Octafish
Octafish's JournalCocaine Coup led by Klaus Barbie and his fellow escaped NAZI war criminals in Ecuador.
And as long as the NAZIs were OUR -- as in Reagan and Bush's -- NAZIs, it was OK.
The story, from a blog:
NEO-NAZIS AND THE COCAINE COUP
by Kieran McGrath
October 31, 2012
On July 17th 1980, the Bolivian General Luis García Meza seized power in what has become known as the “Cocaine Coup”. Meza ruled for three years in a regime fueled by corruption, narcotrafficking and the relentless persecution of anyone who opposed him. The tortures, rapes and abductions that came to define Meza’s violent reign have been well documented: It is thought that over 1,000 people were murdered in the first year of the dictatorship. Meza also recruited the German Nazi, Klaus Barbie, to orchestrate his government’s systematic and ruthless wave of terror. Barbie – who was a former SS Captain, notorious for the slaughtering of 26,000 Jews in Lyon and the murder of Jean Moulin; a French Resistance leader – had been active in South America since 1957 making his living as a consultant and “specialist interrogator” for the military dictatorships in Argentina, Peru and Bolivia where his reputation preceded him, making him the apotheosis of neo-Nazism.
Along with Barbie’s role as chief torturer and interrogator in the Meza regime, he was also responsible for recruiting a number of high-profile European neo-Fascists to aid the dictatorship. The Italian terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie – who, in 1983, was one of the CIA’s most wanted men – was enlisted by Barbie, as was the Spanish neo-Nazi Ernesto Milá Rodríguez. Delle Chiaie earned his infamy after being implicated in a number of bombings in Italy as well as his establishing of the “Avanguardia Nazionale”; a movement of young neo-Nazis who wanted to subvert Italian democracy and return the country to fascism. Milá was also a high-profile fascist accused of a series of bombings in Catalonia during the 1970s as well as the 1980 Copernicus Street Synagogue bombing in Paris.
It is easy to see why this tripartite alliance of Barbie, Delle Chiaie and Milá would have been attracted to the opportunity the Meza regime presented them with: It not only financed their activities whilst granting them sanctuary, but it also allowed them to experiment with their terrorist strategies in a country that had become deeply susceptible to them. Before Meza took power, Bolivia had been under military rule for the best part of two decades. During this period every attempt at establishing democracy had been mired in the kind of chaotic instability that, throughout the twentieth century the world over, gave rise to fear, violence and hatred. Bolivia, a country that has always struggled to stabalise its precarious economy with the tensions generated by its racial diversity, fell prey to the myths of fascism in this period and Meza, who was already in awe of Barbie´s sadistic expertise, must have been seduced by the hierarchical, traditional and nationalist fantasies that Barbie´s history, ideology and very survival represented.
It is tempting to see this strange hybrid of post-colonial European arrogance and resurgent Nazism as a demonic fugitive from the aftermath of the Second World War, as though fascism was – like the monster in some Hollywood b-movie – kept alive after Hitler´s fall by a cult of dignitaries, united by their vaguely esoteric ideals and the mysterious channels that connected them. This crude interpretation of history is a dangerous one because it fails to address the complexity of the crisis in Bolivia, the acquiescence of the US and the basic fact that, although it may have been forced underground, fascism has never left modern societies, whether they be European or American.
CONTINUED...
http://luchaporley2640.com/2012/10/31/neo-nazis-and-the-cocaine-coup-3/
A complicated story that continues...
Outstanding work and brilliant analysis.
Endless wars for profit require cooperation. Like "They" do with the UN, can't take any risks when it comes to democracy.
Who remembers Paul Sanford?
An attorney who also served as a journalist, Paul Sanford was first to ask then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan whether the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name might be considered an act of treason.
A year later he was dead in a fall at a California hotel. The death was ruled a suicide.
We talked about him on DU, back then.
Mark Marzetti of The New York Times, for starters.
Correspondence and collusion between the New York Times and the CIAMark 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
PS: I think I told you about him before. If so, it still stands.
PPS: To learn more about how our nation's press devolved to the point where it now goes along with scripted press conferences, read "On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency" by Mark Hertsgaard. There are a few more studies since then, but that work provides an excellent basis for developing a more sophisticated understanding.
No. The NSA domestic spy op is illegal.
Transparent Citizens, Invisible GovernmentElaine Scarry
Boston Review, June 18, 2013
Editors' note: In 2004, Elaine Scarry described in Boston Review how the Patriot Act inverts the Constitution's commitment to government transparency and citizen opacity. Laws and official actions, Scarry explained, are to be visible for all to see, while individual lives are to be out of government's sightlines. With the recent revelation that the National Security Agency, following authority supposedly granted by the Patriot Act, has been secretly collecting information on millions of Americans, Scarry's idea has been echoed by numerous observers and reporters, such as Glenn Greenwald. Here is an excerpt from her 2004 story, Resolving to Resist. For more, buy Scarry's book Rule of Law, Misrule of Men.
If many members of Congress failed to read the Patriot Act during its swift passage, it is in part because that act is almost unreadable. The Patriot Act is written as an extended sequence of additions to and deletions from previously existing statutes. In making these alterations, it often instructs the bewildered reader to insert three words into paragraph X of statute Y without ever providing the full sentence that is altered either in its original or its amended form. Only someone who had scores of earlier statutes open to the relevant pages could step painstakingly through the revisions. On the issue of electronic surveillance alone, the Patriot Act modifies the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Cable Act, the Federal Wiretap Statutes, and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Reading the Patriot Act is like being forced to spend the night on the steps outside the public library, trying to infer the sentences in the books inside by listening to hundreds of mice chewing away on the pages.
The hundreds of additions and deletions do, despite appearances, have a coherent and unitary direction: many of them increase the power of the Justice Department and decrease the rights of individual persons. The constitutional rights abridged by the Patriot Act are enumerated in the town resolutions, which most often specify violations of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech and assembly, the Fourth Amendment guarantee against search and seizure, the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of due process, and (cited somewhat less often) the Sixth and Eighth Amendment guarantees of a speedy and public trial and protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
The unifying work of the Patriot Act is even clearer if, rather than summarizing it as an increase in the power of the Justice Department and a corresponding decrease in the rights of persons, it is understood concretely as making the population visible and the Justice Department invisible.
The Patriot Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people's lives be private and the work of government officials be public; it instead crafts a set of conditions in which our inner lives become transparent and the workings of the government become opaque. Either one of these outcomes would imperil democracy; together they not only injure the country but also cut off the avenues of repair.
CONTINUED...
http://bostonreview.net/blog/transparent-citizens-invisible-government
Why Gen. Petraeus’ Assassination Inc. Threatens Us All
By Fred Branfman, AlterNet
Posted on Aug 24, 2010
"
General McChrystal says that) for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies." —"The Runaway General," Rolling Stone, 6/22/10
The truth that many Americans find hard to take is that that mass U.S. assassination on a scale unequaled in world history lies at the heart of America’s military strategy in the Muslim world, a policy both illegal and never seriously debated by Congress or the American people. Conducting assassination operations throughout the 1.3 billon-strong Muslim world will inevitably increase the murder of civilians and thus create exponentially more "enemies," as Gen. McChrystal suggests—posing a major long-term threat to U.S. national security. This mass assassination program, sold as defending Americans, is actually endangering us all. Those responsible for it, primarily General Petraeus, are recklessly seeking short-term tactical advantage while making an enormous long-term strategic error that could lead to countless American deaths in the years and decades to come. General Petraeus must be replaced, and the U.S. military’s policy of direct and mass assassination of Muslims ended.
SNIP...
The increasing shift to direct U.S. assassination began on Petraeus’s watch in Iraq,where targeted assassination was considered by many within the military to be more important than the "surge." The killing of Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was considered a major triumph that significantly reduced the level of violence. As Bob Woodward reported in The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008:
"Beginning in about May 2006, the U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence agencies launched a series of top secret operations that enabled them to locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups. A number of authoritative sources say these covert activities had a far-reaching effect on the violence and were very possibly the biggest factor in reducing it. Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) responsible for hunting al Qaeda in Iraq, (conducted) lightning-quick and sometimes concurrent operations When I later asked the president (Bush) about this, he offered a simple answer: ‘JSOC is awesome.’" (Emphasis added.)
SNIP...
Woodward’s finding that many "authoritative sources" believed assassination more important than the surge is buttressed by Petraeus’ appointment of McChrystal to lead U.S. forces in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s major qualification for the post was clearly his perceived expertise in assassination while heading JSOC from 2003-‘08 (where he also conducted extensive torture at "Camp Nama" at Baghdad International Airport, successfully excluding even the Red Cross).
Another key reason for the increased reliance on assassination is that Petraeus’ announced counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan obviously cannot work. It is absurd to believe that the corrupt warlords and cronies who make up the "Afghan government" can be transformed into the viable entity upon which his strategy publicly claims to depend—particularly within the next year which President Obama has set as a deadline before beginning to withdraw U.S. troops. Petraeus is instead largely relying on mass assassination to try and eliminate the Taliban, both within Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The centrality of assassination to U.S. war plans is revealed by the fact that it was at the heart of the Obama review of Afghan policy last fall. The dovish Biden position called for relying primarily on assassination, while the hawkish McChrystal stance embraced both assassination and more troops. No other options were seriously considered.
CONTINUED...
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_gen_petraeus_assasination_inc_threatens_us_all_20100824/
PS: What shocks me is how few Americans in leadership positions express remorse. Do they fear reprisal, should they stand up to War Inc.?
PRISM and the Rise of a New Fascism (John Pilger)
We Are All Witnesses Nowby JOHN PILGER
CounterPunch WEEKEND EDITION JUNE 21-23, 2013
EXCERPT...
Snowden’s revelation that Washington has used Google, Facebook, Apple and other giants of consumer technology to spy on almost everyone is further evidence of a modern form of fascism. Having nurtured oldfashioned fascists around the world – from Latin America to Africa and Indonesia – the genie has risen at home. Understanding this is as important as understanding the criminal abuse of technology.
Fred Branfman, who exposed the “secret” destruction of tiny Laos by the US air force in the 1960s and 1970s, provides an answer to those who still wonder how a liberal African-American president, a professor of constitutional law, can command such lawlessness. “Under Mr Obama, America is still far from being a classic police-state . . .” he wrote. “But no president has done more to create the infrastructure for a possible future police state.” Why? Because Obama understands that his role is not to indulge those who voted for him but to expand “the most powerful institution in the history of the world, one that has killed, wounded or made homeless well over 20 million human beings, mostly civilians, since 1962”.
In the new American cyberpower, only the revolving doors have changed. The director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, was an adviser to Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state in the Bush administration who lied that Saddam Hussein could attack the US with nuclear weapons. Cohen and Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt – they met in the ruins of Iraq – have co-authored a book, The New Digital Age, endorsed as visionary by the former CIA director Michael Hayden and the war criminals Henry Kissinger and Tony Blair. The authors make no mention of the Prism spying programme, revealed by Snowden, that provides the NSA with access to all of us who use Google.
Control and dominance are the two words that make sense of this. These are exercised by political, economic and military design, of which mass surveillance is an essential part, but also by insinuating propaganda into the public consciousness. This was Edward Bernays’s point. His two most successful PR campaigns convinced Americans that they should go to war in 1917 and persuaded women to smoke in public; cigarettes were “torches of freedom” that would hasten women’s liberation.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/21/prism-and-the-rise-of-a-new-fascism/
The National Security State and the Whistleblower
“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
The Last Check on Abuses of Power
The National Security State and the Whistleblower
by MELVIN A. GOODMAN
CounterPunch JUNE 19, 2013
EXCERPT...
Since the Vietnam War, we have observed a system of judicial tolerance, with the Supreme Court only intervening on foreign policy matters to endorse the policies and powers of the president. This deferential attitude toward the White House has resulted in an absence of judicial scrutiny of illegalities, including warrantless eavesdropping and the destruction of the torture tapes at the CIA that documented torture going beyond methods authorized by the Justice Department. Ironically, the destroyer of the 92 videotapes of interrogations, Jose Rodriquez, who ignored a White House order not to destroy the tapes and should have faced at least obstruction of justice charges, has published a book sanctioned by the CIA that maligns the OIG for a “holier-than-thou attitude and the prosecutorial ways they routinely treated fellow CIA employees.”
In addition to the failure of Congress and the courts to provide necessary regulation and oversight of the national security process, the mainstream media has been complacent about its watchdog role regarding secret agencies in a democratic arena. The media require the efforts of contrarians and whistleblowers in order to penetrate the secrecy of the policy and intelligence communities, but typically ignore the reprisals taken against whistleblowers. Often, they disdain the information provided by whistleblowers that is critical of senior officials and government agencies–preferring to protect their access to these officials. David Ignatius of the Washington Post falsely claimed that journalists “instinctively side with leakers,” but he was quick to ridicule Edward Snowden, who has exposed NSA’s spying on millions of Americans‘ phone records and the internet activity of hundreds of millions of foreigners. Ignatius, moreover, has been an apologist for the CIA and has relied on clandestine operatives to present a one-sided picture of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. His novel (“Agents of Innocence”) provided a laudatory account of CIA tradecraft, relying on sensitive leaks from a senior operations officer.
My own experience with the mainstream media as a whistleblower is revelatory. During my congressional testimony in 1991 against the nomination of Robert M. Gates as director of CIA, I provided background information to Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times in order to counter malicious rumors emanating from the White House that was designed to compromise my credibility. Sciolino initially reported this information accurately, but then tilted to support Gates’ confirmation. In a conversation several weeks after the confirmation hearings, Sciolino explained that it was becoming obvious that Gates would be confirmed and would be an important source to her as a CIA director. She added that, as I would return to the National War College as a professor of international relations, I would be of little further use. Sciolino noted that whistleblowers make good sources only in the short run, while journalists must rely on policymakers for long-term access and should not gratuitously offend them. This explains the conventional analysis offered by the press corps and its reluctance to challenge official sources.
As a result of the imbalance in the process of foreign policy decision making, we have come full circle from President Woodrow Wilson, who wanted to make the “world safe for democracy,” to Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, who find the world too dangerous to honoring constitutional democracy. The excesses of the Vietnam War; Watergate; Iran-Contra; and the Global War on Terror have contributed to the creation of a dangerous national security state and a culture of secrecy. Whistleblowers can help all of us decide whether the ends justify the means regarding these excesses.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/19/the-national-security-state-and-the-whistleblower/
Image: STASI prison East Berlin by Johan van Elk. Housed at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmvanelk/7781938604/
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