[font color=darkred]Copley's deadly Cuba ties[/font]

Tales of JFK assassination and CIA link haunt paper at center of San Diego journalistic spy nexus

By Matt Potter, Dec. 18, 2014

JFK at SDSU commencement

...Calling the nation's nearly six-decade covert battle against Castro a "chill" might be considered more than a bit of an understatement, conveniently obscuring the key roles that the newspaper's antecedents under previous ownership — the San Diego Union, Evening Tribune, and the Copley News Service — all played in a deadly intelligence war waged by the Central Intelligence Agency on behalf of a succession of U.S. presidents, beginning with Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.

The story broke back in August 1977, in a Penthouse magazine exposé, by one-time San Diego investigative reporter Joe Trento and Dave Roman, of Union-Tribune publisher Jim Copley's alleged connection to some of history's darkest espionage and assassination plots.

As Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame noted in October, 20 1977’s Rolling Stone, "According to Trento and Roman, Copley personally volunteered his news service to then‑president Eisenhower to act as 'the eyes and ears' against 'the Communist threat in Latin and Central America' for 'our intelligence services.'

“James Copley was also the guiding hand behind the Inter‑American Press Association, a CIA‑funded organization with heavy membership among right‑wing Latin American newspaper editors."

The Penthouse story related that "The current Latin American editor for [Copley News Service], William Giandoni, a former psychological warfare officer, admitted that he not only tried to join the CIA in 1950 but also actually fed information to CIA operative William Kelly in 1961 concerning the coming Bay of Pigs invasion."

"In addition to placing stories for the CIA, Copley News Service acted as the 'eyes and ears' for the CIA when it came to reporting on what other publications might be picking up on agency activities in Latin America," the pair wrote...

http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2014/dec/18/ticker-copley-cuba/#

@MiamiHerald · Dec 16 · Cuban music producer denies having ‘worked’ for USAID http://hrld.us/1uQJvlR

Michael Beschloss @BeschlossDC · Dec 17 · Michael Beschloss in New York Times—“When J.F.K. Secretly Reached Out to Castro”: http://ift.tt/1x0c1sE

Jesse Katz admits that attacking journalist Gary Webb's CIA-cocaine expose ruined Webb's life
By Nick Schou Thursday, May 30 2013

Nine years after investigative reporter Gary Webb committed suicide, Jesse Katz, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who played a leading role in ruining the controversial journalist's career, has publicly apologized — just weeks before shooting begins in Atlanta on Kill the Messenger, a film expected to reinstate Webb's reputation as an award-winning journalist dragged through the mud by disdainful, competing media outlets.

Webb made history, then quickly fell from grace, with his 20,000-word 1996 investigation, "Dark Alliance," in which the San Jose Mercury News reported that crack cocaine was being peddled in L.A.'s black ghettos to fund a CIA-backed proxy war carried out by contra rebels in Nicaragua...

No journalist played a more central role in the effort to obscure the facts Webb reported than former L.A. Times reporter Katz. But on May 22, Katz, who has penned a Los Angeles magazine story hitting newsstands now that resurfaces the Gary Webb episode, essentially apologized, on KPCC-FM 89.3's AirTalk With Larry Mantle.

Katz was discussing "Freeway Rick Is Dreaming" in the July 2013 issue of Los Angeles magazine, in which he profiles Ricky Ross, the notorious crack-cocaine dealer with whom Katz has a long, tortured relationship. In 1994, shortly after Ross got out of prison for coke trafficking, Katz wrote that Ross was the mastermind of America's crack-cocaine epidemic, at his peak pushing half a million rocks a day.

"If there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was 'Freeway' Rick," Katz's 1994 L.A. Times article claimed. "Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived."

But Webb's 1996 Mercury News series exposed a startling fact: Ross' mentor and chief supplier, who helped him climb to the top of the crack trade, was Nicaraguan exile Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes. Blandón belonged to one of Nicaragua's most prominent political families and was a major backer of the "contras" — a rebel movement secretly created by the CIA to overthrow the leftist Sandinista rebels...

http://www.laweekly.com/2013-05-30/news/gary-webb-jess-katz-crack/

@SanhoTree · Under New Management. Honduras to experiment w/private cities. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/01/under_new_management_amapala_honduras_charter_cities … Cuz sovereignty is for those who can afford it.

In 2009, far from Honduras, respected economist Paul Romer, then of Stanford University, appeared at a TED conference in the United Kingdom to unveil a big idea. Against the backdrop of a satellite image of the Korean Peninsula at night, Romer compared the North's blackness with the South, which glowed with electricity and economic activity. Causing the stark contrast, Romer argued, were the Hermit Kingdom's bad or impractical regulations. Similar problems existed throughout the developing world. Romer's plan? Sign over a large tract of "uninhabited" land in a struggling country to a developed guarantor nation, which would create and oversee an investment zone free from the host country's fickle politics and troublesome rules. Enter the charter city.

Romer's idea captured headlines in the Atlantic and the New York Times. Many international development advocates criticized it for its blatantly neocolonialist features, but it found supporters too. Proponents invariably pointed to Hong Kong, China's "special administrative region" that operates under different rules than the mainland, as a shining example of the results that autonomy can yield. And charter cities almost got off the ground in Madagascar, where Romer found a receptive partner in President Marc Ravalomanana. Malagasy charter cities went down the drain, however, when Ravalomanana was forced to resign, partly because of fierce opposition to his willingness to hand over land to foreigners. (He had negotiated a plan to lease more than 1.2 million hectares to South Korea's Daewoo, to grow corn and palm-oil exports.)

Around the same time, in Honduras, President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a coup and replaced by the more conservative Porfirio Lobo Sosa. The new president faced a dire national situation: 60 percent of Honduras's citizens lived in poverty, its murder rate was climbing (from 50 homicides per 100,000 people in 2007, to 70.7 in 2009), and immigration to the United States was rising so fast that a domestic manufacturing association launched a campaign beseeching workers, "Stay With Us." While looking for ways to kick-start investment in the country, a Lobo aide named Octavio Sánchez discovered Romer's TED talk. It echoed similar ideas being proposed by Mark Klugmann, an American political consultant and former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan who had worked on Lobo's campaign. Romer and Sánchez set up a meeting and began working on a plan to build charter cities in Honduras. "My sense was that it was worth putting some of my time and effort into doing something that might help," says Romer, now a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business.

In early 2011, the Honduran National Congress passed a constitutional amendment allowing for special development regions (REDs), which were like charter cities but without Romer's guarantor nation. They would have investors and be overseen by a government-appointed Transparency Commission -- Romer says he was to be a part of it -- which would select a Honduran governor for each RED. The regions would set their own regulations and jurisdictions; only when it had been determined that they had developed the necessary institutions and populations to hold their own elections would regions transition to democratic control...

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/01/under_new_management_amapala_honduras_charter_cities

The 5 creepiest things about how the Koch brothers engineered the shutdown

This weekend, The New York Times revealed how the Koch Brothers and [font color=red]Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese[/font] engineered this here shutdown we’re dealing with right now, and how they’d been planning it ever since Obama was reelected. I wasn’t especially shocked by it, myself. Hell, half of the Tea Party people in the House actually campaigned on it. Which is why I have been annoyed as hell with the whole “Oh, well, it’s really both parties at fault here!” line of reasoning that some people have been trying to take...

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/207311/the-5-creepiest-things-about-how-the-koch-brothers-engineered-the-shutdown/

...When he introduces Garrison's investigation it is essentially more of the same. For instance, about the arrest of Clay Shaw, Talbot writes, "But to Garrison, he was a CIA-linked international businessman. . .."

Today, there can be no "buts" about it. Shaw was not just "linked" to the CIA, he worked for them. We have this not just from the declassified files, but from FBI agent Regis Kennedy, who said, in referring to Shaw's association with Permindex, that Shaw was a CIA agent who had worked for the Agency in Italy. (Let Justice Be Done, by William Davy, p. 100)

To further downplay the importance of what Garrison uncovered, Talbot quotes former RFK aide, Ed Guthman. Guthman was working as an editor for the Los Angeles Times in early 1967. He tells Talbot that he sent his ace reporters to New Orleans and they discovered that Garrison had no evidence for his charges. Guthman calls them "great reporters". If Talbot would have dug a little deeper he would have found out a couple of interesting things these "great reporters" had done.

One of the "great" reporters was Jack Nelson. Nelson's source for Garrison not having any evidence was former FBI agent and Hoover informer Aaron Kohn. Kohn was, among other things, an unofficial assistant to Shaw's defense team. Another of Guthman's "great" reporters was Jerry Cohen. Cohen cooperated with FBI informant Larry Schiller in keeping Garrison from extraditing Loran Hall. This cooperation extended up to flying with Hall to Sacramento to speak to [font color=red]Edwin Meese[/font]. Further, Cohen kept up a correspondence with Shaw's lawyers and even Shaw himself. This is great reporting? ...

http://www.ctka.net/brothers.html