two-volume investigation was published on Oct. 8, 1998. In the report, Hitz identified more than 50 Contras and Contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations throughout the 1980s,” reported journalist Robert Parry.
Andrew Hehir of Salon.com wrote: “Here’s the important thing to say about Webb’s big story: In general terms, and in most of its specifics, it was true. Virtually no one would deny that today; congressional commissions, internal CIA investigations and scholarly articles by historians have reached similar conclusions, shrouded in more lawyerly or diplomatic language.
“You can say that the CIA was apparently complicit in drug-dealing but not directly involved; you can say that the agency ‘turned a blind eye’ to evidence that smuggling revenue was being used to fund the Contras; you can say that ‘the CIA knew or should have known that some of its allies were accused of being in the drug business,’ in the exceedingly careful phrasing of New York Times media reporter David Carr.
“If the tone of Webb’s reporting was sometimes inflammatory, what he said happened pretty much happened. Webb never stated or implied that the CIA had deliberately imported crack cocaine into African-American neighborhoods; that construction or interpretation came later, from other people.”
Filmmaker Marc Levin noted at HuffingtonPost, “The idea that the CIA works with drug traffickers and other criminals and sometimes facilitates their operations and protects them as assets in return for their help in defeating our enemies (i.e. Communists during the Cold War and now Islamic fundamentalists) is not ‘an extraordinary claim.’ It’s a fact.”
See the Movie
I believe each one of us can do something of value: we can go see the film, “Kill the Messenger,” encourage others to do so, read and share the references in the “recommended reading” list below among others and come to our own conclusions.
This issue is not only about a movie and what it reveals, but it is about what Alternet’s Don Hazen states has become a basic tenet of American politics: “that corporate power rules the roost. Nothing significant that will become law in America if corporate power, profits, global competitive advantage, military might, national security and privatization are in any significant way threatened.”
DemocracyNow’s Amy Goodman added: “That’s really what will save us, is when we really know what’s going on, not filtered through the lens or the microphone of the corporation.”
In 2004, rejected by his profession, essentially unemployable, impoverished, divorced, alone, and facing eviction, the 49-year-old Webb prepared for his own cremation and sent suicide notes to family members. He was found dead at his Sacramento County, California home with two gunshot wounds to his head, an apparent suicide.
“Now when I reread the opening sentence of the ‘Dark Alliance’ series,” writes book editor Dan Simon, “I realize Gary had found the big story, the one about the betrayal of a people by its own government. A monumental sadness remains.”
Simon added, “The alternative media, to its credit, honored Gary. But the community of his peers in corporate journalism never again embraced him. He could never quite get over their betrayal. When you are an investigative reporter armed with the truth, the gun often fires backwards.”
America is not what we think it is.
Beverly Bandler’s public affairs career spans some 40 years. Her credentials include serving as president of the state-level League of Women Voters of the Virgin Islands and extensive public education efforts in the Washington, D.C. area for 16 years. She writes from Mexico.
VIDEOS
“Kill the Messenger” Resurrects Gary Webb, Journalist Maligned for Exposing CIA Ties to Crack Trade” on Democracy Now! The video includes an extended clip from the 2012 documentary “Shadows of Liberty” that talks about how freedom of the press in the United States is eroding under increasing corporate control.
“Gary Webb: In his own words.” Anthony Lappé and Stephen Marshal. Guerrilla News Network, 2004. https://archive.org/details/Gary_Webb
“Kill the Messenger.” http://www.focusfeatures.com/kill_the_messenger/
“Shadows of Liberty.” Jean-Philippe Tremblay, director. http://shadowsofliberty.org/ http://shadowsofliberty.org/the-film/
“CIA: America’s Secret Warriors.” (1997). Directed by Marc Levin. The series included a brief history examining the allegations that the agency worked with drug traffickers at the end of World War 2 in Sicily, the KMT in China, the Hmong tribesmen using Air America during the Vietnam war, the various anti-communist insurgents in Latin America and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the late ’70s and ’80s.
“Freeway: Crack in the System.” Documentary by Marc Levin. October 2014. Trailer:
Sources and Recommended Reading
Baldwin, Sam and Daniel Luzer. “The Altered States of America.” What a long, strange trip it’s been: a drug war timeline.” MotherJones, 2009-07. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/07/altered-states-america
Bowden, Charles. “The Pariah.” Esquire, 2012-09-12. http://www.esquire.com/features/pariah-gary-webb-0998
Brian Barger and Robert Parry. “Reports Link Nicaraguan Rebels to Cocaine Trafficking.” Associated Press, 1985-12-20. http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1985/Reports-Link-Nicaraguan-Rebels-to-Cocaine-Trafficking/id-c69eaf370de9884f907a39efd90337d3
Bernstein, Carl. “The CIA and the Media.” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977. http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
Blum, William. “The Real Drug Lords: A brief history of CIA involvement in the Drug Trade.” Global Research, 2008-08-31. http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-real-drug-lords-a-brief-history-of-cia-involvement-in-the-drug-trade/10013
Blum, William and Peter Scott. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Common Courage Press (July 1995).
Central Intelligence Agency. Directorate of Intelligence. “CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story.” Managing a Nightmare. “In the world of public relations, as in war avoiding a rout in the face of hostile multitudes can be considered a success.” 2014-07-29. www.foia.cia.gov/…/DOC_0001372115.pdf
Cockburn, Alexander and Jeffrey St. Clair. Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. Verso (November 17, 1999). “On March 16, 1998, the CIA’s Inspector General, Fred Hitz, finally let the cat out of the bag in an aside at a Congressional Hearing. Hitz told the US Reps that the CIA had maintained relationships with companies and individuals the Agency knew to be involved in the drug business. Even more astonishingly, Hitz revealed that back in 1982 the CIA had requested and received from Reagan’s Justice Department clearance not to report any knowledge it might have of drug-dealing by CIA assets. “With these two admissions, Hitz definitively sank decades of CIA denials, many of them under oath to Congress. Hitz’s admissions also made fools of some of the most prominent names in US journalism, and vindicated investigators andcritics of the Agency, ranging from Al McCoy to Senator John Kerry.”
Cohen, Jeff. “The Resurrection of Gary Webb: Will Hollywood Give Journalist Last Word Against CIA’s Media Apologists?” CommonDreams, 2014-10-06. http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/10/06/resurrection-gary-webb-will-hollywood-give-journalist-last-word-against-cias-media_______“R.I.P. Gary Webb — Unembedded Reporter.” CommonDreams, 2004-12-13. http://www.commondreams.org/views/2004/12/13/rip-gary-webb-unembedded-reporter
Davidson, Lawrence. “How the US Propaganda System Works.” ConsortiumNews, 2014-05-09. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/05/09/how-the-us-propaganda-system-works/
Democracy Now! Amy Goodman. “Inside the Dark Alliance: Gary Webb on the CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.” 2014-10-06. http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/10/6/inside_the_dark_alliance_gary_webb
Gilson, Dave, Michael Mechanic, Alex Park and AJ Vicens. “10 Fascinating Articles from the CIA’s Secret Employee Magazine.” MotherJones, 2014-09-19. http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/09/10-declassified-articles-cia-intelligence-journal
Grandin, Greg. “The New York Times Wants Gary Webb to Stay Dead.” The Nation, 2014-10-10. http://www.thenation.com/blog/181940/new-york-times-wants-gary-webb-stay-dead#
Grim, Ryan. “Kill The Messenger: How The Media Destroyed Gary Webb.” Huffington Post, 2014-10-10. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/10/kill-the-messenger_n_5962708.html
Grim, Ryan, Matt Sledge and Bart Ferner. “Key Figures in CIA–Crack Cocaine Scandal Begin to Come Forward. HuffingtonPost, 2014-10-10. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/10/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748.html
Hart, Peter. “A ‘Worthless and Whiny’ Attack on a Genuine Journalistic Hero.” Fair, 2014-10-21. http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/10/21/wash-post-webb/
Hazen. Don. “Apocalypse Now: Seriously, It Is Time for a Major Rethink About Liberal and Progressive Politics.” Alternet, 2014-10-25. http:/www.alternet.org/activism/apocalypse-now-seriously-it-time-major-rethink-about-liberal-and-progressive-politics
Hedges, Chris. The Movie that Completely Exposes the Myth of the ‘Free Press.” Kill the Messenger reveals the media’s subservience to power. Alternet, 2014-10-27. http://www.alternet.org/media/movie-completely-exposes-myth-free-press
_______“The Myth of the Free Press.” TruthDig, 2014-10-26. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_myth_of_the_free_press_20141026
Hehir, Andrew. “From Gary Webb to James Risen: The struggle for the soul of journalism.” Two courageous reporters dug up dark government secrets. Only one was betrayed by his peers. Why did it happen? Salon, 2014-10-25. http://www.salon.com/2014/10/25/from_gary_webb_to_james_risen_the_struggle_for_the_soul_of_journalism/
Kornbluh, Peter. “The Storm over ‘Dark Alliance.’ ” Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 1997. http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/storm.htm
Kurtz, Howard. “The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story. Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn’t Make Front Page.” Washington Post, 2004-08-12. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58127-2004Aug11_4.html
Lee, Martin A. and Norman Solomon. Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media. 1st ed. 1990. LGLA (January 13, 2013).
Leen, Jeff. “Gary Webb was no journalism hero, despite what ‘Kill the Messenger’ says.” Washington Post, 2014-10-17. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gary-webb-was-no-journalism-hero-despite-what-kill-the-messenger-says/2014/10/17/026b7560-53c9-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html See Hart 10-21 and Parry 10-18.
Lippmann, Walter and Charles Merz. “A Test of the News.” The New Republic, August 1920. “Their study came out as a forty-two page supplement to the New Republic in August 1920 and demonstrated that the Times’ coverage was neither unbiased nor accurate. They concluded that the paper’s news stories were not based on facts, but were “dominated by the hopes of the men who composed the news organizations.” The paper cited events that did not happen, atrocities that never took place, and reported no fewer than ninety-one times that theBolshevik regime was on the verge of collapse. “The news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see,” Lippmann and Merz charged. ‘The chief censor and the chief propagandist were hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors.’ ”
Mackenzie, Angus. Secrets: The CIA’s War at Home.University of California Press; New Ed edition (April 22, 1999).
Marcy, William L. The politics of cocaine: how U.S. policy has created a thriving drug industry in Central and South America. Chicago Review Press. (2010).
Mackenzie, Angus. Secrets: The CIA’s War at Home. University of California Press; New Ed edition (April 22, 1999).
Massing, Michael. “Now They Tell Us.” New York Review of Books, 2004-02-26. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/feb/26/now-they-tell-us/
McCoy, Alfred W. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Chicago Review Press; Revised edition (May 1, 2003). “The first book to prove CIA and U.S. government complicity in global drug trafficking…” Amazon reviewer: “A historical study of the opium and heroin trade and its political context, based on primary and secondary sources, including interviews with some of the key players of the developments in Indochina in the 1950s through 1970s.”
McGovern, Ray. “Truman’s True Warning on the CIA.” ConsortiumNews, 2013-12-22. http://consortiumnews.com/2013/12/22/trumans-true-warning-on-the-cia/
_______ “Break the CIA in Two.” ConsortiumNews, 2009-12-22. http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/122209a.html
New York Times. Featured Subject: “The Dark Alliance Expose.” With Articles From the Archives of The New York Times. (9-21-1996 to 1-30-1998). http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/cia.html
Parry, Robert. “How the Washington Press Turned Bad.” ConsortiumNews, 2014-10-28. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/10/28/how-the-washington-press-turned-bad/
_______“WPost’s Slimy Assault on Gary Webb.” Consortium News, 2014-10-18. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/10/18/wposts-slimy-assault-on-gary-webb/
_______“The Sordid Contra-Cocaine Saga.” ConsortiumNews, 2014-10-09. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/10/09/the-sordid-contra-cocaine-saga/ “If you ever wondered how the mainstream U.S. mediachanged from the hard-nosed Watergate press of the 1970s into the brown-nose MSM that swallowed the Iraq War lies, a key middle point was the Contra-cocaine scandal of the 1980s/1990s.”
_______ “NYT’s Belated Admission on Contra-Cocaine.” ConsortiumNews, 2014-10-04. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/10/04/nyts-belated-admission-on-contra-cocaine/
_______ “The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up ConsortiumNews, 2014-09-26. http://consortiumnews.com/2014/09/26/the-ciamsm-contra-cocaine-cover-up/
_______ Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’ Media Consortium; 1 edition (July 1, 1999). Amazon reviewer: “This book is a real gem. It outlines a tale of both corruption and ideological mendacity within the White House, and of ignorance and unprofessionalism with the Directorate of Operations in the Central Intelligence Agency….The editors of the history of the Department of State have on several occasions complained, both publicly and privately, that an accurate history of the foreign relations of the United States of America cannot be written without more complete disclosure of our various covert operations.”
Pew Research Center. “Who Owns the News Media Database.” Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2012-06-26. http://www.journalism.org/commentary_backgrounder/who_owns_news_media_database_summary_findings?src=pp-footer
Pincus, Walter “Inspector: CIA kept Ties With Alleged Traffickers.” The Washington Post, 1998-03-17 A12.
Prouty, L. Fletcher (author). Jesse Ventura (foreword). The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World. Skyhorse Publishing; Second Edition edition (April 1, 2011). Prouty is controversial but it is a fact that he “was a retired colonel of the U.S. Air Force, served as the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years, and was directly in charge of the global system designed to provide military support for the clandestine activities of the CIA.” One Amazon reviewer writes: “This is an extremely important book. The proof of it is that even the official copy in the Library of Congress disappeared (!). Moreover, even after his death, the author continues to be the object of a smear campaign.”
Risen, James. Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. War corrupts. Endless war corrupts absolutely. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (October 14, 2014).
______State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. Free Press; First Edition edition (January 5, 2006)
_____ “C.I.A. Says It Used Nicaraguan Rebels Accused of Drug Tie.” New York Times, 1998-07-17. http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/17/world/cia-says-it-used-nicaraguan-rebels-accused-of-drug-tie.html
Schou, Nick. Kill the Messenger (Movie Tie-In Edition): How the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb. Nation Books; Revised Edition edition (September 9, 2014).
_______“The truth in ’Dark Alliance.’ ” Los Angeles Times, 2006-08-18. http://articles.latimes.com/2006/aug/18/opinion/oe-schou18
Scott, Peter Dale. American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (War and Peace Library). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; 1St Edition edition (November 16, 2010).
Solomon, Norman. War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. Wiley (June 1, 2006).
Spartacus Educational. “Walter Pincus.” http://spartacus-educational.com/MDpincus.htm “Walter Pincus also led the attack on Gary Webb when he published his series of articles on CIA involvement with the Contras and the drug industry. After Dark Alliance was published Pincus wrote: “‘Washington Post investigation into Ross, Blandon, Meneses, and the U.S. cocaine market in the 1980s found the available information does not support the conclusion that the CIA-backed contras – or Nicaraguans in general – played a major role in the emergence of crack as anarcotic in widespread use across the United States. “The Washington Post refused to publish Webb’s letters when he attempted to defend his views on the CIA. This included information that Pincus had been recruited by the CIA when he was at Yale University in order to spy on student groups at several international youth conferences in the 1950s. Later, Geneva Overholser, the Washington Post ombudsman, criticized Pincus and other reporters working for the newspaper: ‘A principal responsibility of the press is to protect the people from government excesses. The Washington Post (among others) showed more energy for protecting the CIA from someone else’s journalistic excesses.’ “When Gary Webb committed suicide, French journalist, Paul Moreira, made a television documentary for France’s Canal Plus. He interviewed Pincus and asked him why in October, 1998, he had not reported on the CIA’sinspector general report admitting the agency worked with drug dealers throughout the 1980s. Pincus was unable to explain why he and other mainstream journalists completely ignored this report that helped to support Webb’s case against the CIA.”
Umansky, Eric. “Total Coverage: The CIA, Contras, and Drugs.” The CIA-coke connection was detailed long before Dark Alliance — and the evidence keepscoming. Mother Jones, 1998-08-25. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1998/08/total-coverage-cia-contras-and-drugs
Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: Movie Tie-In Edition: The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press; Reprint edition (September 30, 2014). 1st ed. June 1999.
Wikipedia. “CIA and Contras cocaine trafficking in the US.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_trafficking_in_the_US _______“Gary Webb.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb _______Kerry Committee Report. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerry_Committee_report#cite_note-white-2
SOURCE: https://consortiumnews.com/2014/11/02/gary-webb-and-media-manipulation/
Thank goodness for ConsortiumNews, wot?
When I was growing up in the drug filled 60s and 70s we never saw heroin in rural Ohio. Now it is everywhere.
Not that it's turned into something heroic, a modern day Jesse James kind of meme, or anything dramatic.
Contra-Cocaine: Evidence of Premeditation
By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews, June 1, 1998
New evidence, now in the public record, strongly suggests that the Reagan administration's tolerance of drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contras and other clients in the 1980s was premeditated.
With almost no notice in the national press, a 1982 letter was introduced into the Congressional Record revealing how CIA Director William J. Casey secretly engineered an exemption sparing the CIA from a legal requirement to report on drug smuggling by agency assets.
The exemption was granted by Attorney General William French Smith on Feb. 11, 1982, only two months after President Reagan authorized covert CIA support for the Nicaraguan contra army and some eight months before the first known documentary evidence revealing that the contras had started collaborating with drug traffickers.
The exemption suggests that the CIA's tolerance of illicit drug smuggling by its clients during the 1980s was official policy anticipated from the outset, not just an unintended consequence followed by an ad hoc cover-up.
Before the letter's release, the documentary evidence only supported the allegation that Ronald Reagan's CIA concealed drug trafficking by the contras and other intelligence assets in Latin America. The CIA's inspector general Frederick P. Hitz confirmed that long-held suspicion in an investigative report issued on Jan. 29, 1998.
Laundry List
But the newly released letter, placed into the Congressional Record by Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., on May 7, establishes that Casey foresaw the legal dilemma which the CIA would encounter should federal law require it to report on illicit narcotics smuggling by its agents. The narcotics exemption is especially noteworthy in contrast to the laundry list of crimes which the CIA was required to disclose.
Under Justice Department regulations, "reportable offenses" included assault, homicide, kidnapping, Neutrality Act violations, communication of classified data, illegal immigration, bribery, obstruction of justice, possession of explosives, election contributions, possession of firearms, illegal wiretapping, visa violations and perjury.
Yet, despite reporting requirements for many less serious offenses, Casey fought a bureaucratic battle in early 1982 to exempt the CIA from, as Smith wrote, "the need to add narcotics violations to the list of reportable non-employee crimes."
In his letter, Smith noted that the law provides that "when requested by the Attorney General, it shall be the duty of any agency or instrumentality of the Federal Government to furnish assistance to him for carrying out his functions under" the Controlled Substances Act.
But Smith agreed that "in view of the fine cooperation the Drug Enforcement Administration has received from CIA, no formal requirement regarding the reporting of narcotics violations has been included in these procedures." [At the time of Smith's letter, Kenneth Starr was a counselor in the attorney general's office, although it is not clear whether Starr had any input into the exemption.]
On March 2, 1982, Casey thanked Smith for the exemption. "I am pleased that these procedures, which I believe strike the proper balance between enforcement of the law and protection of intelligence sources and methods, will now be forwarded to other agencies covered by them for signing by the heads of the agencies," Casey wrote.
In the years that followed, "protection of intelligence sources and methods" apparently became the catch-all excuse for the CIA's tolerance of South American cocaine smugglers using the contra war as cover. Though precise volume estimates are impossible, the contra-connected drug pipeline clearly pumped tons of cocaine into the United States during the early-to-mid 1980s.
Contra Umbrella
Some contra defenders have argued that the anti-Sandinista armies in Honduras and Costa Rica were not the primary beneficiaries of the narcotics smuggling, that most of the profits probably went to drug lords with few political interests. Still, over the past 15 years, substantial evidence has surfaced revealing that many drug smugglers scurried under the contra umbrella. They presumably understood that the Reagan administration would be loath to expose its pet covert action to negative publicity and possibly even to criminal prosecution.
According to the accumulated evidence, Bolivia's "cocaine coup" government of 1980-82 was the first in line filling the contra drug pipeline. But other contra-connected drug operations soon followed, including the Medellin cartel, the Panamanian government, the Honduran military and Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans. The contra-connected cocaine also moved through transshipment points in Costa Rica and El Salvador. [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History; Cocaine Politics by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall; or Gary Webb's forthcoming book, Dark Alliance.]
Less clear is exactly what the U.S. government knew about the contra-connected drug trafficking and when. Reagan authorized CIA support for the contra army in mid-December 1981. But the first publicly known case of contra cocaine shipments appeared in government files in an Oct. 22, 1982, cable from the CIA's Directorate of Operations.
The cable passed on word that U.S. law enforcement agencies were aware of "links between (a U.S. religious organization) and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups [which] involve an exchange in (the United States) of narcotics for arms." The material in parentheses was inserted by the CIA as part of its declassification of the cable. The name of the religious group remains secret.
Over the next several years, the CIA learned of other suspected links between the contras and drug trafficking. In 1984, the CIA even intervened with the Justice Department to block a criminal investigation into a suspected contra role in a San Francisco-based drug ring, according to Hitz's report.
In December 1985, Brian Barger and I wrote the first news article disclosing that virtually every Nicaraguan contra group had links to drug trafficking. In that Associated Press dispatch, we noted that the CIA knew of at least one case of cocaine profits filtering into the contra war effort, but that DEA officials in Washington claimed they had never been told of any contra tie-in. The Casey exemption explains why that was possible.
After the AP story ran, the Reagan administration attacked it as unfounded and the article was largely ignored by the rest of the Washington press corps. But it did help spark an investigation by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who over the next two years amassed substantial evidence of cocaine smuggling in and around the contra war. Still, the Reagan and Bush administrations continued to disparage Kerry's probe and its many witnesses.
Through the end of the decade, the mainstream Washington media also denigrated the allegations. In April 1989, when Kerry released a lengthy report detailing multiple examples of how the contra war supplied cover for major drug trafficking operations, the nation's most prestigious newspapers -- The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times -- published only brief, dismissive accounts.
With the end of the contra war in 1990, the controversy faded further into the historical recesses. The Clinton administration quietly rescinded Casey's narcotics exemption in 1995.
Crack Epidemic
The contra-cocaine issue arose again in 1996 with an investigative series by Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury-News. Those stories traced how one of the contra drug conduits helped fuel the crack epidemic in Los Angeles.
In response, the major newspapers again rallied to the CIA's defense. They denounced the series as overblown, although finally acknowledging that the allegations raised during the 1980s were true. Webb's series also prompted a new investigation by the CIA's inspector general.
In the first volume of his investigative report, Hitz admitted the CIA knew early on about contra drug trafficking and covered it up. The report's second volume reportedly puts the CIA in even a worse light.
The CIA press office acknowledges that the second volume has been completed, but adds that there is no timetable for releasing a declassified version. "They'll only let it out if they're pressured," commented one U.S. official.
But the CIA apparently is counting on continued disinterest by the national press as a sign that there is no need to revisit the issue. That assessment was bolstered on May 7 when Waters introduced the Casey-Smith letters into the Congressional Record and drew very little media interest in the damaging admissions.
For her part, Waters stated that the Casey-Smith arrangement "allowed some of the biggest drug lords in the world to operate without fear that the CIA would be required to report their activities to the DEA and other law enforcement agencies. ... These damning memorandums ... are further evidence of a shocking official policy that allowed the drug cartels to operate through the CIA-led contra covert operations in Central America."
Though Waters's comments focused on the contra war, Casey's narcotics exemption could have had other CIA covert operations in mind. In the early 1980s, the CIA-backed Afghan mujahedeen also were implicated as major heroin traffickers in the Near East.
But whatever the genesis of the drug exemption, the Casey-Smith exchange of letters stands as important historical evidence bolstering the long-denied allegations of CIA complicity in drug trafficking. Worse yet, the documents are evidence of premeditation.
Copyright (c) 1998
SOURCE: https://consortiumnews.com/archive/crack12.html
Bottom Line: ConsortiumNews defended Gary Webb simply for telling the truth. Mainstream media, not at all -- even when they were proven wrong.
Gee. That sounds familiar.
The BFEE pays well. And we're watching you Octafish. We're watching you closely.
Have you gotten reimbursed for June's expenses yet?
I know Audrey in accounting is on vacation, but I thought Charlie was going to handle it.
Sid
If the latter, you make a point that's banal: ConsortiumNews is still operational.
If the former, you must have missed the Tag Team attacks above on this thread and on just about every post referring to ConsortiumNews' coverage of the war in Ukraine.
Guiding Obama into Global Make-Believe
Exclusive: The Orwellian concept of “information warfare” holds that propaganda can break down enemies and decide geopolitical outcomes, a strategy that has taken hold of the U.S. government’s approach to international crises, especially the Ukraine showdown, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains.
By Ray McGovern
ConsortiumNews, March 14, 2015
CIA Director John Brennan told TV host Charlie Rose on Friday that, on assuming office, President Barack Obama “did not have a good deal of experience” in intelligence-related matters, adding – with remarkable condescension – that now “he has gone to school and understands the complexities.”
If that’s the case, I would strongly suggest that Obama switch schools. Judging from his foreign policy team’s inept and increasingly dangerous actions regarding Ukraine and the endless stream of dubious State Department and senior military cry-wolf accusations of a Russian “invasion,” Obama might be forgiven for being confused by the “complexities.”
He should not be forgiven, though, if he remains too timid to bench his current foreign policy team and find more substantively qualified, trustworthy advisers without axes to grind. He is, after all, President. Has he no managerial skill … no guts?
This U.S. pattern of exaggeration – making scary claims about Ukraine without releasing supporting evidence – has even begun to erode the unity of the NATO alliance where Germany, in particular, is openly criticizing the Obama administration’s heavy-handed use of propaganda in its “information warfare” against Russia.
The German magazine Der Spiegel has just published a highly unusual article critical of the NATO military commander, Air Force General Philip Breedlove, entitled “Breedlove’s Bellicosity: Berlin Alarmed by Aggressive NATO Stance on Ukraine.”
It is becoming clearer day by day that the Germans are losing patience with unsupported and alarmist U.S. statements on Ukraine, particularly in the current delicate period when a fledgling ceasefire in eastern Ukraine seems to be holding tenuously.
The Spiegel story was sourced to German officials who say Breedlove and his breed are making stuff up, adding that the BND (the CIA equivalent in Germany) “did not share” Breedlove’s extreme assessment of Russian actions. Spiegel continued:
“For months now, many in the Chancellery simply shake their heads each time NATO, under Breedlove’s leadership, goes public with striking announcements about Russian troop or tank movements. … False claims and exaggerated accounts, warned a top German official during a recent meeting on Ukraine, have put NATO — and by extension, the entire West — in danger of losing its credibility.”
Scaring the Europeans
The Obama administration’s erratic and bellicose approach to Ukraine caused German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande to take matters into their own hands in February to press for a ceasefire and an agreement on how to resolve the crisis politically, rather than following the U.S. strategy of having the regime in Kiev escalate its “anti-terrorist operation” against ethnic Russian rebels in the east who are supported by Moscow.
Fearing the conflict was spinning out of control – with the prospects of a showdown between nuclear-armed Russia and the United States on Russia’s border – Merkel traveled to the White House on Feb. 9 seeking assurances from President Obama that he would not fall in line behind his tough-talking aides and members of Congress who want advanced weaponry for Ukraine.
Though Obama reportedly assured Merkel that he would resist the pressure, he continues to keep slip-sliding into line behind the war hawks and letting his subordinates feed the propaganda fires that could lead to a more dangerous war, especially Gen. Breedlove and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, a former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.
In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 4, 2015, Nuland presented her usual black-and-white depiction of the Ukrainian civil war, claiming Russia had “manufactured a conflict controlled by the Kremlin, fueled by Russian tanks and heavy equipment.” She added that Crimea and eastern Ukraine live under a “Reign of Terror.”
Of course, the core problem with how Nuland and pretty much the entire U.S. establishment present the Ukraine crisis is that they ignore how it got started. Nuland, Sen. John McCain and other U.S. officials egged on western Ukrainians to destabilize and overthrow the elected President Viktor Yanukovych, whose political base was in the south and east, including Crimea.
The coup opened historic fissures in this deeply divided country where hatreds between the more European-oriented west and the ethnic Russian east go back many generations, including the unspeakable slaughter during World War II when some western Ukrainians joined with the Nazis to fight the Red Army and exterminate Jews and other minorities.
Despite the U.S. claims over the past year about unprovoked “Russian aggression,” Russian President Vladimir Putin was not the instigator of the conflict, but rather he was reacting to a violent “regime change” on his border and to Russian fears that NATO would seize the historic Russian naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea.
But Nuland and other neocon hardliners have never been interested in a nuanced presentation of reality. Instead, they have treated Ukraine as if it were a testing ground for the latest techniques in psychological or information warfare, although the propaganda is mostly aimed at the U.S. and European publics, getting them ready for more war.
Mocking Merkel
As for Merkel and her peace efforts, Nuland was overheard during a behind-closed-doors meeting of U.S. officials at a security conference in Munich last month disparaging the German chancellor’s initiative, calling it “Merkel’s Moscow thing,” according to Bild, a German newspaper, citing unnamed sources.
Another U.S. official went even further, the report said, calling it the Europeans’ “Moscow bullshit.”
The tough talk behind the soundproof doors at a conference room in the luxurious Bayerischer Hof hotel seemed to get the American officials, both diplomats and members of Congress, worked into a lather, according to the Bild account.
Nuland suggested that Merkel and Hollande cared only about the practical impact of the Ukrainian war on bread-and-butter issues of Europe: “They’re afraid of damage to their economy, counter-sanctions from Russia.”
Another U.S. politician was heard adding: “It’s painful to see that our NATO partners are getting cold feet” – with particular vitriol directed toward German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen as “defeatist” because she supposedly no longer believed in a Kiev victory.
Sen. McCain talked himself into a rage, declaring “History shows us that dictators always take more, whenever you let them. They can’t be brought back from their brutal behavior when you fly to Moscow to them, just like someone once flew to this city,” Munich, a reference to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s “appeasement” of Adolf Hitler.
According to the Bild story, Nuland laid out a strategy of countering Merkel’s diplomacy by using strident language to frame the Ukraine crisis in a way that stops the Europeans from backing down. “We can fight against the Europeans, we can fight with rhetoric against them,” Nuland reportedly said.
NATO Commander Breedlove was quoted as saying the idea of funneling more weapons to the Kiev government was “to raise the battlefield cost for Putin, to slow down the whole problem, so sanctions and other measures can take hold.”
Nuland interjected to the U.S. politicians present that “I’d strongly urge you to use the phrase ‘defensive systems’ that we would deliver to oppose Putin’s ‘offensive systems.’” But Breedlove left little doubt that these “defensive” weapons would help the Ukrainian government pursue its military objectives by enabling more effective concentration of fire.
“Russian artillery is by far what kills most Ukrainian soldiers, so a system is needed that can localize the source of fire and repress it,” Breedlove reportedly said. “I won’t talk about any anti-tank rockets, but we are seeing massive supply convoys from Russia into Ukraine. The Ukrainians need the capability to shut off this transport. And then I would add some small tactical drones.”
Nuland’s Rhetoric
Before the Ukraine coup in February 2014, Nuland was overheard in a phone conversation with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt discussing who should become the country’s new leaders – “Yats is the guy,” she said about Arseniy Yatsenyuk who became the post-coup prime minister – while also criticizing the less aggressive European approach with the pithy phrase, “Fuck the EU.”
Nuland’s tough-gal rhetoric continues, including her bellicose testimony before Congress this month, along with the alarmist (and unproven) reports from Gen. Breedlove, who claimed that “well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery’ having been sent to the Donbass” in eastern Ukraine.
The Nuland-Breedlove allies in Kiev are doing their part, too. Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko recently claimed that around 50 tanks, 40 missile systems and 40 armored vehicles entered east Ukraine’s breakaway Luhansk region from Russia via the Izvaryne border crossing.
This “rhetoric” strategy follows the tried-and-true intelligence gambit known as the Mighty Wurlitzer, in which false and misleading information is blasted out by so many different sources – like the pipes of an organ – that the lies become believable just because of their repetition.
The Ukraine story has followed this pattern with dubious claims being made and repeated by U.S. and Ukrainian officials and then amplified by a credulous Western news media, persuading people who otherwise might know better — even when supporting evidence is lacking.
Similarly, Official Washington’s chorus of loud demands for ignoring Merkel and sending sophisticated weapons to Ukraine continues to build with the latest member of the choir, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
On March 4, Clapper broke the important ethos of professional intelligence officers scrupulously avoiding policy advocacy when he told an audience in New York that the U.S. should arm the Ukrainians “to bolster their resolve and bolster their morale that, you know, we are with them.”
Clapper offered this endorsement as his “personal opinion,” but who cares about James Clapper’s personal opinion? He is Director of National Intelligence, for God’s sake, and his advocacy immediately raises questions about whether Clapper’s “personal opinion” will put pressure on his subordinates to shape intelligence analysis to please the boss.
We saw a possible effect of this recently when journalist Robert Parry contacted the DNI’s office to get an updated briefing on what U.S. intelligence has concluded about who was at fault for shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.
Blaming the Russians
In prepared testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Assistant Secretary Nuland had insinuated that the Russians and the ethnic Russian rebels were to blame. She said, “In eastern Ukraine, Russia and its separatist puppets unleashed unspeakable violence and pillage; MH-17 was shot down.”
This may have been another example of Nuland using “rhetoric” to shape the debate, but it prompted Parry to ask the DNI’s office about what evidence there was to support Nuland’s finger-pointing in this tragic incident that killed 298 people.
Kathleen Butler, a DNI spokesperson, insisted that the U.S. intelligence assessment on MH-17 had not changed since July 22, 2014, five days after the shoot-down when the DNI’s office distributed a sketchy report suggesting Russian complicity based largely on what was available on social media.
Parry then sent a follow-up e-mail saying: “are you telling me that U.S. intelligence has not refined its assessment of what happened to MH-17 since July 22, 2014?” Butler responded: “Yes. The assessment is the same.” To which, Parry replied: “That’s just not credible.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “US Intel Stands Pat on MH-17 Shoot-down.”]
But the DNI’s response does make sense if later U.S. intelligence analysis contradicted the initial rush to judgment by Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior officials blaming Russia and the rebels. The Obama administration might not want to surrender a useful propaganda club to bash Moscow, or as Nuland might say, an important piece of anti-Russian “rhetoric.”
As for Brennan and his appearance before the stuffy Council on Foreign Relations fielding questions posed by Charlie Rose as the “presider,” the CIA director seemed more concerned about the flak his agency has been getting for having a cloudy crystal ball and not anticipating how the Ukraine crisis would unfold, saying:
“Now I know that many would like the CIA to predict the future — answering questions such as ‘will Crimea secede and be annexed by Russia’ and ‘will Russian forces move into Eastern Ukraine.’ But the plain and simple truth is that … virtually all events around the globe, future events — including in Ukraine — are shaped by numerous variables and yet-to-happen developments as well as leadership considerations and decisions.”
But the prospect of CIA analysts seeing events clearly – both understanding what may have caused an event in the past and perceiving the complex forces that may shape the future – are diminished when the U.S. intelligence community becomes politicized and exploited for propaganda purposes, when it gets enlisted into “information warfare.”
Obama could surely use some experienced, mature help in putting an end to this potpourri of you-pick-your-favorite-statement about “Russian aggression.” The disarray and deceit on such an important issue does nothing to bolster confidence that he has been tutored well, that he understands the value of sober intelligence work, or that he is in control of U.S. foreign policy.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He worked primarily on Russian and European issues during his 27 years as a CIA analyst; he also prepared the President’s Daily Brief for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. He is now a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SOURCE w/links, details: https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/14/guiding-obama-into-global-make-believe/
So, given the choice of only those two options, I'd say some DUers wouldn't want readers to learn that PNAC types are still playing major roles in the State Department, even to the point of undermining Sec. Kerry's work.
Because if you had, you would know it was a link to a Daily Show segment where Lewis Black eviscerates Glenn Beck for his hyperbolic Nazi comparisons and claims of Nazi-style smears and persecution against him.
Now why on earth would I post such a thing as a reply to this OP?
I guess you don't know him, eh?
Even though you said you did.
Since you seem to think I was promoting "Glenn Beck NAZI" shit here, rather than showing a Daily Show clip of Lewis Black making fun of it, it probably would've helped if you'd watched the thing.
Amazing journalism technique, though. "Why waste my time? I can just guess and completely miss the point."
Col. Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle, Sr., training members of the team which opposed fascism during World War II.
The source is a former Secret Service agent, who is still alive if anyone wants to learn more about him, Abraham Bolden.
Former U.S. Secret Service Agent Abraham BOLDEN was the first African American Secret Service agent to serve in the White House, personally appointed and literally hand-picked by President John F. Kennedy to the White House detail. Agent Abraham Bolden reported overt racism by his fellow agents and outright hostility toward the "n------loving president," quoting fellow Secret Service agents on the JFK detail.
In addition to enduring all manner of personal indignities, he was concerned at the lack of professionalism in those assigned to protect the president and reported his concerns, including agents who said out loud if anyone started shooting the president, they would not take a bullet for him. He was told, "OK. Thanks" by his superiors. When the problems weren't addressed, Bolden requested transfer back to the Secret Service office in Chicago.
Abraham Bolden speaks at JFK Lancer.
The story of a man who told the truth:
After 45 Years, a Civil Rights Hero Waits for Justice
Thom Hartmann
June 12, 2009 11:52 AM
A great miscarriage of justice has kept most Americas from learning about a Civil Rights pioneer who worked with President John F. Kennedy. But there is finally a way for citizens to not only right that wrong, but bring closure to the most tragic chapter of American presidential history.
After an outstanding career in law enforcement, Abraham Bolden was appointed by JFK to be the first African American presidential Secret Service agent, where he served with distinction. He was part of the Secret Service effort that prevented JFK's assassination in Chicago, three weeks before Dallas. But Bolden was framed by the Mafia and arrested on the very day he went to Washington to tell the Warren Commission staff about the Chicago attempt against JFK.
Bolden was sentenced to six years in prison, despite glaring problems with his prosecution. His arrest resulted from accusations by two criminals Bolden had sent to prison. In Bolden's first trial, an apparently biased judge told the jury that Bolden was guilty, even before they began their deliberations. Though granted a new trial because of that, the same problematic judge was assigned to oversee Bolden's second trial, which resulted in his conviction. Later, the main witness against Bolden admitted committing perjury against him. A key member of the prosecution even took the fifth when asked about the perjury. Yet Bolden's appeals were denied, and he had to serve hard time in prison, and today is considered a convicted felon.
After the release of four million pages of JFK assassination files in the 1990s, it became clear that Bolden -- and the official secrecy surrounding the Chicago attempt against JFK -- were due to National Security concerns about Cuba, that were unknown to Bolden, the press, Congress, and the public not just in 1963, but for the next four decades.
SNIP...
Abraham Bolden paid a heavy price for trying to tell the truth about events involving the man he was sworn to protect -- JFK -- that became mired in National Security concerns. Bolden still lives in Chicago, and has never given up trying to clear his name.
Will Abraham Bolden live to finally see the justice so long denied to him?
CONTINUED...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thom-hartmann/after-45-years-a-civil-ri_b_213834.html
After the assassination, he went to Washington on his own dime and reported what he saw to the Warren Commission. For his trouble -- and despite an exemplary record as a Brinks detective, Illinois State Trooper, and Secret Service agent -- Bolden was framed by the government using a paid informant's admitted perjury and spent a long time in prison. The government also drugged him and put him into psychiatric hospitals.His real crime was telling the truth.
Americans know the Truth: the country hasn't been the same since Nov. 22, 1963. President Kennedy kept the nation out of Vietnam and started toward the moon. Imagine what the New Frontier could have become for us today? Certainly would not be a time where "money trumps peace."
What makes me sad, is how many DUers think they're on the "right" side of history censoring important information that is not on tee vee, not taught in crapademia, nor even mentioned in "polite company." Thanks for the kind words, polly7! They mean the world.
What's telling is that is how some behave when asked to show where ConsortiumNews is wrong.
Here's an important history most Americans know zero about: The NAZI Echo.
Many of them have escaped facing justice on earth. Not our problem, which is their ideological progenitors, inheritors, and beneficiaries. These warmongers and banksters enrich themselves through government service at the expense of the innocent people of the nation and planet. They are the ones I want to see face justice.
DU Nazis.
Crickets...
You must have missed it.
Who enabled NAZI Germany to round up the Jews? Think IBM.
The company and its Hollerith machines enabled the fascists to tabulate census data and find out "who was who?" and "who did what?"and "who lives where?"
Oh. The IBM machines and the cards they used to process information also were used to find out "how many Jews?" and "where are they?"
IBM & "Death's Calculator"
by Edwin Black
EXCERPT...
When the Reich needed to mount a systematic campaign of Jewish economic disenfranchisement and later began the massive movement of European Jews out of their homes and into ghettos, once again, the task was so prodigious it called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed. When the Final Solution sought to efficiently transport Jews out of European ghettos along railroad lines and into death camps, with timing so precise the victims were able to walk right out of the boxcar and into a waiting gas chamber, the coordination was so complex a task, this too called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed.
However, another invention did exist: the IBM punch card and card sorting system-a precursor to the computer. IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler's program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success. IBM Germany, using its own staff and equipment, designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitler's Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before-the automation of human destruction. More than 2,000 such multi-machine sets were dispatched throughout Germany, and thousands more throughout German-dominated Europe. Card sorting operations were established in every major concentration camp. People were moved from place to place, systematically worked to death, and their remains cataloged with icy automation.
SNIP...
I was haunted by a question whose answer has long eluded historians. The Germans always had the lists of Jewish names. Suddenly, a squadron of grim-faced SS would burst into a city square and post a notice demanding those listed assemble the next day at the train station for deportation to the East. But how did the Nazis get the lists? For decades, no one has known. Few have asked.
The answer: IBM Germany's census operations and similar advanced people counting and registration technologies. IBM was founded in 1898 by German inventor Herman Hollerith as a census tabulating company. Census was its business. But when IBM Germany formed its philosophical and technologic alliance with Nazi Germany, census and registration took on a new mission. IBM Germany invented the racial census-listing not just religious affiliation, but bloodline going back generations. This was the Nazi data lust. Not just to count the Jews — but to identify them.
CONTINUED...
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/gypibm.html
For me, one who's carried this knowledge most of my adult life, I find it difficult to grasp how anyone could fail to fathom where today's secret government and all its illegalities will head.
So, for science:
Did you know that IBM helped the NAZIs round up the Jewish people in Germany and throughout occupied Europe?
Gee, REP. Come to think of it, I don't see too many other posts on Edwin Black on DU or, like he says in the following video, on tee vee or the New York Times, thanks to pressure from some quarter or another.
Hope people spread some important news in days when IBM serves the NSA and employees of the Carlyle Group.
The American news media have betrayed the American people by overlooking the crimes of the Bushes*. Some of the biggest lies of ommission concern how, as Vice President and then as President, George Herbert Walker Bush helped arm Iraq and its strongman, Saddam Hussein. In their work to create a counterbalance to the Ayatollahs of Iran, Bush and his cronies created a Frankenstein. Today, Bush's son, installed as president by a partisan and thus crooked Supreme Court, continues to use the threat of this Bush-made Frankenstein as justification for the illegal invasion of Iraq.
First: George Herbert Walker Bush and his toadie Donald Rumsfeld led the charge to arm Saddam Hussein... of course, their "work" was done on behalf of Ronald "Can't Recall" Reagan...
In the Loop: Bush's Secret Mission
by Murray Waas and Craig Unger
The New Yorker Magazine - November 2, 1992
EXCERPT…
Iraq desperately needed American aid. On February 26th, the State Department sent a memo, classified "Confidential," to Bush's national-security adviser, Donald P. Gregg, who is now Ambassador to South Korea. The memo was intended to prepare the Vice-President for a March 2nd meeting with Nizaar Hamdoon, the Iraqi Ambassador, and was accompanied by "talking points for Bush to use in conversations first with John Bohn, the new chairman of the Export-Import Bank, and then with Hamdoon. "Iraqi Ambassador Hamdoon is calling on me soon," Bush's first script read, "and I expect him to raise the issue of short-term Exim credit insurance for Iraq...I urge you and your colleagues on the Board to give that favorable consideration... Exim's support for continued trade with Iraq would be a powerful timely signal... of U.S. interest in stability in the Gulf."
The bank's economists had already concluded that Iraq had little chance of repaying the loan. Nevertheless, Bohn agreed to Bush's request, overriding the advice of the bank's professional staff, and when the Vice-president met with Hamdoon he was able to relay the good news. He was scripted to say, the memo notes, "I am pleased that Commerce has recently issued licenses for some long pending items" - high-technology exports -for Iraq. "You should take that as a sign of our seriousness in addressing the issue." Many of those items, it is now known, were examples of dual-use technology -helpful to Iraq's programs to develop ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons.
By this time, the Iran-Contra investigations were under way in Congress. But one of the key witnesses, William Casey, was unable to appear, he was in Georgetown hospital, being treated for a malignant brain tumor. He died on May 6th. Amiram Nir, who was also expected to be a witness in the Iran-Contra trials, died in the crash of a small plane in Mexico in 1988. Meanwhile, Vice-President Bush was trying to escape the political fallout of the Iran-Contra disclosures. He told the Washington Post that he had not been aware that serious objections were raised by Shultz and Weinberger to selling weapons to Iran. "If I had sat there, and heard George Shultz and Cap express it strongly, maybe I would have had a stronger view. But when you don't know something it's hard to react... We were not in the loop."
On August 6, 1987, the day the Post article appeared, Weinberger telephoned Shultz, incredulous that Bush had denied knowledge. "He was on the other side," Weinberger said, according to notes taken by Shultz's executive secretary, Charles Hill. "It's on the record! Why did he say that?"
More recently, Howard Teicher, the former national Security Council adviser who worked closely with Casey and Bush on the covert arms sales, had come forward to dispute Bush's story. "Bush definitely knew almost everything about the Iranian arms-sales initiative," Teicher told us. "I personally briefed him in great detail many times. Like so many others, he got premature Alzheimer's after the arms sales became public."
CONTINUED…
http://www.jonathanpollard.org/2002/111402.htm
Gee. One would think the American people would be, uh, angry to discover their government was arming a nutjob? Maybe that's why most people don't know this stuff.
U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup
Trade in Chemical Arms Allowed Despite Their Use on Iranians, Kurds
by Michael Dobbs
High on the Bush administration's list of justifications for war against Iraq are President Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons, nuclear and biological programs, and his contacts with international terrorists. What U.S. officials rarely acknowledge is that these offenses date back to a period when Hussein was seen in Washington as a valued ally.
Among the people instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Hussein as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions.
The story of U.S. involvement with Saddam Hussein in the years before his 1990 attack on Kuwait -- which included large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors -- is a topical example of the underside of U.S. foreign policy. It is a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms proliferators, all on the principle that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Throughout the 1980s, Hussein's Iraq was the sworn enemy of Iran, then still in the throes of an Islamic revolution. U.S. officials saw Baghdad as a bulwark against militant Shiite extremism and the fall of pro-American states such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan -- a Middle East version of the "domino theory" in Southeast Asia. That was enough to turn Hussein into a strategic partner and for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad to routinely refer to Iraqi forces as "the good guys," in contrast to the Iranians, who were depicted as "the bad guys."
CONTINUED…
ARCHIVED: https://web.archive.org/web/20040215203712/http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1230-04.htm
Here's more to remember: The same technology we sold to Saddam were used to justify the illegal invasion of 2003.
Saddam Hussein: Made in the USA
by Mike Burke
imc-nyc-print@indymedia.org, February 14, 2003
"The Bush administration sent U.S. technology to the Iraqi military and to many Iraqi military factories, despite over-whelming evidence showing that Iraq intended to use the technology in its clandestine nuclear, chemical, biological, and long-range missile programs."
No this quotation is not pulled from a conspiracy-minded website, but from the Congressional Record from July 27, 1992. They are the words of the late Congressman Henry Gonzalez of Texas.
For months in the early 1990s Gonzalez released hundreds of documents that outlined how the highest levels of the U.S. government - including Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - had secretly and illegally helped arm Saddam Hussein. The scandal was known as Iraqgate.
In 1991, Charles Schumer, then a New York Congressman, now the New York Senator, said Hussein was Bush's Frankenstein: "He had been created in the White House laboratory with a collection of government programs, banks, and private companies." At the time, future Vice President Al Gore said, "Bush is presiding over a cover up significantly worse than Watergate."
SNIP...
In December, the White House boldly seized Iraq's 12,000-page weapons document in order to censor parts for the non-permanent Security Council states.
Among the information deleted was a list of U.S. corporations, government agencies and laboratories that aided Iraq. The companies included Honeywell, Kodak, Bechtel, Dupont and Hewlett-Packard. Among the government agencies were the Departments of Defense, Energy, Commerce and Agriculture. And then there were government nuclear weapons laboratories Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia, which all offered training to Iraqi scientists. This information emerged only after a German news reporter obtained unedited portions of the Iraq documents.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Iraq/Saddam_MadeInUSA.html
Thanks largely to Joseph Trento, we still have someone around who can still talk about all this. He's in the pen, like Poppy's other business buddies Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega...
Another Failed Attempt to Gag The Arms Dealer Who Supplied Saddam
Joe Trento's Column
5/16/2005
Miami – Sarkis Soghanalian was once the most powerful arms dealer in the world. Filled with charm, able to communicate in eight languages, Soghanalian had one weakness – he liked to speak to reporters. A few weeks ago I went into the Perdue rehabilitation center in South Miami to reconnect with the arms dealer. Even sick with diabetes and unable to walk, Soghanalian still scares the hell out of the Bush family and their business associates.
SNIP...
Soghanalian has also had a long relationship with the CIA, working with one of their brightest (now retired) officers, Lou Severe. His poorest relationship was with Customs and Immigration, now known as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). He had been instructed by his bosses in the Reagan White House not to do business with Customs. The Miami office of Customs, now ICE, has been angry with Soghanalian ever since he refused to help them by becoming a snitch concerning other CIA front companies.
In 1984 former Nixon officials (including John Mitchell, Spiro Agnew and others) forced the arms dealer to put them in business selling military uniforms to Saddam. If Sarkis didn’t throw the uniform business their way, he was told he would not get export licenses to provide the helicopters the Reagan Administration wanted sent to arm Saddam. Even Richard Nixon, wrote letters of endorsement of the deal. The $450 million dollar deal produced shoddy uniforms Saddam refused to pay for. Soghanalian was sued in civil court by these former public servants. After Soghanalian beat the businessmen in civil court, the arms dealer found he was being targeted by his old associates through the administration of George H.W.Bush. When Soghanlian began sharing details with ABC’s Nightline, of how the Reagan/Bush team had aided Saddam through the 80’s as the 1991 Gulf War loomed, the hammer fell on Soghanalian. In the early 1990’s the first Bush Administration orchestrated a prosecution of Soghanalian for delivering weapons on his private 727 to Iraq. One of the key witnesses standing by to testify against him was former Marine Colonel Jack Brennan, then a Bush I White House aide. Brennan had been a key partner in the uniform deal. The case was political. Bush was running for reelection and the Iraqgate scandal was engulfing him.
Bush I appointees in Miami indicted and convicted Soghanalian. That resulted in a six-year federal prison sentence and an attempt by the Bush Administration to cut Soghanalian off from all media contact while in the Federal prison system. But even in jail the arms dealer had bombs to throw. He told me in an interview for British television that Mark Thatcher (son of the Prime Minister) had profited from dealing classified night vision devices to Saddam’s government. That resulted in a major scandal in England. George H. W. Bush’s defeat gave Soghanalian a chance to show the Clinton Administration - what he could do about its $100 bill counterfeiting problem. He was so successful in his work with the Secret Service that his jail sentence suddenly ended and he was back in business in time for the 1995 Paris Air Show. Working with France, Soghanalian was involved in deals around the world, including Saudi Arabia.
In 1995 while on a visit to Los Angeles Soghanalian was approached by an associate of now infamous Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. That meeting resulted in a previously unreported FBI investigation of a top Republican member of the House of Representatives and his wife. A two-year off and on FBI investigation followed. Soghanalian was promised that sanctions against Iraq would be lifted—allowing Soghanalian to be paid—in exchange for a huge payment to self-proclaimed surrogates of the politician. The investigation was stopped at the highest levels in the FBI during the Clinton impeachment proceedings. The main target of the probe left elective political life with no evidence collected that he had done anything illegal. According to the prosecutor in charge there were very hard feelings against Soghanalian for his role in starting the investigation. According to federal agents involved in the case the FBI leadership stopped the case before evidence could be collected on the politician.
CONTINUED...
http://www.dcbureau.org/20050516805/trentos-take/another-failed-attempt-to-gag-the-arms-dealer-who-supplied-saddam.html
Hmm. Jack Abramoff? No wonder no one in Washington like to talk about all this.
*Since November 22, 1963, the American media have turned a blind eye toward one family name – Bush. This series of posts is to fill in and correct the record of the Bush Family Evil Empire. Contrary to what the Press Corpse and its psyops handlers report, there is such a thing as a vast right wing conspiracy. And it works on behalf of the Secret Government, the one headed by the people that pay for George Walker Bush, his Poppy and all their sick and sordid ilk.
Death. Death. Death.
Original Post on DU: Sept. 18, 2005
------------------------
BONUS HISTORY:
THE ADMINISTRATION'S IRAQ GATE SCANDAL
BY WILLIAM SAFIRE
Congressional Record
Extension of Remarks - May 19, 1992
Washington
Americans now know that the war in the Persian Gulf was brought about by a colossal foreign-policy blunder: George Bush's decision, after the Iran-Iraq war ended, to entrust regional security to Saddam Hussein.
What is not yet widely understood is how that benighted policy led to the Bush Administration's fraudulent use of public funds, its sustained deception of Congress and its obstruction of justice.
As the Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar, was urging Mr. Bush and Mr. Baker to buy the friendship of the Iraqi dictator in August 1989, the F.B.I. uncovered a huge scam at the Atlanta branch of the Lavoro Bank to finance the buildup of Iraq's war machine by diverting U.S.-guaranteed grain loans.
Instead of pressing the investigation or curbing the appeasement, the President turned a blind eye to lawbreaking and directed another billion dollars to Iraq. Our State and Agriculture Department's complicity in Iraq's duplicity transformed what could have been dealt with as `Saddam's Lavoro scandal' into George Bush's Iraqgate.
The first element of corruption is the wrongful application of U.S. credit guarantees. Neither the Commodity Credit Corporation nor the Export-Import Bank runs a foreign-aid program; their purpose is to stimulate U.S. exports. High-risk loan guarantees to achieve foreign-policy goals unlawful endanger that purpose.
Yet we now know that George Bush personally leaned on Ex-Im to subvert its charter--not to promote our exports but to promote relations with the dictator. And we have evidence that James Baker overrode worries in Agriculture and O.M.B. that the law was being perverted: Mr. Baker's closest aid, Robert Kimmett, wrote triumphantly, `your call to . . . Yeutter . . . paid off.' Former Agriculture Secretary Clayton Yeutter is now under White House protection.
Second element of corruption is the misleading of Congress. When the charge was made two years ago in this space that State was improperly intervening in this case, Mr. Baker's top Middle East aide denied it to Senate Foreign Relations; meanwhile, Yeutter aides deceived Senator Leahy's Agriculture Committee about the real foreign-policy purpose of the C.C.C. guarantees. To carry out Mr. Bush's infamous National Security Directive 26, lawful oversight was systematically blinded.
Third area of Iraqgate corruption is the obstruction of justice. Atlanta's assistant U.S. Attorney Gail McKenzie, long blamed here for foot-dragging, would not withhold from a grand jury what she has already told friends: that indictment of Lavoro officials was held up for nearly a year by the Bush Criminal Division. The long delay in prosecution enabled James Baker to shake credits for Saddam out of malfeasant Agriculture appointees.
When House Banking Chairman Henry Gonzalez gathered documents marked `secret' showing this pattern of corruption, he put them in the Congressional Record. Two months later, as the media awakened, Mr. Bush gave the familiar `gate' order; stonewall.
`Public disclosure of classified information harms the national security,' Attorney General William Barr instructed the House Banking Committee last week. `. . . in light of your recent disclosures, the executive branch will not provide any more classified information'--unless the wrongdoing is kept secret.
`Your threat to withhold documents,' responded Chairman Gonzalez, `has all the earmarks of a classic effort to obstruct a proper and legitimate investigation . . . none of the documents compromise, in any fashion whatsoever, the national security or intelligence sources and methods.'
Mr. Barr, in personal jeopardy, has flung down the gauntlet. Chairman Gonzalez tells me he plans to present his obstruction case this week to House Judiciary Chairman Jack Brooks, probably flanked by Representatives Charles Schumer and Barney Frank, members of both committees.
`I will recommend that Judiciary consider requiring the appointment of an independent counsel,' says Mr. Gonzalez, who has been given reason to believe that Judiciary--capable of triggering the Ethics in Government Act--will be persuaded to act.
Policy blunders are not crimes. But perverting the purpose of appropriated funds is a crime; lying to Congress compounds that crime; and obstructing justice to cover up the original crime is a criminal conspiracy.
SOURCE: http://fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1992/h920519l.htm
As for E Howard Hunt: Oh, yeah. He's the same guy who torpedoed Nixon at Watergate and confessed on his deathbed to being a "benchwarmer" in Dallas to his son. The guy's old school CIA, chums of Poppy, who also, coincidentally I'm told, was in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
As we run up to more war for profit, some things to remember from 12 years ago:
Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception
Many neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz are disciples of a philosopher who believed that the elite should use deception, religious fervor and perpetual war to control the ignorant masses.
By Jim Lobe / AlterNet May 18, 2003
What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your intelligence agencies couldn't find the evidence to justify a war?
A follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the "right" kind of men to get the job done – people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary, the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers could not detect.
The "right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled 'Selective Intelligence,' was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) – an agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq.
Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including Wolfowitz and Shulsky's alma mater, the University of Chicago, before his death in 1973.
Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the administration. They include 'Weekly Standard' editor William Kristol; his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Lynne Cheney), and Gary Schmitt, the director of the influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is chaired by Kristol the Younger.
Strauss' philosophy is hardly incidental to the strategy and mindset adopted by these men – as is obvious in Shulsky's 1999 essay titled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)" (in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality). As Hersh notes in his article, Shulsky and his co-author Schmitt "criticize America's intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment." They argued that Strauss's idea of hidden meaning, "alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception."
CONTINUED...
http://www.alternet.org/story/15935/leo_strauss%27_philosophy_of_deception
Thank you for standing up for Democracy, CrawlingChaos. Your presence means the world.
You are the best of the best at DU. I'm so grateful for what you do. Please don't ever stop.
And what the hell, here's a hug because I love ya 
1.) No public oversight.
2.) No public accountability.
3.) Secret Enemies.
4.) Secret Privilege.
From rigged elections and wars without end for profit: When government power is exercised in secret, there's no telling who benefits, who pays, what it costs, nor what it means for the nation and its citizens or the planet and its people.
You never say anything about any of that, Major Nikon. Why?
Is what makes your reputation.
Sorry you got shown for who you really are in this misguided thread of yours.
A tongue lashing from you and stevenleser. Roger Ailes must be trembling in his leather boots.
According to the new biography (and a history going back a ways in GOP circles), The Loudest Voice In The Room: How The Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News — And Divided A Country:
Ailes was “a big fan” of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s notorious favorite filmmaker—not for her Nazi ideology but for her cinematic talent as a propagandist. “Ailes was especially taken by Riefenstahl’s use of camera angles.”
SOURCE: http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/01/extraordinary-revelations-about-roger.html
Terry Gross of Fresh Air interviewed Gabriel Sherman, the guy who wrote, the book today.
This is the kind of information that Fox viewers might appreciate knowing before watching their television screens.
Did you know Roger Ailes and the Big Money has been in bed with Big NAZI for a long time, zappaman?
Wow.
By the way, shouldn't you be out trying to figure out the mysterious mystery of the mysterious unexplainable crop circle mystery?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2897407
Mine was more informative.
Sure as hell not the USAF. What exactly would lessons on censorship have to do with inprocessing and preparing a recruit to perform his basic duties in the military?
If I didn't know better, I'd say you're just making shit up again. I would think someone who claims to be a journalist would have learned that's a no-no.
I'm a friend of hers.
I thought you must be since you have so much knowledge about basic training!
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You troublemaker, you
We know this because that is what George Herbert Walker Bush told the FBI.
We also know, from the same FBI report, that Poppy heard someone threaten to kill President Kennedy.
So, why did Bush wait until AFTER JFK was assassinated to come foward with the warning?
Here's the document:
Here's a transcript of the text:
TO: SAC, HOUSTON DATE: 11-22-63
FROM: SA GRAHAM W. KITCHEL
SUBJECT: UNKNOWN SUBJECT;
ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT
JOHN F. KENNEDY
At 1:45 p.m. Mr. GEORGE H. W. BUSH, President of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company, Houston, Texas, residence 5525 Briar, Houston, telephonically furnished the following information to writer by long distance telephone call from Tyler, Texas.
BUSH stated that he wanted to be kept confidential but wanted to furnish hearsay that he recalled hearing in recent weeks, the day and source unknown. He stated that one JAMES PARROTT has been talking of killing the President when he comes to Houston.
BUSH stated that PARROTT is possibly a student at the University of Houston and is active in political matters in this area. He stated that he felt Mrs. FAWLEY, telephone number SU 2-5239, or ARLINE SMITH, telephone number JA 9-9194 of the Harris County Republican Party Headquarters would be able to furnish additional information regarding the identity of PARROTT.
BUSH stated that he was proceeding to Dallas, Texas, would remain in the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel and return to his residence on 11-23-63. His office telephone number is CA 2-0395.
# # #
Here's background:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKbushG.htm
Another FBI memo, from a week later, was unearthed just prior to the 1988 election. In it, "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" was debriefed by J Edgar Hoover himself about the Pro- and Anti-Castro Cuban communities in Miami. 1988 Presidential Candidate Vice President ex-DCI ex-China legation head George Bush said "It wasn't me." Surprisingly and contrary to longstanding policy, the agency even released the name of another "George Bush" who worked at CIA for six months or so. That guy was surprised to find reporters on his doorstep and told them he was a photo analyst on loan from another government department and he never was debriefed by J Edgar Hoover, let alone for the anything to with the assassination of President Kennedy.
Here's a transcript of the above:
Date: November 29, 1963
To: Director
Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Department of State
From: John Edgar Hoover, Director
Subject: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY
NOVEMBER 22, 1963
Our Miami, Florida, Office on November 23, 1963, advised that the Office of Coordinator of Cuban Affairs in Miami advised that the Department of State feels some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in U. S. policy, which is not true.
Our sources and informants familiar with Cuban matters in the Miami area advise that the general feeling in the anti-Castro Cuban community is one of stunned disbelief and, even among those who did not entirely agree with the President's policy concerning Cuba, the feeling is that the President's death represents a great loss not only to the U. S. but to all of Latin America. These sources know of no plans for unauthorized action against Cuba.
An informant who has furnished reliable information in the past and who is close to a small pro-Castro group in Miami has advised that these individuals are afraid that the assassination of the President may result in strong repressive measures being taken against them and, although pro-Castro in their feelings, regret the assassination.
The substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. W. T. Forsyth of this Bureau.
# # #
I do remember that GHWB was head of the CIA when the Church Committee was looking into the CIA assassination programs. He made things all friendly-like and turned what had been a serious hunt for truth under previous DCI Colby into another dog-and-pony show.
So. We wonder why America is in the shape it's in? Austerity for the majority and a state of permanent war, where "money trumps peace."
Needs to be it's own OP... if it ain't already.
How am I Spinoza know?
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,2022164,00.html
Krugrman wrote about her in the New York fucking Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/24/opinion/the-good-guys.html?ref=topics
Sid
Krugrman wrote about her in the New York fucking Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/24/opinion/the-good-guys.html?ref=topics
Sid
It would explain a lot.
Here's more on Ms. Rowley, missing from TIME and The New York Times:
"What if you lived in a country where, after the Administration negligently failed to prevent a major terrorist attack, they deliberately exploited everyone's fears and utilized shock doctrine to do INSANELY stupid and dangerous things: things like launching costly pre-emptive wars, subverting law, and destroying the checks and balances of the Constitution and common standards of decency by re-instituting torture? Well, We DO live in that country." -- Former FBI special agent and attorny, Coleen Rowley
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/coleen-rowley
She also ran for the US Congress in 2006 as a Democrat. The national party, for some reason, didn't seem to give her all the support beating an incumbent required.
The details add so much, don't you think?
that virtually everyone had heard of Colleen Rowley before today, and that, yes, the major news outlets had covered her story.
Sid
...as do all who support, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America and the People.
It's time for another Bush/Nazis thread
2-9-2008: It's time for an updated BFEE/NAZI thread
Leaked documents show 9,000 Nazi war criminals fled to South America after World War 2
And that's what the great DUers and mighty DUers strive to do.
Response to Octafish (Original post)
80's synth pop. What's not to love.
I had this song blaring from the tape deck of my '83 Mercury Lynx, the summer of '86, after graduating from high schooi.
Now you're going to tell me I wasn't cool.
Sid
Hope you feel better!
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a common disorder that affects the large intestine (colon). Irritable bowel syndrome commonly causes cramping, abdominal pain, bloating, gas, diarrhea and constipation. IBS is a chronic condition that you will need to manage long term.
Even though signs and symptoms are uncomfortable, IBS — unlike ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, which are forms of inflammatory bowel disease — doesn't cause changes in bowel tissue or increase your risk of colorectal cancer.
Only a small number of people with irritable bowel syndrome have severe signs and symptoms. Some people can control their symptoms by managing diet, lifestyle and stress. Others will need medication and counseling.
Punisher IV?
You must have me confused.
Maybe you ran into someone else while dropping off your sci-fi script!
What was it optioned for again?
You!
The CIA's History Problem is Our History Problem
David Wallace
Huffington Post, 06/16/2006 Udated: 05/25/2011
EXCERPT...
Such is the case with recent news accounts in the Washington Post and the New York Times that in the late 1950s the CIA knew that Adolf Eichmann was living in Argentina and had a pretty close pseudonym for him (Clemens instead of the actual alias of Klement), but did nothing to bring him to justice. That the CIA sought the cooperation and protection of Nazis, even those guilty of war crimes, after World War Two to serve its Cold War struggles is not news. But the extent of these relationships and the depths the CIA went through to protect them is news. These disclosures have been made possible through the ongoing efforts of the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), launched over eight years ago by the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (Public Law 105-246). The key that unlocked this unsavory history has been the unparalleled access granted to the IWG into formerly secret government records and archives.
Concern over these disclosures extend beyond the sad facts surfaced by the IWG: such as official protection of Nazis residing in the United States and the CIA's post-war use of top Eichmann aides. They also include the entirely unconscionable fact that it has taken generations for the CIA to disclose this information, and only did so after a special act of Congress supplemented by years long battles to protect them from public knowledge. IWG member Thomas H. Baer pointed to such battles when he thanked the CIA for finally coming clean this past week. However, coming clean occurred only after "reversal of [a six year] policy of thinly veiled noncompliance" with the IWG's legal mandate and the ongoing efforts of members of Congress and (some) IWG members and staff in making an "ironclad case decrying CIAs misinterpretation of its [legal] obligations."
Why has the CIA taken so long to open such records and archives? And do the excuses proffered around protecting national security really hold any credible value? I think the answer to the second question must be no, of course not. As to the first question, that is a trickier one, but one must look beyond the legal loopholes that protect secret information for such inordinate periods and look to see what agendas are at play. Clearly one agenda is to provide a simplistic and comforting (and at times woefully inaccurate) past as a means of enabling an ignorant, but strongly held, patriotism as a form of social glue that (kind of) holds society together. But a simplistic and comforting and inaccurate past can only be realized through the unreasonable, though legal, controls granted to the CIA over its historical records and archives. And it is in these seemingly rationally derived controls that the past itself can be held hostage.
Archives and records are more than just what they would appear to be at face value. They are more than just static documentary objects that record "what happened." In fact, they themselves are desired objects of manipulation and control that go to the heart of what society believes and comes to believe. They often lie at the center of what narratives can be constructed, or not constructed, as a means for making sense or nonsense of our world.
CONTINUED w/links to the fine print...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-wallace/the-cias-history-problem-_b_23206.html
That's the kind of stuff no one apart from seven or eight people on DU and the 40 or 50 hits on HP will muster. But when it comes to Democracy, they matter infinitely more than the millions hynotized by the tee vee.
It was always stupid of them to try and pretend transparency, nobody is fooled by it and I don't even know why the CIA pretends to be anything more than the biggest shit stirring organization on the planet. That reputation is well founded by now and they should own it with pride.
History will not be kind to the CIA, not at all and they cannot stand the fact that time doesn't take sides.
We've stayed here Octa, despite all the crap from the 'permanetly outraged at your outrage' swarm. Saw through it way back on DU1 and see no reason to drink the kool aid and agree with them now. They ran off great people and like the CIA, history will not be kind to the shit stirrers either. When has it ever been?
There are two kinds of people Octa, those that learn and those that repeat forever. Thankfully you and I and others never let go of our critical thinking skills in place of permanet outrage. The BFEE lovers did and look at them now. Without a leg to stand on and standing out like sore thumbs.
They put down ConsortiumNews, CounterPunch, and fellow DUers. There's no unanimity of opinion within any of those outfits, let alone within the body of work of writers at each.
The issue of censoring diversity of opinion -- at the same time the government is engaged in wall-to-wall domestic surveillance for no good reason -- seems disgusting on an elemental level, JEB, to all Americans. Hannah Arendt said, there's good reason:
The goal of wholesale surveillance, [font color="green"]as (Hannah) Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” [/font color]And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.
Chris Hedges, The Last Gasp of American Democracy
Chris Hedges, The Last Gasp of American Democracy
The great DUer H2O Man reminded us about history untaught and unreported: The admiral on the right in the picture below ran a spy operation on the president at left.
The reason? He and the Joint Chiefs thought Nixon was going soft on communism. What business is that of theirs, nobody asked?
Al Haig, The NSC and the White House Spy Ring: The Nixon Story You Never Heard
Joan Hoff
Montana State University, Jan. 2014, M
EXCERPT...
Over three decades ago on December 21, 1971, Richard Nixon approved the first major cover-up of his administration. He did so reluctantly at the behest of his closest political advisers, Attorney General John Mitchell, Domestic Counselor John Ehrlichman, and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman. The public remains ignorant of this seminal event in Nixon’s first term and journalists and historians have largely ignored it. The question is why? A recently released Nixon tape transcribed from an enhanced CD produced by the Nixon Era Center provides the clearest answer to this thirty-year-old Nixon secret.
On that December day Nixon agreed to cover-up a criminally insubordinate spying operation conducted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff inside the National Security Council because of the military’s strong, visceral dislike of Nixon’s foreign policy. In particular, the JCS thought Nixon gone “soft on communism” by reaching out to the Chinese and Russians, and they resented Vietnamization as a way to end the war.
As early as 1976 Admiral Elmo Zumwalt publicly made these military suspicions and resentment abundantly clear in his book, On Watch: A Memoir. “I had first become concerned many months before the June 1972 burglary,” Zumwalt wrote, “(about) the deliberate, systematic and, unfortunately, extremely successful efforts of the President, Henry Kissinger, and a few subordinate members of their inner circle to conceal, sometimes by simple silence, more often by articulate deceit, their real policies about the most critical matters of national security.” In a word, Zumwalt, like many within the American military elite, thought that Nixon’s foreign policies bordered on the traitorous because they “were inimical to the security of the United States.”
This atmosphere of extreme distrust led Admiral Thomas Moorer, head of the JCS, to first authorize Rear Admiral Rembrandt C. Robinson and later Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander, both liaisons between the Joint Chiefs and the White House’s National Security Council, to start spying on the NSC. For thirteen months, from late 1970 to late 1971, Navy Yeoman Charles E. Radford, an aide to both Robinson and Welander, systematically stole and copied NSC documents from burn bags containing carbon copies, briefcases, and desks of Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and their staff. He then turned them over to his superiors.
SNIP...
The most striking aspect of this tape is the passive role played by Nixon–the so-called original imperial president. First, he is out-talked by the others throughout this fifty-two-minute conversation. Toward the end of tape, the president can be heard saying to his advisers in a loud voice that the JCS spy activity was “wrong! Understand? I’m just saying that’s wrong. Do you agree?” A little later he called it a “federal offense of the highest order.” Up to this point, however, John Mitchell told the president that “the important thing is to paper this thing over” because “this Welander thing . . . Is going to get right into the middle of Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
In other words, Nixon would have to take on the entire military command if he exposed the spy ring. Moreover, this expose would take place in an election year and when the president had scheduled trips to both China and the Soviet Union to confirm improved relations with these countries–which the military opposed. Taking on the military establishment with such important political and diplomatic events on the horizon could have proven disastrous for the president’s most important objectives and revealed other back-channel diplomatic activities of the administration. Later in his memoirs the president said that the media would have completely distorted the incident and exposure would have done “damage to the military at time when it was already under heavy attack.”
In contrast, at the time all three men agreed with Nixon about the seriousness of the crime committed by the JCS. Mitchell even compared it to “coming in (to the president's office) and robbing your desk.” However, they advised him to do no more than to inform Moorer that the White House knew about the JCS spy ring, to interview Welander (who was later transferred to sea duty), and to transfer Radford. Moorer subsequently denied obtaining any information from purloined documents, fallaciously claiming that Nixon kept him fully informed about all his foreign policy initiatives. If this had been true there would have been no need for Moorer to set up a spy ring. Welander, for his part according to this tape, had initially refused to answer questions about the spying he was supervising on the questionable grounds that he had a “personal and confidential relationship” with both Kissinger and Haig.
CONTINUED...
http://spikethenews.blogspot.com/2014/01/al-haig-nsc-and-white-house-spy-ring.html
Yeoman Radford stole from Henry Kissinger's briefcase on secret trip to China...
...in all he may've copied more than 10,000 documents.
"I didn't know he screened through the thing, but I knew he did carry 'em to me and I just returned from San Clemente and I had been told every damn thing that was in there...I gave the things back to (Alexander) Haig." -- Thomas H. Moorer, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
SOURCE: http://nixontapes.org/welander.html
SOURCE: http://nixontapes.org/welander.html
History shows that the brass hats who run the Pentagon are just as liable as any lowly journalist to forget for whom they work. Thanks to NSA and all the rest of the oxymoronic alphabet soup of an Military Industrial Intelligence Community, while we don't need to remind them what we think of that, as they're listening and reading just about everything that's transmitted, they know. We do need to remind them of who's the boss. And as long as there's a Constitution, We the People will.
A few years later, after Watergate exposed -- and focused exclusively on Nixon's depravity -- we learned that CIA and FBI and who knows what else were running rogue "in the name of fighting communism." Great. Sounds scary. Profitable, too.
Frank Church warned us in 1975 about the secret government and secret spy powers and how they would impact DEMOCRACY.
Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) was a patriot, a hero and a statesman, truly a great American.
The guy also led the last real investigation of CIA, NSA and FBI. When it came to NSA Tech circa 1975, he definitely knew what he was talking about:
[font color="blue"]“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”[/font color]
-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. A brave man, the NSA was turned on him. Coincidentally, he narrowly lost re-election the next cycle.
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”[/font color]
-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. A brave man, the NSA was turned on him. Coincidentally, he narrowly lost re-election the next cycle.
And what happened to Church, for his trouble to preserve Democracy:
In 1980, Church will lose re-election to the Senate in part because of accusations of his committee’s responsibility for Welch’s death by his Republican opponent, Jim McClure.
SOURCE: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=frank_church_1
SOURCE: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=frank_church_1
From GWU's National Security Archives:
"Disreputable if Not Outright Illegal": The National Security Agency versus Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Art Buchwald, Frank Church, et al.
Newly Declassified History Divulges Names of Prominent Americans Targeted by NSA during Vietnam Era
Declassification Decision by Interagency Panel Releases New Information on the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Panama Canal Negotiations
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 441
Posted – September 25, 2013
Originally Posted - November 14, 2008
Edited by Matthew M. Aid and William Burr
Washington, D.C., September 25, 2013 – During the height of the Vietnam War protest movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the National Security Agency tapped the overseas communications of selected prominent Americans, most of whom were critics of the war, according to a recently declassified NSA history. For years those names on the NSA's watch list were secret, but thanks to the decision of an interagency panel, in response to an appeal by the National Security Archive, the NSA has released them for the first time. The names of the NSA's targets are eye-popping. Civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King and Whitney Young were on the watch list, as were the boxer Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and veteran Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald. Also startling is that the NSA was tasked with monitoring the overseas telephone calls and cable traffic of two prominent members of Congress, Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Howard Baker (R-Tennessee).
SNIP...
Another NSA target was Senator Frank Church, who started out as a moderate Vietnam War critic. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee even before the Tonkin Gulf incident, Church worried about U.S. intervention in a "political war" that was militarily unwinnable. While Church voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution, he later saw his vote as a grave error. In 1965, as Lyndon Johnson made decisions to escalate the war, Church argued that the United States was doing "too much," criticisms that one White House official said were "irresponsible." Church had been one of Johnson's Senate allies but the President was angry with Church and other Senate critics and later suggested that they were under Moscow's influence because of their meetings with Soviet diplomats. In the fall of 1967, Johnson declared that "the major threat we have is from the doves" and ordered FBI security checks on "individuals who wrote letters and telegrams critical of a speech he had recently delivered." In that political climate, it is not surprising that some government officials eventually nominated Church for the watch list.[10]
SOURCE: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB441/
I wonder if Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-CT), a liberal Republican, also got the treatment from NSA?
“I think that the report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards, and I think the people who read it in the long run future will see that. I frankly believe that we have shown that the [investigation of the] John F. Kennedy assassination was snuffed out before it even began, and that the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up.” — Senator Richard Schweiker on “Face the Nation” in 1976.
Lost to History NOT, thanks to people who care. Unfortunately, the secret government continues to stonewall Justice, even there. Under that rock is where we find buried Lady Liberty. If there's a pulse, God, let's get her to safety.
Fuck the haters.
Wasn't that long ago:
Correspondence and collusion between the New York Times and the CIA
Mark Mazzetti's emails with the CIA expose the degradation of journalism that has lost the imperative to be a check to power
Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 August 2012 14.58 EDT
EXCERPT...
But what is news in this disclosure are the newly released emails between Mark Mazzetti, the New York Times's national security and intelligence reporter, and CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf. The CIA had evidently heard that Maureen Dowd was planning to write a column on the CIA's role in pumping the film-makers with information about the Bin Laden raid in order to boost Obama's re-election chances, and was apparently worried about how Dowd's column would reflect on them. On 5 August 2011 (a Friday night), Harf wrote an email to Mazzetti with the subject line: "Any word??", suggesting, obviously, that she and Mazzetti had already discussed Dowd's impending column and she was expecting an update from the NYT reporter.
SNIP...
Even more amazing is the reaction of the newspaper's managing editor, Dean Baquet, to these revelations, as reported by Politico's Dylan Byers:
"New York Times Managing Editor Dean Baquet called POLITICO to explain the situation, but provided little clarity, saying he could not go into detail on the issue because it was an intelligence matter.
CONTINUED with LINKS...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/correspondence-collusion-new-york-times-cia
It's like, tradition at NYT.
The CIA and the Media
How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up
After leaving The Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship of the CIA and the press during the Cold War years. His 25,000-word cover story, published in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977, is reprinted below.
By Carl Bernstein
October 20, 1977 In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.
Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28610.htm
And, thanks to Scooter Libby and NYT reporter Judith Miller's thing while exposing a CIA NOC Valerie Plame to intimidate whistleblowers like her husband Amb. Joseph Wilson, we get to see the reality:
"Think of the Aspens," Scooter Libby reminded Judy Miller, then an imprisoned NYT reporter, "they're all connected." Yes, underground.
Then, that wasn't the first time the Corporate Owned News helped lie America into war on Iraq. Remember the first Iraq War? If you don't, know that the War Party pulled out all the stops and spared no expense to build public support for their war of choice:
"I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where ... babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."
Turned out the "15-year old hospital volunteer" Nayirah really was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington when she testified to Congress.
"If I wanted to lie, or if we wanted to lie, if we wanted to exaggerate, I wouldn't use my daughter to do so. I could easily buy other people to do it." -- Kuwait Ambassador
That was 1990. Here's the story:
http://www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html
I don't recall New York Times bringing any of that up in 2002 when helping lead the run-up to Iraq War II, do you?
Sorry if that fails to fully address your POV towards less-equal sources that do support "acupuncture, aliens, atlantis, chem trails, grassy knolls, fairies, 'pyramid power'.. garbage like that," but I don't really care. Intelligent people get the point.
Here's where we can directly see the corrupt nature of America's "news media."
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his sister Rory Kennedy told Charlie Rose that their father, the Attorney General of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, believed there was a conspiracy behind the death of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. For the first time in almost 50 years, members of the slain president's family were on the record about their father's thoughts about the assassination.
The story made news, as it were, for a day or two -- it was on page 8 here in Detroit (try finding it using The Free Press or Detroit News web site search engines) -- and apart from several threads on DU, that's about it as coverage goes. The Charlie Rose interview was part of a program put together by the media and good people in Dallas to celebrate JFK's life.
What bothers me about the media coverage is the constant attack, not on the government's lousy investigation of the assassination and its attendant cover-up, but, rather, the attack on anyone who brings up the subject of conspiracy in the death of the president, even when it's children of attorney general who also was the brother of the slain president.
Check out this condescending piece of opinion from the Dallas Observer:
Not Even Charlie Rose Could Rein in RFK Jr. in Dallas Last Night. Also: Conspiracy Theories!
By Betsy Lewis Sat., Jan. 12 2013 at 11:01 AM
It got weird when he went into a historical lecture about his father's investigation into the JFK assassination. He was speaking about it as if he had been part of it, then cited a book called The Unspeakable by Jim Douglas (sic - actually "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" by James Douglass) as being the best book on the subject, then kept referencing things from the book. He was losing the audience, so he burst out, "My father believed that the Warren Report was a shoddy piece of craftsmanship," to the delighted applause of the mostly Baby Boomer audience.
Whenever Charlie Rose would ask about the family, RFK Jr. would evade the question until he heard either delighted Boomer applause or delighted Boomer laughter. One of his responses to a family question was an unrelated story about World War II. A lady behind me who must have recently Netflixed The Iron Lady kept saying, "Here here!" for the benefit of us unfortunate people around her.
Some of the strangest RFK Jr. outbursts with the biggest applause were:
"We're becoming a national security state!" (applause, "Here here!"
"Corporations want profits!" (applause, "Here here!"
"Corporations are great things, but we'd be nuts to let them run our government!" (applause, "Here here!"
"Nationalism in Africa! The end of colonialism!"
At this point, I don't think anyone knew what the hell he was talking about. It was something about the Kennedy family airlifting President Obama's father out of Kenya to begin a new life in America.
RFK Jr.: "Yes."
CONTINUED...
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/mixmaster/2013/01/charlie_rose_live_the_kennedy.php
Me, I don't believe any of that stuff was "out there." Why writer Betsy Lewis chooses to believe what the media tell her is true I'll guess lies in allegiance to a pay check.
Likewise for the lack of coverage given the story in the national media, where the same few corporations that swore up and down there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, both in 1990 and 2002, now want no part of "conspiracy talk" during the 50th anniversary observance. So far, as far as I'm aware, the Charlie Rose program has not aired.
What's more telling is what didn't get noted in the nation's corrupt mass media at all: The fact that Attorney General and later Senator Robert F. Kennedy also was assassinated. Some think that was a coincidence, because the mass media told them so. One thing's for certain, the questions still surrounding the deaths of two liberal icons doesn't get discussed at all today in our supposedly "free press."
Original OP Feb. 22, 2013
PS: Thank you, Uncle Joe! Every time I read your name, my heart feels light as a feather.
Thank you for noticing, McMike! Sometimes a fortune rests on a mere scrap of information, like in a "Fistful of Dollars."
CIA moonlights in corporate world
In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.
In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.
The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.
SNIP...
But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.
The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.
CONTINUED...
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eIFPhHBh
Then there's the signature tradition of playing both sides off the middle, like selling rifles to both the Allies and the Central Powers during World War I, or the bounty hunters in "For a Few Dollars More" getting one inside to work out.
Stratfor: executive boasted of 'trusted former CIA cronies'
By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent
9:08PM GMT 28 Feb 2012
The Telegraph
A senior executive with the private intelligence firm Stratfor boasted to colleagues about his "trusted former CIA cronies" and promised to "see what I can uncover" about a classified FBI investigation, according to emails released by the WikiLeaks.
Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at the Texas firm, also informed members of staff that he had a copy of the confidential indictment on Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
The second batch of five million internal Stratfor emails obtained by the Anonymous computer hacking group revealed that the company has high level sources within the United States and other governments, runs a network of paid informants that includes embassy staff and journalists and planned a hedge fund, Stratcap, based on its secret intelligence.
SNIP...
Mr Assange labelled the company as a "private intelligence Enron", in reference to the energy giant that collapsed after a false accounting scandal.
CONTINUED...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9111784/Stratfor-executive-boasted-of-trusted-former-CIA-cronies.html
Then, there's Booz Allen, NSA's go-to private spyhaus, vacuums and filters the right stuff for Carlyle Group, a buy-partisan business which always seems to know where and what to bomb and make a buck, but the lines between sides turned out be fuzzy and amorphous nebula-like -- like in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."
The Knights of the Revolving Door
When War is Swell: the Carlyle Group and the Middle East at War
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition September 6-8, 2013
Paris.
A couple of weeks ago, in a dress rehearsal for her next presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of humanitarian interventionism, made a pit-stop at the Carlyle Group to brief former luminaries of the imperial war rooms about her shoot-first-don’t-ask-questions foreign policy.
For those of you who have put the playbill of the Bush administration into a time capsule and buried it beneath the compost bin, the Carlyle Group is essentially a hedge fund for war-making and high tech espionage. They are the people who brought you the Iraq war and all those intrusive niceties of Homeland Security. Call them the Knights of the Revolving Door, many of Carlyle’s executives and investors having spent decades in the Pentagon, the CIA or the State Department, before cashing in for more lucrative careers as war profiteers. They are now licking their chops at the prospect for an all-out war against Syria, no doubt hoping that the conflagration will soon spread to Lebanon, Jordan and, the big prize, Iran.
For a refresher course on the sprawling tentacles of the Carlyle Group, here’s an essay that first appeared in CounterPunch’s print edition in 2004. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening years, except these feted souls have gotten much, much richer. – JSC
Across all fronts, Bush’s war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 1000, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Ba’athists for decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.
Still not all of the president’s men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtel’s triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.
Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son’s war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They’ve remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don’t need to hire lobbyists..
Bush Sr. serves as a kind of global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president doesn’t negotiate arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of high level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive business and political ties. According to an account in the Washington Post, Bush Sr. earns around $500,000 for each speech he makes on Carlyle’s behalf.
One of the Saudi investors lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group, the construction conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced Shafiq Bin Laden, Osama’s half brother, to sink $2 million of BinLaden Group money into Carlyle’s accounts. In a pr move, the Carlyle group cut its ties to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/06/when-war-is-swell-the-carlyle-group-and-the-middle-east-at-war/
This barely scratches the surface. The reality is that underneath what shows for public navigators is one enormous iceberg made from blood-red ice, invisible to the proles and serfs who are doing their best to keep afloat in a frozen sea of austerity, endless war and debt servitude. And these are, by far, the wealthiest times in human history.
PS: Did you see this on [link:http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026939527|that General Walker fellah], McMike? The guy's almost forgotten these days.
And all of their contributors are still breathing.
It's almost like this was tasteless, hyperbolic nonsense or something.
I don't mind you disagreeing, but alleging that I posted that is beyond what the lowest of the low have written about me on Conservative Cave, NuclearDem.
Here one thing I did write about the Holocaust:
George W Bush, at Auschwitz, revealed himself to be a ''Holocaust Denier.''
Press Gaggle on Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau
Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary
Krakow, Poland
May 31, 2003
EXCERPT...
MR. FLEISCHER: Oh, that probably extended some 30, 40 feet behind glass, and you just see hair. Women's hair. The guide talked about in the next room that Auschwitz was also a site of plunder because as the Jews were rounded up and sent there, they brought their belongings with them so they had their suitcases. They didn't know they were going to their death, so they carried their life's possessions with them, which was then quickly plundered, the guide explained.
The President saw the Jewish prayer shawls that were hanging. And then another deeply moving part, he saw artificial limbs, actual artificial limbs, prosthesis, legs that were there and which she explained to the President, even these were plundered after people were killed, and then used back in Germany.
The President would say things such as "Powerful." I just wrote down as I listened to him -- "powerful." When he saw the suitcases, he said, "So sad." And then at one point when he went by another display where there were teeny little shoes, the President looked at it and said, "All the little baby shoes." He told the guide, "You've done a good job recording history."
The President talked about the current context of it, how many people come each year. He asked, where do they come from. He asked, [font size="6"][font color="red"]"Do people challenge the accuracy of what you present?"[/font color][/font size]
Q: And what did the guide say?
MR. FLEISCHER: She explained where people come from. They come from all over, she said. A lot come from Poland, from the United States, from Israel, from Germany.
Q: Did she answer his question, do people challenge --
MR. FLEISCHER: I didn't get it. If she did, I don't remember, I didn't write it down.
Then he saw some cells where the prisoners were kept. Now, these are not -- at Birkenau he saw the bunk cells. But this were actual prison cells with doors that swing open and bars, very, very small rooms. And in one small room, the guide explained, there were 39 people in a small cell with a teeny, teeny little bit of air that came in from a window up top. And this cell was very small. And she said to him, on the doors you can see signs on how to scratch the door to survive. And you could see it -- on the door they would just scratch to get air into the room. They tried to claw their way through a very thick wooden door.
CONTINUED...
http://www.state.gov/p/eur/rls/rm/2003/21131.htm
That's a lot different than what you imply I wrote, NuclearDem.
BTW: Like the commercial says, people can tell a lot about you from the words you use.
"pi** you off"