CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: "We'll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us." The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy). It uses every trick in the book: propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, sexual intrigue, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, death squads and even assassination. These efforts culminate in a military coup, which installs a right-wing dictator. The CIA trains the dictator’s security apparatus to crack down on the traditional enemies of big business, using interrogation, torture and murder. The victims are said to be "communists," but almost always they are just peasants, liberals, moderates, labor union leaders, political opponents and advocates of free speech and democracy. Widespread human rights abuses follow.

This scenario has been repeated so many times that the CIA actually teaches it in a special school, the notorious "School of the Americas." (It opened in Panama but later moved to Fort Benning, Georgia.) Critics have nicknamed it the "School of the Dictators" and "School of the Assassins." Here, the CIA trains Latin American military officers how to conduct coups, including the use of interrogation, torture and murder.

The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (2) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."

The CIA justifies these actions as part of its war against communism. But most coups do not involve a communist threat. Unlucky nations are targeted for a wide variety of reasons: not only threats to American business interests abroad, but also liberal or even moderate social reforms, political instability, the unwillingness of a leader to carry out Washington’s dictates, and declarations of neutrality in the Cold War. Indeed, nothing has infuriated CIA Directors quite like a nation’s desire to stay out of the Cold War.

read more:

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html

 

see also: 

Porkie inc

 

 

A US army general has confirmed that Washington has decided to put an end to a CIA scheme to equip and train certain rebel groups fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad. He insisted the policy shift had nothing to do with improving relations with Russia.

US Army General Raymond Thomas, head of the Special Operations Command, said the decision was "based on assessment of the program."

"At least from what I know about that program and the decision to end it, (it was) absolutely not a sop to the Russians," Thomas said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado on Friday.

READ MORE: No ‘complete confidence’ US arm supplies to Syria won’t end up with ISIS

Unnamed government sources told various media outlets last week that the decision to end the program had been partly due to the Trump administration wanting a better relationship with Russia.

The decision to terminate the program was reportedly taken by Trump in consultation with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser H.R. McMaster ahead of his meeting with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Hamburg earlier this month.

READ MORE: Macron: Eliminating terrorist threat now more important than ousting Assad

But the end of the CIA's Timber Sycamore strategy was not a precondition for the ceasefire deal reached between Putin and Trump on the sidelines of the G20 summit, the US officials insisted.

"We are not the world’s cop; we are not a panacea." Commander Thomas explains the scope of US Special Operations at #AspenSecurity. pic.twitter.com/8VNViCNuBw

— Aspen Security Forum (@AspenSecurity) July 21, 2017

 

The covert CIA program began arming and training the so-called moderate Syrian opposition forces in 2013.

Two US officials who spoke on condition of anonymity with Reuters, pointed out that the covert CIA tactic had produced little success...

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/397153-cia-operation-syria-end/

 

Having investigated the CIA and illustrated the case of Indonesia above, not to mention the "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" big disinformation campaign, Gus would be cautious in taking the change at face value. This could mean is that the CIA operation would be more discreet... In order for the instructions to the CIA change of heart be believed, the USA would also have to change their tune about Assad. Ms Haley should be removed from her job at the UN as well — and replaced by a more decent person.

 

President Donald Trump has ordered that the CIA begin to phase out its covert train-and-equip program in support of so-called “moderate” rebels fighting against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The program represented the tip of the spear of a larger goal of regime change that had been the official policy of the United States since September 2013, when President Obama declared “Assad must go” in the aftermath of a chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta that killed hundreds of civilians. Through this action, President Trump is walking away from an established policy of America taking an active role in forcing the Syrian President’s ouster, willing instead to leave Assad’s fate in the hands of the Syrian people and its allies. The decision by Trump to terminate support for the “moderate” Syrian rebels, while not giving voice to a policy that rejects regime change in Syria, is the clearest signal yet that the United States has changed course on trying to force regime change in Damascus as a precondition for a political settlement of the Syrian crisis.  

The train and equip mission of the CIA in Syria can be traced back to the spring of 2011, when a revolution broke out in Libya against the dictatorial rule of Muammar Gadhafi. Backed by NATO airpower, anti-regime fighters were able to establish control over large areas inside Libya. The CIA began a program to train and equip these fighters, supplying weapons to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, who in turn shipped these weapons to Libya, where they were turned over to Libyan rebels. (This circuitous route was chosen to avoid the U.S. being in violation of a UN embargo against weapons deliveries to Libya.)  

In August 2011, in the aftermath of the capture of the Libyan capital of Tripoli by rebel forces, Qatar began diverting arms originally intended for Libya to Turkey, where they were turned over to rebel forces that had, since June of 2011, been fighting against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. These rebels were grouped together under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), an ostensibly secular resistance group that  was in reality controlled by the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization that had been crushed by Bashar al-Assad’s father back in the early 1980’, and was operating in exile in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. While the CIA was not directly involved in this activity, CIA personnel in Libya and Turkey monitored these shipments to make sure no sensitive weaponry, such as hand-help surface-to-air missiles, made their way into Syria. This effort, which involved billions of dollars of arms, including those provided by the United States for the express purpose of aiding Libyan rebels, continued through 2012 and into 2013. (The U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, who was killed in an attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi in September 2012, was involved in coordinating these weapons transfers.)

As the fighting in Syria expanded in scope and scale, the number of anti-regime combatant organizations increased. The FSA took on an increasingly Islamist character, and many of its fighters defected to more extreme organizations, such as al-Nusra (an Al Qaeda affiliate). Many of the CIA-provided weapons being shipped by Qatar through Turkey made their way into these Islamist units, with the unintended result being that the U.S. was actively arming Al Qaeda and other extremist entities openly hostile to American interests. In an effort to control the flow of weaponry into Syria, President Obama authorized the CIA to formally take over the process of training and equipping Syrian rebels. This operation, known by its codename, Timber Sycamore, was run out of Turkey and Jordan with the full support of both governments.  

From 2013 through 2015, Timber Sycamore oversaw the purchase of billions of dollars of modern weaponry from Balkan suppliers, primarily in Croatia, and their shipment to ports in Turkey and Jordan, where the CIA, working with Turkish and Jordanian intelligence agencies, trained and equipped thousands of rebel fighters from more than 50 groups inside Syria that had been vetted by the CIA. The impact of this program on the fighting in Syria was significant—by the fall of 2015, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad was teetering on the brink of collapse, largely due to the military pressure brought to bear on the regime by these U.S.-backed groups. The success of these rebels played a large role in triggering Russian military intervention in Syria in the fall of 2015, with Russian air power being unleashed against these very same rebels in an effort to save the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The Russian gambit worked, and by 2016 the Syrian military had reclaimed the initiative, recapturing the city of Aleppo and driving the U.S.-backed rebels back on all fronts.

The U.S. and its allies had no effective response to the Russian intervention. One of the reasons for this is the fact that there was little to differentiate the U.S.-backed rebels on the ground inside Syria from the more extremist fighters from al-Nusra and other Islamist groups. While the United States protested the Russian air strikes, it had to deal with the reality that Timber Sycamore was arming far more than just the so-called FSA. In both Turkey and Jordan, corrupt intelligence officers were siphoning off tens of millions of dollars in weapons and munitions, selling them on the black market, where they were bought by al-Nusra and, after 2014, ISIS. The U.S.-backed rebels would often sell or trade their US-provided weapons to both al-Nusra and ISIS, and in many cases, U.S.-trained fighters would defect with these weapons. Thousands of fighters serving under the banner of Al Qaeda and ISIS were, in fact, armed and trained by the CIA.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/say-goodbye-to-regime-ch...

The media’s “insatiable demand” for leaks is prompting the US intelligence community to anonymously disclose government secrets, according to CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who spoke after President Donald Trump blasted intelligence agencies for constant leaks.

“The media’s insatiable demand for leaks presents enormous risks to the United States of America,” Pompeo told the Washington Free Beacon.

“I am confident that this administration is going to do its level best, once the secrets are out, to identify those who did them,”Pompeo added. His comments came on the heels of President Trump saying that he wants leakers to be prosecuted.

Last week, Pompeo blasted The New York Times for publishing the name of the undercover officer in charge of the agency’s Iran operations.

CIA Dir Pompeo calls out @NYTimes for publishing name of an UNDERCOVER CIA agent.

Just as disgraceful?@BretStephensNYT REPEATS name 2x's! pic.twitter.com/wp9dUDmu1S

— Dan Scavino Jr. (@Scavino45) July 21, 2017

 

“It matters to me personally. We have CIA officers who will get killed as a result of these [leaks],” Pompeo said in the Free Beacon interview.

Leaks from the intelligence community have plagued Trump’s White House since he took office. They included information about his conversations with world leaders, as well as counterterrorism efforts.

US media have increasingly relied on anonymous intelligence sources for their reporting. And many of the leaks were used to attack President Trump.

After Trump’s conversation with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, in May, intelligence sources leaked to the press that Trump discussed a terrorist threat to civil aviation with the diplomat.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/397624-cia-pompeo-leaks-scaramucci/

 

 

according to clive, the cia is funding the australian environment movement campaign to keep the carbon tax...

 

 

interfering in everyone's business to control the world....

 

Last week a Trump administration official decided to inform the news media that the CIA program to arm and train anti-Assad Syrian forces had been terminated. It was welcome news amid a deepening U.S. military commitment reflecting the intention to remain in the country for years to come. As my recent article inTAC documented, the net result of the program since late 2011 has been to provide arms to al Qaeda terrorists and their jihadist and other extremist allies, which had rapidly come to dominate the military effort against the Assad regime.

The Trump administration’s decision to acknowledge explicitly its decision to end the program invites a more systematic analysis of why and how such a program, which was so clearly undermining a fundamental U.S. national-security interest, could have gotten started and continue for so long. The preliminary version of the program that began in late 2011 is easier to explain than its more direct form two years later, which had continued (at least formally) until now.

One of the keys to understanding its origins is that the program was launched not because of a threat to U.S. security, but because of a perceived opportunity. That is always a danger sign, prompting powerful national-security bureaucrats to begin thinking about a “win” for the United States. (Think Vietnam and Iraq.)  

The opportunity in this case was the rise of opposition protests against the Assad regime in spring 2011 and the belief among national security officials that Assad could not survive. The national-security team saw a shortcut to the goal. Former Obama administration official Derek Chollet recalled in his book The Long Gamethat Obama’s advisers were all talking about a “managed transition” and urging Obama to publicly demand that Assad step down, according to Chollet. What that meant to Obama’s advisers was bringing pressure from outside, including providing arms to the opposition.

That was wishful thinking not only in regard to the willingness of an Alawite-dominated regime to hand over power to its sectarian foes, but in regard to the assumed Iranian willingness to go along with toppling the regime. Not one of Obama’s advisers had sufficient understanding of regional dynamics to warn the President that Iran would not allow their Syrian ally to be overthrown by an opposition supported by Sunni states and the United States.

But the decisive factor in pushing the administration toward action was the pressure from U.S. Sunni allies in the region—Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar—which began in autumn 2011 to press Obama to help build and equip an opposition army. Turkey was the leader in this regard, calling for Washington to agree to provide heavy weaponry—including anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles—to the rebel troops that didn’t even exist yet, and even offering to invade Syria to overthrow the regime if the U.S. would guarantee air cover.  

In the ideology of the national security elite—especially its Democratic wing—regional alliances are essential building blocks of what is styled as the U.S.-sponsored global “rules-based order.” In practice, however, they have served as instruments for the advancement of the power and prestige of the national security bureaucracies themselves. The payoffs of U.S. alliances in the Middle East have centered on the military bases in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar that allow the Pentagon and the military brass to plan and execute military operations that guarantee extraordinary levels of military spending. But enormous Saudi arms purchases and the financing of any covert operations the CIA doesn’t wish to acknowledge to Congress have long been prime benefits for those powerful organizations and their senior officials.

Then CIA Director David Petraeus was particularly interested in ginning up a covert operation to arm and train the Syrian opposition. With the security bureaucracies supporting the allies’ desire to unseat Assad, Hillary Clinton, whose sympathies and political strategy always lay with the war, eagerly took the lead to take the lead in the administration on arming the rebels and calling for a “no fly zone,” which the Turks badly wanted.  

Despite this set of interrelated factors pulling the administration toward a policy of regime change, Obama said no to heavy weapons, a no-fly zone, and an official U.S. role in arms supply. What he did agree to, however, was a covert CIA operation designed by Petraeus to load weapons from Libyan government stocks in Benghazi on ships and arrange for them to be shipped to the war zone. It was Obama’s way of placating all of the actors pushing for an aggressive policy of regime change in Syria without being publicly committed to regime change.  

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-cia-and-allies-trapp...

 

Most of the dead (and refugees to Europe from this region) in Syria have been due to this inflation by the CIA of a conflict that would have soon been arrested — though the Saudis would also have been happy to fan the fire by supporting ISIS. see: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/28653

Refugees to Europe from Africa have been due to the war set up in Libya by extremists supported by the US (Hillary Clinton's war) and that idiot Sarkozy (modern French Napoleon).

 

 

Archival documents show the British Government – like Australia and the U.S. – actively assisted Indonesia cover up crimes against humanity in East Timor. Dr Adam Henryreports.

In recent research in the National Archives (UK) regarding the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and East Timor, three things emerged repeatedly.

The first was that the British had clear information (both from their own sources) and by liaison with friendly Embassies (such as the Australian) on almost all events and developments inside East Timor before and after the Indonesian invasion of East Timor of 1975.

Second, the British (like their Australian counterparts) were very well informed about numerous human rights abuses committed by the Indonesian military during and after the invasion.

Thirdly, the British (like their Australian counterparts) were committed to undermining the question of East Timorese human rights in favour of expanding diplomatic and economic relations with Jakarta. Here we have an example of nations particularly fond of lecturing others about human rights knowingly and flagrantly enabling crimes against humanity (if not genocide) to occur. The United States, along with Australia, Britain, Japan, Europe, Canada and others, were committed to expanding ties with the Suharto regime — the perpetrators of great crimes. Indeed, the U.S. and UK (including Australia) maintained military ties, vital weapon sales and continuously provided diplomatic cover for the Indonesian military while it committed these crimes. Without such support – freely given and blatant in its near total ethical disregard for spirit of international law – the Indonesian military could never have seriously contemplated any war of aggression against East Timor, let alone a 25-year occupation claiming the lives of up to 200,000 men, women and children.

It is important to emphasise that the information about events in East Timor was most often highly accurate. This is not only demonstrated by the documentation with have in the present about what occurred between 1975 and during 1999 – when Indonesian authorities orchestrated one last crime against humanity following the independence referendum – but in the Australian, British and American archives. 

read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/evidence-of-b...

 

Read from top.

 

After WWII, the West had one huge ‘problem’ on its hands: all three most populous Muslim countries on Earth – Egypt, Iran and Indonesia – were clearly moving in one similar direction, joining group of patriotic, peaceful and tolerant nations. They were deeply concerned about the welfare of their citizens, and by no means were they willing to allow foreign colonialist powers to plunder their resources, or enslave their people.

In the 1950’s, the world was rapidly changing, and there was suddenly hope that the countries which were oppressed and pillaged for decades and centuries by first the European and then North American geopolitical and business interests, would finally break their shackles and stand proudly on their own feet.

Several Communist countries in Eastern Europe, but also newly liberated China, were actively helping with rapid de-colonizing process in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and other parts of the world.

Those developments were exactly what the West in general and both the U.K. and the U.S. in particular, were not ready or willing to accept. ‘Ancient’ belief in some sort of ‘inherited right’ to colonize, to loot and to control entire non-white world, was deeply engraved in the psyche of the rulers in both Europe and North America.

Peaceful, tolerant and socially oriented Islam was seen as a tremendous threat, at least in London, Washington, and Paris. It had to be stopped, even destroyed – resolutely and by all available means. Only the pre-approved Wahhabism, which was collaborative with the West and from the onset at least partially ‘co-produced’ by the British Empire, was singled-out and allowed to ‘bloom and succeed’.

READ MORE:

https://off-guardian.org/2017/08/20/the-world-remembers-64th-anniversary...

 

Read from top...

 

Richard Helms, who died [in November 2002]... at age 89, was described by his biographer Thomas Powers as a "gentlemanly planner of assassinations." The epithet captured the essence of the former CIA director's style: socially correct, bureaucratically adept, operationally nasty. In mid-20th-century Washington, this combination proved effective, if not glamorous. Helms gained the confidence of presidents and the admiration of syndicated columnists. Yet ultimately his faith in political assassination was no small part of his fall from power to disgrace.

At a time when there is revived interest in using assassination as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy to deal with the likes of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, Helms' career offers a cautionary epitaph: The assassination business has a way of ending badly.

Helms professed to be something of a skeptic of assassination. In Powers' biography, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, Helms is quoted as saying that assassination rarely achieved its expected goals. Yet once he took command of the American clandestine service in 1962, his prudence deserted him. President Kennedy and his successors wanted to use the tool of assassination, and Helms gave them what they wanted.

Leaving aside moral questions, his performance was far from impressive. Helms first turned to his good friend William Harvey, a brilliant, pistol-packing operative, who enlisted some of his friends in the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro. They proved unable to pierce Castro's security detail. In the summer of 1963, the deputy CIA director made another poor personnel choice. He activated contact with a disgruntled former hero of the Cuban revolution named Rolando Cubela. Known by his CIA cryptonym, "AMLASH," Cubela was a complex character. While he spoke of killing Castro, he was also loyal to the ideals of the Cuban revolution. Helms' counterintelligence staff advised caution, but Helms overruled them.

This homicidal conspiracy took on a more sinister aspect on Nov. 22, 1963, when President Kennedy was killed in Dallas. At the very moment Kennedy died, one of Helms' agents was delivering a poison pen to Cubela in Paris. The revelation of this coincidence in 1975 crystallized a wave of public indignation and revulsion that prompted Congress to slash the agency's budget and restrict its activities. 

Helms and his defenders bemoaned the conspiratorial bent of the American public, which often implicated the CIA in Kennedy's death. Yet Helms was hardly in a position to complain about conspiracy-mongering. He himself had been instrumental in the publication of the first JFK assassination conspiracy theory.

CIA files uncovered by a civilian watchdog panel in 1998 revealed what Helms sought to hide. In the summer of 1963, his top psychological warfare specialist in Miami, a dapper, multilingual lawyer named George Joannides, was slipping $25,000 a month to a group of anti-Castro Cuban exile students in Miami. When Kennedy was killed three months later, these same students, using CIA funds from Joannides, published a special edition of their newspaper, proclaiming that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had acted at Castro's behest. Dated Nov, 23, 1963, this broadsheet featuring photos of Castro and Oswald was the first concerted effort to articulate a conspiratorial explanation of Kennedy's death—and it was paid for out Dick Helms' budget.

Even a loyal CIA insider who worked with Helms concluded that the spymaster's actions encouraged suspicion of the agency. In 1963, John Whitten was a respected senior staffer whom Helms put in charge of reviewing all CIA files on Oswald. As an investigator, Whitten was appalled that Helms had not disclosed the Cubela/AMLASH plot to members of the Warren Commission, the blue-ribbon panel that probed Kennedy's death. Helms' actions, he said, were "morally highly reprehensible."

But no one knew about Helms' actions at the time. His ability to keep secrets meant that he was never held accountable. Even Cubela's arrest and conviction in March 1966, a propaganda bonanza for Castro, did not impede Helms' ascent in Washington. Three months later, he was named director of Central Intelligence.

Director Helms' willingness to countenance political murder on behalf of the White House continued to produce dismal results. In 1970, President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were disturbed by the emergence of a leftist democracy in Chile led by Salvador Allende. As the Senate Intelligence Committee later determined, the CIA reported that Chilean Gen. Rene Schneider was seen as a linchpin of the fledgling government, a respected military leader whose fidelity to constitutional principles was blocking a right-wing military coup. Helms, while skeptical, dispatched his top operatives to Chile, where they provided money and encouragement to two groups of officers who spoke of their intention to kidnap Schneider. A few days later, the general was mortally wounded during a kidnapping attempt by one of the groups. The next day, Helms commented that "the Chileans have been guided to a point where a military solution is at least open to them." The coup did not materialize at that time. But Chile's leftist democracy had been badly wounded.

Over the years, Helms stoutly denied that the CIA intended Schneider to die, but a congressionally mandated investigation in September 2000 revealed a telling epilogue. A few weeks after Schneider's death, one of his assailants made contact with the CIA. The agency responded by sending him $35,000—"to maintain the good will of the group." In September 2001, Schneider's two sons filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Helms and Kissinger in Washington court. Helms' passing excused him from the indignity of having to defend his actions in court.

When President Nixon was struggling to cover up the White House role in the Watergate burglary in 1972, he sought Helms' help. "We protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things," Nixon said. But Helms refused to play ball, and Nixon forced him out as CIA director in January 1973.

Helms was soon back in the news for less savory reasons. In 1975, congressional investigators uncovered the Castro assassination plots. Testifying under oath, he told incredulous senators that the Cubela operation was not an assassination plot, a thesis refuted by the agency's own documents. Congress forbade the agency from engaging in assassination.

The agency's reputation has never recovered from the legacy of Helms' tenure. The revelations about Mafiosos and poison pens became etched so deeply in the American mind that stories involving rogue assassins and cynical CIA officials are now a Hollywood genre, impervious to refutation.

In 1977, Helms pleaded no contest in a federal court to misdemeanor charges of failing to testify fully before Congress about the CIA operations in Chile. "I found myself in a position of conflict," Helms said. "I had sworn my oath to protect certain secrets." As the New York Times noted, "For a man who considered himself a genuine patriot, it was a bleak note on which to end his professional career."

Yet in retirement Helms managed to rehabilitate himself. He defended his actions, saying accurately that he had merely carried out the wishes of the president. He worked the Washington social circuit, "lunching with influential media figures," as his Washington Post obituary discreetly noted. He made himself available to reporters and held court at agency events. He returned to respectability.

Since Sept. 11, pundits and politicians have urged Congress to lift its ban on CIA assassination of foreign leaders. But as the career of Dick Helms indicates, assassination rarely, if ever, advanced the interests of U.S. foreign policy or the security of the American people. Rather, assassination, even in the hands of a most accomplished spook, served mostly to encourage cynicism about the American government.

read more:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/obit/2002/11/the_gentlem...

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Helms

 

Porkie inc

 

and of course: 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/11276

 

 

With the election of President Obama in November 2008 and his Muslim Outreach initiative, exemplified by his Cairo “A New Beginnings Speech” at al Azhar University, the Obama administration extended a welcome to the MB. Investor’s Business Daily noted the ensuing chronology of events, punctuated by the overthrow of the Mubarak regime in Egypt during the Arab Spring of 2011 that swept the heartland of the Muslim ummah.

2009: The White House invites ISNA’s president to President Obama’s inauguration ceremonies, even though the Justice Department just two years earlier had blacklisted the Brotherhood affiliate as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial — the largest terror-finance case in U.S. history.

2009: Obama delivers his Cairo speech to Muslims, infuriating the Mubarak regime by inviting Brotherhood leaders to attend.

2009: The White House dispatches top presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett to give the keynote speech at ISNA’s annual convention.

2009: Obama appoints a Brotherhood-tied Islamist — Rashad Hussain — as U.S. envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which strongly supports the Brotherhood.

2010: Hussain meets with the Brotherhood’s grand mufti in Egypt.

2011: White House sends intelligence czar James Clapper to Capitol Hill to whitewash the Brotherhood’s extremism. Clapper testifies the group is a moderate, “largely secular” organization.

2011: The Brotherhood’s spiritual leader — Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi — is given a hero’s welcome in Tahrir Square, where he raises the banner of jihad. Qaradawi, exiled from Egypt for 30 years, had been calling for “days of rage” before the rioting in Egypt. Before Obama’s Cairo speech, Qaradawi  wrote an open letter to the President arguing [Islamic] terrorism is a direct response to U.S. foreign policy.

2011: The Brotherhood vows to tear up Egypt’s 30-year peace treaty with Israel. Since Mubarak’s fall, it has worked to formally reestablish Cairo’s ties with Hamas and Hezbollah.

2011: Obama gives Mideast speech demanding Israel relinquish land to Palestinians.

2011: White House security adviser gives friendly speech at Washington-area mosque headed by ISNA’s new president.

2011: Justice Department pulls plug on further prosecution of Muslim Brotherhood front groups identified as collaborators in conspiracy to funnel millions to Hamas.

What is not well known is that the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood to the west was facilitated by the CIA during the Cold War Era as part of an anti-Soviet, anti-Communism initiative during the Eisenhower Administration. The creation of an Islamic Center in Munich, involved an ex-Nazi Turkologist, and former Nazi Muslim veterans from the Soviet Muslim satellites which were captured by advancing German forces during WWII in the Caucasus and Crimea. The CIA funded Hasan al Banna’s son-in-law to advance the MB cause via the World Muslim League.  This resulted in an MB beachhead in the US launched from the Munich Islamic Center.

read more:

http://www.newenglishreview.org/Jerry_Gordon/How_the_CIA_Helped_The_Musl...

 

Gus: what is not well-known as well is the the Muslim Brotherhood (formed in egypt in 1928 — possibly formed with the help of the US secret services of the time) was very friendly with the Nazis during WWII...

 

Meanwhile (or previously since this piece was written before the next revolution in Egypt when the Brotherhood was expelled from government):

In a recent video entitled "Days with the Imam" in which he recalls Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri declares that the founder of al Qaeda had been a "member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arabian Peninsula" before he was evicted in the 1980s. He was expelled because of his insistence on fighting alongside the mujahidin in Afghanistan while the Brotherhood allowed him to bring aid to Pakistan but didn’t want him to go any further. Zawahiri’s claims seem to have caused some embarrassment among the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), judging from how quick MB spokesman Mahmoud Ghozlan was to refute them. 

One reason for the embarrassment may be that, with a Muslim Brotherhood president recently elected in Egypt, the organization is eager to reassure the West of its moderate Islamist orientation and is therefore afraid of anything associating it with al Qaeda or jihadism. 

read more:

http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/10/03/osama-bin-laden-and-the-saudi-muslim-brotherhood/

 

NOTE: despite some minor differences in methods of operations and assassinations, Daesh and the Muslim Brotherhood are brothers-in-arm... The link with the CIA is very puzzling and go back to the days of Nasser who took over the Suez Canal. Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood did not see eye to eye, as Nasser was a strong secularist...

Thirty thousand pages of files have been released on US activities in Indonesia during the archipelago’s gory transition from a socialist dictatorship to a pro-West military dictatorship in the mid-60s. The documents confirm that Washington was aware of, and supported, the military takeover of the government and purge of communist opponents.

The anti-communist purges in 1965 and 1966 were horrific, described by the CIA as "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century." Between 400,000 and 1 million accused leftists were killed, with some estimates going as far as to place the figure at 3 million.

It has long been known that the US and allied governments supported the 1965 military takeover. The US embassy, as well as the CIA, have been accused of providing weapons, economic assistance, and training to Suharto's forces as well as lists of names of 5,000 communists. The embassy asserted in 1990 that the list in question was compiled by a single official acting on his own direction, and scholars debated whether or not the US helped facilitate the mass killings.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/asia/201710191058357817-indonesia-communist-mass...

We've been on the story since July on this site... way before by Gus...

Read from top...

If you read from top, you would read about something that's news today (!) but that we exposed quite a while ago: The CIA "considered" to assassinate Sukarno... Rubbish... No, the CIA had been ordered to get rid of Sukarno by whatever means by President Ike Eisenhower. From top you would read that Sukarno was helped by the communists to get rid of the Dutch colonialists, but thereafter the USA wanted to break this alliance. It took ten years for the CIA to replace Sukarno with Soharto.

----------

Jakarta: One of the daughters of Indonesia's first president has called for the US to apologise after the release of a "top secret" document from 1975 that reveals the CIA considered assassinating Sukarno during the Cold War.

The document – a summary of an investigation into CIA involvement in plans to assassinate foreign leaders – was among 2800 previously classified files related to the assassination of President John F Kennedy that were released last week.

Read more:

http://www.smh.com.au/world/cia-considered-assassinating-former-indonesi...

by Olav Boye translated from Norwegian by Terje Maloy

The CIA is the infamous, criminal intelligence agency which is the mastermind behind a long series of attacks on legal, elected political leaders and massive interventions to create chaos in countries [that] are in the United States’ bad books. By creating conflicts with help of paid agents and assassinating political leaders, they have fomented violent regime changes in numerous countries, Now it has the reputation of being a violent organization which is in the service of the US political leadership. The list of its criminal activities is long, but no one is punished for these crimes.

The CIA is heavily involved in the area of organized labour. Their aim is to sabotage trade unions and to hinder their the battle against negative globalization and abuses from multinational corporations and global financial institutions. The main labour union in the United States, the AFL-CIO, is the backer of American Institute for Free Labor Development – AIFLD, an organization which has supported right wing unions and political organizations, especially in Latin-America. Amongst other things, the AFL-CIO cooperated with the CIA and AIFLD to subvert and overthrow Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president in Chile, and his leftwing government.

AFL-CIO is the backer of international ‘Solidarity Centres’ that exists in 60 countries around the world. My experience with this from Macedonia was an aggressive interpreter who misinterpreted and constantly interrupted my lecture to an assembly from the Cultural Workers Union. My lecture was an orientation on the market liberalism in the European Union and globalization, where my opinion was that this greatly harmed the trade union movement’s struggle for political and professional rights. The interpreter was employed by the Solidarity Centre in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, after her education in Florida. She claimed that people like me were communists and were destroying the labour movement. These claims were debated in the assembly, but the audience demanded a new interpreter. Solidarity Centres buy trust in the labour unions with amongst other things free computers and money grants. Here we can see the infiltration from the AFL-CIO – or the AFL-CIA, as some people like to call them.

During Ronald Reagan’s presidency the AFL-CIO was given substantial economic support from NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, one of CIA’s front organizations. In the Third World, they were better known for undermining activist trade unions than for their support of the labour movement’s professional and political struggle.

One example is the support to Lech Walesa’s Solidarity-movement in Poland. Human rights organizations both inside and outside of the US have accused the NED of «interference in other countries’ internal matters». There have also been accusations that entire organizations were created to legally continue the CIA’s support to political actors in countries where the agency was banned from operating, and that it therefore is the «heir» to CIAs covert work.

One fact frequently mentioned is that because the foundation is private, it is possible for it to operate freely where governmental agencies are bound by US laws. According to the Columbian journalist and writer Hernanado Calvo Ospina, this view was confirmed to a large extent by the foundation’s first director, Allen Weinstein, in an interview with Washington Post in 1991, where he stated that “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

Through my work with the international labour movement, I have on several occasion been approached by people who directly or indirectly tried to recruit me to their negative activities. By this I mean CIA-agents amongst labour leaders in ITUC based in Brussels, and Germans from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES), which we know was, and possibly still is, financed by the CIA.

We can also look at the Ola Teigen-affair in the late 1960s, when money from the CIA went to The International Union of Socialist Youth, the international organization the biggest political youth organization in Norway, The Workers’ Youth League, belongs to. Of course the money went via the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. It is commonly known that the George Soros’ Open Society Foundation is in the same business, to great harm for all communist and socialist trade unions.

After the so called Carnation Revolution in Portugal in the mid 1970s, when leftwing officers seized power from the fascist government, I was hired by the Worker’s Educational Association AOF to run seminars in cooperation with Portuguese trade unions. I lived in Portugal for several months, arranging seminars and meetings, and afterwards we jointly selected people for further education at the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions’ own school in Sørmarka. During a seminar in Porto, I noticed that two guys were sitting in the back of the room. They were not participants, and during the break I asked them who they were. They represented the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES), and had the same mission as I, to train trade unionist cadres.

When I arrived in Lisbon a few days later, I was contacted by a representative from the Norwegian embassy, who informed me that I had been taken off the mission and was going home. Later I got to know why. During the meeting in Porto, a construction worker had asked me if they should organize a broad trade union movement for all political groups, similar to the Nordic countries, or if they should have an ideological split like in Spain, where socialists, communists and Catholics each had their own trade union. My answer was that a broad union movement is preferable. The guys from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation did not like to hear this, since they were in Portugal to fight communists and radical socialist. It has long been well known that FES was financed by the CIA and that their mission was to make sure the labour movements in Germany and other places in Europe did not get radicalized or would become obstacles to the imperialist policies of the EU and the United States.

After the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I, as secretary for the Nordic Graphical Union, was sent to Sarajevo to strengthen the Graphical Trade Union in this war-torn country. The Friedrich Ebert Foundation was of course also active here, to steer the political direction of the Bosnian trade unions. Here it was not a matter of cooperation, but of diktat from FES and the global trade union ITUC. They had an admitted CIA-agent, Rudy Porter, in their headquarters in Brussels, supposedly representing American trade unions. The representative of FES in Sarajevo, who was under Porter, was highly critical of my negative attitude to globalization and the EU’s market liberalism, which I freely discussed with my Bosnian colleagues. He claimed I was dead wrong and wanted me to join his team, to stop communists and socialist from getting any power in the labour movement in the former Yugoslavia. On commission from the graphical unions in the Nordic countries, I continued our positive work to rebuild the Graphical Union Organization in Bosnia.

In December 1999, I received a phone call from the leader of LO, the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions, who asked me if I wanted to accept a mission in Montenegro. It was on behalf of the general secretary of the ITUC, Bill Jordan, an splendid British trade unionist whom I knew previously from my work as secretary general of the Graphical International Union IGF. He wanted me to do some work in cooperation with the trade union in Montenegro. I asked for some time to consider the offer and called an American friend of mine in the ITUC. He went out to a phone booth on the street to call me back and tell me that I would be working under the CIA and the same Rudy Porter who I had met in Sarajevo. He was now responsible for the ITUC’s entire work in the Balkans and still got his payslip from the CIA, according to my colleague. I told the Norwegian trade union leader about this connection, and declined the offer to work with the trade union in Montenegro under such conditions.

CIA and the organizations which collaborate with it organize political criminal operations in a number of countries, including Norway. The trade union movement is an important target for the CIA and their political masters.

Their target is that trade unions won’t fight against multinational corporations, global financial institutions, powerful lobby groups and other opponents of trade unions. There can be no doubt that the CIA works systematically to subvert trade unions and political parties on the left, as more people than me can document. They have to a large degree succeeded – globally, in Europe, as well as in Norway.

Olav Boye is former secretary general of the International Graphical Federation. Translated by Terje Maloy.The article is Creative Commons for non-commercial purposes.

 

https://off-guardian.org/2018/03/06/how-the-cia-infiltrates-trade-unions/

The secret American "black site" for interrogating suspected terrorists in Thailand was known to the CIA as "Detention Site Green" but for its first detainee, it was decidedly white.

Four halogen lights blasted the white walls 24 hours a day, according to Steve Coll in his book Directorate S, about the Pakistani spy service and those it arrested.

At other times, alleged terrorist Abu Zubaydah was kept in a coffin-sized box for hundreds of hours and waterboarded until he passed out, according to the Washington Post.

"Interrogation techniques such as slaps and "wallings" (slamming detainees against a wall) were used in combination, frequently concurrent with sleep deprivation and nudity," stated a US Senate report in 2014.

The Thai interrogation site is back in the news after Donald Trump's nomination of Gina Haspel to become the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Ms Haspel is widely reported to have overseen operations at the secret site, codenamed Cat's Eye.

"Gina Haspel … briefly ran a secret CIA prison where terror suspects Abu Zubayadah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri were waterboarded in 2002," according to current and former US intelligence officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

 

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-15/torture-and-secrecy-in-thailand-un...

Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Steve Coll, Penguin Press, 784 pages

Twelve days after 9/11, on the night of September 23, 2001, the CIA’s Islamabad station chief, Robert Grenier, received a telephone call from his boss, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet. “Listen, Bob,” Tenet said, “we’re meeting tomorrow at Camp David to discuss our war strategy in Afghanistan. How should we begin? What targets do we hit? How do we sequence our actions?”

Grenier later wrote in his book, 88 Days to Kandahar, that while he was surprised by the call he’d been thinking about these same questions—“mulling them over and over and over,” as he later told me—so he was ready. President George Bush’s address to the U.S. Congress just a few days before, Grenier told Tenet, was a good start: demand that Afghanistan’s Taliban ruler, Mullah Omar, turn bin Laden over to the United States. If he refused, the U.S. should launch a campaign to oust him. Grenier had thought through the plan, but before going into its details with Tenet he abruptly stopped the conversation. “Mr. Director,” he said, “this isn’t going to work. I need to write this all down clearly.” Tenet agreed.

Grenier set to work, and over the next three hours he laid out the battle for Afghanistan. Included in the paper was a detailed program of how the CIA could deploy undercover teams to recruit bin Laden’s enemies among Afghanistan’s northern Tajik and Uzbek tribes (an uneasy coalition of ethnic militias operating as the Northern Alliance), supply them with cash and weapons, and use them in a rolling offensive that would oust the Taliban in Kabul. With U.S. help, which included deploying American Special Forces teams (under CIA leadership) coupled with American airpower, the Northern Alliance (more properly, the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan) would start from its Panjshir Valley enclave in Afghanistan’s far northeast and, recruiting support from anti-Taliban forces along the way, roll all the way into Kabul.

Grenier gave the eight-page draft paper to his staff to review, then sent it to Tenet in Washington, who passed it through the deputies committee (the second-in-command of each of the major national security agencies), then presented it to Bush. “I regard that cable,” Grenier wrote, “as the best three hours of work I ever did in my twenty-seven-year career.”

Three days after the Tenet-Grenier telephone conversation, on September 26, the CIA landed a covert-operations team in Afghanistan to recruit local allies in the hunt for bin Laden. The quick action was impressive, but then events slowed to a crawl. It wasn’t until October 20 that the first U.S. Special Forces team linked up with anti-Taliban rebels, and it took another week for U.S. units to land in strength. But by early November al Qaeda was on the run and the Taliban’s grip on the country was slipping away. On November 13, militias of the Northern Alliance seized Kabul. The Taliban was defeated, its badly mauled units fleeing south and east (its last bastion, in the south, fell on December 6), and into nearby Pakistan, while what remained of al Qaeda holed up in a series of cave complexes in the Spin Ghar mountain range of eastern Afghanistan.

By almost any measure, the CIA-led anti-al Qaeda and anti-Taliban offensive (dubbed Operation Enduring Freedom by George Bush) marked a decisive victory in the war on terror. The U.S. had set out a plan, marshaled the forces to carry it out, and then seen it to completion.

 

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/colls-directorate-s-is-d...

 

Not "disturbing" if you know how the CIA operates...

Read from top.

Australian intelligence operations that took place during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor should stay secret, the head of the country's overseas spy agency will argue today.

Key points:

• Academic Clinton Fernandes has been fighting for access to ASIS records on East Timor
• Australia's spy chief is scheduled to appear at a tribunal to explain why ASIS does not want the documents made public
• The documents in question relate to Australia's covert operations during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor in the 1970s

 

In what is believed to be a first, Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) director-general Paul Symon is scheduled to appear at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal to put forward his organisation's case.

The spy chief's testimony is in response to Canberra-based academic Clinton Fernandes, who has battled since 2014 for access to the 40-year-old ASIS records on East Timor.

At first ASIS and the National Archives insisted that they could not even confirm or deny whether such records existed, claiming that to do so would cause damage to Australia's "security, defence or international relations".

Professor Fernandes challenged this position in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, and in February the National Archives backed down, conceding it did in fact have such records.

But National Archives insisted it and ASIS needed up to a year to examine the documents to consider whether they could be released.

"It was common knowledge that Australia was involved in East Timor and was very interested in Indonesia in the 1970s," Professor Fernandes told the ABC.

"To say that even a confirmation that ASIS records exist would harm national security seems ridiculous to me.

"We hope in the proceedings to ask questions that make [ASIS director-general Paul Symon] justify why on national security grounds these materials should continue to be withheld 43 years after the event."

 

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-27/asis-chief-to-front-tribunal-to-ke...

 

Why?  Read from top...

Documents show White House and No 10 conspired over oil-fuelled invasion plan

Nearly 50 years before the war in Iraq, Britain and America sought a secretive “regime change” in another Arab country they accused of spreading terror and threatening the west’s oil supplies, by planning the invasion of Syria and the assassination of leading figures.

Newly discovered documents show how in 1957 Harold Macmillan and President Dwight Eisenhower approved a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion by Syria’s pro-western neighbours, and then to “eliminate” the most influential triumvirate in Damascus.

The plans, frighteningly frank in their discussion, were discovered in the private papers of Duncan Sandys, Mr Macmillan’s defence secretary, by Matthew Jones, a reader in international history at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Although historians know that intelligence services had sought to topple the Syrian regime in the autumn of 1957, this is the first time any document has been found showing that the assassination of three leading figures was at the heart of the scheme. In the document drawn up by a top secret and high-level working group that met in Washington in September 1957, Mr Macmillan and President Eisenhower were left in no doubt about the need to assassinate the top men in Damascus.

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/05/15/guardian-archive-2003-macmillan-back...

Read from top.

From the moment it took power in the U.S. in 2009, the Barack Obama Administration was angling to overthrow Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad. And then, by the time of December of 2012, Obama’s team were relying mainly on Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch to lead the tens of thousands of the U.S.-Saudi alliance’s boots-on-the ground ‘moderate rebels’ in this overthrow-Assad war, fighters who have actually been fundamentalist Sunnis recruited from all over the world to come to Syria in order to replace the secular President of Syria, the Alawite Shiite, Assad. Propaganda in the U.S. portrays U.S. Government policy as being driven by a concern for the welfare of the Syrian people: to ‘protect their human rights’ — not to overthrow a government that refuses to cooperate with U.S. oil companies and other corporate interests in the U.S.

But even with the anti-Obama Donald Trump in the White House, there has been nothing really new about any of this U.S. Government scam, any of this attempted-but-never-publicly-acknowledged conquest against the Syrian people. The U.S. Government — along with the U.S.-aristocracy-allied fundamentalist Sunni Saud family, the world’s wealthiest family, who own Saudi Arabia, and who finance the fundamentalist-Sunni Al Qaeda and similar Sunni jihadist organizations — has been trying ever since 1949 to control Syria, and still tries. The main difference between now and 1949 is that the Saud family have become more brazen about conquest than they were, back in 1949, when they had wanted merely that the Syrian Government approve an American-built pipeline for their oil to go into Europe. In the present day, the Sauds are openly at war against Shiites everywhere, even inside Saudi Arabia itself, and are bombing the hell out of the Shiite (Houthi) areas of Yemen, basically trying to take over the entire Middle East, and to destroy Iran, which is the leading Shiite country. The U.S. is allied with the Sauds in all of this.

On 30 March 1949, the CIA, in a coup planned by James Hugh Keeley Jr. and Miles Copeland Jr., replaced the democratically elected Syrian President Shukri al-Quwatli, replaced him with France’s stooge, General Husni al-Za’im, who displeased King Saud of Saudi Arabia, and so got overthrown and killed on 14 August 1949, by a different France-stooge General, Sami al-Hinnawi. Za’im had left his mark on Syria, however:

The pro-Western Za’im remained in power for three months — long enough to grant [the Saudi-American] Aramco’s Tapline concession to pipe Saudi oil to the Mediterranean.”

But Hinnawi pleased the CIA and Sauds even more than Za’im did, so got the Presidency, and Za’im simply got killed. (The CIA and the Saud family are very demanding of their stooges.)

In December 1949, the CIA, in a coup planned by Miles Copeland (Syria’s third and final coup that year), carried out the desire of King Saud, and installed as Syria’s leader, Adib Shishakli.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia implemented a new policy towards Syria by giving financial support amounting to six million dollars.”

Shishakli’s barbarism was so great that four years later, Syria’s generals formed the secular Ba’ath Party and on 6 September 1955, restored to power Syria’s democratically elected President, Quwatli, who in 1958 joined Syria into the United Arab Republic, which lasted till 1971. However, while Quwatli was still Syria’s President, the CIA, yet again, in 1957, tried to oust him via a coup, but that coup-attempt had to be called-off.

A permanent result of that brazen attempt in 1957 was to cause Syria to sever relations with the U.S.; so, from that time forward, the U.S. regime works in Syria mainly by its agents and allies, such as King Saud who owns Saudi Arabia, and Emir Thani who owns Qatar. Both families are fundamentalist Sunni Arabs — the Saud family being Al Qaeda’s main financial backer, and the Thani family being the Muslim Brotherhood’s main financial backer. (Both Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood are fundamentalist Sunni organizations, whereas Syria, at least after 1957, is strongly secular, anti-sectarian.) But now that King Saud wants to overthrow Emir Thani and take Qatar, and is trying to blockade Qatar, the U.S. regime has stayed with King Saud, but not to such an extent as to jeopardize Emir Thani’s willingness to host in Qatar America’s biggest Middle Eastern military base, Al Udeid Air Base, which the Thanis see as essential to their staying in power. So: the U.S., under Donald Trump, is mildly supportive of King Saud’s aggressions against Qatar, but not to such an extent as to withdraw from Al Udeid.

As a result of the Sunni Sauds’ attacks against the Sunni Thanis, the Thanis have turned away from the Sauds, who hate Iran and all Shiites. Thus, the Thanis now are non-partisan in the Sauds’ longstanding efforts to conquer Iran and other Shiite-majority areas; the Thanis have become more pan-Arabic than when they were allied with the Sauds; they’re no longer dedicated to war against Shia. They are no longer allies of the Sauds against Shia.

The U.N. ‘peace’ talks on Syria are between Syria’s Government and Saudi Arabia’s Government, not between Syria’s Government and any authentically representative native Syrians versus the Syrian Government. The Saud family selected the “High Negotiations Committee” who are negotiating against Syria’s Government there, as ‘representatives’ of ‘the opposition’. Even the U.S. subscription-only GlobalSecurity.org site admits:

The High Negotiations Committee is a Saudi-backed coalition of Syrian opposition groups. The High Negotiations Committee (HNC) was created in Saudi Arabia in December 2015.”

Non-sectarian — even secular — Syria is the odd-man-out, insisting on its own national sovereignty, and secularism, no matter what, and willing to do whatever they must in order to maintain their independence. And the majority of the Syrian people thus support Assad (55% did, even at the very height of the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings throughout the Arab world), and 82% of Syrians blame the U.S. Government for the presence of ISIS and other jihadists in their country.

This is history. What can the U.S. regime credibly present to the world as being justification for continuing its decades-long effort to conquer Syria? The U.S. regime condemns Syria’s non-sectarian Government for ‘humanitaian violations’ fighting against the U.S.-Saudi imported terrorists who are trying to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government. The U.S. has thousands of its own troops in their invasion and military occupation of Syria, and condemns Assad for leading the fight against that invasion-occupation.

As regards Ukraine, you can either see this terrific video-compilation documenting how Obama perpetrated a bloody coup which in February 2014 overthrew and replaced Ukraine’s democratically elected Government, or you can read my “Are Michael Isikoff And David Corn CIA Agents?” which documents the lies by those two ‘investigative journalists’, who spread the falsehoods about Ukraine that the U.S. aristocracy want to be spread against Russia, and which lies go against the realities that that video shows.

Incidentally, on 10 February 2017, in the video shown here, Isikoff interviewed Bashar al-Assad, who took his stenographed transmission of quite possibly fabricated ‘evidence’ against Assad, and turned it instead against the regime whose agent Isikoff so clearly does represent.

Obama’s coup destroyed Ukraine. The World Happiness Reports, from the U.N. and Columbia University, have been published for 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2018. Each year’s report covers, generally speaking, the surveys that were done worldwide during the preceding year. The American coup in Ukraine occurred in February 2014. So, the only pre-coup survey done was the 2013 publication, which covered the year 2012. As internationally ranked for happiness by the World Happiness Report, Ukraine went from #87 out of 156 nations, or 87/156 (the bottom 45%) in 2013, to 111/138 (the bottom 20%) in 2015, to 123/157 (the bottom 22%) in 2016, to 132/155 (the bottom 15%) in 2017, to 138/155 (the bottom 12%) in 2018. So: before the coup, Ukraine was in the worst 45%, but by 2018 it reached the worst 12%. That’s an enormous plunge. Barack Obama wanted the coup, he got it, and it destroyed Ukraine. The U.S. claims to be trying to save Ukraine from Russia, but the reality is the exact opposite: that the U.S. destroyed Ukraine in order to become enabled to bring Ukraine into NATO and position U.S. nuclear missiles less than ten minutes flight-time from Moscow. Ukrainians have every reason to hate the U.S. Government, for what it did to them. Like what it did to Afghans, and Iraqis, and Yemenese, and Hondurans — and Chileans, and Guatemalans, and so forth. And like what it’s doing to anyone who wants to avoid World War III — including the American people, who nominally (but not really) are represented by this rapacious Government, controlled by this rapacious aristocracy.

So: the documentation is unequivocally clear, that the U.S. Government lies shamelessly about both Syria and Ukraine — and Russia, and Iran, and much else.

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/07/09/how-the-u-s-government-lies-about-sy...

To this map, other countries in Europe such as France and Germany have been "roughed up" by various US means — political, financial and entertainment (including some Hollywood products "made for the European market") in order to get them to comply to the US wishes. It's only under Sarkozy that France "rejoined" NATO (2009). As well Indonesia, Canada and Mexico should be added to the map.

Russia nearly fell to the US (West) tricks in 1998. Had Putin not been a "tyrant" (which he is not), by this I mean an intelligent man who knew the tricks — AND THE OUTCOME, Russia would have become a third world country, plundered by the West. This is what the sanctions against Russia are all about. 

Today we are warned about the resurgence of China... It's fair to say that China may no be playing by the rules in regard to some issues. But what are the rules? 

The US has often undercut the local manufacturing or agriculture by subsidising its own and exporting massive amount of "surplus" at a loss. As well through various mechanism of "charitable" enterprises, it encourages, by giving "free" foods, the replacement of "local" diets with an American diet (Coke, etc). This one is very insidious. The way the IMF won't supply moneys to "socialist" countries but only to capitalist private enterprise has seen the decline of proper "local" food supply in Africa.

Read from top.

 

Read also:  interfering in everyone's business to control the world....

 

...

... The US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) became [in 1947] the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Untrammeled by any laws anywhere, it is devoid of any governmental oversight so as to give American politicians ‘plausible deniability’. Such absolute power can only corrupt, making psychopaths of men like Allen Dulles whose brother John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State. Both men enjoyed power and their arrogance was colossal; trained as Wall Street lawyers, they held laws and lawmakers in contempt. Although Truman had set-up the CIA, in a newspaper article (exactly one month after the assassination of President Kennedy) he called for an end to CIA covert ops.

Because we are dealing with the most dishonest and secretive of agencies, what little we know can only ever be the tip of the iceberg. Yet the known record fills hundreds of books, and details the constant interference in every country on earth: blackmail, disinformation, torture and assassination are the tools of their trade, as is made explicit by the latest appointment of Gina Haspell as head of the CIA. No other country in history has ever operated at this level of depravity and yet they are never held to account for these crimes against Humanity.

It is at this point that I make a plea to our elected leaders. The historical record shows that an alliance with the devil is a dangerous arrangement: those who foolishly seek power and ride the back of the tiger end up inside. New Zealand is a small, friendly and decent country with no obvious enemies in sight; this reputation for good neighbourliness, justice and fair play, once lost, would be very hard to regain. If our erstwhile allies (US/UK) have been complicit in every international crime imaginable: torture, indefinite detentions, incarceration of refugees, illegal invasions, starving of populations, drone strikes, white phosphorous, depleted uranium, cluster bombs, napalm, agent orange, nuclear weapons etc. It is long overdue that we broke free from this ghastly association.

New Zealand has stood tall many times in the past and punched well above her weight in many ways. The non-violent resistance of Parihaka (before Gandhi was born); women’s suffrage, the 8-hour working day, the opposition to Apartheid, our revulsion of nuclear weapons. What would those giants of our past have to say about today’s toadying lack of moral courage, our slavish devotion to two degenerate empires, our choosing the wrong side – both of history and of our own survival? Never forget that if Blair had stood up to George W. Bush, there would have been no 2003 invasion of Iraq nor the resultant Hell throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Why should we spend billions on anti-submarine aircraft when we cannot pay the salaries of nurses, teachers, police, and all the other services which our taxes ought to cover? Why should American arms manufacturers profit by selling us weapons that do nothing whatsoever to protect us, but everything to destroy us – physically, morally, spiritually and financially?

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/07/28/new-zealand-the-ebb-flow-of-history/

 

Read from top...

 

Read also:

under the surface of news — more on the momentous 2, February 1959, leading eventually to brexit...

....

In reality, the majority of local families, according to my own survey, lives on US$2-3 dollars a day (family of 4-5). Food in supermarkets costs 2-8 times more than in places like Germany. Therefore, the supermarkets are empty. The Majority of people shop at pasars – markets, where food is often full of cancerogenic chemicals, and filth is everywhere.

But most of people do not feel poor. They feel insulted when they are told that they live in misery. All without exception answer that they have nothing against capitalism. Most of them know nothing about the world; they have never been taught to compare.

Everybody ‘hates Communists”, as demanded by the West and by the local rulers. There are entire anti-Communist museums here, and people going out to go there, even paying from their own pocket to get further indoctrinated. If you tell them that all they see is one huge lie, they get mad, angry, sometimes even violent. Their entire lives are based on myths. Their lives depend on them, psychologically. If myths were to be taken away, their entire lives would collapse, as they would lose meaning. That is why there is too much noise, and no substance. People are scared. But they don’t know what frightens them.

Everybody thinks the same. There is hardly any variety. It is scary. Indonesia feels like North Korea, as it is presented by the West and its propaganda. But North Korea is actually totally different – there I found definitely much more intellectual diversity than in Jakarta!

Nobody wants to change things – at least not the system, the essence. People want “more money and better life”. Is their life bad now? “No!” Do they hold their elites responsible? “For what?” They don’t understand – they don’t know what I am talking about, or pretend they don’t know, when I ask such questions.

And the rich? Their kids are in the US, Japan or Europe, studying how to screw their own population even more, after returning back. For them, the greatest pride is to work for some foreign company, or to be awarded with the Western diplomas, and to be given some reward from Europe or the United States.

And the city is choking on its own gasses, garbage and excrement. While the rich have their condos and villas in Australia, California, Singapore and Hong Kong. They can get out of Indonesia whenever they want, as they have already stolen millions, billions of dollars. When they come back to Indonesia, it is to rob even more.

I have to admit, it is all ‘a little bit tiring’. Fine, honestly: it is exhausting. Documenting all this is deadly. So now you know.

And I also have to admit, it is often lonely working here. No one in his or her sane mind would come here, to work. The expenses, both financial but also related to mental sanity and physical health, are tremendous. Rewards are near zero. The West does not allow the truth about Indonesia to reach the world, and therefore, no powerful criticism of the country can ever by aired by the mainstream media.

But it is my duty to speak. Therefore, I speak. And write. And film. And as my maternal Russian and Chinese grandparents did – I fight against fascism, regardless of the cost!

By Andre Vitchek

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/11/15/jakarta-filming-the-most-depressing-...

----------------------------------

 

Read from top

and see how things ended up like this, through the promotion of capitalism for some and "povertism" for the rest. :

Isms run deep, we breath them in daily

Part of the cultures where we grew

Toxic soups shaping our identity. 

Yet there’s another ism in the brew, 

The one that judges poverty. 

Chav, Pov, Hillbilly 

Hick, Scum, White Trash

Deemed less than, because they lack the cash

Born in the wrong place in our “liberal” society

We need a movement of true solidarity

Not everyone fighting for their individual identity

But Diverse Spectrum Unity

An authentic state of Global Equity

 

Taken from The Homing Crisis

 

If there’s one form of prejudice that’s acceptable to the liberally minded and well educated it’s Povertism.

Read more:

https://medium.com/@jaycousins/povertism-and-the-need-to-extend-our-unde...

An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful—and secretive—colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers.

America’s greatest untold story: the United States’ rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA. Drawing on revelatory new materials—including newly discovered U.S. government documents, U.S. and European intelligence sources, the personal correspondence and journals of Allen Dulles’s wife and mistress, and exclusive interviews with the children of prominent CIA officials—Talbot reveals the underside of one of America’s most powerful and influential figures.

Dulles’s decade as the director of the CIA—which he used to further his public and private agendas—were dark times in American politics. Calling himself “the secretary of state of unfriendly countries,” Dulles saw himself as above the elected law, manipulating and subverting American presidents in the pursuit of his personal interests and those of the wealthy elite he counted as his friends and clients—colluding with Nazi-controlled cartels, German war criminals, and Mafiosi in the process. Targeting foreign leaders for assassination and overthrowing nationalist governments not in line with his political aims, Dulles employed those same tactics to further his goals at home, Talbot charges, offering shocking new evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

An exposé of American power that is as disturbing as it is timely, The Devil’s Chessboard is a provocative and gripping story of the rise of the national security state—and the battle for America’s soul.

 

 

Source:

 

https://www.amazon.com/Devils-Chessboard-Dulles-Americas-Government/dp/0...

 

 

 

 

Read from top.

 

Read also: Uncle George... and the JFK conspiracies...

 

 

and: under the surface of news — more on the momentous 2, February 1959, leading eventually to brexit...

 

 

Counterpunch Shadowboxes and Loses

Edward Curtin 

In a fair boxing match, opponents enter the ring with similarly padded gloves and battle under the bright lights for the world to see. There are, of course, cases where one fighter cheats, as in the infamous case in 1983 when Luis Resto wore weakly padded gloves and hand wraps hardened with plaster to make them rock solid. His opponent, Billy Collins, an up-and-coming boxer from Tennessee with a 14-0 record, was permanently and very seriously injured in the fight at Madison Square Garden. His eyes were battered shut and his vision damaged. He never fought again and died depressed the following year at age twenty-two.

In the fight for truth in the public arena, similar subterfuges occur.

To battle honestly in the open forum, to argue to and fro squarely, is often prevented in advance by eliminating an opponent’s voice from the debate. This is the typical method used by the corporate mass media that stack the deck with sycophants and refuse dissidents a place to voice their ideas.

Then there is the masquerade of fighting an opponent who is really a collaborator and benefactor, whose punches one counters in a game of shadow boxing meant to convince the audience that the fight is real and you are on their side. Some alternative media use this technique because they are gatekeepers for the power elite.

Sometimes this ruse is so blatant that the fix becomes transparent because the smart-asses who play this game screw up, yet they still expect their real opponents to shut up and walk away because their fixer’s mantra is “Never apologize, never explain.” It has always been the code of the rich and powerful.

Some are brawlers, however, and fight back against this bullshit.

The well-known leftist website Counterpunch is an example of the “never apologize, never explain” school. A number of writers and journalists who have published many pieces at Counterpunch have been banned from the site in recent years without an explanation, Andre Vltchek and C.J. Hopkins being two who crossed an invisible boundary the Shadow had drawn and were never again published by Counterpunch. Others, smelling an odd odor, have walked away. The numbers are growing.

I’ve recently seen Counterpunch shadowbox and the Shadow won.

On January 29, 2019, I published an article highly critical of the CIA (The CIA Then and Now: Old Wine in New Bottles) that was posted at Global Research the same day. Lew Rockwell picked it up the next day. The Greanville Post and Dissident Voice posted it on the 30th. Then The Unz Review published it on January 31, 2019. Five ideologically diverse websites that saw value in a harsh and complicated critique of the spy agency. Other sites would also publish it in the following days, including Off-Guardian. After the piece appeared, I received an email from the editor of Counterpunch, Jeffrey St Clair, telling me that he too was going to publish this article on Friday, February 1, for Counterpunch’s weekend edition.

I had written a few dozen pieces that Counterpunch had published and had a very cordial relationship with St Clair. In fact, when I was in Rome in 2018, he had asked me to place a stone for him on Keats’ and Shelley’s graves when I visited the cemetery where they were buried. I did that, and my wife took photos that I sent to him. All was copacetic. Buddies. High fives!

On February 1, 2019, shortly after midnight Eastern time (12:02 AM), Counterpunch published my piece for their weekend edition where articles remain for three days. When I awoke at 4 A.M., I saw it. Then at 8 A. M., when I arrived at the college where I teach, I again saw it. At 11 A.M., when I had finished teaching a few classes, I looked again and it had disappeared. Transitive verb: Counterpunch had disappeared it. Eliminated it. Scratched it. Excised it.

All the other numerous articles remained. Only mine was gone. At first I thought it was a mistake. But as the day wore on I wondered. So I emailed St Clair and asked my buddie what had happened. As compatriots don’t do, he did not reply. But I assumed he was busy, as I am, and gets many emails. So I waited. When I emailed him again, there was no reply. A third very cordial email three days later went unanswered.

Unlike Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, I am no longer waiting. No reply is coming, and St Clair isn’t Godot, or on second thought he may be, a chimerical leftist gatekeeper enticing Counterpunch’s followers to wait forever for a revelation that isn’t coming. Like his mentor and the founder of Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn, who was so fond of excoriating as “idiots” and “conspiracy nuts” anyone questioning the JFK assassination or the attacks of September 11, 2001 – two fundamental issues that only believers in official government conspiracy theories such as Cockburn could dismiss – St Clair seems similarly dismissive of explaining why a writer’s critique of the CIA would deserve to be eliminated from their front page after being published. As if only an idiot would want to know.

However, any reasonable person would ask: Why would he not respond? St Clair, the editor-in-chief, published the piece and then disappeared it after 10-11 hours? This is highly unusual, to put it mildly. Unprecedented for the so-called left-wing alternative media. It is the kind of thing when done by the mainstream corporate media would be denounced and exposed as censorship. Not publishing an article is a publication’s prerogative, of course, but what could cause one to eliminate an article highly critical of the CIA after people had ten or so hours to read it, and since the author and editor had a very cordial relationship up to that point and the editor had days to read it carefully?

Having eliminated the piece from their front page weekend edition where it could have been viewed by readers for four days while that page was available, they subsequently dumped it into their archives where the only reader who would later see it would be one who knew about it and went looking for it by title or author’s name. Very few would have reason to do that, of course, though readers of this article may be among the few. Censors often have a bag of tricks that allow for plausible denial after the fact.

One doesn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that someone objected to the piece. But who could that be? If it were St Clair’s managing editor, Joshua Frank, twenty years his junior (the two run the operation), then St Clair could have explained to me why, since we were on good terms. I wouldn’t have liked it and argued my points, but at least we could have cordially agreed to disagree. But the Frank possibility makes no sense, for a managing editor would be intimately involved in the publishing process that was completed the previous day in time for the very early Friday A.M. postings. And in any case, St Clair is in charge.

Clearly an outside reader objected. The question is: Who is that reader who could exert such control over a publication that promotes itself as one that “Tells the Facts, Names the Names”? A publication that is considered radically leftist and in opposition to the ruling elites.

Okay, Counterpunch, would you name the name of the shadowy one who won this fight?

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/02/21/counterpunch-shadowboxes-and-loses/

 

 

Read from top

 

From Chris Floyd

 

 

CIA Über Alles: The Spooky Loyalties of Evan McMullin

 

Evan McMullin is a former (presumably) CIA operative who once declared that his main job with the Agency was "to go out and convince al Qaeda operatives to instead work with us." In 2010 he left the CIA (presumably)  to become an investment banker, then served as an adviser and policy director for the berserk right-wing extremists in the House of Representatives until 2016. In that year, he launched a brief campaign for president, offering himself as an "anti-Trump" Republican (and garnering just over half of one percent of the national vote). Since then, he has postured as an above-the-fray voice of reason, still opposing Trump, while continuing to support almost all of the extremist GOP agenda that Trump has empowered.

Lately, the possibility has arisen that the Democrats might nominate a presidential candidate who espouses some of the actual core beliefs of most party members and, what's more, might actually seek to implement at least some of them (unlike the Pelosi-Schumer old guard, who prefer lip service for the rubes and lube jobs for their corporate backers, greasing the wheels for their profit and power). Even the remote possibility of this happening seems to have given McMullin a fit of the vapors. A recent tweet is a case in point. On March 9, McMullin offered this broadside to a nation desperate to hear how CIA operatives want them to vote in the coming election:

"I’ll never vote for Trump and I’ll never vote for Sanders. Proto-fascists and socialists are two sides of the same illiberal, Russian-backed coin. We can do much better and I believe we will."

Now, on the one hand, this is such an asinine statement -- baseless, fact-free, jejune, dumb -- that it almost defies comment. It's like watching a cat hock up a hairball: well, there it is. What can you say? It's a hairball; that's it. But in an idle moment of a Sunday afternoon, I was moved to lob a few tweets back to McMullin, which I've gathered into a more coherent bundle below. 

You have publicly stated that your job for the CIA was to talk to al Qaeda members and try to get them to cooperate with the US. But you would balk at making common cause with a longtime US senator if he is chosen by millions of Americans in a democratic process. I find that odd.

You are obviously not an idiot, so you know that the policies advocated by Sanders are diametrically opposed to Trump's -- just as, say, the Socialists of prewar Germany were not identical to the Nazis. So why are you pushing this brazenly false equation? In doing so, you are partaking in precisely the same distortion of reality that is Trump's chief weapon. Again: you'll negotiate with al Qaeda killers to get them to work with the US, but you reject out of hand US politicians going through the democratic process, and make false equations about them.

What is it about al Qaeda killers that you find more attractive than a democratic socialist whose policies are completely in line with mainstream FDR liberalism? Is it because your al Qaeda friends cooperated with the CIA, while there is a chance a Sanders' presidency MIGHT hinder, in some small way, the activities of our intelligence apparatchiks? Is that where your true loyalties are: with the institutional power of the CIA rather than the democratic processes of the country? You'd make common cause with al Qaeda, but not FDR liberalism?

I think your dissemination of these false equations between ordinary American liberalism and Trump's proto-fascism -- not to mention your McCarthyite smears of Sanders as a Kremlin tool -- speak volumes about what you really stand for and your true vision for the country.

Of course, McMullins' 2016 admission of the CIA's intricate intertwining with al Qaeda in order to use the terrorist organization for Agency purposes in worth a great deal more attention than it has ever warranted. But we'll save that for a later time.

 

Read more:

http://www.chris-floyd.com/mobile/articles/cia-uber-alles-the-spooky-loy...

 

 

 

Read from top.

US intelligence agencies fear losing financial flow from Togliattiazot

 

The Samara Regional Court began consideration of the appeal against the verdict of the Komsomolsky District Court of Togliatti in relation to Sergey Makhlai, Vladimir Makhlai, E. Korolev, A. Zivi, and B. Ruprecht. They were found guilty under Art. 159.4 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - fraud committed by an organized group on an especially large scale. In this case, an especially large scale means 87 billion rubles.

Striving to reverse the conviction and refusing to give back the money stolen from the enterprise and minority shareholders, the Makhlais filed an appeal against the judgement of the court of first instance; and now in this process they are using the proven tactics of delaying hearings. However, in addition to the desire to escape responsibility, there are other reasons behind such actions of the criminals that hide abroad.

Not only are the convicts themselves interested in canceling the guilty verdict. Sergei Makhlai's curator, a well-known person, arrived to the Samara Regional Court - US citizen Anthony V. Raftopol. He had appeared in the court of first instance as a representative of a civil defendant - the offshore Cypriot company Florenta Management Ltd., which owns a large block of shares in Transammiak JSC. This company owns the ammonia pipeline, which, according to the investigation, was used by the defendants in the scheme for the abduction of ammonia manufactured by PJSC ToAZ.

Raftopol's behavior and track record clearly identify the sphere of his activity. He definitely works for the US intelligence agencies: he knows five languages, he refused to give the court his home address saying that he lives somewhere in Dubai. His track record includes oil companies in Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria. Moreover, his arrival to these regions strangely coincides with the periods of war outbreaks in these territories.

At the hearing in the Samara Court on October 18, he fully confirmed the tactic of the process delaying - he wanted to file a motion during the judge's report, he was temporarily denied consideration because the case report was going on. Later, Raftopol filed a petition for the issuance of a copy of the case file to him; however, the court refused to satisfy it since copies had already been issued.

Since Sergey Makhlai (aka Serge Makhlai, George Mack) is supervised by the FBI in the United States (Mahlai is actively replenishing the budget of the Bahamas venture fund, which was created by retired FBI employees, in other words, he actually pays for his protection), there is a good reason to believe that he is their man. Such structures have a special interest in monitoring the Togliattiazot trial in Russia: most likely, Sergey, or Serge as his overseas patrons call him, corrupts FBI officials. For example, Michael Spiritus is paid as the financial director of Ameropa AG, which owned Nitrochem Distribution AG that used to be an exclusive trader of ToAZ and placed the plant in absolutely enslaving position. All parties to this conspiracy are afraid that information about the bribes received from Makhlai will be disclosed. In this case, the US "partners" will suffer too.

In this sense, the recent scandal in the US with the son of former vice president Joe Biden, who is accused of gaining corrupt income in Ukraine, is significant. The main goal of Makhlai's FBI curators is not only to avoid the disclosure of their corrupt ties with George Mack but also not to lose their source of income from Togliattiazot; these people have been claiming their share of profit from sales of its products for many years.

There is no doubt that, as in the case of Joe Biden, the corruption ties between Anthony Raftopol, Michael Spiritus, other ex-FBI officers and Sergei Makhlai will emerge eventually, and then these persons will not get away with a juicy scandal only. Anti-corruption legislation of both Russia and the United States provides for the most stringent measures against corrupt officials, regardless of their ranks and offices. It is very possible that the exposure of this lesion of corruption will cause another diplomatic conflict between the countries, and the intelligence agencies do not like this at all.

Now we only have to add that according to eyewitnesses, on Friday, October 18, after the court hearings, a meeting of the lawyers of the convicts with the participation of Raftopol was held in one of the restaurants in Samara, where they discussed the tactics of their further opposition to Russian justice.

Читайте больше на https://www.pravdareport.com/news/business/144007-togliattiazot/?utm_ref...

https://www.corbettreport.com/the-cias-global-propaganda-network-propagandawatch/

This week on the de-program James digs up an old New York Times report on the CIA’s “mighty wurlitzer,” their global propaganda network that included hundreds of journalists, editors, academics, publishing houses, newspapers, magazines and front companies. Although the Times piece is, as expected, a limited hangout, it does provide some interesting pieces of the global intelligence propaganda puzzle.

SHOW NOTES:

Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.

PDF copy

Crashes of Convenience: KAL 007 (Tom Braden clip)

JFK murder confession by CIA agent – full interview

Episode 302 – How To Free Your Tax Cattle (Hadley Cantril and War of the Worlds)

How the CIA Plants News Stories in the Media

 

 

Read from top

by Edward Curtin

 

Before I digress slightly, let me state from the outset that the book by Greg Poulgrain that I am about to review is extraordinary by any measure. The story he tells is one you will read nowhere else, especially in the way he links the assassination of President Kennedy to former CIA Director Allen Dulles and the engineering by the latter of one of the 20th century’s most terrible mass murders.  It will make your hair stand on end and should be read by anyone who cares about historical truth.

About twelve years ago I taught a graduate school course to Massachusetts State Troopers and police officers from various cities and towns.  As part of the course material, I had created a segment on the history of the United States’ foreign policy, with particular emphasis on Indonesia.

No one in this class knew anything about Indonesia, not even where it was. These were intelligent, ambitious adults, eager to learn, all with college degrees. This was in the midst of the “war on terror” – i.e. war on Muslim countries – and the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency.  Almost all the class had voted for Obama and were aware they he had spent some part of his youth in this unknown country somewhere far away.

I mention this as a preface to this review of JFK vs. Dulles, because its subtitle is Battleground Indonesia, and my suspicion is that those students’ lack of knowledge about the intertwined history of Indonesia and the U.S. is as scanty today among the general public as it was for my students a dozen years ago.

This makes Greg Poulgrain’s remarkable book – JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia – even more important since it is a powerful antidote to such ignorance, and a reminder for those who have fallen, purposefully or not, into a state of historical amnesia that has erased the fact that the U.S. has committed systematic crimes that have resulted in the deaths of more than a million Indonesians and many more millions throughout the world over innumerable decades.

Such crimes against humanity have been hidden behind what the English playwright Harold Pinter in his 2005 Nobel Prize address called “a tapestry of lies.”  Of such massive crimes, he said:

But you wouldn’t know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.

And when one examines the true history of such atrocities, again and again one comes up against familiar names of the guilty who have never been prosecuted.  Criminals in high places whose crimes around the world from Vietnam to Chile to Cuba to Nicaragua to Argentina to Iraq to Libya to Syria, etc. have been – and continue to be – integral to American foreign policy as it serves the interests of its wealthy owners and their media mouthpieces.

In his brilliant new book on U.S./Indonesian history, Dr. Greg Poulgrain unweaves this tapestry of lies and sheds new light on the liars’ sordid deeds. He is an Australian expert on Indonesia whose work stretches back forty years, is a professor at University of the Sunshine Coast in Brisbane and has written four highly-researched book about Indonesia.

In JFK vs. Dulles, he exposes the intrigue behind the ruthless regime-change strategy in Indonesia of the longest-serving CIA director, Allen Dulles, and how it clashed with the policy of President John F. Kennedy, leading to JFK’s assassination, Indonesian regime change, and massive slaughter.

Poulgrain begins with this question:

Would Allen Dulles have resorted to assassinating the President of the United States to ensure that his ‘Indonesian strategy’ rather than Kennedy’s was achieved?

To which he answers: Yes.

But let me not get ahead of myself, for the long, intricate tale he tells is one a reviewer can only summarize, so filled is it with voluminous details.  So I will touch on a few salient points and encourage people to buy and read this important book.

INDONESIA’S STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE

The strategic and economic importance of Indonesia cannot be exaggerated.  It is the world’s 4th most populous country (275+ million), is located in a vital shipping lane adjacent to the South China Sea, has the world’s largest Muslim population, has vast mineral and oil deposits, and is home in West Papua to Grasberg, the world’s largest gold mine and the second largest copper mine, primarily owned by Freeport McMoRan of Phoenix, Arizona, whose past board members have included Henry Kissinger, John Hay Whitney, and Godfrey Rockefeller.

Long a battleground in the Cold War, Indonesia remains vitally important in the New Cold War and the pivot to Asia launched by the Obama administration against China and Russia, the same antagonists Allen Dulles strove to defeat through guile and violence while he engineered coups home and abroad. It is fundamentally important in the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific strategy for what it euphemistically calls a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” While not front-page news in the U.S., these facts make Indonesia of great importance today and add to the gravity of Poulgrain’s historical account.

JFK

Two days before President John Kennedy was publicly executed by the US national security state led by the CIA on November 22, 1963, he had accepted an invitation from Indonesian President Sukarno to visit that country the following spring.  The aim of the visit was to end the conflict (Konfrontasi) between Indonesia and Malaysia and to continue Kennedy’s efforts to support post-colonial Indonesia with economic and developmental aid, not military.   It was part of his larger strategy of ending conflict throughout Southeast Asia and assisting the growth of democracy in newly liberated post-colonial countries worldwide.

He had forecast his position in a dramatic speech in 1957 when, as a Massachusetts Senator, he told the Senate that he supported the Algerian liberation movement and opposed colonial imperialism worldwide.  The speech caused an international uproar and Kennedy was harshly attacked by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even liberals such as Adlai Stevenson.  But he was praised throughout the third world.

Poulgrain writes:

Kennedy was aiming for a seismic shift of Cold War alignment in Southeast Asia by bringing Indonesia ‘on side.’  As Bradley Simpson stated (in 2008), ‘One would never know from reading the voluminous recent literature on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and Southeast Asia, for example, that until the mid-1960s most officials [in the US] still considered Indonesia of far greater importance than Vietnam or Laos.

Of course JFK never went to Indonesia in 1964, and his peaceful strategy to bring Indonesia to America’s side and to ease tensions in the Cold War was never realized, thanks to Allen Dulles.  And Kennedy’s proposed withdrawal from Vietnam, which was premised on success in Indonesia, was quickly reversed by Lyndon Johnson after JFK’s murder on November 22, 1963.  Soon both countries would experience mass slaughter engineered by Kennedy’s opponents in the CIA and Pentagon. Millions would die.

While the Indonesian mass slaughter of mainly poor rice farmers (members of the Communist Party – PKI) instigated by Allen Dulles began in October 1965, ten years later, starting in December 1975, the American installed Indonesian dictator Suharto, after meeting with Henry Kissinger and President Ford and receiving their approval, would slaughter hundreds of thousands East-Timorese with American-supplied weapons in a repeat of the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians in 1965 when the CIA engineered the coup d’état that toppled President Sukarno.  

The American installed dictator Suharto would rule for thirty years of terror.  The CIA considers this operation one of its finest accomplishments.  It became known as “the Jakarta Method,” a model for future violent coups throughout Latin America and the world.

And in-between these U.S. engineered mass atrocities, came the bloody coup in Chile on September 11, 1973 and the ongoing colossal U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

DULLES’S SECRET

What JFK didn’t know was that his plans for a peaceful resolution of the Indonesia situation and an easing of the Cold War were threatening a covert long-standing conspiracy engineered by Allen Dulles to effect regime change in Indonesia through bloody means and to exacerbate the Cold War by concealing from Kennedy the truth that there was a Sino-Soviet split. 

Another primary goal behind this plan was to gain unimpeded access to the vast load of natural resources that Dulles had kept secret from Kennedy, who thought Indonesia was lacking in natural resources. But Dulles knew that if Kennedy, who was very popular in Indonesia, visited Sukarno, it would deal a death blow to his plan to oust Sukarno, install a CIA replacement (Suharto), exterminate alleged communists, and secure the archipelago for Rockefeller controlled oil and mining interests, for whom he had fronted  since the 1920s.

Reading Poulgrain’s masterful analysis, one can clearly see how much of modern history is a struggle for control of the underworld where lies the fuel that runs the megamachine – oil, minerals, gold, copper, etc.  Manifest ideological conflicts, while garnering headlines, often bury the secret of this subterranean devil’s game.

THE DISCOVERY OF GOLD

His murder mystery/detective story begins with a discovery that is then kept secret for many decades.  He writes:

In the alpine region of Netherlands New Guinea (so named under Dutch colonial rule – today, West Papua) in 1936, three Dutchmen discovered a mountainous outcrop of ore with high copper content and very high concentrations of gold.  When later analyzed in the Netherlands, the gold (in gram/ton) proved to be twice that of Witwatersrand in South Africa, then the world’s richest gold mine, but this information was not made public.

The geologist among the trio, Jean Jacques Dozy, worked for the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company (NNGPM), ostensibly a Dutch-controlled company based in The Hague, but whose controlling interest actually lay in the hands of the Rockefeller family, as did the mining company, Freeport Sulphur (now Freeport McMoRan, one of whose Directors from 1988-95 was Henry Kissinger, Dulles’ and the Rockefeller’s close associate) that began mining operations there in 1966.

It was Allen Dulles, Paris-based lawyer in the employ of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, who in 1935 arranged the controlling interest in NNGPN for the Rockefellers.  And it was Dulles, among a select few others, who, because of various intervening events, including WW II, that made its exploitation impossible, kept the secret of the gold mine for almost three decades, even from President Kennedy, who had worked to return the island to Indonesian control. JFK “remained uninformed of the El Dorado, and once the remaining political hurdles were overcome, Freeport would have unimpeded access.” Those “political hurdles” – i.e. regime change – would take a while to effect.

THE NEED TO ASSASSINATE PRESIDENT KENNEDY

But first JFK would have to be eliminated, for he had brokered Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua/West Irian for Sukarno from the Dutch who had ties to Freeport Sulphur.  Freeport was aghast at the potential loss of “El Dorado,” especially since they had recently had their world’s most advanced nickel refinery expropriated by Fidel Castro, who had named Che Guevara its new manager.  Freeport’s losses in Cuba made access to Indonesia even more important. Cuba and Indonesia thus were joined in the deadly game of chess between Dulles and Kennedy, and someone would have to lose.

While much has been written about Cuba, Kennedy, and Dulles, the Indonesian side of the story has been slighted. Poulgrain remedies this with an exhaustive and deeply researched exploration of these matters. He details the deviousness of the covert operations Dulles ran in Indonesia during the 1950s and 1960s.  He makes it clear that Kennedy was shocked by Dulles’s actions, yet never fully grasped the treacherous genius of it all, for Dulles was always “working two or three stages ahead of the present.” 

Having armed and promoted a rebellion against Sukarno’s central government in 1958, Dulles made sure it would fail (shades of the Bay of Pigs to come) since a perceived failure served his long-term strategy.  To this very day, this faux 1958 Rebellion is depicted as a CIA failure by the media.  Yet from Dulles standpoint, it was a successful failure that served his long-term goals.

“This holds true,” Poulgrain has previously written, “only if the stated goal of the CIA was the same as the actual goal.  Even more than five decades later, media analysis of the goal of The Outer Island rebels is still portrayed as a secession, as covert US support for ‘rebels in the Outer Islands that wished to secede from the central government in Jakarta’.  The actual goal of Allen Dulles had more to do with achieving a centralized army command in such a way as to appear that the CIA backing for the rebels failed.”

DULLES’ THE DEVIL

Dulles betrayed the rebels he armed and encouraged, just as he betrayed friend and foe alike during his long career.  The rebellion that he instigated and planned to fail was the first stage of a larger intelligence strategy that would come to fruition in 1965-6 with the ouster of Sukarno (after multiple unsuccessful assassination attempts) and the institution of a reign of terror that followed.  

It was also when – 1966 – Freeport McMoRan began their massive mining in West Papua at Grasberg at an elevation of 14,000 feet in the Alpine region.  Dulles was nothing if not patient; he had been at this game since WW I.  Even after Kennedy fired him following the Bay of Pigs, his plans were executed, just as those who got in his way were.  Poulgrain makes a powerful case that Dulles was the mastermind of the murders of JFK, U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold (working with Kennedy for a peaceful solution in Indonesia and other places), and Congolese President Patrice Lumumba, the first president of a newly liberated Congo.

His focus is on why they needed to be assassinated (similar in this regard to James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable), though with the exception of Kennedy (since the how is well-known and obvious), he also presents compelling evidence as to the how. Hammarskjold, in many ways Kennedy’s spiritual brother, was a particularly powerful obstacle to Dulles’s plans for Indonesia and colonial countries throughout the Third World. Like JFK, he was committed to independence for indigenous and colonial peoples everywhere and was trying to implement his Swedish-style ‘third way,’ proposing a form of ‘muscular pacifism’.

Poulgrain argues correctly that if the UN Secretary General succeeded in bringing even half these colonial countries to independence, he would have transformed the UN into a significant world power and created a body of nations so large as to be a counter-weight to those embroiled in the Cold War.

He draws on documents from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu to show the connection between South Africa’s “Operation Celeste” and Dulles’s involvement in Hammarskjold’s murder in September 1961.  While it was reported at the time as an accidental plane crash, he quotes former President Harry Truman saying, “Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him.  Notice that I said, ‘When they killed him’.”  Hammarskjold, like Kennedy, was intent on returning colonized countries to their indigenous inhabitants and making sure Papua was for Papuans, not Freeport McMoRan and imperial forces.

And Dulles sold his overt Indonesian strategy as being necessary to thwart a communist takeover in Indonesia. Cold War rhetoric, like “the war on terrorism” today, served as his cover.  In this he had the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his side; they considered Kennedy soft on communism, in Indonesia and Cuba and everywhere else. Dulles’s covert agenda was to serve the interests of his power elite patrons.

While contextually different from David Talbot’s portrayal of Dulles in The Devil’s Chessboard, Poulgrain’s portrait of Dulles within the frame of Indonesian history is equally condemnatory and nightmarish.  Both describe an evil genius ready to do anything to advance his agenda.

DULLES AND GEORGE DE MOHRENSCHILDT

Poulgrain adds significantly to our understanding of JFK’s assassination and its aftermath by presenting new information about George de Mohrenschildt, Lee Harvey Oswald’s handler in Dallas.  Dulles had a long association with the de Mohrenschildt family, going back to 1920-21 when in Constantinople he negotiated with Baron Sergius Alexander von Mohrenschildt on behalf of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.  The Baron’s brother and business partner was George’s father.  Dulles’s law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, was Standard Oil’s primary law firm.

These negotiations on behalf of elite capitalist interests, in the shadow of the Russian Revolution, became the template for Dulles’s career: economic exploitation was inseparable from military concerns, the former concealed behind the anti-communist rhetoric of the latter.  An anti-red thread ran through Dulles’s career, except when the red was the blood of all those whom he considered expendable.  And the numbers are legion.  Their blood didn’t matter.

Standard Oil is the link that joins Dulles [who controlled the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of JFK] and de Mohrenschildt. This connection was kept from the Warren Commission despite Dulles’ prominent role and the importance of the testimony of de Mohrenschildt. Poulgrain argues convincingly that de Mohrenschildt worked in “oil intelligence” before his CIA involvement, and that oil intelligence was not only Dulles’s work when he first met George’s father, Sergius, in Baku, but that that “oil intelligence” is a redundancy. 

The CIA, after all, is a creation of Wall Street and their interests have always been joined. The Agency was not formed to provide intelligence to US Presidents; that was a convenient myth used to cover its real purpose which was to serve the interests of investment bankers and the power elite, or those I call The Umbrella People who control the U.S.

While working in 1941 for Humble Oil  (Prescott Bush was a major shareholder, Dulles was his lawyer, and Standard Oil had secretly bought Humble Oil sixteen years before), de Mohrenschildt was caught up in a scandal that involved Vichy (pro-Nazi) French intelligence in selling oil to Germany.  This was similar to the Dulles’s brothers and Standard Oil’s notorious business dealings with Germany.

It was an intricate web of the high cabal with Allen Dulles at the center.

In the midst of the scandal, de Mohrenschildt, suspected of being a Vichy French intelligence agent, “disappeared” for a while.  He later told the Warren Commission that he decided to take up oil drilling, without mentioning the name of Humble Oil that employed him again, this time as a roustabout.

“Just when George needed to ‘disappear’, Humble Oil was providing an oil exploration team to be subcontracted to NNGPM – the company Allen Dulles had set up five years earlier to work in Netherlands New Guinea.” 

Poulgrain makes a powerful circumstantial evidence case (certain documents are still unavailable) that de Mohrenschildt, in order to avoid appearing in court, went incommunicado in Netherlands New Guinea in mid-1941 where he made a record oil discovery and received a $10,000 bonus from Humble Oil.

“Avoiding adverse publicity about his role in selling oil to Vichy France was the main priority; for George, a brief drilling adventure in remote Netherlands New Guinea would have been a timely and strategic exit.” 

And who best to help him in this escape than Allen Dulles – indirectly, of course; for Dulles’s modus operandi was to maintain his “distance” from his contacts, often over many decades.

In other words, Dulles and de Mohrenschildt were intimately involved for a long time prior to JFK’s assassination. Poulgrain rightly claims that “the entire focus of the Kennedy investigation would have shifted had the [Warren] Commission become aware of the 40-year link between Allen Dulles and de Mohrenschildt.” Their relationship involved oil, spying, Indonesia, Nazi Germany, the Rockefellers, Cuba, Haiti, etc.  It was an international web of intrigue that involved a cast of characters stranger than fiction, a high cabal of the usual and unusual operatives.

Two unusual ones are worth mentioning: Michael Fomenko and Michael Rockefeller.  

The eccentric Fomenko – aka “Tarzan” – is the Russian-Australian nephew of de Mohrenschildt’s wife, Jean Fomenko.  His arrest and deportation from Netherlands New Guinea in 1959, where he had travelled from Australia in a canoe, and his subsequent life, are fascinating and sad. It’s the stuff of a bizarre film. 

It seems he was one of those victims who had to be silenced because he knew a secret about George’s 1941 oil discovery that was not his to share. 

“In April 1964, at the same time George de Mohrenschildt was facing the Warren Commission – a time when any publicity regarding Sele 40 [George’s record oil discovery] could have changed history – it was decided that electro-convulsive therapy would be used on Michael Fomenko.”

He was then imprisoned at the Ipswich Special Mental Hospital.

Equally interesting is the media myth surrounding the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, Nelson’s son and heir to the Standard Oil fortune, who was allegedly eaten by cannibals in New Guinea in 1961. His tale became front-page news, “a media event closed off to any other explanation and the political implications of his disappearance became an ongoing tragedy for the Papuan people.”

To this very day, the West Papuan people, whose land was described by Standard Oil official Richard Archbold in 1938 as “Shangri-la,” are fighting for their independence.

THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT

While the gold in West Papua was very important to Allen Dulles, his larger goal was to keep the Cold War blazing by concealing the dispute between China and the Soviet Union from Kennedy while instigating the mass slaughter of “communists” that would lead to regime change in Indonesia, with Major-General Suharto, his ally, replacing President Sukarno. In this he was successful. Poulgrain says:

Not only did Dulles fail to brief Kennedy on the Sino-Soviet dispute early in the presidency, but he also remained silent about the rivalry between Moscow and Beijing to wield influence over the PKI or win its support.  In geographical terms, Beijing regarded Indonesia as its own backyard, and winning the support of the PKI would give Beijing an advantage in the Sino-Soviet dispute.  The numerical growth of the PKI was seen by Moscow and Beijing for its obvious political potential.  Dulles was also focused on the PKI, but his peculiar skill in political intelligence turned what seemed inevitable on its head.  The size of the party [the Indonesian Communist Party was the largest outside the Sino-Soviet bloc] became a factor he used to his advantage when formulating his wedge strategy – the greater the rivalry between Moscow and Beijing over the PKI, the more intense would be the recrimination once the PKI was eliminated.

The slaughter of more than a million poor farmers was a trifle to Dulles.

THE SEPTEMBER 30, 1965 MOVEMENT

In the early hours of October 1, 1965, a fake coup d’état was staged by the CIA’s man, Major-General Suharto.  It was announced that seven generals had been arrested and would be taken to President Sukarno “to explain the rumor that they were planning a military coup on October 5.”

Suharto declared himself the head of the army. Someone was said to have killed the generals. In the afternoon, a radio announcement was made calling for the Sukarno government to be dismissed.  This became Suharto’s basis for blaming it on the communists and the so-called September 30 Movement, and he gave the order to kill the PKI leaders.  This started the massive bloodshed that would follow.

With one hand, Suharto crushed the Movement, accusing the PKI of being the ultimate instigator of an attempt to oust Sukarno, and with the other hand he feigned to protect the “father of the Indonesian revolution,” while actually stripping Sukarno of every vestige of political support.

When the generals’ bodies were recovered a few days after Oct 1, Suharto falsely claimed the PKI women had tortured and sexually mutilated them as part of some primitive sexual orgy.  This heinous perversion of power was the start of the Suharto era.  In total control of the media, he manipulated popular wrath to call for revenge.

If this confuses you, it should, because the twisted nature of this fabricated coup was actually part of a real coup in slow motion aimed at ousting Sukarno and replacing him with the CIA’s man Suharto.  This occurred in early 1967 after the mass slaughter of communists.  It was a regime change cheered on by the American mass media as a triumph over communist aggression.

NEW EVIDENCE OF US DIRECT INVOLVEMENT IN THE SLAUGHTER

Poulgrain has spent forty years interviewing participants and researching this horrendous history. His detailed research is quite amazing. And it does take concentration to follow it all, as with the machinations of Dulles, Suharto, et al.

Some things, however, are straightforward.  

For example, he documents how, during the height of the slaughter, two Americans – one man and one woman – were in Klaten (PKI headquarters in central Java) supervising the Indonesian army as they killed the PKI. These two would travel back and forth by helicopter from a ship of the U.S. 7th Fleet that was off the coast of Java.  

The plan was that the more communists killed, the greater would be the dispute between Moscow and Beijing, since they would accuse each other for the tragedy, which is exactly what they did.  This was the wedge that was mentioned in the Rockefeller Brothers Panel Report from the late 1950s in which Dulles and Henry Kissinger both participated.

The hatred drummed up against these poor members of the Communist Party was extraordinary in its depravity.  In addition to Suharto’s lies about communist women mutilating the generals’ bodies, a massive campaign of hatred was directed against these landless peasants who made up the bulk of the PKI.  False Cold War radio broadcasts from Singapore stirred up hostility toward them, declaring them atheists, etc.  Wealthy Muslim landowners – the 1 per cent – made outrageous charges to assist the army’s slaughter.  Poulgrain tells us:

Muhammadiyah preachers were broadcasting from mosques that all who joined the communist party must be killed, saying they are the ‘lowest order of infidel, the shedding of whose blook is comparable to killing a chicken.’

For those Americans especially, who think this history of long ago and far away does not touch them, its compelling analysis of how and why Allen Dulles and his military allies would want JFK dead since he was a threat to national security as they defined in it their paranoid anti-communist ideology might be an added impetus to read this very important book. Indonesia may be far away geographically, but it’s a small world.  

Dulles and Kennedy had irreconcilable differences, and when Dulles was once asked in a radio interview what he would do to someone who threatened national security, he matter-of-factually said, “I’d kill him.”  The Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say that the introduction to JFK vs. Dulles by Oliver Stone and the afterward by James DiEugenio are outstanding. They add excellent context and clarity to a really great and important book.

 

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2021/02/07/review-jfk-vs-allen-dulles/

 

Read from top.

 

See also: uncle george...

 

and: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35134

 

Note that John Foster Dulles was the brother of Allen Dulles...

The Dulles brothers ascended to the pinnacle of power without ever being elected to office; they rose to power via Wall Street and the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. The Dulles brothers had a uniquely privileged upbringing, a long career advising the world’s richest corporations, and a profound religious faith in unfettered Capitalism. Their values, beliefs, and instincts were those of the international elite. One of John Foster Dulles’ biographers who wrote that he was “out of touch with the rough and tumble of humanity” because “his whole background was superior, sheltered, successful, safe.”

In his book The Brothers…and Their Secret World War (2014) Stephen Kinzer writes that the brothers shared abiding faith in “American Exceptionalism” which condones overthrowing governments and advancing American business interests as if these were a noble global good. Both men built personal fortunes as lawyers and partners in Sullivan & Cromwell. Their work frequently allowed them to act simultaneously in a governmental role and as client representatives, benefiting their firm, themselves and the client. They advanced the firm’s international legal and lobbying scope and influence, which continues today.

Sullivan & Cromwell “thrived on its cartels and collusion with the new Nazi regime.” The Dulles brothers were especially interested in Germany, which they visited regularly. Foster Dulles spent much of 1934 “publicly supporting Hitler,” leaving even his partners “shocked that he could so easily disregard law and international treaties to justify Nazi repression.” When asked during this period how he dealt with German clients who were Jewish, he replied that he had simply decided “to keep away from them.” (Kinzer. Overthrow, 2006)

The Dulles brothers tightly controlled both the overt and covert arms of American global policy during the Eisenhower Administration. Kinzer documents how the brothers drove America’s interventionist foreign policy on behalf of major corporate interests; economic preoccupations dominated their world view. He shows how they were jointly responsible for acts of extreme geopolitical myopia, grave operational incompetence and misguided adherence to a creed of corporate globalism. He shows how their “ruthlessly confrontational view of the world’’ are responsible in some or even large measure for the Cold War and anti-Americanism around the world.

“Fortified with confidence, they went forth to do battle, serenely and secretly, on behalf of capitalism and Christianity and against communism. They created secret prisons, recruited underground armies, and prompted killings and bombings around the world, most especially in Iran, Guatemala, Lebanon, and the Congo. … “ (Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change 2013)

No wonder that nefarious Nazi modus operandi seeped into American public policies under the uncontested dominance of an elite coterie of government intelligence officials with deep ties to Wall Street corporate interests intertwined with dominant Nazi corporations. (Hersh, 1992; 2002; Loftus. 2010; Kinzer 2013) These highest level American government officials empathized with the Nazis war criminals that they shielded and with whom they engaged amicably.

 

Read from top — and I mean READ FROM TOP.

FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats

By Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

Washington Post Writers

Tuesday, October 10, 1972; Page A01

 

FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon's re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

The activities, according to information in FBI and Department of Justice files, were aimed at all the major Democratic presidential contenders and -- since 1971 -- represented a basic strategy of the Nixon re-election effort.

During their Watergate investigation, federal agents established that hundreds of thousands of dollars in Nixon campaign contributions had been set aside to pay for an extensive undercover campaign aimed at discrediting individual Democratic presidential candidates and disrupting their campaigns.

"Intelligence work" is normal during a campaign and is said to be carried out by both political parties. But federal investigators said what they uncovered being done by the Nixon forces is unprecedented in scope and intensity.

They said it included:

Following members of Democratic candidates' families and assembling dossiers on their personal lives; forging letters and distributing them under the candidates' letterheads; leaking false and manufactured items to the press; throwing campaign schedules into disarray; seizing confidential campaign files; and investigating the lives of dozens of Democratic campaign workers.

In addition, investigators said the activities included planting provocateurs in the ranks of organizations expected to demonstrate at the Republican and Democratic conventions; and investigating potential donors to the Nixon campaign before their contributions were solicited.

Informed of the general contents of this article, The White House referred all comment to The Committee for the Re-election of the President. A spokesman there said, "The Post story is not only fiction but a collection of absurdities." Asked to discuss the specific points raised in the story, the spokesman, DeVan L. Shumway, refused on grounds that "the entire matter is in the hands of the authorities."

Law enforcement sources said that probably the best example of the sabotage was the fabrication by a White House aide -- of a celebrated letter to the editor alleging that Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine) condoned a racial slur on Americans of French-Canadian descent as "Canucks."

The letter was published in the Manchester Union Leader Feb 24, less than two weeks before the New Hampshire primary. It in part triggered Muskie's politically damaging "crying speech" in front of the newspaper's office.

Washington Post staff writer Marilyn Berger reported that Ken W. Clawson, deputy director of White House communications, told her in a conversation on September 25th that, "I wrote the letter."

Interviewed again yesterday, Clawson denied that he had claimed authorship of the "Canuck" letter, saying the reporter must have misunderstood him. "I know nothing about it," Clawson said.

William Loeb, publisher of the Manchester paper, said yesterday that although the person who signed the letter -- a Paul Morrison of Deerfield Beach, Fla. -- has never been located, "I am convinced that it is authentic."

However, Loeb said he is investigating the possibility that the letter is a fabrication because of another letter he received about two weeks ago. The recent letter, Loeb said, maintains that another person was paid $1,000 to assist with the "Canuck" hoax.

B. J. McQuaid, Editor-in-Chief of the Union-Leader, said earlier this year that Clawson had been "useful" to the paper in connection with the "Canuck" letter. Though McQuaid did not elaborate, he too said that he believed the original letter was authentic.

Clawson, a former Washington Post reporter, said yesterday that he met McQuaid only briefly during the New Hampshire primary while lunching in the state with editors of the newspaper.

He denied that he provided any assistance with the letter. Clawson said the first time he heard of the "Canuck" letter was when "I saw it on television" following the Muskie speech.

Immediately following his "crying speech," Muskie's standing in the New Hampshire primary polls began to slip and he finished with only 48 percent of the Democratic primary vote -- far short of his expectations.

Three attorneys have told The Washington Post that, as early as mid-1971, they were asked to work as agents provocateurs on behalf of the Nixon campaign. They said they were asked to undermine the primary campaigns of Democratic candidates by a man who has been identified in FBI reports as an operative of the Nixon re-election organization.

All three lawyers, including one who is an assistant attorney general of Tennessee, said they turned down the offers, which purportedly included the promise of "big jobs" in Washington after President Nixon's re-election. They said the overtures were made by Donald H. Segretti, 31, a former Treasury Department lawyer who lives in Marina Del Ray, Calif.

Segretti denied making the offers and refused to answer a reporter's questions.

One federal investigative official said that Segretti played the role of "just a small fish in a big pond." According to FBI reports, at least 50 undercover Nixon operatives traveled throughout the country trying to disrupt and spy on Democratic campaigns.

Both at the White House and within the President's re-election committee, the intelligence-sabotage operation was commonly called the "offensive security" program of the Nixon forces, according to investigators.

Perhaps the most significant finding of the whole Watergate investigation, the investigators say, was that numerous specific acts of political sabotage and spying were all traced to this "offensive security," which was conceived and directed in the White House and by President Nixon's re-election committee.

The investigators said that a major purpose of the sub rosa activities was to create so much confusion, suspicion and dissension that the Democrats would be incapable of uniting after choosing a presidential nominee.

The FBI's investigation of the Watergate established that virtually all the acts against the Democrats were financed by a secret, fluctuating $350,000 -$700,000 campaign fund that was controlled by former Attorney General John N. Mitchell while he headed the Justice Department. Later, when he served as President Nixon's campaign manager, Mitchell shared control of the fund with others. The money was kept in a safe in the office of the President's chief fundraiser, former Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans.

According to sources close to the Watergate investigation, much of the FBI's information is expected to be revealed at the trial of the seven men indicted on charges of conspiring to eavesdrop on Democratic headquarters at the Watergate.

"There is some very powerful information," said one federal official, "especially if it becomes known before Nov. 7."

A glimpse of the Nixon campaign's spying and disruptions are to be found in the activities of Segretti. According to investigators, Segretti's work was financed through middlemen by the $350,000-$700,000 fund.

Asked by The Washington Post to discuss Segretti, three FBI and Justice Department officials involved in the Watergate probe refused. At the mention of Segretti's name, each said -- in the words of one -- "That's part of the Watergate investigation." One of the officials, however, became angry at the mention of Segretti's name and characterized his activities as "indescribable."

Segretti, visited in his West Coast apartment last week by Washington Post special correspondent Robert Meyers, repeatedly answered questions by saying, "I don't know." "I don't have to answer that." And "No comment." After 15 minutes, he said: "This is material for a good novel, it's ridiculous," and chased the reporter outside when he attempted to take a picture.

According to the three attorneys interviewed by The Post, Segretti attempted to hire them in 1971 as undercover agents working on behalf of President Nixon's re-election. All three said they first met Segretti in 1968, when they served together in Vietnam as captains in the Army Judge Advocate General Corps.

One of the lawyers, Alex B. Shipley, a Democrat who is now assistant attorney general of Tennessee, said Segretti told him, "Money would be no problem, but the people we would be working for wanted results for the cash that would be spent."

Shipley, 30 added: "He (Segretti) also told me that we would be taken care of after Nixon's re-election, that I would get a good job in the government."

According to Shipley, Segretti said that the undercover work would require false identification papers under an assumed name; that Shipley recruit five more persons, preferably lawyers, for the job; that they would attempt to disrupt the schedules of Democratic candidates and obtain information from their campaign organizations; that Shipley would not reveal to Segretti the names of the men he would hire; and that Segretti could never reveal to Shipley specifically who was supplying the money for the operation.

Shipley recalled in a telephone interview: "I said, 'How in hell are we going to be taken care of if no one knows what we're doing?' and Segretti said: 'Nixon knows that something is being done. It's a typical deal.' Segretti said, 'Don't-tell-me-anything-and-I-won't-know.'"

Segretti's first approach, said Shipley, came on June 27, 1971. "He called me before then and told me he would be in Washington and he came to a dinner party at my apartment at South Four Towers (4600 S. Four Mile Run Drive, Arlington) the night before," said Shipley. "Nothing was said about it then. The next morning I met him for breakfast and drove him to the airport -- Dulles."

According to Shipley, he picked Segretti up that morning, a Sunday, at the Georgetown Inn, where -- hotel records show -- a Donald H. Segretti stayed in room 402 on June 25, and June 26,1971 (total bill $54.75, including $2.25 in telephone calls). In addition, travel records obtained by The Washington Post show that Segretti bought a Washington-San Francisco-Monterey (Calif.) airline ticket on June 27 (departure Dulles).

On the way to Dulles, said Shipley, Segretti "first mentioned the deal. He asked would I be interested because I was getting out of the Army. We were both setting out shortly...and didn't have anything lined up. He mentioned on the way to Dulles that we would do a little political espionage."

Shipley continued: "I said, 'What are you talking about?' He (Segretti) said: 'For instance, we'll go to a Kennedy rally and find an ardent Kennedy worker. Then you say that you're a Kennedy man too but you're working behind the scenes; you get them to help you. You send them to work for Muskie, stuffing envelopes or whatever, and you get them to pass you the information. They'll think that they are helping Kennedy against Muskie. But actually you're using the information for something else.

"It was very strange," Shipley recalled. "Three quarters of the way to the airport I said, 'Well, who will we be working for?' He said, 'Nixon' and I was really taken aback, because all the actions he had talked about would have taken place in the Democratic primaries. He (Segretti) said the main purpose was that the Democrats have an ability to get back together after a knockdown, drag-out campaign. What we want to do is wreak enough havoc so they can't."

Shipley said he told Segretti, "Well, it sounds interesting; let me think about it."

In addition to Shipley, Roger Lee Nixt of Dennison, Iowa, and Kenneth Griffiths of Atlanta, Ga., said they turned down similar offers from Segretti, with whom they served in Vietnam. Both declined to discuss the offers in detail, but they acknowledged that Segretti had told them they would be engaged in sub rosa activities -- similar to those described by Shipley -- to aid President Nixon's re-election.

Still another lawyer who served with Segretti in Vietnam, Peter Dixon of San Francisco, also said Segretti made him an offer. However, Dixon said he told Segretti, "No thanks," before any details of the job were revealed. I said, "Gee, I'm not interested in political matters, and I'm not a Republican anyway," said Dixon.

The most detailed account of Segretti's activities was given by Shipley, who said he wrote a memorandum to himself about the episode, "because it all seemed so strange."

At one point during the four-month period when Segretti was trying to recruit him, said Shipley, he approached a friend who worked for Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.) and was advised to try and "string him (Segretti) out to see what he's up to." Although "I don't like these type of shenanigans," Shipley said, he never subsequently contacted anyone else about the matter and said he has not been questioned by the FBI about Segretti.

During a meeting on July 25, said Shipley, Segretti "didn't go into much detail because it was mostly 'Are you with me or not?'" When he asked Segretti exactly what would be expected of him, in participating in clandestine activities, Shipley said he was told:

"'Enlist people, be imaginative' One thing he stressed was asking lawyers because he didn't want to do anything illegal. It wasn't represented as a strictly strong-arm operation. He stressed what fun we could have. As an example, he gave this situation:

"'When a rally is scheduled at 7 p.m. at a local coliseum by a particular candidate, you call up and represent to the manager that you're the field manager for this candidate and you have some information that some rowdies, some hippies or what-have-you are going to cause trouble. So you ask him to move the rally up to 9 o'clock -- thereby insuring that the place would be padlocked when the candidate showed up at 7.'"

Shipley said he was asked by Segretti to fly to Atlanta to enlist their Army colleague, Kenneth Griffiths, in the project, but that he never made the trip. However, when visiting Griffiths last Christmas, said Shipley, "Griffiths mentioned to me that Segretti had been in contact with him and that Griffith had expressed absolutely no interest at all."

The last time he heard from Segretti, said Shipley, was on Oct 23.1971, when "he called from California and asked me to check into Muskie's operation in Tennessee...I just never did anything about it"

"At one time during these conjectural discussions," Shipley continued, "Segretti said it might be good to get a false ID to travel under, that it would be harder for anyone to catch up with us. He mentioned he might use the pseudonym Bill Mooney for himself...

"Segretti said he wanted to cover the country," Shipley continued, "that he would be more or less the head coordinator for the country. But some of the things he proposed to do didn't seem that damaging, like getting a post office box in the name of the Massachusetts Safe Driving Committee and awarding a medal to Teddy Kennedy -- with announcements sent to the press."

"The one important thing that struck me was that he seemed to be well-financed," Shipley said. "He was always flying across the country. When he came to Washington in June he said he had an appointment at the Treasury Department and that the Treasury Department was picking up the tab on this -- his plane and hotel bill."

Segretti later told him, Shipley said that "it wasn't the Treasury Department that had paid the bill, it was the Nixon people. He said, 'Don't ask me any names.'"

(According to travel records, Segretti criss-crossed the country at least half of 1971. Stops included Miami, Houston, Manchester, N.H., Knoxville, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Portland, Ore., Albuquerque, Tucson, San Francisco, Monterey and several other California cities.)

(Federal investigators identified the following jurisdictions as the locations of the most concentrated Nixon undercover activity: Illinois, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, California, Texas, Florida, and Washington, D.C.)

Segretti told him one other major element about his covert work, said Shipley: "He intended to go into a law firm near Los Angeles by the name of Young and Segretti -- he said it was a cover, that he would be doing only political work."

According to the California Bar Association, Segretti's law office is at 14013 West Captain's Row, Marina Del Rey, California.

There in an apartment surrounded by comfortable furniture, piles of photograph records, tomato plants, a stereo receiver, a tape deck and a l0-speed bike, Segretti was found last week by Post special correspondent Myers.

Questioned whether he knew Alex Shipley, Roger Lee Nixt, Kenneth Griffiths, or Peter Dixon, Segretti asked, "Why?" Informed that they had said Segretti attempted to recruit them for undercover political work, he replied "I don't believe it." Then he declined to answer a series of questions except to say either, "I don't know," "No comment," or some similar response.

At one point, Segretti said: "This is all ridiculous and I don't know anything about this." At another point he said: "The Treasury Department never paid my way to Washington or anywhere else." Biographical details about Segretti, who stands about 5 feet 8 and weighs about 150 pounds, are minimal.

From Army colleagues and classmates at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California in Berkeley, it is known that he was raised on the West Coast.

After receiving his law degree, he served as a Treasury Department attorney in Washington for less than a year, according to friends , and then entered the Army as an officer in the Army Judge Advocate General Corps.

A Treasury Department spokesman confirmed that Segretti, in 1966 and 1967, worked as an attorney in the office of the Comptroller of the Currency here.

About a year of Segretti's Army service, friends said, was spent in Vietnam, with American Division headquarters in Chulai and U.S. Army Vietnam headquarters at Longbinh.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/articles/101072-1.htm

 

------------------------

 

 

By James DiEugenio

Special to Consortium News

 

Jefferson Morley begins his new book on Watergate, Scorpions’ Dance, in and adroit and forceful manner. Former C.I.A. Director Richard Helms has been called back to Washington from his new position, ambassador to Iran. He is beginning his testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee.

Right at the start Helms makes categorical statements about the agency’s lack of involvement with just about every aspect of the unfolding Watergate scandal. Helms specifically denies any involvement at all with the break in, and adds that he was determined to make that point clear from when it happened to that moment.

The day was Aug. 2, 1973.  Helms’ denials led both the CBS and ABC evening news programs.  They were bannered by The New York Times and praised by Lou Cannon in The Washington Post. As Morley and others have revealed, the problem with Helms’ testimony is that it was, at best, deceptive, at worst, simply false.  And, even worse, Helms likely knew this before he said it.

For instance, one of the captured Watergate burglars, Eugenio Martinez, had an agency case officer before and after the break-in. Martinez was being paid a monthly stipend.  Even before the Watergate break-in, the C.I.A. was extending aid to one of the band’s ringleaders, Howard Hunt. This involved a raid on Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrists’ office. 

As Morley notes, although Helms tried to say he did not even know Dr. Louis Fielding, this was likely another dubious denial. Because the agency had extended support and aid to Hunt for that break-in.  They even worked up a psychological profile on Ellsberg.

Helms said he did not even know Ellsberg had a psychiatrist. Yet he had seen the photos of the casing of the building before the break-in. And that was because the Agency was giving Hunt photographic help on the operation. 

But in this first appearance, Helms tried to go even further.  He tried to imply that he really did not know very much about Hunt at all.  This is another point that Morley shows is false. 

The author pegs the first meeting between the two most likely in 1957  in Havana. 

But Helms knew of Hunt even earlier, due to Howard’s literary efforts; in this instance trying to get C.I.A. rights to Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Helms later encouraged and aided Hunt’s attempts to market a series of espionage novels to Paramount Pictures. But as Hunt notes toward the end of Scorpion’s Dance, once the Watergate hearings commenced, it was as if Helms never knew him.

 

Hunt & James McCord

There is a subsidiary question to this issue of Helms and Hunt.  Namely, the relationship between Hunt and James McCord. 

Hunt’s role in Watergate was to recruit the Cuban exiles out of Miami and guide them, as he spoke fluent Spanish. McCord was the technical expert on the surveillance elements of the operation at the Watergate Hotel.  The reason being it was the home of the Democratic National Committee. Hunt and McCord maintained they did not know each other prior to their work for President Richard Nixon in April of 1972: Hunt at the White House and McCord at the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP). 

But in his fascinating book on Watergate, Secret Agenda, author Jim Hougan made a strong case that this was also not accurate. There was evidence to show that the two already knew each other from working together while in the C.I.A. on anti-Castro projects and a Washington area surveillance operation.

At the time of the Helms appearance, his words echoed throughout the chamber. And like Colin Powell before the United Nations, there was really no one questioning him on that day. 

Why?  Because the entire media conglomerate had been immersed in the series put out by Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee and The Washington Post.  It was those stories that set the template for almost every other newspaper and broadcast story about the phenomenon known as Watergate. This included the committee Helms was testifying before, Sen. Sam Ervin’s Senate Watergate Committee. That committee was controlled by a strong Democratic majority led by Ervin and Chief Counsel Sam Dash.  They had little affection or sympathy for Richard Nixon. It would be more accurate to say that he was their target.

 

One Exception 

There was one exception to this on that committee; one person who was not fully accepting the Woodward/Bernstein paradigm.  This was Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee. 

Baker was the minority leader on that committee. Although he had a friendly relationship with Ervin in public, he was the first to diverge in private from where he felt that committee was headed. Which was towards the impeachment of Nixon.

As Baker came into contact with these C.I.A. elements, he found them rather inexplicable. 

If Hunt had retired from the C.I.A., why were they extending him technical help? And not just on Watergate, but on the ITT-Dita Beard matter. Who was the case officer for Martinez?  And did Martinez inform him of the break-in before it happened? Why was Helms trying to separate himself from Hunt, and to a lesser degree, Jim McCord?

Baker decided that, for partisan reasons, Ervin and Dash were going to ignore these issues.  Therefore, he decided to set up his own task force inside the committee.  He and the minority counsel –and future senator– Fred Thompson — led it. Once they started their inquiry, the parameters did not decrease, they widened.

For instance, there was the issue of Robert Bennett. Bennett had purchased the Mullen Company.  This was a PR operation which, as Morley writes, had employed Hunt on Helm’s recommendation after he retired from the agency. It turned out that the Mullen Company was a C.I.A. front. And it was from there that Bennett and Hunt badgered White House assistant Charles Colson to give Hunt a position in the White House.

Then there was Maxie Well’s desk. When Martinez was apprehended he had a key to her desk at the Watergate.  That key opened all the drawers to that desk. She was the secretary to Spencer Oliver. Oliver was one of the targets of Jim McCord’s faulty bugging equipment, which the burglars were there to replace.

How did Martinez get this key?  Wells said there were only two in existence and one was wrapped around her neck. Was there an inside man at the DNC? We will likely never know. Morley states Martinez refused to reply to these questions and part of his oral history has been classified.

 

CIA Memo

As is also revealed in Scorpion’s Dance, one of the documents under Howard Baker’s review was a C.I.A. memorandum of March 1, 1973.  It stated Bennett had been feeding stories to Woodward “with the understanding that there be no attribution to Bennett. Woodward is suitably grateful for the fine stories and by-lines which he gets….” 

Baker was naturally captivated by this memo.  Bennett told Thompson that he knew nothing about the break-in before it occurred.  But this collided with another fact Baker discovered.

There was a sixth burglar on board the day before the last break-in.  He was a young man named Tom Gregory. Gregory had second thoughts and backed out the day before. Interestingly, he went to Bennett to inform him of his decision. As Morley notes, The Washington Post did not disclose the Mullen Company was a C.I.A. front for two years.

Helms also prevaricated about a C.I.A. operative named Lee Pennington. Pennington was a friend of McCord’s. Morley notes that Helms tried to disguise his knowledge of Pennington by giving out the name of another Pennington to confuse matters.

Lee Pennington was important to the whole affair. Just a few days after the break-in, contract agent Pennington went over to McCord’s home. He and his wife now began burning all kinds of materials.  Although

Pennington said he only burned a few papers, the fire got so big that it blackened the walls of the residence, to the point it had to be repainted. As the C.I.A. later admitted, Pennington helped to destroy McCord’s files in order to eliminate any evidence of a connection between the C.I.A. and McCord. Since McCord’s past C.I.A. employment was common knowledge, one has to ask: was Pennington there to burn anything indicating a more current connection?

Let us close this discussion with two aspects which touch on the Washington Post, and Woodward and Bernstein. 

When Thompson and Baker got hold of the C.I.A. memorandum about Bennett and Woodward the word got out about it at the Post. Bernstein called Baker for a meeting on the memo.  Both men denied any such relationship with Bennett.  Since Bernstein was not specifically mentioned by Bennett, his denial was at least mildly credible.  But Woodward’s was less so.  One has to wonder: was this discovery about his partner the impetus for Bernstein’s milestone Rolling Stone article in 1977 The CIA and the Media.

Related to this, as we all know, in 2005 Woodward and former F.B.I. officer Mark Felt decided to disclose that it was Felt who was Deep Throat. This was the nickname given to one of Woodward’s secret sources on Watergate. The character became quite central to the tale as a result of the Robert Redford-produced film of the Woodward/Bernstein book All the President’s Men. Who can forget the scenes of actor Hal Holbrook in those dark parking garages at night?

It turned out that Woodward made a mistake at this time. He and Bernstein allowed the University of Texas to purchase their Watergate papers. When Felt, who was suffering from early dementia at the time, decided to come out of the woodwork, Woodward donated his notes on Deep Throat to the Ransom Center as part of their agreement.

Ed Gray, the son of L. Patrick Gray, Nixon’s interim F.B.I. director, was completing a book that his father’s death had left undone. The resulting work, In Nixon’s Web, is a fine, overlooked contribution to the literature on the subject.

Nearing completion, Ed Gray visited the Ransom Center and looked over the new “Deep Throat” notes. After inspecting them all, and communicating with Woodward, he came to a startling conclusion. In these very notes, Woodward unconsciously revealed that Deep Throat was — as most people thought — a composite.

For instance, Woodward referred to two distinct sources in one set of notes. Also, there is information in those notes that Felt could not have known. Only someone close to CREEP could have. Could this have been Bennett? And if so, was this what Woodward did not wish to admit.

For reasons given above, we will never know what the real role of the C.I.A. was in Watergate. Because of the partisanship of the Ervin Committee — they resisted even printing Baker’s minority report — and the whirlpool created by The Washington Post, that role will remain clouded. But slowly but surely, that role is finally becoming, if not explained, as least delineated.

James DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His most recent book is  The JFK Assassination : The Evidence Today.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

 

READ MORE:

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/07/13/the-cias-role-in-watergate/

 

READ FROM TOP....

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW...........................

 

 

By Duncan Graham

 

More than six decades after his plane crashed it remains the great Cold War mystery: Was UN secretary-general (1953-61) Dag Hammarskjöld killed by sabotage, a technical fault, pilot error or air attack? If he was assassinated who was the mastermind?

Dr Greg Poulgrain, who teaches Indonesian history at the University of the Sunshine Coast, suggests the Swedish peacemaker was killed under directions from the US Central Intelligence Agency’s hard-right director Allen Dulles (1893-1969).

The Australian academic’s theory has been given weight by the little-noted release in August of a UN investigation into the death of Hammarskjöld and the 15 passengers and crew on 18 September 1961.

The chartered Douglas DC-6 started from Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) where it had been parked unattended.

It was heading to cease-fire negotiations in Ndola between UN forces and local militia when it smashed into a forest in Zambia (then Rhodesia) during the landing approach.

The 100-page UN report recommends further disclosures from governments, including the US and UK which allegedly hold unreleased air traffic records. Poulgrain suggests the altimeter records be re-checked and technicians traced.

The UN investigation led by former Tanzania Chief Justice Mohamed Chande Othman, was initiated by new info about the tragedy.

A 2019 Danish documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld suggested the DC-6 was harassed by a small fighter plane during descent, though it seems no bullet holes were found in the wreckage.

Researchers on the film told Othman of documents from the South African Institute for Maritime Research. Despite the benign title, it claimed this was a pro-apartheid clandestine militia linked to a foreign intelligence agency,

This information surfaced apparently by chance during South Africa’s 1998 Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu released a folder from the National Intelligence Agency.

Inside were letters referring to a plan to assassinate Hammarskjöld and involving Dulles. It was called Operation Celeste (heavenly, as in celestial).

Othman never saw the originals so they haven’t been authenticated. This is despite several requests to SA authorities.

The UN inquiry’s other source is Poulgrain’s 2020 book JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia.

The author interviewed two UN officials, the Irish intellectual and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien, and Australian diplomat George Ivan Smith, ‘Hammarskjöld’s right-hand man’.

They claimed the Secretary-General had been intentionally killed. Smith asserted there were two CIA planes on the Ndola tarmac waiting for Hammarskjöld’s flight, one full of communications gear, though it’s unclear what this implies.

Poulgrain also cited 14 inquiries on US intelligence activities led by US Democrat Senator Frank Church (1924-84). Some referred to Operation Celeste and this extract:

‘UNO is becoming troublesome and it is felt that Hammarskjöld should be removed. Allen Dulles agrees and has promised full cooperation from his people.’

Most theories about the plane crash involve hostility to Hammarskjöld’s mediation efforts during the Congo civil war (1960-65) following the new nation’s liberation from Belgium.

Poulgrain links the alleged assassination to Indonesia. He says Smith revealed that before heading to the Congo, Hammarskjöld had been focused on the sovereignty of West New Guinea.

The Indonesian Republic under first President Soekarno wanted to seize the resource-rich western half of the island of New Guinea, then Dutch territory.

The dispute was eventually resolved in 1969 through a referendum (‘An Act of Free Choice’). The Indonesian military selected 1,025 village chiefs who voted to join the Republic.

Poulgrain suggests that Dulles as head of the CIA wanted Hammarskjöld removed because he favoured ‘the independence of the Papuan people.’

His policy was supported by President John Kennedy but opposed by Dulles who was also involved with a company that had discovered massive gold deposits in West Papua, now the Grasberg mine.

Dulles was a heavy-duty anti-Communist Republican who specialized in forceful regime changes. Under his rule, the CIA engineered coups in Iran and Guatemala and failed assassination attempts against Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

A US Senate investigation found Dulles responsible for the death of Congo PM Patrice Lumumba in the same year Hammarskjöld died.

The disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA-funded Cuban exiles led to Dulles forced resignation.

Hammarskjöld was the opposite, a poet and philosopher as well as a diplomat. He was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

London University researcher Dr Susan Williams, author of Who killed Hammarskjöld? called him ‘a courageous and complex idealist, who sought to shield the newly-independent nations of the world from the predatory instincts of the Great Powers’.

After the Swede’s death Kennedy commented: ‘I realise now that in comparison to him, I am a small man. He was the greatest statesman of our century.’

Former Democrat President Harry Truman told a journalist Hammarskjöld ‘was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him’.’ He would not elaborate.

A clearly frustrated Othman thinks the truth has still to be found. His report urges the UN to continue pushing its members to release info he sought:

‘The passage of time has not reduced the significance of this matter to the families of the victims of flight SE-BDY, who died serving the noble aims of the UN.

‘Nor has it become less important for the organisation itself that a true accounting of history be made.

‘My assessment remains that it is of the highest probability that specific and important information exists, but that it has not been disclosed by a small number of member states.’

The Danish doco Cold Case Hammarskjöld starts with the statement: ‘This could be the world’s biggest murder mystery – or the world’s most idiotic conspiracy theory’.

That was written before Donald Trump claimed his 2020 election loss was a fraud. Either way the case stays open.

 

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/how-did-dag-hammarskjold-die-the-cia-and-indonesian-connection/

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW................

When is a purge a genocide? When a young Australian researcher finds solid evidence that’s long eluded international scholars, proving the minds of millions have been poisoned with lies.

Dr Jess Melvin is an award-winning academic at Sydney Uni. In 2018 she published The Army and the Indonesian Genocide using official Indonesian documents.

Her book – since released in Indonesian – conclusively showed that the mass slaughter across Indonesia of real or imagined Communists in 1965 and 66 was not an impulsive uprising of angry peasants, but government-organised mass murder.

Almost six decades after the mutilated bodies of at least half-a-million were thrown in rivers and shallow graves, relatives and friends of the victims have often been too frightened to speak. That’s because the official version has become embedded as the one truth ensuring all other accounts are heretical.

Now the deceived may find the courage to condemn as President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo has spoken: ‘With a clear mind and earnest heart, I as Indonesia’s head of state admit that gross human rights violations did happen in many occurrences. I have sympathy and empathy for the victims and their families.’

The apology follows recommendations made by a team he set up to look into severe cases of human rights violations and suggest non-judicial resolutions. There are 11 others, but the post-coup killings are the worst. Significantly he included West Papua where a prolonged and poorly reported insurgency continues.

In Indonesia the President’s statement has been getting applause, but the clappers forget that 23 years earlier the late fourth president Abdurrahman (Gus Dur) Wahid had already publicly apologised to victims and survivors of the massacres and detentions.

Some background:

During his 1945-1965 rule, founding president Soekarno ran an anti-imperialist Jakarta, Beijing, Pyongyang axis’ policy terrifying the West. When he started Konfrontasi with Malaya as the former British colony moved towards independence, Western strategists feared a second front would weaken the war in Vietnam.

Not all were on Soekarno’s side. The military imagined a peasants’ revolt as the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) cracked its knuckles, so aroused the West. General Soeharto ousted Soekarno after the coup, consolidating his position by declaring martial law, banning free media and launched saturation promotion of only one narrative.

A crude film Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (Treachery of G30S/PKI) was regularly telecast on the state channel TVRI. Viewing was compulsory at schools every October, though the graphic scenes would rate it R in the West.

Hundreds of thousands of intellectuals, artists and writers were exiled on remote Buru island for years. None faced court.

Although the coup is still officially labeled Communist, it was long suspected the military was involved, covertly aided by UK MI5 and US CIA operatives.

Following the putsch, a massive slaughter of real and imagined reds began. The army said the killings were spontaneous, driven by the people’s anger at the generals’ deaths. In reality soldiers were handing lists of suspects to civilian militias, and supplying machetes and guns to the vengeful.

A secret CIA report claimed the massacres ‘rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s and the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War.

That didn’t concern Australian PM Harold Holt who told the New York Times: ‘With 500,000 to 1 million Communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it’s safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.’

In 2017 a US National Security Archive release of Jakarta Embassy papers showed diplomats ‘were documenting tens of thousands of killings by the military, paramilitary groups, and Muslim militias’.

Most visitors don’t know Bali’s sands are blood-soaked. The death squads were brutally active on the so-called isle of peace and harmony where Australians love to frolic. Few of the 80,000 victims, including women and children, were active PKI members but targeted in revenge killings often involving land and community disputes.

On the island of Flores, Catholic priests stood back while their parishioners were chopped and shot.

Overseas historians reckoned – but couldn’t prove – the slaughter was engineered by the military. That assumption is now concrete, thanks to Melvin collecting 3,000 pages of original army documents during a field trip to Aceh.

During the 2014 presidential campaign Widodo promised an investigation into the genocide. That was wiped from his agenda. Instead he’s been photographed watching and approving the ghastly film.

In 2012 a Komnas HAM ( the National Commission on Human Rights) report to the Attorney General recommended a full legal investigation to bring the perpetrators to account. The Attorney General refused, claiming ‘not enough evidence’.

“This is simply a lie,’ Melvin told this column. ‘I think it’s hard to see the President’s announcement as anything other than a cynical attempt to salvage his legacy ahead of next year’s general election.

‘He came to power with the promise of resolving Indonesia’s past human rights abuses and yet he has done very little in this regard. This latest announcement is further evidence of just how hollow these attempts have been.

‘My greatest concern is that the latest charade may actually make the situation more difficult for survivors. Similar promises were made in 2020 to provide ‘urgent assistance’ to civilian conflict victims in the province of Aceh (North Sumatra) but not a single rupiah has been received. (An intermittent independence campaign between 1976 and 2005 took an estimated 15,000 lives and displaced thousands. In 2006 the World Bank gave US $20 million to 1,724 ‘conflict affected villages.’)

‘If Jokowi is serious about salvaging his legacy, he should begin by accepting Komnas HAM’s recommendations and launch a judicial investigation into the events of 1965-66. At the same time, he should concentrate of ensuring that promised assistance is actually delivered to human rights victims and their families.’

(Some background info first appeared in Pearls & Irritations in 2020).

 

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/killing-times-indonesia-grapples-with-legacy-of-government-organised-mass-murder/

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

THANKS TO OUR READERS TO POINT OUT A RECENT ARTICLE IN JACOBIN... WE'VE BEEN FOLLOWING THIS ISSUE FOR SOME TIME BUT NOT RECENTLY:

 

Indonesia Is Stepping Up Its Repression of West Papua’s Freedom Movement

BY
DOUGLAS GERRARD
A recent military escalation in West Papua is the latest episode in a long history of repression and dispossession since the island came under Indonesian control. But the authorities in Jakarta still haven’t been able to stabilize their rule over West Papua.

 

On September 15, an Indonesian military unit killed five teenage West Papuans in the highlands regency of Yahukimo. The provincial police chief quickly described the victims, aged between fifteen and eighteen, as members of the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB), West Papua’s predominant armed resistance movement — an allegation that local church leaders and the TPNPB itself immediately denied.

This rhetorical back-and-forth is common in the aftermath of Indonesian military violence. When the authorities do not smear victims directly as “Kelompok Kriminal Bersenjata” — “armed criminal group,” Indonesia’s euphemism for Papuan resistance — they routinely spin civilian deaths as the unfortunate side-effect of clashes between the Indonesian military and the TPNPB.

Only days before the Yahukimo incident, another five Papuans were killed during a military sweep in the coastal regency of Fakfak. Atrocities are rarer in coastal areas, reflecting both the relative isolation of the mountainous interior and the intensity of the resistance therein. News of the Fakfak massacre was accompanied by a photo of two Papuan elders, stripped naked, with their heads bowed, surrounded by jeering soldiers.

Such images are a familiar feature of Indonesian rule. Most Papuans are acquainted with the famous “trophy” photo of the corpse of fighter Yustinus Murib, while in April, a picture emerged of two Papuans, bearing signs of torture, kneeling in the dirt while soldiers mockingly raised the Morning Star — West Papua’s banned national flag — behind them.

Military Escalation

Now entering its sixth decade under Indonesian occupation, West Papua has found itself in the grip of a significant military escalation. After the TPNPB kidnapped a New Zealand pilot named Phillip Mehrtens in February, the military declared a “combat alert,” triggering a fresh deployment of troops and an intensification of the checkpoint regime across the highlands.

Now entering its sixth decade under Indonesian occupation, West Papua has found itself in the grip of a significant military escalation.

Mehrtens had been collecting a group of construction workers building a nearby health center when a TPNPB outfit led by Egianus Kogoya stormed his plane. West Papua has since seen a rare period of extended international coverage, with lurid, racialized stories casting Kogoya as a psychopath or terrorist.

Few mentioned that his father, also a guerilla fighter, had been killed during a similar hostage siege in 1996. Even fewer noticed that the highlands regency of Nduga, where the kidnapping occurred, has been the epicenter of the Papuan refugee crisis since 2018. Indonesian military operations have displaced over forty-five thousand people in that time — close to half of Nduga’s entire population.

The rationale for attacking medical services in an isolated area may appear unclear. But for West Papuans, the health center, like the military post, is colonial infrastructure, serving soldiers and settlers, and supporting the ever-expanding archipelago of plantations and mines that scar the forest.

Nor had the kidnapping been wholly unexpected: the local TPNPB had previously warned against flying small aircraft into Nduga. Indonesia’s refusal of international assistance to peacefully secure the release of Mehrtens through negotiations has set in motion a familiar dynamic, whereby violent resistance serves as a pretext for intensified militarization.

A slew of mass killings has resulted, including those in Yahukimo and Fakfak. Predictably, hardly any have attracted the attention of international media.

“Chequebook Diplomacy”

Understanding the distinctive role of the military in West Papua is key to grasping the unusual level of brutality with which it often operates. Though it works as the enforcement arm of the Ministry of Industry in West Papua, the military also retains a large degree of independence from Jakarta — a holdover from decades of military dictatorship. Only a third of its funding comes from the state; the rest arrives via the black market and through protection deals with foreign corporations like Freeport and BP.

Understanding the distinctive role of the military in West Papua is key to grasping the unusual level of brutality with which it often operates.

Compounding this situation is Indonesia’s consistent unwillingness to prosecute Indonesian soldiers, even for particularly heinous crimes. When human rights abuses do make it to court, the resulting proceedings often resemble show trials, with Indonesian judges presiding over Indonesian military law. It took eight years for “Bloody Paniai” — a 2014 massacre that killed four children and wounded seventeen others — to make it into court, with last year’s trial ending in the sole defendant being acquitted on all charges.

A further condition for the current escalation lies in the outcome of the August summit of the subregional forum the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), which ended with MSG leaders declining to grant full membership to the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), an umbrella organization of three of the most significant proindependence groupings. Decried by Papuans as the result of “chequebook diplomacy,” this rejection — or at least postponement — of West Papuan representation has emboldened the sense of Indonesian impunity.

Full membership of the MSG has long been a goal of the liberation movement, with the ULMWP having sat as an observer member of the group since 2015. Diplomatically, it would represent a significant advance for a movement consistently hamstrung by the international legal sanction that Indonesia’s occupation enjoys.

The new prime  minister of Fiji, an important power in Pacific politics, had raised hopes by announcing that he would support the ULMWP bid, reversing a decade of diplomatic precedent in the process. However, the MSG works by consensus, meaning that all five of its members had to agree to admit the ULMWP as a full member — no easy task in a region of mostly small island nations dominated by Indonesia, who can rapidly distribute sweetheart trade deals and much-needed economic aid.

Colonial Legacies

Reduced to a strategy, MSG full membership represents West Papua’s route into the international community. But the symbolic dimension of the MSG drama is perhaps more important, reflecting how decades of occupation have accentuated the distinctive indigenous identity of West Papuans.

Assertions of Melanesian-ness have become a key discursive weapon in the liberation movement’s anti-colonial armory: “Melanesian, not Indonesian!” is a popular chant at West Papuan protests, while activists often depict full MSG membership as a “homecoming,” with Papuans seeking a return to their “Melanesian family.” For its part, Indonesia has sought to shore up its rule by orienting itself toward Oceania, increasingly occupying the liminal psychogeography of the “Asia-Pacific.”

Assertions of Melanesian-ness have become a key discursive weapon in the liberation movement’s anti-colonial armory.

Dutch colonization set the basic coordinates for this conflict in place by aligning West Papua with Muslim, rice-growing Indonesia, rather than their black Christian neighbors in Melanesia, where sago, taro, and sweet potato are the staple crops. However, Dutch rule was only nominal in large swathes of what was then termed Western New Guinea, with the primary interaction of many Papuans with outsiders coming instead through Christian missionaries.

As the Netherlands began slowly exiting the Indonesian archipelago in the 1940s and ’50s, West Papuans made extensive preparations for their own independence, establishing an anthem, provisional government structures, and a national flag. But Indonesia laid claim to West Papua after gaining political independence from the Netherlands in 1949, aiming to unify all former Dutch territory. Ironically, Indonesian nationalism doomed the new republic to recapitulate old colonial dynamics, with resources flowing from the provinces to the Javanese metropole.

 

Framing invasion as liberation, Indonesia moved to seize West Papua while its founding father Sukarno was playing a leading role in the anti-imperial Non-Aligned Movement. By contrast, the Dutch cautiously favored West Papuan independence, partly as a means of retaining a measure of influence in Southeast Asia. This peculiar colonial history has affected the independence movement since its founding: colonized by the colonized, West Papuans have often ploughed a lonely furrow toward liberation, lacking the spontaneous recognition and alliances enjoyed by other revolutionary movements.

West Papua’s formal incorporation into Indonesia was a product of Cold War power politics. The United States, worried that Dutch intransigence risked pushing Indonesia toward the Soviet Union, orchestrated the 1962 New York Agreement that transferred control of West Papua to Indonesia. In typical colonial fashion, the agreement was signed by the United States, Indonesia, and the Netherlands, without a single Papuan present. Yet it contained a provision for West Papuan freedom, in the form of a requirement that Indonesia hold a free and fair vote on independence.

West Papua’s formal incorporation into Indonesia was a product of Cold War power politics.

Indonesia knew that the sympathies of West Papuans lay overwhelmingly with the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (Free Papua Movement, or OPM), which had by that time flourished into an “all-pervasive revolutionary movement,” in the words of a US State Department communiqué. It thus could not take any chances on self-determination. Accordingly, officials gathered 1,025 Papuan elders, thrust guns in their faces, and forced them to vote on behalf of a population of over eight hundred thousand. The resulting “referendum,” which the UN dutifully ratified, remains Indonesia’s sole international legal claim against West Papuan sovereignty.

Operation Annihilation

Successive colonial orders have alternately imagined West Papua as an Edenic paradise or a site of untold savagery — “a few thousand miles of cannibal land,” as an advisor to President John F. Kennedy put it in 1961. Colonizers unfavorably compared Melanesia to Polynesia, whose hereditary chiefdoms more closely resembled European polities. By contrast, the relatively egalitarian tribal structures of the Black Pacific continue to be seen as vestiges of an imaginary “stone age.”

Repurposed colonial racism characterized Indonesia’s initial approach to the national aspirations of West Papuans.

Repurposed colonial racism, rather than the emancipatory spirit of the Bandung Conference, characterized Indonesia’s initial approach to the national aspirations of West Papuans. Indonesian rhetoric portrayed Papuans as primitive dupes of Dutch imperialism, with Jakarta’s policy aiming to “get them down from the trees,” as Sukarno’s first foreign minister put it.

The policy of “Indonesianization” was taken up in increasingly brutal fashion after a CIA-backed coup installed General Suharto as leader in 1965–67. In the early 1970s, Indonesia launched Operation Koteka, named after the traditional Papuan penis gourd it aimed to forcibly eliminate. Other military operations launched at the time include Operation Wear Clothes and Operation Annihilation. Later in the 1970s, the military killed thousands of highlands Papuans in a brutal effort to eradicate indigenous culture.

Indonesian racism has given West Papuans an impressive vocabulary of resistance: the 2019 Papuan uprising, the most substantial proindependence mobilization in two decades, was triggered by the racist abuse of a group of Papuan students studying in Indonesia. Reclaiming the epithet hurled at the students, Papuans wore monkey masks as they demonstrated, staged sit-ins, and raised the Morning Star over burnt-out government buildings.

Anti-Papuan racism continues to license acts of rare savagery, including the killings at Yahukimo and Fakfak, as well as the massacre of ten Papuans in the highlands capital of Wamena this February. Following the Wamena massacre, Indonesian vice president Ma’ruf Amin urged the world to remember that “we are dealing with a population who are easily provoked.”

Amin’s predecessor, Jusuf Kalla, previously attributed West Papua’s underdevelopment to the indigenous population’s “high consumptive culture and low productivity.” The influence of Western racial hierarchies in the presentation of Papuans as lazy and quick tempered is unmistakable. But far from being a mere vestige of European colonialism, we should understand anti-Papuan racism as an essential pillar of Indonesian rule — a kind of common sense-making that lends colloquial justification to Indonesia’s claim on the land and treatment of its people.

Development as Destruction

Today, the civilizing mission of formal colonialism has given way to a paternalistic focus on “development,” presented by Jakarta as a way of elevating Papuans out of poverty. Current Indonesian president Joko Widodo, elected on a reforming platform in 2015, has prioritized control and connectivity in West Papua, overseeing new agribusiness projects and mines in the interior, while accelerating construction on the vast Trans-Papua Highway, which stretches across the entire territory.

However, as the common slippage between economic uplift and military control illustrates, “development” is a highly euphemistic concept. The real aim is to expand Indonesian and corporate access to the resource-rich land, while pacifying Papuan resistance and diluting the indigenous population through successive state settlement programs.

Like early Virginia plantations operated by English peasants, or the penal settlement of Aboriginal Australia, these World Bank–funded “transmigration” schemes use the internal victims of Indonesian capitalism — often poor and landless Javanese — to both cultivate and subdue the Papuan frontier. Transmigration has set a potential demographic time bomb for West Papuan national ambitions: having fallen to around half, the indigenous population is already a minority in many urban areas.

Completing the analogy with early English colonialism is the minimal role indigenous labor plays in West Papua’s political economy. In urban areas and on industrial developments, transmigrants fill the large majority of jobs, whether at a menial or management level. Indigenous Papuans, the majority of whom practice subsistence farming, are effectively a surplus population.

When Papuans are evicted from their ancestral lands by a new plantation or mining concession, they are reduced to toiling in the grey economy.

As ULMWP leader Benny Wenda has put it, “Indonesia doesn’t want the West Papuan people — they only want our resources.” The essential logic is one of elimination, not exploitation. Understanding this helps explain various recurring themes of Indonesian occupation, including its vicious racism, the frequency of mass killings, and the prevalence of internal displacement.

When Papuans are evicted from their ancestral lands by a new plantation or mining concession, they are reduced to toiling in the grey economy, often panning for gold in the tailings of large mines or living off remittances offered by the corporations who have displaced them. Tens of thousands live peripatetic lives in the rainforest, prevented from returning to their villages by military patrols. Thousands more are in semipermanent refugee camps in neighboring Papua New Guinea.

As the connection between people and land is severed through perpetual scattering, transmigration, and the violent intrusion of the market into traditional life, so too is the particularity of West Papuan culture gradually lost. In her recent book about the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE), a huge megaplantation in southeastern West Papua, Sophie Chao describes how the destruction of the native sago forest has warped the customs and cosmology of the Marind tribe.

One striking segment of the book concerns the Marind notion of time, which is deeply bound up with the organic rhythms of forest life. For the Marind, the replacement of sago with oil palm, and the consequent “atemporality of the monocrop landscape,” has meant that their notion of the future has been obliterated — time itself has “come to a stop.”

Continuity of Coercion

This process, which one scholar has described as an “ecologically induced genocide,” is also devastating the West Papuan rainforest, 13 percent of which is predicted to disappear within fifteen years. While the Amazon takes center stage in campaigns around deforestation, the Papuan rainforest already hosts more ambitious industrial projects: the world’s largest gold mine; its largest single palm oil plantation; and an agribusiness scheme that would cover Bali twice over.

The current frenzy of development reflects West Papua’s ongoing centrality to Indonesian growth.

Central government plans envision West Papua as a “breadbasket” or “rice bowl.” MIFEE launched with the promise to “feed Indonesia, then the world.” Trading on familiar progressive arguments that pit Western environmentalism against Global South developmental ambitions, Widodo has railed against “discriminatory” EU deforestation regulations that would deprive Indonesia of a key market for West Papuan goods.

The current frenzy of development reflects West Papua’s ongoing centrality to Indonesian growth — and the structural continuities between Suharto’s New Order and the postdictatorship Reform Era. Indonesia’s stuttering experiment with civilian rule has left intact many of the fundaments of its former government, including the independent power of its military, and its dependence on the continued plunder of its Papuan periphery. With Widodo ineligible to run in next year’s election, Indonesia’s first civilian president may yet be succeeded by General Prabowo Subianto, a veteran of the genocidal campaign in East Timor.

Foreign observers would likely read a Subianto triumph in 2024 as evidence of Indonesia backsliding on its hard-won democratic inheritance. But the failure of Indonesia — even democratic Indonesia — to obtain any level of subaltern consent for its rule in West Papua has already ensured its continued reliance on predemocratic methods: harassment, torture, military violence, and a brutal carceral regime. From Suharto to Sukarno to Widodo, little has changed on the ground.

Similarly, various efforts to cultivate a Papuan elite loyal to Jakarta have failed — as recently demonstrated by the destruction of Lukas Enembe, the indigenous governor of Papua Province. Despite a lifetime’s work within Indonesian institutions, Enembe’s modest reformism on behalf of his Papuan constituents saw him fall afoul of local state officials, and eventually the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), which in September 2022 snared him in a bribery case that resulted in an eight-year prison sentence.

An All-Pervasive Movement

Enembe had been outspoken against a plan to carve five provinces from West Papua’s existing two, recognizing that the plan would open up West Papua to further predation by international corporations. Perversely, Enembe’s experience may offer some hope to West Papuans. Indonesia’s utter inability to stabilize its rule in West Papua has ensured a state of permanent resistance, at all levels of life.

Indonesia’s utter inability to stabilize its rule in West Papua has ensured a state of permanent resistance, at all levels of life.

The TPNPB attracts more recruits than it has weapons, while the ULMWP — despite its recent setback at the MSG — has succeeded in forcing West Papua up the agenda of multiple international bodies, and into a position of unprecedented prominence. Profits from bags and vegetables sold on roadside stalls are used to fund the revolution.

It is precisely the ubiquity of Papuan struggle that requires Indonesia to operate such a totalizing form of control. But Indonesian rule has also inculcated a fearlessness in West Papuans, as the recent release of independence activist Victor Yeimo from prison indicated.

Though Yeimo had been imprisoned on treason charges for his part in a 2019 anti-racism protest, upon his release he was greeted by hundreds of Papuans flying the Morning Star — also a treasonous offense. The “all-pervasive revolutionary movement” acknowledged by the US State Department six decades years ago has not abated.

 

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/indonesia-west-papua-colonialism-development-repression-resistance/

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

 

Anyone Who Believes in the Hollywood Image of the CIA Should Come to Serbia—Where the Agency Has Long Aligned with One of the Country’s Most Notorious Criminal Gangs

By Olga Peterson

 

Most people tend to believe that the CIA is just an intelligence service, gathering information to enable better public policy.

However, CAM readers know that its real purpose is to engage in political skullduggery and subvert or destabilize other countries in order to help facilitate the goal of U.S. global domination.

Below is an interview by a local Serbian TV presenter and Nikola Vrzić, a reputable Serbian journalist and the author of the book The Third Bullet who was mentioned in my earlier articles for CovertAction Magazine.

These articles covered U.S. and CIA subversion of Serbian politics in the aftermath of the 1990s U.S.-NATO military intervention and their efforts to destroy the last vestiges of socialism and independence. Successive U.S. administration-supported pro-Western politicians who would effectively give up Serbia’s sovereignty.

There is suspicion of CIA involvement in the assassination of Zoran Djindjić after he refused to hand over materials to the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia which would challenge the narrative that the U.S. was trying to advance through these tribunals.

The interview below details the CIA’s alliance with the criminal Zemunski Clan, which has helped to advance U.S. political interests in Serbia and carried out the Djindjić assassination.

These are the kind of allies the CIA has a long record of cultivating—going back to the post-World War II era when the CIA allied with the founder of the Japanese Yakuza, Yoshio Kodama, to help stamp out Communism in Japan, and facilitated the drug traffic in Laos and Thailand during the Indochina Wars in alliance with criminal gangsters.

During the 1990s Kosovo War, the CIA armed and empowered the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a leading drug-trafficking organization run by the Albanian mafia, to fight the Serbs. So the pattern we see today, unfortunately, is nothing new.

TV host: In the second part of your book The Third Bullet, you are dealing with the issue of the political background of the assassination of our prime minister, Zoran Djindjić, in which you are telling that there is a lot of evidence, and it was proven so and confirmed by our national security services, that the presence of “foreign intelligence,” the CIA to be more precise, among the Zemunski Klan (the Zemunski Clan) among the assassins. And at the same time you are presenting arguments, on the grounds of which one can see that one side, the U.S. Embassy, was in close contact with the trial judge in that they insisted that certain witnesses, which is rather odd, try to influence a judge, with political or other reasons in mind, so that certain witnesses should be given a status of “protected witnesses.” So we have here foreign interference and you are proving that [in your book].

NV: That was the most delicate chapter in the whole book so as to avoid being stigmatized as a “conspiracy theorist” or whenever the CIA is mentioned, people start being jocular. “Hey, it is CIA, my dear. It is CIA,” which often is taken as an object of ridicule.

Therefore, I prepared that chapter in the most careful, meticulous, conservative way possible. Here is what that precisely means. You mentioned the CIA and the Zemunski Clan. Our BIA [i.e., Serbian Security and Intelligence Agency] made the cross-section of the intelligence information about the Zemunski Clan, which have identified a certain Čedomir Mihajlović.

TV host: How did you get ahold of that document?

NV: Oh, well, through my own sources. The document is authentic and that is what is relevant. I am unable to disclose each particular detail but the document is surely authentic and it represents a summary, i.e., the evolution of what is normally referred to as the Surčinsko—Zemunski Clan, which was originally a criminal gang and then it turned into the Zemunski Clan only [both Zemun and Surčin are parts of the city of Belgrade, Serbia, in its outskirts] and all the inter-connections of these people, etc., etc. So it has to do with the materials, i.e., the facts laid out there, and among other things it is mentioned that that person Čedomir Mihajlović, alias Igor Baruh [he had a few other fake names as well]…He was well-known [i.e., in police circles]. I am not using only one source of information. Even Miša Vasić wrote about him publicly at the time. It is common knowledge that he was co-opted by the CIA by the end of the 1980s or perhaps by the beginning of the 1990s.

TV host: There was one American bearing our name and surname among the Zemunski Clan, is it so?

NV: So, in any case, we have an identified body of a male with no clothes on, who is there with them. We know on the basis of many other testimonies that that person was indeed in close contact with them and there were horse races and car races mentioned. It is irrefutable that that person was there and we have a number of sources who confirmed that he was “co-opted” by the CIA earlier by the end of the 1980s or the beginning of the 1990s as I have already said. So there is this person who is a member of the Zemunski Clan. So it is possible that he may have influenced the activities of the Clan? So we leave that as a possibility. In any case, there is close contact between the U.S. intelligence service and the most powerful criminal gang in our country.

TV Host: Where else were there foreigners?

NV: We have a report by Mile Novaković, the colonel in the police ranks or he may have been a general. I cannot remember at this point. So he was one of those who would be carrying out an investigation after the assassination. He was talking about the fact that the members of British and American intelligence…I have his report prior to the assassination…He talked about the process of “hiding away” Ljubiša Buha Čume.

So they [the CIA] was in that position as well. And we also have “the Americans” appearing in…You mentioned the “relationship” between the U.S. Ambassador and the presiding judge at the time, Marko Kljajević. We also have the WikiLeaks and the official U.S. diplomatic cables, the authenticity of which was also confirmed. There is no doubt about that. The whole world “shook and trembled” about this in that it caused political aftershocks globally, the WikiLeaks documents that is. Well, among other things we have a diplomatic cable there, let me be perfectly clear, it is to do with the report which the U.S. Embassy sent to the U.S. State Department.

TV host: The diplomatic cables? You are talking about those?

NV: Yes, the conversation between the then U.S. Ambassador was retold in the cable…I think it was Michael Polt at the time with Judge Marko Kljajević on whether Dejan Milenković Bagzi was to be given the status of a “cooperative witness” or not, given that he was arrested under suspicious circumstances, in which the U.S. Ambassador was trying to convince the judge who was leading the legal proceedings to assign the status of a cooperating witness to Dejan Milenković Bagzi.

TV host: Which came true eventually…

NV: Judge Kljajević kept opposing that, it is stated in the WikiLeaks cable…in the end it came true. And he, go figure, confirms that official version, which we, based on a series of documents later on, proved to be flawed.

TV host: We also have the Prime Minister’s best man who was involved with the Zemunski Clan, who was an MI6 guest in London, UK, for a while. These are his own words. I mean…

NV: You mean Vladimir Popović?

TV host: No, but the PM’s best man from Surčin.

NV: Aha. You mean Dragoljub Marković? There is a long series of…he is connected with Chume….

TV host: There is a piece of information which you may not know about that, in front of witnesses after the interview in our TV report here, Mr. Željko Cvijanović told me that he asked the former Minister of Internal Affairs in his Cabinet about the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjić who that may have been and Zeljko Cvijanović said at that moment that the Minister turned around, he pulled heavy curtains over the windows of his Cabinet so as to avoid anybody “eavesdropping” and he said that he thought that the British were behind the assassination. Of course, if anybody tells a journalist that the British were behind it, it may well mean most probably that the Americans were behind it because I assume that the whole truth is not supposed to be told… [in that way].

NV: Yes. The fact is that the U.S./British traces—I would personally not make a distinction between the two sides)—the fact is that there are their “traces” [“signatures”] everywhere except “on the trigger of the gun.” But even before the assassination and during the investigation which resulted in a “fake” official version—I can say that without fear of contradiction—they [the British and the Americans involved in the whole affair] were there all the time and probably not without a good reason. All the more so because Prime Minister Zoran Djindjić was in a serious conflict with them prior to his assassination.

TV host: What can be a political motive for this assassination then?

NV: Kosovo. Kosovo and Metohija above all. But also a bigger picture in terms of…

TV host: Wasn’t Zoran Djindjić assigned to his political position by the U.S. in the first place?

NV: Yes, he was.

TV host: Why would the Americans kill him then?

NV: Because he became a part of the problem instead of a part of the solution. Look at…try to find the last interview by Zoran Djindjić and not only that TV interview he gave from Banja Luka (Republika Srpska), which was also vitally important, but the last interview he gave for Večernje Novosti published on March 7, 2003. He openly talks about the issue of Kosovo and the fact that the U.S. was against initiating the debate on the Kosovo issue. Of course, Zoran Djindjić’s bottom line all the time was for Kosovo to remain within our country of Serbia. At that point he got into a serious conflict with them. Then he started being “called names” by the “drugosrbijanci” [the local 5th column] and stigmatized as yet another Slobodan Milošević; Djindjić in that interview answers that question and he says “I couldn’t care less. Let them ‘call me names.’ So the man who cooperated with The Hague Tribunal in arresting Milosević two years later says: “Oh, well, let them call me ‘another Milosevic’ but I am working for the good of my own country. Those who do not want to help me when I act for the good of my own country are not my friends.”

TV host: Well, the assassination cannot be planned and prepared in a matter of five days.

NV: Well, look. That “Kosovo offensive” by Djindjić [i.e., a political, diplomatic offensive], let me call it that way began literally from the 1st of January, 2003, with his interview in Der Spiegel when he “prompted” that conversation for the first time. Later, it would result in the letter for the UN Security Council member states, in which he is demanding the return of our military and police to Kosovo and Metohija in accordance with UN Resolution 1244. We have published the facsimile of that letter in the book as well. Nobody after Zoran Djindjić ever dared repeat that demand. Not that this detail is not important perhaps. Before that, according to many testimonies and public traces left behind him, Zoran Djindjić during the summer and early autumn 2002 experienced some sort of his own internal metamorphosis [enlightenment]. He began thinking about the national identity of Serbia and the national issues. He initiated the charity dinners for the Temple of St. Sava, the return of the religious education in schools etc., etc. His relations with The Hague Tribunal, let us not forget….I refer to the archives in the book and what was happening. Well, The Hague Tribunal and Florence Hartmann, who was at the time the spokesperson of The Hague Tribunal Chief Prosecutor, accused Zoran Djindjić of being the biggest obstacle in the cooperation with The Hague Tribunal and not Vojislav Koštunica. Zoran Djindjić was targeted as the biggest obstacle. And the U.S. put a halt on some financial aid of about one hundred thousand dollars, then Zoran Djindjić said in public—all of these were his public statements with the existing evidence still…

TV host: We were “spoon-fed” a story that Djindjić fell prey to the anti-Hague lobby.

NV: Zoran Djindjić was urged to deliver the archives of our military and police to them [the U.S.]. His response was—and I am saying this again that everything I say is verifiable. I am writing on the basis of facts only—His response was: “You [the U.S.] should have thought about that when you bombed us.”

TV host: Tell me, please. You mean to say that Zoran Djindjić turned into the biggest problem in our country for the Americans during those six months.

NV: I suppose so. Look, if we remember what the political scene was in Serbia at the time, Zoran Djindjić was the only…all the others were at the “pro-national” line. All the way from Vojislav Koštunica to SPS [Socialist Party of Serbia], the then Radical Party [which were united among themselves in their own ranks at the time], all of them were taking a firm pro-national approach. They were even less “flexible” let me put it that way.

TV host: And then what happens after the assassination of Zoran Djindjić?

NV: Firstly, Zoran Živković and Boris Tadić as the Defense Minister deliver all those archives Zoran Djindjić claimed had been previously destroyed.

TV host: So, what Djindjić did not want to do, these two gave away.

NV: That is so. There was even “a celebratory delivery of the archives” instead of continuing with the pursuit for the return of our Serbian military and police forces to return to Kosovo. Zoran Živković if you remember, he offered our police forces to work in Afghanistan.

TV host: Zoran Djindjić demanded that our 1,000 soldiers return to Kosovo and…[but Zoran Živković who came afterwards asked for Serbian troops to join NATO and go and fight in Afghanistan]…

NV: Exactly. And not only by way of media but he sent an official letter to the UN Security Council member states.

TV host: And Zoran Živković offered our soldiers to the U.S.?

NV: Yes, you remember when he…Zoran Živković , when he became PM [immediately after the assassination of Zoran Djindjić] left for Washington, D.C., a few months later…During that time, while Zoran Djindić was alive, he demanded the process of resolving the issue of Kosovo and Metohija as soon as possible.

TV host: To accelerate the process of resolving the issue?

NV: Well, yes. He kept warning that they [the U.S., NATO, etc.] are building “a wild/ lawless political construct” behind our back and we were going to be placed at gunpoint to comply. He said he wanted to…

TV host: And what did Živković do?

NV: On his return to Serbia, the Americans were of the opinion… the reason why I mention this is…they said “no, we are not to rush into things with this issue…. Let us do things slowly,” etc. Zoran Živković then travels to Washington, D.C., and he comes back with a sentence “on his lips”: “No, we are not to rush into things with this issue….” He changed his mind completely. That was his political “180 degree” turnaround.

Another related interview for this article:

RAS TV interview with Nikola Vrzić and Milan Veruović:

TV host: What is interesting and what surely has to be taken into account in the analysis by our TV viewers watching this report is that the U.S. intelligence service establishes a contact with the Zemunski Clan shall we say a diplomatic U.S. network via one American national of Serbian origin by the name Čedomir Mihajlović, alias Igor Baruh.

NV: Yes, that is true.

TV host: Čedomir Mihajlović establishes a contact with those criminals from Zemunski Clan and after all that he vanishes into thin air without a trace. The very same thing was done by one man precisely from the CIA who comes to Belgrade, who happens to have good contacts, he then disappears, one of them in the Perišić affair gets killed in [neighboring] Hungary. Anyways, we come to the detail that we can estimate as being “foreign influence,” which at the end of the day Dušan Mihajlović, the Minister of Internal Affairs at the time, also talks about. He says that in our pursuit to find Zoran Djindjić’s assassin, we should place particular attention on the foreign intelligence services.

TV host: And to be more precise, with the British and U.S. intelligence services.

NV: True. I would just disagree that we mark anybody in particular “with a tick” too early whether it might be British, U.S. or perhaps German intelligence.

TV host: But without some of their agents this cannot have happened.

NV: Yes, that is most definitely true. In fact, Nikola and I, while searching through the documents with our security and intelligence services, we received the information that it was Čedomir Mihajlović, the person who introduced himself as a sales agent, some sort of businessman who arrived there in a luxury car and allegedly had “good contacts and combinations.” I think he appears around 2001 and he gets into the Zemunski Clan via his contacts “in the street” [by word of mouth through local street gangs]. It was easy for him to reach them with those huge sums of money and with his offer that he was the one to get them appropriate “business” contacts with the big bosses and the cartels in South America, which was their ultimate goal. He infiltrates among them and gets to organize them. He influences them “well.” Dušan Spasojevic places a high level of trust in him at the time. He is even mentioned in the “mutiny” later when “the Unit” came out in protest.

TV host: You mean JSO unit [the Special Operations Unit]?

NV: Yes. He then all of a sudden disappears. He manages to “iron out” the situation and he disappears.

Who was Čedomir Mihajlović? 

This is what Serbian journalist Misa Vasic wrote in a famous article in 2007:

It has been 14 years since he died in a car crash. If that had been him anyways. Yet even though he did die, it may have been him under a different name.

But let us begin from the very beginning step by step.

According to what Milan Veruović is telling us, Mihajlović was a foreign agent who was noticed by our intelligence services by the end of the 1990s.

He was co-opted by the CIA and he came to Serbia a few times to gather “information.” He then later appeared under a number of different pseudonyms, but what is relevant here is that he was infiltrated into the Zemunski Clan under the name Čedomir Mihajlović—Veruović told us at the time. Apart from introducing himself as the investor from the USA with good contacts iin the criminal circles he also promised them to get them connected with the criminal gangs in South America. He even offered one million dollars to bail out Dušan Spasojević from prison. According to some insider knowledge, he also took part in the preparations of the Red Berets’ mutiny.

In 2002 he vanishes without a trace. He left his luxury car and a few racing horses with Spasojevic. Obviously, CIA decided “to withdraw him” after he had finished “the job.”

At the beginning of the year 2007, Serbian reporter Milos Vasić wrote an article in Vremeabout the tragic death in a car accident on January 1st of a U.S. citizen under the name Igor Baruh. The police found personal documents on the spot, issued to a U.S. national under the name mentioned above. The body was cremated duly but it was later found out that the deceased also embezzled an amount of 8,500 U.S. dollars allegedly to organize a Serbian folk dancing company tour in the States for them. Somebody in the U.S. Consulate then remembered who Igor Baruh was.

According to Veruović, if the news was true then, Čedomir Mihajlović died in the car crash, better known as Emir Gujić, Esad Ramadanović and Igor Baruh, born between the years of 1946 and 1950. His other passports were also forged.

[Note: Taking into account the facts that his other aliases are not typical Serbian names nor surnames either, this may indicate he was either a member of infiltrated Albanian Shiptari gangs or possibly Ustasha from Croatia much earlier. He may have been assigned a Serbian-sounding name and surname by the CIA to infiltrate locally more easily. (Comment by the author)]

He was a high-class conman, what the police officers used to call “an international artist.” He had to use his brains and made a big effort to achieve something. Čedomir Mihajlović made it into history as a man who would approach any of his numerous operations with a lot of commitment, zeal and hard work. It was all the same to him if it was to do with one hundred dollars or one million dollars. That goes to prove his high level of professionalism, which is not common today—Vasić wrote in his article back then (with loads of sarcasm I presume)

Take this most recent example: Čedomir Mihajlović did not find it difficult at all to invent a law office in Palo Alto, California, with a relevant email address, PO Box and phone number as well, and to maintain a correspondence with a local Serbian folk-dancing group, promising them participation in a folk-dancing concert in the U.S..

Nothing very glamorous but just a decent folk concert. He was using the identity of his father-in-law though. He would take his personal details, fingerprints and passports from the folk-dancing group members, and then even he would insist on them paying him for their U.S. visas, insurance and accompanying expenses. He would then delete his email address related to the law office “Donovan, Donovan & Baruch LLP” and then he would disappear with 8,500 U.S. dollars in his pockets he would have collected from them earlier.

This is what could be read from the legal actions taken against him by the local Serbian folk-dancing company which was submitted to the MUP of Serbia (Ministry of Internal Affairs) on January 5 and to the Fourth Municipal Court Prosecutor’s Office on January 8. One might say 8,500 U.S. dollars might not be a big amount of money at all. Oh, well, it depends…For Čedomir it was big enough, a dollar each day “slowly, diligently and securely”—Vasić also wrote in his article back then with even more sarcasm I presume again.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/11/11/anyone-who-believes-in-the-hollywood-image-of-the-cia-should-come-to-serbia-where-the-agency-has-long-aligned-with-one-of-the-countrys-most-notorious-criminal-gangs/

 

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

 

How the CIA destabilises the worldBy Jeffrey D. Sachs  

There are three basic problems with the CIA: its objectives, methods, and unaccountability. Its operational objectives are whatever the CIA or the President of the United States defines to be in the U.S. interest at a given time, irrespective of international law or U.S. law. Its methods are secretive and duplicitous. Its unaccountability means that the CIA and president run foreign policy without any public scrutiny. Congress is a doormat, a sideshow.

As a recent CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, said of his time at the CIA: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

The CIA was established in 1947 as the successor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS had performed two distinct roles in World War II, intelligence and subversion. The CIA took over both roles. On the one hand, the CIA was to provide intelligence to the US Government. On the other, the CIA was to subvert the “enemy,” that is, whomever the president or CIA defined as the enemy, using a wide range of measures: assassinations, coups, staged unrest, arming of insurgents, and other means.

It is the latter role that has proved devastating to global stability and the U.S. rule of law. It is a role that the CIA continues to pursue today. In effect, the CIA is a secret army of the U.S., capable of creating mayhem across the world with no accountability whatsoever.

When President Dwight Eisenhower decided that Africa’s rising political star, democratically elected Patrice Lumumba of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), was the “enemy,” the CIA conspired in his 1961 assassination, thus undermining the democratic hopes for Africa. He would hardly be the last African president brought down by the CIA.

In its 77-year history, the CIA has been held to serious public account just once, in 1975. In that year, Idaho Senator Frank Church led a Senate investigation that exposed the CIA’s shocking rampage of assassinations, coups, destabilisation, surveillance, and Mengele-style torture and medical “experiments.”

The expose by the Church Committee of the CIA’s shocking malfeasance has recently been chronicled in a superb book by the investigative reporter James Risen, The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy.

That single episode of oversight occurred because of a rare confluence of events.

In the year before the Church Committee, the Watergate scandal had toppled Richard Nixon and weakened the White House. As successor to Nixon, Gerald Ford was unelected, a former Congressman, and reluctant to oppose the oversight prerogatives of the Congress. The Watergate scandal, investigated by the Senate Ervin Committee, had also empowered the Senate and demonstrated the value of Senate oversight of Executive Branch abuses of power. Crucially, the CIA was newly led by Director William Colby, who wanted to clean up the CIA operations. Also, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, author of pervasive illegalities also exposed by the Church committee, had died in 1972.

In December 1974, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, then as now a great reporter with sources inside the CIA, published an account of illegal CIA intelligence operations against the U.S. antiwar movement. The Senate Majority Leader at the time, Mike Mansfield, a leader of character, then appointed Church to investigate the CIA. Church himself was a brave, honest, intelligent, independent-minded, and intrepid Senator, characteristics chronically in short supply in U.S. politics.

If only the CIA’s rogue operations had been consigned to history as a result of the crimes exposed by the Church Committee, or at the least had brought the CIA under the rule of law and public accountability. But that was not to be. The CIA has had the last laugh —or better said, has brought the world to tears—by maintaining its preeminent role in U.S. foreign policy, including overseas subversion.

Since 1975, the CIA has run secretive operations backing Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan that utterly wrecked Afghanistan while giving rise to al-Qaeda. The CIA has likely run secretive operations in the Balkans against Serbia, in the Caucuses against Russia, and in Central Asia targeting China, all deploying CIA-backed jihadists. In the 2010s, the CIA ran deadly operations to topple Syria’s Bashir al-Assad, again with Islamic jihadists. For at least 20 years, the CIA has been deeply involved in fomenting the growing catastrophe in Ukraine, including the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 that triggered the devastating war now engulfing Ukraine.

What do we know of these operations? Only the parts that whistleblowers, a few intrepid investigative reporters, a handful of brave scholars, and some foreign governments have been willing or able to tell us, with all of these potential witnesses knowing that they might face severe retribution from the U.S. government. There has been little to no accountability by the U.S. government itself, or meaningful oversight or restraint imposed by Congress. On the contrary, the government has become ever-more obsessively secretive, pursuing aggressive legal actions against disclosures of classified information, even when, or especially when, that information describes the illegal actions by the government itself.

Once in a while, a former U.S. official spills the beans, such as when Zbigniew Brzezinski revealed that he had induced Jimmy Carter to assign the CIA to train Islamic jihadists to destabilise the government of Afghanistan, with the aim of inducing the Soviet Union to invade that country.

In the case of Syria, we learned from a few stories in the New York Times in 2016 and 2017 of the CIA’s subversive operations to destabilise Syria and overthrow Assad, as ordered by President Barack Obama. Here is the case of a dreadfully misguided CIA operation, blatantly in violation of international law, that has led to a decade of mayhem, an escalating regional war, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and millions of displaced people, and yet there has not been a single honest acknowledgment of this CIA-led disaster by the White House or Congress.

In the case of Ukraine, we know that the U.S. played a major covert role in the violent coup that brought down Yanukovych and that swept Ukraine into a decade of bloodshed but to this day, we don’t know the details. Russia offered the world a window into the coup by intercepting and then posting a call between Victoria Nuland, then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State (now Under-Secretary of State) and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt (now Assistant Secretary of State), in which they plot the post-coup government. Following the coup, the CIA covertly trained special operations forces of the post-coup regime the U.S. had helped bring to power. The U.S. government has been mum about the CIA’s covert operations in Ukraine.

We have good reason to believe that CIA operatives carried out the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, as per Seymour Hersh, who is now an independent reporter. Unlike in 1975, when Hersh was with the New York Times at a time when the paper still tried to hold the government to account, the Times does not even deign to look into Hersh’s account.

Holding the CIA to public account is of course a steep uphill struggle. Presidents and the Congress don’t even try. The mainstream media don’t investigate the CIA, preferring instead to quote “senior unnamed officials” and the official cover-up. Are the mainstream media outlets lazy, suborned, afraid of advertising revenues from the military-industrial complex, threatened, ignorant, or all of the above? Who knows.

There is a tiny glimmer of hope. Back in 1975, the CIA was led by a reformer. Today, the CIA is led by William Burns, one of America’s long-standing leading diplomats. Burns knows the truth about Ukraine, since he served as Ambassador to Russia in 2008 and cabled Washington about the grave error of pushing NATO enlargement to Ukraine. Given Burns’ stature and diplomatic accomplishments, perhaps he would support the urgently needed accountability.

The extent of the continuing mayhem resulting from CIA operations gone awry is astounding. In Afghanistan, Haiti, Syria, Venezuela, Kosovo, Ukraine, and far beyond, the needless deaths, instability, and destruction unleashed by CIA subversion continues to this day. The mainstream media, academic institutions, and Congress should be investigating these operations to the best of their ability and demanding the release of documents to enable democratic accountability.

Next year is the 50th anniversary of the Church Committee hearings. Fifty years on, with the precedent, inspiration, and guidance of the Church Committee itself, it’s urgently time to open the blinds, expose the truth about the U.S.-led mayhem, and begin a new era in which U.S. foreign policy becomes transparent, accountable, subject to the rule of law both domestic and international, and directed towards global peace rather than subversion of supposed enemies.

 

Republished from Common Dreams, February 12, 2024

 

https://johnmenadue.com/how-the-cia-destabilises-the-world/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOWWWWWWWWWW....................

 

https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/49833

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aOj41uYuK0

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Does The CIA Destabilize the World?

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOWWWWWWWWWW....................

 

https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/49833