Yes, hopefully we will survive the coronavirus crisis without too much damage and with a new outlook on reality. But what Gus means here is: will we survive the crisis of unconfirmed information which has been used by the authorities to control our actions and viewpoints?

 

The arts have died. By this I suggest that official and private galleries, theatres and movie houses, have had to close down— and even on the internet, no platform will take any form of protest — or even practical suggestions — artistic or not. Protests and alternatives will be judged dangerous. The sheep are quiet in their little barns. No self-imposed sequestration protest is allowed.

 

The article at top is quite complex to develop in simple terms to avoid any mistakes. The subject covered are as varied as :

 

The toolmakers:

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the geezers who invented the wheel.

The inventors of the CIA and other "intelligence agencies"

The money machines

 

The beliefs controllers:

The Fall of the Western Roman Empire

The fake Christian history based on a murder, that of Jesus.

The trust managers: the priests

The governments

The media

 

 

The plotters:

The list of machinations to control power

Kingdoms and democracy

Mercantilism versus sharing

 

The believers:

The experts, the investigators on behalf of the approved disinformation

The disbelievers

 

This is a story of intrigues, murders and warfare that makes Homeland, the series, look pale in comparison. We will give outlooks on James Jesus Angleton, information on some of the Mafia's best known characters, Operation Paperclip, Otto Skorzeny, the First Council of Nicaea, and many other defining moments and characters of the recent 2000 years human history where deceit was rife, with the crust of officialdom removed. By the end of it we will investigate Operation Covert19. We shall see how far we can go in this caper, as we cannot trust the good intentions of the systems. It will take quite a few days to construct in a simple form.

 

 

Meanwhile, here is Colin Todhunter

 

Following the court decision in the US to award in favour of Dewayne Johnson (exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer and its active ingredient, glyphosate, caused Johnson to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma), attorney Robert Kennedy Jr said at the post-trial press conference:

The corruption of science, the falsification of science, and we saw all those things happen here. This is a company (Monsanto) that used all of the plays in the playbook developed over 60 years by the tobacco industry to escape the consequences of killing one of every five of its customers… Monsanto… has used those strategies…”

Johnson’s lawyers argued over the course of the month-long trial in 2018 that Monsanto had “fought science” for years and targeted academics who spoke up about possible health risks of the herbicide product. 

Long before the Johnson case, critics of Monsanto were already aware of the practices the company had engaged in for decades to undermine science. At the same time, Monsanto and its lobbyists had called anyone who questioned the company’s ‘science’ as engaging in pseudoscience and labelled them ‘anti-science’.

We need look no further than the current coronavirus issue to understand how vested interests are set to profit by spinning the crisis a certain way and how questionable science is again being used to pursue policies that are essentially ‘unscientific’ – governments, the police and the corporate media have become the arbiters of ‘truth’.

We also see anyone challenging the policies and the ‘science’ being censored on social media or not being given a platform on TV and accused of engaging in ‘misinformation’. It’s the same old playbook.

The case-fatality ratio for COVID-19 is so low as to make the lockdown response wholly disproportionate. Yet we are asked to blindly accept government narratives and the policies based on them.

Making an entire country go home and stay home has immense, incalculable costs in terms of well-being and livelihoods. This itself has created a pervasive sense of panic and crisis and is largely a result of the measures taken against the ‘pandemic’ and not of the virus itself.

Certain epidemiologists have said there is very little sturdy evidence to base lockdown policies on, but this has not prevented politicians from acting as if everything they say or do is based on solid science.

The lockdown would not be merited if we were to genuinely adopt a knowledge-based approach. If we look at early projections by Neil Ferguson of Imperial College in the UK, he had grossly overstated the number of possible deaths resulting from the coronavirus and has now backtracked substantially. 

Ferguson has a chequered track record, which led UK newspaper The Telegraph to run a piece entitled ‘How accurate was the science that led to lockdown?’ The article outlines Ferguson’s previous flawed predictions about infectious diseases and a number of experts raise serious questions about the modelling that led to lockdown in the UK.

Ferguson’s previous modelling for the spread of epidemics was so off the mark that it may beggar believe that anyone could have faith in anything he says, yet he remains part of the UK government’s scientific advisory group. Officials are now talking of ‘easing’ lockdowns, but Ferguson warns that lockdown in the UK will only be lifted once a vaccine for COVID-19 has been found.

It raises the question: when will Ferguson be held to account for his current and previously flawed work and his exaggerated predictions? Because, on the basis of his modelling, the UK has been in lockdown for many weeks, the results of which are taking a toll on the livelihoods and well-being of the population which are and will continue to far outweigh the effects of COVID-19.

According to a 1982 academic study, a 1% increase in the unemployment rate will be associated with 37,000 deaths [including 20,000 heart attacks, 920 suicides, 650 homicides], 4,000 state mental hospital admissions and 3,300 state prison admissions. 

Consider that by 30 April, in the US alone, 30 million had filed for unemployment benefit since the lockdown began. Between 23 and 30 April, some 3.8 million filed for unemployment benefit. Prior to the current crisis, the unemployment rate was 3.5%. Some predict it could eventually reach 30%.

Ferguson – whose model was the basis for policies elsewhere in addition to the UK – is as much to blame as anyone for the current situation. And it is a situation that has been fuelled by a government and media promoted fear narrative that has had members of the public so afraid of the virus that many have been demanding further restrictions of their liberty by the state in order to ‘save’ them. 

Even with the promise of easing the lockdown, people seem to be fearful of venturing out in the near future thanks to the fear campaign they have been subjected to.

Instead of encouraging more diverse, informed and objective opinions in the mainstream, we too often see money and power forcing the issue, not least in the form of Bill Gates who tells the world ‘normality’ may not return for another 18 months – until he and his close associates in the pharmaceuticals industry find a vaccine and we are all vaccinated.

In the UK, the population is constantly subjected via their TV screens to clap for NHS workers, support the NHS and to stay home and save lives on the basis of questionable data and policies. Emotive stuff taking place under a ruling Conservative Party that has cut thousands of hospital beds, frozen staff pay, placed workers on zero-hour contracts and demonised junior doctors.

It is also using the current crisis to accelerate the privatisation of state health care. 

In recent weeks, ministers have used special powers to bypass normal tendering and award a string of contracts to private companies and management consultants without open competition.

But if cheap propaganda stunts do not secure the compliance, open threats will suffice. For instance, in the US, city mayors and local politicians have threatened to ‘hunt down’, monitor social media and jail those who break lockdown rules.

Prominent conservative commentator Tucker Carlson asks who gave these people the authority to tear up the US constitution; what gives them the right to threaten voters while they themselves or their families have been exposed as having little regard for lockdown norms. As overhead drones bark out orders to residents, Carlson wonders how the US – almost overnight – transformed into a totalitarian state.

With a compliant media failing to hold tyrannical officials to account, Carlson’s concerns mirror those of Lionel Shriver in the UK, writing in The Spectator, who declares that the supine capitulation of Britain to a de facto police state has been one of the most depressing spectacles he has ever witnessed.

Under the pretext of tracking and tracing the spread of the virus, the UK government is rolling out an app which will let the likes of Apple and Google monitor a person’s every location visited and every physical contact. There seems to be little oversight in terms of privacy. 

The contact-tracing app has opted for a centralised model of data collection: all the contact-tracing data is not to be deleted but anonymized and kept under one roof in one central government database for ‘research purposes’.

We may think back to Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of Facebook data to appreciate the potential for data misuse. But privacy is the least concern for governments and the global tech giants in an age where ‘data’ has become monetized as a saleable commodity, with the UK data market the second biggest in the world and valued at over a billion pounds in 2018. 

Paranoia is usually the ever-present bedfellow of fear and many people have been very keen to inform the authorities that their neighbours may have been breaking social distancing rules. 

Moreover, although any such opinion poll cannot be taken at face value and could be regarded as part of the mainstream fear narrative itself, a recent survey suggests that only 20% of Britons are in favour of reopening restaurants, schools, pubs and stadiums.

Is this to be the new ‘normal’, whereby fear, mistrust, division and suspicion are internalized throughout society? In an age of fear and paranoia, are we all to be ‘contact traced’ and regarded by others as a ‘risk’ until we prove ourselves by wearing face masks and by voluntarily subjecting ourselves to virus tests at the entrances to stores or in airports? 

And if we refuse or test positive, are we to be shamed, isolated and forced to comply by being ‘medicated’ (vaccinated and chipped)?

Is this the type of world that’s soon to be regarded as ‘normal’?

A world in which liberty and fundamental rights mean nothing. A world dominated by shaming and spurious notions of personal responsibility that are little more than ideological constructs of a hegemonic narrative which labels rational thinking people as ‘anti-science’ – a world in which the scourge of authoritarianism reigns supreme.

As this article was going to press, it was announced that Neil Ferguson is resigning from his role as science advisor to Boris Johnson’s government, in the wake of the allegations he has broken the lockdown rules he himself recommended in order to meet his girlfriend – ed.

 

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/06/authoritarianism-in-the-age-of-pseudoscience/

 

 

 

 

 

 

How come people came to believe in an old fabricated fantasy, way into the present modern age? 

We, humans, are gullible and ready to accept any signs of authority that tell us whatever is for our own good — health-wise, money-wise (though we grumble about the price of fish) or for the salvation of our “soul". We don’t like taking responsibility for our own self, let alone be responsible for our neighbour… We buy snake oil and let the psychopaths in charge dictate our future. Even today, when the young ones are told to be assertive and be “themselves”, there is still a powerful psychological containment that prevents asking questions and do something outside the norms — anything outside the box being a “sin”... This is powerful indoctrination, be it by churches, states or iPhones inanities. Freedom is limited. And this “control” of whom we are as a society, started a long time ago… The individuals who stray too far, or know too many secrets outside the realm of control, are eliminated. Assange included. He should be free for exposing the truth, nonetheless — but the system, even in our modern times, hates the truth and is ruthless, under a seemingly caring fatherly imprimatur. The system is sputtering like crazy at the moment...

The system has many hierarchical levels and we, the plebs in our "democracies", are only asked to choose which next psychopath is going to rule the system. We also learn the skills that will make us apply for which level we are going to be accepted. In kingdoms like that of the Saudis, the people are not even consulted. The decisions are made by the ruling family and the high priests of the beliefs. We chastise the Chinese for having an undemocratic democracy, while ours is a fictitious one in which various form of thieving are sanctioned… For the Western World, our modern democratic troubles started when the Roman Republic became an Empire… This shit started way before this, but we need to draw a line somewhere… Okay, let start earlier:

Say that the Roman republic formed in 509 BC stood strong for several centuries. In the 1st century BC, Cicero uncovered a plot by a senator, Lucius Catiline, to overthrow the government. Some citizens attempted to institute government reforms and social reforms to help the poor. Ultimately, factions emerged, hostilities erupted, and a series of civil wars ensued. A prominent general named Julius Caesar began to gain significant power.

The Senate demanded Caesar give up command of his army in Gaul and return to Rome as a citizen. Caesar instead took his army to Rome. Another civil war erupted between Caesar and Pompey. Caesar emerged victorious and named (himself?) dictator for life. The title dictator was only given to an appointed, temporary, leader in times of military emergency. Leaders within the republic feared Caesar would become a tyrant. To prevent this, a group of senators conspired and assassinated him. In response to his death, Caesar's nephew Augustus defeated the conspirators and established himself as the first Roman emperor. Now you know.

By 286 (AD), the first split of the Roman Empire by Emperor Diocletian (ruler from 284-305) was a defining moment in history. 

The history of these confused yet quite weirdly recorded times, as vaguely remembered and relearnt by Gus, is defined by war, backstabbing, assassinations and the rise of a new religious beliefs that helped Emperors control the populace better than the drunkard frolicking Roman gods ever did. Controlling people has been THE NAME OF THE GAME all the time. We know. 

At its singular height, the Empire stretched from Italy through Europe to the British Isles, across North Africa, down through Egypt and up into Mesopotamia and across Anatolia (Turkey). By 285, the Empire had grown so vast that it was difficult to govern all the provinces from Rome and the annoying Christians were stirring the populace. The split of 286 soon created animosity between Emperors of each half. 

While the Eastern half of the Roman Empire stood reasonably well till 1453, when invaded by the Ottoman Empire (Islamic Oghuz tribes led by Osman I of Turkic origin, but Persianised in language and culture) — the Western Empire struggled and finally fell in 476 to the barbaric hordes. 

In time, the single-god religious dictum was recognised as being quite efficient at controlling people. The Western Roman Empire was revived as the Holy Roman Empire — first under the reign of Charlemagne, from 800 till 814, but his successors could not maintain its integrity. The (Western) Holy Roman Empire was then recreated by Otto I of Germany who ruled from 962 till 973. 

The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806, as it had lost cohesion, becoming increasingly corrupt and ineffectual... In 1848, Germany’s little kingdoms became a confederation at the Frankfurt declaration. Then Germany was declared an Empire in 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, of all places — replacing the German Confederation and the Holy Roman Empire. The House of Habsburg-Lorraine — the dynasty that formerly ruled over the German princes during the German Confederation and Holy Roman Empire, gathered there to proclaim William I of Prussia and the House of Hohenzollern as German Emperor, following the French capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War. 

Our democratic troubles continued — though France was strongly secular, America has been singing "god bless America...". 

As we also know, there had been some pull and shove, when Luther stirred the religious dogma within the Holy Roman Empire which after the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, was divided between Catholic and Protestant provinces. The Peace of Augsburg ended conflict between German Lutherans and Catholics by allowing princes to select either Lutheranism or Catholicism within the domains they controlled. A new war began when the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, tried to impose Roman Catholicism on the lot. The Protestant states revolted against him, until…  

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Soon after the split of 286, Emperors from one half of the Roman Empire tried to "conquer" the other, mostly like in bloody episodes of “in the family”… also referred to as the Battle of the “Titans” (not the gods, but the human psychos).

Not long after the split, in 293 A.D. Diocletian reigning in the Eastern Empire, while Maximian reigned in the Western Empire, started the tetrarchy. Maximian further divided up the workload of ruling the Empire. The two Augusti (Emperors), Diocletian and Maximian, each chose a Caesar (sub-emperor). Diocletian chose Galerius (born in modern Bulgaria) and Maximian chose Julius Constantius  — the son of Constantius Chlorus and his wife Theodora, the adopted daughter of emperor Maximian. This system worked until the two senior Augusti abdicated. The two Caesars became Augusti (Emperors) and needed to appoint their new Caesars. The new Caesars were Severus II and Maximinus Daia. 

The looming problem was that Constantius had a son, Constantine, and Maximian had a son, Maxentius. These young men wanted power. One smells BIG trouble. When Constantius died in 306, his son Constantine was crowned emperor of the Western Roman Empire, on July 25, accepted by Galerius into the tetrarchy as Caesar, but Constantine appears as if for the time being, he was an Augustus without an Empire, as he was in Britain fighting the Brits…  Thus Severus had been appointed, on May 1, 305, caesar to Emperor Constantius (ruled 305–306) and given control of Pannonia, Italy, and Africa. On the news of Constantius death, Severus II was made full augustus of the West by the remaining emperor, Galerius, who controlled the East. But Severus II soon became unpopular when he imposed higher taxes that meant the Romans would lose their tax-free status... On Oct. 28, 306, a revolt led by Maxentius, broke out in Rome against Galerius’s protégé, Severus II.
Severus II marched on Rome from Mediolanum, but his 70,000 troops deserted him and he was forced to take refuge in Ravenna. After the defeat of Severus II, Maxentius took possession of northern Italy up to the Alps and the Istrian peninsula to the east, and gave himself the title of Augustus. The citizens of Rome hailed Maxentius the Emperor of the Western Roman Empire. 

Maxentius asked his father, Maximian, to come out of retirement. Father and son repelled an attack by Galerius. They formed a brief alliance with Constantine. Maximian, however, tried to seize power in Rome in April of 308. His attempted coup failed and Maximian fled to Gaul under the protection of his son in law, Constantine. Maximian later betrayed Constantine and had to commit suicide in 310. Maxentius, ironically, deified his father and blustered to avenge his death. Maxentius was now all alone and surrounded by enemies. 

All these plots and counter-plots cannot happen without betrayals, secret agents, loyal and disloyal army commanders — and a lot of deceit, already prepared even before making any “agreements”… "The Game of Throne" has nothing on the Roman Empire… The present political situation in the Western world is in a similar state of disrepair, especially when the hidden “experts” demand lockdown, confusing the dorks in charge...

Enters Licinius...

Licinius, born in a peasant family in Moesia Superior (Modern Kosovo), was sent by Eastern Emperor Galerius  — both very close friends since childhood — as an envoy in 307 to chastise the “new” Western Emperor Maxentius in Italy, attempting to sort out his political shenanigans, but to no avail. 

After the death of Severus, Galerius went to deal with Maxentius personally,  but his negotiations could do no better than Licinius did.

Upon his return to the east, Galerius elevated Licinius to the rank of Augustus on 11 November 308, in charge of a subdivision of the Western Empire, that included the Balkan provinces of Illyricum, Thrace and Pannonia. In 310 Licinius took control of the war against the Sarmatians, defeating them. On the death of Galerius in May 311, Licinius entered into an agreement with Maximinus II (Daia) to share the Eastern provinces between them. Meanwhile, an alliance between Maximinus II and Maxentius forced a war, in which Constantine, still in the background, defeated Maxentius in 312, who purportedly perished by drowning in the Tiber, Rome. 

Constantine and Licinius made another agreement. Licinius became Emperor in the East, while his brother-in-law, Constantine, was supremo in the West. The musical chairs were in full swing. The people had nothing to say about it, except whether they had to pay taxes or not...

In March 313 Licinius married Flavia Julia Constantia, half-sister of Constantine I, Emperor of Western Roman Empire, at Mediolanum (now Milan). Their marriage was the occasion for the jointly-issued "Edict of Milan" in Nicomedia (Milan) on 14 June 313, that reissued Galerius' previous Edict of Toleration in Serdica (sofia) in 311, allowing Christianity (and any religion one might choose) to be professed in the Empire, with additional dispositions that restored confiscated properties to Christian congregations and exempted Christian clergy from municipal civic duties. The law of the land was still based on Imperial dictums, not on any religious dogma. Many of the Christians then were Jews or of Jewish decent that had been converted by the "Great Commission”.

But Maximinus II from the eastern side of the Eastern Roman Empire was still in the frame. He became embroiled in the Civil wars of the Tetrarchy for control of the Empire, in which he was defeated by Licinius in April 313. A committed pagan, Maximinus II had engaged in persecutions of Christians. So there were only two left: Constantine and Licinius… It was a waiting game to see which one was going to blink first...

Constantine the Great or Constantine I, ruled between AD 306 (though he was not “in place" until his defeat of Maxentius in 312) and 337. Born in Dacia Ripensis, now known as Niš (in Serbia), he was the son of Flavius Valerius Constantius, a Roman Army officer of Illyrian (Indo-European tribes of the Balkans) origins. His mother, Helena, was Greek. His father became Caesar, the deputy Emperor in the west, in AD 293. Constantine was sent east, where he rose through the ranks to become a military chief under Emperors Diocletian and Galerius. 

As we’ve mentioned before, in 305, Constantius was raised to the rank of Augustus, senior western Emperor. Constantine was called to campaign under his father Constantius in Britannia. Constantine was acclaimed as Emperor by the army at Eboracum (modern-day York) after his father's death in AD 306. But Maxentius stayed on the throne, then till 312...

In 324, Licinius was defeated at the Battle of Chrysopolis by Constantine, and was later executed on the orders of Constantine, who thus took over the whole Empire — east and west… And so there was only one left, Constantine...


And we have not mentioned the earlier times when the Roman Empire had 6 Augustus (Emperors) in one single year… All of them being complete psychopaths fighting for the loot.

This is Roman history as nearly recorded in the school books when I was a kid in eastern Europe. We had to learn all this shit, the names, the dates, the heroism, because this defined the status of where things were at, before communism and a lot of other unsavoury alliances that followed were made for survival of little piddly countries and limited-reach languages, from which some of the Emperors came from… This is the privilege of people: we speak Romanian, Arabic, Dutch, Lithuanian or German. We do not speak European. For a while Russian became a second lingo. These days, the second language is, most likely, the bastardised version of English called American so we can understand the word hamburger. 

Meanwhile, the Christians were more disunited than the Roman Empire. The edict by Licinius/Constantine meant that one could believe anything… Not a personal problem per se, but a huge one should you (especially the self anointed psychopath grand priest with a pointed hat) wish to control people efficiently. 

The Christian narrative, as fanciful as it was then, had to be consistent. The various “biblical” text were confused, contradictory and people interpreted the “not-so-yet gospel" gospel at their own discretion. Though the spiel was to go and proselytise as much as possible under the “Great Commission" umbrella.

One would not think that the murder of one guy, Jesus, would carry so much weight, but one can see the various trick of faith along the way. The main sticking point was regarding the godly status of Jesus. Was he equal to the “Father”, was he a second fiddle (half-man-half-god like in the Roman godly scenes) and what was the importance of the Holy Spirit? All stupid stuff but in order to make the populace swallow this fanciful story, it had to be homogenous and dictatorial. A lot of the pre-history to this legend came from the Jewish people's own invented record of their relationship with god. The Muslim followed suit when Mahomet borrowed bits of Christianity/Jewish history to write his own version of godly imaginings, including downgrading the status of women and waging war against the infidels. 


For the Eastern/Western Roman Emperor, Constantine I, a solution that unified the belief system had to be reached in order to control people better and to invent Christian Trinitism. By then “democracy” (the republic) in the Empire had long gone out of the window — and politics were the domain of the dictators (emperors), and soon would become the spiritual realm of the “bishops” influencing the emperors. 

The streamlining was done with the First Council of Nicaea — convened around Easter in 325, by Constantine the Great — now the unique Emperor of the entire Roman Empire — upon the recommendations of a synod led by the bishop Hosius of Corduba (Spain). This synod was charged with investigating the trouble brought about by the Arian controversy in the Greek-speaking east and of the teachings of Arius “that were heretical and dangerous to the salvation of souls". The bishops of all provinces were summoned to Nicaea, (the modern Turkish city of İznik situated in a fertile basin at the eastern end of Lake Ascanius) — a place accessible to many delegates, particularly those of Asia Minor, Georgia, Armenia, Syria, Egypt, Greece, and Thrace…

The Son's precise relationship with the Father had been discussed for decades before Arius's advent; Arius intensified the controversy and carried it to a Church-wide audience, where others like Eusebius of Nicomedia proved much more influential in the long run. In fact, some later Arians disavowed the name, claiming not to have been familiar with the man or his specific teachings. However, because the conflict between Arius and his foes brought the issue to the theological forefront, the doctrine he proclaimed — though not originated by him — is generally labeled as Arius's.

The Great Commission has become a tenet in Christian theology emphasising ministry, missionary work, evangelism, and baptism. The apostles are said to have dispersed from Jerusalem and founded the apostolic sees. Preterists believe that the Great Commission and other Bible prophecies were fulfilled in the 1st century while futurists believe Bible prophecy was yet to be fulfilled at the Second Coming. See you there...

We might leave these historical manipulations of beliefs which led to and acknowledge a break-up of the Christians. The Orthodox and the Catholics, both camps having further sub-break-ups, in the middle ages, under henry the VIII and later on, mostly in the 1800s America, with the various evangelical splits and revisionism of the original texts. 

Following this First Council of Nicaea, the Christians, mostly the Catholics, went into the bed of the next psychopathic kings and queens to make sure democracy would never happen. 

Gus is a Rabid Atheist. Atheism is NOT a religion.

 
An (unfortunately updated?) old joke is doing the round on the internet…

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years.No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:
- Knowing when to come in out of the rain;  
- Why the early bird gets the worm; 
- Life isn't always fair; 
- And maybe it was my fault.
Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

  

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. 
Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

  

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children.

  

It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

  

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims.

  

Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

  

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot.  She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.

  

Common Sense was preceded in death,  
- by his parents, Truth and Trust,
- by his wife, Discretion,
- by his daughter, Responsibility,
- and by his son, Reason.

  

He is survived by his five stepchildren;  
- I Know My Rights 
- I Want It Now 
- Someone Else Is To Blame 
- I'm A Victim
- Pay me for Doing Nothing
Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone.  If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.

——————

We all know (we all should) that Common Sense died from being naively useless the day he was born in a world of greed, god and guns, or was he? Truth never ever lived and trust is relatively limited by the price of fish and suspicion. Discretion? The word sounds more like excretion in regard to the sanitation of history… Reason would tell us that god is a fanciful invention, but tell this to the common sensed Christians… 

It seems that the old joke has been appropriated by what smells like a right-wing conspiracy against human rights. Like truth, Common Sense lives in the dark corners of Hell, conjointed to his twin Superior Hubris. This is the old chestnut of the head with two faces...

Common Sense’s smarter cousins, Satire and Questioning, actually try to wriggle under various pseudonymes — Charlie Hebdo, Voltaire Network, YD, The Monthly, the Corbett Report and many more — hidden under tons of Irony and a few feathers from the bird of obvious reality, while we try to place Superior Hubris under aneasthetic. Most of the plebs don’t seem to care about Common Sense anyway — and are ready to sell him to the highest bidder to pay lest taxes and organise a barbecue on fire-ban day. Our leaders are thus not worried about Common Sense. We employ them to burn him like a Straw Man, in daily rituals, as told with gravitas through the mainstream channels of information. 

While we know why Common Sense isn’t real, and some rights of decency seem to stop priests playing with his balls, our system has been working hard to hide the truth by whatever means and feed us with bullshit under the name of Common Sense, with various hubristic voodoo such as “in the national interest”, “for your own good”, “let’s do this together”, “freedom of speech (to vilify you — unless you have tons of money to defend yourself in courts), and other patent excuses. This is most obvious in times of conflicts, which is nearly all the time, as we invent new enemies when we defeat one by design, or by accident — or by the obvious truth that this or that enemy was not real.

In our times of cyber-encryptions, deceit is still the main game. Humans have lived in “The Age of Deceit” since they fell from their tree. As we have explained many times on this site, deception is the main purpose of “intelligence” agencies while hiding the true intent of conflicts behind “crusade", "just wars”, "regime change", "defence by aggression before we get hit”. 

Having just celebrated 75 years since the end of WW2, you would think that the US administration would recognise the contribution made by Russia in this conflict. But no. The White House possibly afraid of another impeachment for “colluding with the Russians", Russia has been wiped out of the victory.

It was in fact the Ruskies who reached Berlin before the rest of the allies.

In a few posts on this site we intimate that Russia actually won the war. Without Russia, the war could have dragged on till the atomic bomb — and should Stalin have aligned himself with Hitler, as revisionists are trying to fudge history by intimating, Europe would now speak German as first lingo. 

Common Sense would tell us that we should never have left our tree, because everything else that created civilisation has been hubris, delusion and technology with no common sense at all. 

In regard to hubris, the list of deceptions in our modern times is long. A character that we should know about is James Jesus Angleton.

... was chief of CIA Counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975. His official position within the organization was Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence (ADDOCI). Angleton was significantly involved in the US response to the purported KGB defectors Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko. Angleton later became convinced the CIA harbored a high-ranking mole, and engaged in an intensive search. Whether this was a highly destructive witch hunt or appropriate caution vindicated by later moles remains a subject of intense historical debate.

According to  Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms: "In his day, Jim was recognized as the dominant counterintelligence figure in the non-communist world." Investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein agrees with the high regard in which Angleton was held by his colleagues in the intelligence business, and adds that Angleton earned the trust ... of six CIA directors — including Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, Allen W. Dulles and Richard Helms. They kept Angleton in key positions and valued his work.
…

DCI William Colby [the new director of the CIA then] reorganized the CIA in an effort to curb Angleton's influence, beginning by stripping him of control over the Israeli "account", which had the effect of weakening counter-intelligence. Colby then demanded Angleton's resignation. It has been claimed that Angleton directed CIA assistance to the Israeli nuclear weapons program.


Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Angleton privately accused various foreign leaders of being Soviet spies. He twice informed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that he believed Prime Minister Lester Pearson and his successor Pierre Trudeau to be agents of the Soviet Union. In 1964, under pressure from Angleton, the RCMP detained John Watkins, a close friend of Pearson and formerly Canadian Ambassador to the Soviet Union; Watkins died during interrogation by the RCMP and the CIA and was subsequently cleared of suspicion. Angleton accused Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson of using their access to NATO secrets to benefit the USSR. Brandt resigned in 1974, after one of his aides was found to be a mole from the East German secret police.



Attempted removal of Gough Whitlam

Australian journalist Brian Toohey claimed that Angleton considered then Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam a "serious threat" to the US and was concerned after the Commonwealth police raided ASIO headquarters in Melbourne in 1973 at the direction of Attorney general Lionel Murphy. In 1974, Angleton sought to instigate the removal of Whitlam from office by having CIA station chief in Canberra, John Walker, ask Peter Barbour, then head of ASIO, to make a false declaration that Whitlam had lied about the raid in Parliament. Barbour refused to make the statement.


Read more:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Jesus_Angleton


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Next we study Frank Olson...

Human strive to improve themselves, as a species and personally. Some of our social constructs reach a level of “traditions” beyond which improvements are not welcome if these threaten the accepted traditions. These improvements can be moral, philosophical and technological. 

Technologies will derive from knowledge, mostly scientific knowledge of the world around us. These technological improvements will range from health to transport, from construction material to genetically modifying crops. These improvements have led to the development of multinational companies that used to deal in spices and slaves, now dealing in pharmaceuticals products and armament, as well as cars, planes, fast foods and sodas.

Humans are fighting diseases all the time. We are under constant attack from microbes, viruses and defects from our own genetic material — either from birth or as we age. Ageing is a bitch. Since the age of Enlightenment, much knowledge has been acquired that led to the industrial revolution and medical discoveries. Much of these happened by trial and error, as new designs were based on experiments successes or failures. Mathematics helped streamlined mechanical inventions, but on the medical front, we are still dependent of trial and error, despite the desire to create “designer” drugs. Even the big pharmaceutical firms create and test many drugs all the time, until they reach a certain level of confidence that the product will help “cure” a disease without too many “side-effects”.

Some of this testing is first done on animals, mice and monkeys or pigs, while the next stage is to test on humans. These tests call for volunteers, paid or for the glory of helping humanity, unless one is forced into becoming a “guinea pig” without consent. In the present pandemic of Covid19 we need to be reminded that drug testing, old and new, is still an iffy business — and that “vaccination” is never 100 per cent, especially in regard to coronaviruses that have the cunning ability — like most of living creatures — to adapt and mutate.

This is where we enter the world of "experiments" after WW2:

Dr. Herbert Bruno Gerstner was not the only former Nazi researcher to be brought to Texas by Project Paperclip. When Gerstner arrived, there were already a dozen Nazi aeromedical scientists working at the Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. Among this initial group was one physician who would eventually become widely known and controversial. This was Dr. Hubertus Strughold, today unabashedly considered the “Father of American Space Medicine.” Suspicions loom large today that Strughold’s past wartime involvement in human experiments was overlooked and covered-up by Paperclip officials so that his expertise could be exploited by America’s then burgeoning aerospace program.
When Strughold died in 1986, years after retiring from an illustrious 18-year career with the U.S. government, the Justice Department had only just come around to investigating his wartime activities, an inquiry that eventually went nowhere. Additionally, readers who think Strughold had no links to the CIA should think again. Military and aerospace activities at SAM in the 1950s, and beyond, very much involved the CIA as is well documented in recent years by numerous declassified documents and reports concerning the ultra-secret U-2 spy aircraft program, Projects Idealist and Aquatone, and other espionage activities centered in Texas.

Strughold consistently argued that he knew nothing about Nazi human experiments until after the war ended. “I was against Hitler and his beliefs”, Strughold told one reporter in the 1968. He claimed, “I sometimes had to hide myself because my life was in danger from the Nazis”, but this defense appears trumped-up in light of evidence uncovered by American historian and investigative journalist Linda Hunt. Hunt— whose life was threatened a number of times during her ten-year investigation of Project Paperclip, and who was shot at by an unknown assailant on one occasion— discovered that on October 26 and 27, 1942, Strughold attended a Nazi scientific conference in Nuremberg to discuss “Medical Problems Arising from Distress at Sea and Winter Hardships.”
At the conference, a Nazi researcher, identified as Professor Holzloehner, presented his findings through experiments he conducted on Dachau concentration camp inmates “who were frozen to death in vats of ice water in the camp yard during winter.” According to Holzloehner’s presentation, the human subjects suffered excruciating pain before they died from having various body parts frozen. Linda Hunt also discovered at least five other Paperclip scientists who worked at SAM who knew about the Dachau experiments through their participation at the same 1942 conference. These were Drs. Walter Schreiber, Hans Clamann, Ulrich Luft, Konrad Buettner, and Richard Landenberg.
This author (Albarelli) found Dr. Konrad J.K. Buettner’s work for the U.S. government at SAM particularly intriguing. Buettner was brought to the U.S. in 1947 by Project Paperclip to work with the Air Force’s SAM program in Texas. According to Air Force files, Buettner conducted extensive research on the “effects of extreme heat on humans.”
In April 1952, Buettner made minor headlines in the United States when he announced the findings of a study he conducted for the UCLA engineering department. The main finding being: “[That] Negroes would be in special danger of heat from an atomic explosion” due to their “heavily-pigmented skin.” Buettner worked closely for at least two years with former Nazi Storm Trooper and Nazi Party member Dr. Heinrich Rose. In 1952, in the Nevada desert, Buettner and Rose found that following an atomic blast selected observing service men serving as guinea pigs suffered severe eye damage, including blindness, but the two scientists urged further experiments of the same sort. [See Jet Magazine, April 10, 1953.]
Buettner’s extreme heat research led him to closely consult with two US Army researchers at the Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, Texas. The two researchers were Lt. Col. John A. Moncrief and Major Jose A. Rivera. Moncrief and Rivera conducted a six-year study of “more than 1,000 burn cases” that focused on “the mortality rate from septicemia [infection] for 55 percent of all deaths.” Moncrief, Rivera, and Buettner met on many occasions related to this study, as well as several other projects overseen by Buettner. [See the forthcoming book by H.P. Albarelli Jr., Exploiting Evil: Project Paperclip, the Pentagon, CIA and Human Experimentation to be published this year by Progressive Press from which sections of this article are extracted].

Both Moncrief and Rivera also worked at the Brooke Center with former Nazi Dr. Ulrich Cameron Lutz, hired through Project Paperclip in 1947 to perform rapid decompression experiments at SAM. From 1951 to about 1963, Lutz served intermittently as a consultant on high altitude acclimatization for both the Air Force and the CIA. This work included the ultra-secret development of the CIA’s U-2 spy plane. Ulrich, the son of a Scottish mother and German father, was born in Berlin in 1910. He was schooled as a research physiologist and physician, and by 1938 was an authority in the fields of lung physiology and the physiological effects of oxygen deprivation.
In 1937 and 1938, Lutz traveled as part of an expedition to climb Nanga Parbat [in Pakistan], the ninth highest mountain in the world. In 1954, William Randolph Lovelace II, a prominent American scientist who maintained a long-standing relationship with the CIA, invited Lutz to head the Department of Physiology at the Lovelace Clinic for Medical Education and Research in New Mexico. The CIA’s Project Oxcart made extensive use of the Lovelace Clinic in the training of high altitude spy pilots. Lutz passed away peacefully in 1991 at his Albuquerque, New Mexico home.
As some readers may be aware, Maj. Jose A. Rivera went on to become a figure of mystery due to his peripheral and bizarre involvement in the JFK assassination. Months before the assassination, in April 1963, he is reported to have dosed a woman with LSD and then attempted to hypnotize her. The woman, Adele Edisen, was then a 35-year old post-doctoral fellow at the National Institute of Health’s Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness at the Louisiana University School of Medicine. Edisen encountered Rivera at a medical conference in Atlantic City, New Jersey. During their subsequent encounter in Washington, D.C., Rivera said a number of bizarre things to Edisen, including asking her to telephone Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans and to tell him “to kill the chief.”
Hidden Facts of Early U.S. LSD Experiments
As revealed in part-one of this article, chief among the former Nazis who worked at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal and for the CIA was Dr. Friedrich Hoffmann, who was brought to the U.S. in 1947. Hoffmann’s official title at Edgewood was Chief of Agents Research. “Agents” in this case were any drugs that held incapacitating or lethal potential in chemical warfare, including the targeting of small groups or individuals. One of the earliest drugs that drew Hoffmann’s attention was LSD, a compound he had been aware of since before the conclusion of World War II.

As is widely known today, Drs. Arthur Stoll and Albert Hofmann at the Pharmaceutical-Chemical Research Laboratories of Sandoz AG [now Novartis] in Basle, Switzerland first synthesized LSD in 1938. Equally well known is the often-told story of Albert Hofmann’s LSD trip in 1943 that included his riding his bicycle.
Not so well known is that Sandoz’s Hofmann within less than two months of his 1943 experience launched a number of experiments with LSD on unwitting human subjects. Wrote British psychiatrist and LSD researcher, Dr. Ronald Sandison in 1965: “Hofmann then went to the Burgholzli Hospital, where he gave LSD on 20 occasions to 3 male and 3 female schizophrenic patients. The results, as may be expected, were inconclusive.”
In addition to hospital patients, Hoffman experimented with LSD on about 20 university students and laboratory workers, at least one of whom committed suicide by jumping from a high window, an event that was successfully covered up for decades.
Interesting to note is the curious timing of the Sandoz human experiments which coincided with Nazi experiments with mescaline on inmates at the Dachau concentration camp only about two hundred miles away from the Sandoz laboratories. Indeed, in the late 1990s rumors emerged from Europe that the Sandoz company, as well as some of its officials and leading chemists, maintained close ties with Nazi scientists during the war years.

Rumors advanced to facts in 2001 when the findings of an Independent Commission of Experts (ICE), established to probe Switzerland’s wartime past, released its report. The commission concluded that Sandoz, and other Basel-bases companies, including Ciba, took full advantage of their ties to the Third Reich and based their economic planning on their relationships with the Nazis. ICE revealed that Sandoz and Ciba had extensive contacts with the Nazis, and that several Swiss companies employed slave and forced labour at their plants. The commission also reported that Sandoz in the interests of maintaining ties and good will with the Nazis removed a number of their Jewish directors of German subsidiaries and replaced them with Germans loyal to the Nazi party and the party’s “Aryanisation” policies. Additionally, information released by the commission demonstrated Sandoz in many ways acted as part-and-parcel with the IG Farben company, which manufactured the lethal gases used to murder millions of Jews in concentration camps.
In early 1949, former Nazi Friedrich Hoffmann [not to be confused with Sandoz’s Albert Hofmann] consulted with U.S. Army Chemical Corps research director Dr. L. Wilson Greene on the merits of LSD as a chemical warfare agent employed to avoid the traditional bloodshed and violence of war. His contacts with Greene soon led to the Army’s advancement of LSD and other hallucinogenics as possible uses for modern warfare.

Read more:
https://www.voltairenet.org/article168573.html



Enters Olson:

Frank Rudolph Olson (July 17, 1910 – November 28, 1953) was an American bacteriologist, biological warfare scientist and an employee of the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories (USBWL) who worked at Camp Detrick (now Fort Detrick) in Maryland. At a meeting in rural Maryland, he was covertly dosed with LSD by his colleague Sidney Gottlieb (head of the CIA's MKUltra program) and, nine days later, plunged to his death from the window of the Hotel Statler The U.S. government first described his death as a suicide, and then as misadventure, while others allege murder.[1] The Rockefeller Commission report on the CIA in 1975 acknowledged their having conducted drug studies.
....

Although Olson's family told friends that he had suffered "a fatal nervous breakdown" which resulted in the fall,[1] the family had no real knowledge of the specific details surrounding the tragedy, until the Rockefeller Commission uncovered some of the CIA's MKULTRA activities in 1975. That year, the government admitted that Olson had been dosed with LSD, without his knowledge, nine days before his death. After the family announced they planned to sue the Agency over Olson's "wrongful death," the government offered them an out-of-court settlement of $1,250,000, later reduced to $750,000, which they accepted.[6] The family received apologies from President Gerald Ford and then-CIA director William Colby.[7]

1994–1996

In 1994, Eric Olson had his father's body exhumed to be buried with his mother. The family decided to have a second autopsy performed. The 1953 medical report completed immediately after Dr. Olson's death indicated that there were cuts and abrasions on the body.[8] Theories that sparked about Olson having been assassinated by the CIA led to second autopsy was performed by James Starrs, Professor of Law and Forensic Science at the George Washington University National Law Center. His team searched the body for any cuts and abrasions and found none, though did find a large hematoma on the left side of Olson's head and a large injury on his chest. Most of the team concluded that the blunt-force trauma to the head and the injury to the chest had not occurred during the fall, but most likely before the fall (one team member dissented).[1] Starrs called the evidence "rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide."[7]

 

 

Read more:

 

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

 

 

 

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Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte (20 March 1811 – 22 July 1832), Prince Imperial, King of Rome, known in the Austrian court as Franz from 1814 onward, Duke of Reichstadt from 1818, was the son of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, and his second wife, Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria.

When born, by some acts of the new French Napoleonic Constitution, he was declared Prince Imperial, but he also became the King of Rome, that his dad gave him as a gift. The nickname “L’Aiglon" (the Young Eagle) was awarded posthumously. The kid seemed to have been of poor health since birth.

When Napoleon I tried to abdicate in April 1814, he demanded that his son (then 3 years of age) would rule as Emperor. However, the victors refused and Napoleon abdicated unconditionally some days later. Although Napoleon II never actually ruled France, he was briefly the Emperor of the French in 1815 (aged 4), after Waterloo — a battle that could have gone either way, according to Wellington who said it was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life”. Waterloo was another major turning point in history...

His tutors described Napoleon II as intelligent, serious and focused. He was also a tall young man — growing to nearly 6 feet by the time he was 17.


His military training gave some concern for the monarchies of Europe and interest to the French leaders over his possible return to France. However, he was never allowed to have a political role though was used by Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich as a bargaining chip with France to gain advantage for his country. Fearful of anyone in the Bonaparte family regaining power, Metternich even rejected a request for Franz to move to the warmer climate of Italy.

Upon the death of his stepfather, Adam Albert von Neipperg (his mother having remarried), and the revelation that his mother had borne two illegitimate children to Neipperg prior to their marriage, Franz grew distant from her — and felt that his Austrian family was holding him back. He told his friend, Anton von Prokesch-Osten, "If Josephine had been my mother, my father would not have been buried in Saint Helena, and I should not be at Vienna. My mother is kind, but weak; she was not the wife my father deserved".

In 1831, Franz became commander of an Austrian battalion, but never got the chance to serve. In 1832, he became bedridden for several months with pneumonia. On 22 July, Franz died of tuberculosis at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. He left no descendants. The Napoleonic claim to the Empire passed to his cousin, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who restored the Empire as Napoleon III in 1852, after the Commune revolution. Louis called himself Napoleon III to acknowledge Napoleon II and his brief baby reign. He was defeated by the Prussians in 1870. Meanwhile, He, with his Paris prefect Haussmann, started to destroy and rebuilt Paris as we now know it...

Haussmann's renovation of Paris was a vast public works program that included the demolition of medieval neighbourhoods that were deemed overcrowded and unhealthy by officials at the time… This was an excuse to widen the streets so that cannons could be used to squash revolts… This also involved the construction of new sewers, fountains and water supplies. Haussmann's demolition was met with fierce opposition, and he was finally dismissed by Napoleon III in 1870 though the work on this projects continued until 1927.


This poem below by Victor Hugo (1802—1885) is about Napoleon trying to start a new dynasty in France and looking after his son. 

TO UNDERSTAND the significance of Victor Hugo, one must begin at the end, with his death on May 22, 1885. His funeral attracted more than two million people, one of the largest mass mobilizations ever seen in Paris and more than the city’s total population at the time.

The French government was well aware that Hugo’s funeral would attract masses of people and feared an uprising. Only a few years earlier, half a million people had shown up to pay respects to him on his seventy-ninth birthday. In an attempt to capitalize on his death, the government co-opted the service, preparing a massive tribute to the writer despite his expressed wish for a simple funeral. The only request the government honored was that he be buried in a pauper’s casket. Despite all the pomp and circumstance, it was truly a festival of the oppressed, as workers, the poor, and the exploited arrived en masse to celebrate the life and work of a man who had given voice to the voiceless.

read more:
https://isreview.org/issue/89/enduring-relevance-victor-hugo

His well-known novel Les Miserables is one of his many many masterpieces that gave the populace hope of justice and truth of a better social order… What went wrong?


Translation of Victor Hugo’s Napoléon II (extracts) by Jules Letambour below:

Eighteen hundred and eleven — Oh times when the people who do not count 

Awaiting prostrated under a darkened cloud
That the sky would approve their clout,
Feeling the ancient states trembling beneath them
And watching the Louvre enveloped by thunder and rain
As if the Sinai mountain !

…..

God is the keeper of your time and place ;
You can on this earth enjoy all the space,
Be as important as a big cloud in the sky ;
Sir, you could take, to your fancy,
Europe from Charlemagne, Asia from Mahomet ; —
but you cannot take tomorrow from the Almighty !



III

Oh contretemps ! oh lesson ! — When the child of this man
Got the Roman empire for a toy ;
As we gave him a name of power ;
As we exposed his royal face that trembles
For the people, amazed that one can together
Be so great and so little ;

…

Glory, youth, pride, all goods that the grave takes !
The man wanted to leave something at the gates,
      But death said no !
Every part returns to where it shall go.
The air absorbs the smoke, and the earth, the cinders.
     the void the word rescinders.



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From supporting Noriega to prevent the rise of socialism in the Americas and using the Mafia to assassinate Castro, The CIA — on behalf of the people of the USA — committed a large number of very serious crimes. But these were all for a good cause: protecting capitalism from the democratic power of the people for the people — us.

 

Although capitalism isn’t a political ideal, its main supporters — the neo-conservatism of the Republican Party and its twin, the neo-liberalism of the Democrats — have bamboozled the people of America — and of the world — into a pseudo-democratic illusion which has always been an oligarchy, controlled by rich business barons. You can vote for whichever red or blue balloons you wish, the same string-pullers will get their wish: money. And should you be ruthless and psychopathic enough, you can join them. This is why someone like Bernie has been like a wake up call to a people that has been under the spell of god and cash for too long. 

In the end the blacks and the poor, afraid of getting a status above that of being oppressed, having to make really progressive decisions, and possibly voodooed by evangelicalism and spiritual songs, killed off the Bern to support a white guy who is as clean as a chimney sweep before having a shower.

There were some revelations when Assange and Snowden spilled a few beans, but in general, the dark ops from the US military, the shenanigans (and sometimes redemption) of the FBI, and the clever deception of the CIA, are still operational beyond what we can imagine. The US Navy is presently trying to show Russia and/or China that it can float its bathtubs in areas where it should not be (https://www.rt.com/news/487857-barents-sea-destroyers-provocation/). 


"Family Jewels" is the informal name used to refer to a set of reports that detail activities conducted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Considered illegal or inappropriate, these actions were conducted over the span of decades, from the 1950s to the mid-1970s.[1] William Colby, who was the CIA director in the mid-1970s and helped in the compilation of the reports, dubbed them the "skeletons" in the CIA's closet.[1] Most of the documents were publicly released on June 25, 2007, after more than three decades of secrecy.[2][3] The non-governmental National Security Archive had filed a FOIA request fifteen years earlier.[4][2]


The reports that constitute the CIA's "Family Jewels" were commissioned in 1973 by then CIA director James R. Schlesinger, in response to press accounts of CIA involvement in the Watergate scandal—in particular, support to the burglars, E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, both CIA veterans.[1] On May 7, 1973, Schlesinger signed a directive commanding senior officers to compile a report of current or past CIA actions that may have fallen outside the agency's charter.[5] The resulting report, which was in the form of a 693-page loose-leaf book of memos, was passed on to William Colby when he succeeded Schlesinger as Director of Central Intelligence in late 1973.[6]
Leaks and official release[edit]

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed some of the contents of the "Family Jewels" in a front-page New York Times article in December 1974,[7] in which he reported that:

The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States according to well-placed Government sources.[8]

Additional details of the contents trickled out over the years, but requests by journalists and historians for access to the documents under the Freedom of Information Act were long denied. Finally, in June 2007, CIA Director Michael Hayden announced that the documents would be released to the public at an announcement made to the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.[1] A six-page summary of the reports was made available at the National Security Archive (based at George Washington University), with the following introduction:
The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s.[4]

The complete set of documents, with some redactions (including a number of pages in their entirety), was released on the CIA website on June 25, 2007.[9]

Content[edit]
The reports describe numerous activities conducted by the CIA during the 1950s to 1970s that violated its charter. According to a briefing provided by CIA Director William Colby to the Justice Department on December 31, 1974, these included 18 issues which were of legal concern:[10]

• Confinement of a KGB defector, Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, that "might be regarded as a violation of the kidnapping laws”
• Wiretapping of two syndicated columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott (see also Project Mockingbird)[10]

• Physical surveillance of investigative journalist and muckraker Jack Anderson and his associates, including Les Whitten of The Washington Post and future Fox News Channel anchor and managing editor Brit Hume. Jack Anderson had written two articles on CIA-backed assassination attempts on Cuban leader Fidel Castro

• Physical surveillance of Michael Getler, then a Washington Post reporter, who was later an ombudsman for The Washington Post and PBS

• Break-in at the home of a former CIA employee

• Break-in at the office of a former defector

• Warrantless entry into the apartment of a former CIA employee

• Opening of mail to and from the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1973 (including letters associated with actress Jane Fonda) (project SRPOINTER/HTLINGUAL at JFK airport)

• Opening of mail to and from the People's Republic of China from 1969 to 1972 (project SRPOINTER/HTLINGUAL at JFK airport – see also Project SHAMROCK by the NSA)

• Funding of behavior modification research on unwitting US citizens, including unscientific, non-consensual human experiments[11] (see also Project MKULTRA concerning LSD experiments)

• Assassination plots against Cuban President Fidel Castro; DR Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba; President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic; and René Schneider, Commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army. All of these plots were said to be unsuccessful[12]

• Surveillance of dissident groups between 1967 and 1971 (see Project RESISTANCE, Project MERRIMAC and Operation CHAOS)

• Surveillance of a particular Latin American female, and of US citizens in Detroit

• Surveillance of former CIA officer and Agency critic Victor Marchetti, author of the book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, published in 1974

• Amassing of files on 9,900-plus US citizens related to the antiwar movement (see Project RESISTANCE, Project MERRIMAC and Operation CHAOS)

• Polygraph experiments with the sheriff of San Mateo County, California

• Fake CIA identification documents that might violate state laws

• Testing of electronic equipment on US telephone circuits



Reactions to release[edit]

Then-President of Cuba, Fidel Castro, who was the target of multiple CIA assassination attempts reported in these documents, responded to their release on July 1, 2007, saying that the United States was still a "killing machine" and that the revealing of the documents was an attempt at diversion.[13][14] David Corn of the liberal / progressive magazine The Nation wrote that one key 'jewel' had been redacted and remained classified.[15]Writing for The New York Times, Amy Zegart wrote: "Given all the illegal activities actually listed in this document, the hidden sections are all the more disturbing."

Note: there are far more hideous "skeletons in the closet" at the CIA and in all the US administrations. The war on Saddam being one of those, studied in many facets on this site...


Enters a woman:
Judith Campbell Exner was the first woman to publicly admit her affair with President John F. Kennedy, but not at her own discretion. An FBI investigation into JFK’s assassination and certain mob dealings uncovered Exner’s name and brought them to expose her to the nation.

But what did Judith Exner actually know?

The young woman’s first marriage put her in contact with Hollywood elites of all kinds, but most notably Frank Sinatra. Exner met the singer in November 1959 after she had divorced Campbell, and he invited her to a vacation in Hawaii. The two had a romantic relationship for several months.

It was on the evening of February 7, 1960, when Exner’s life changed forever: in the audience at one of Sinatra’s shows in Las Vegas that night was John F. Kennedy.

He was a Senator from Massachusetts at the time and in the running to become the Democratic nominee for president. Sinatra introduced them.

Judith Exner recalled the meeting in an interview with People magazine. “When you talked to Jack [JFK], he talked just to you. He was endlessly curious about everything and everybody. He loved gossip. That night he did not want me to leave his side.”

Exner spent the next day with Kennedy at Sinatra’s place. Exner claimed that Kennedy called her every day for a month following that encounter in Las Vegas. On March 7, 1960, the night before the New Hampshire primary, Kennedy and Exner made love for the first time in New York City, according to her account.

Kennedy needed help to win the West Virginia primary, and he felt that Sam Giancana, known also as Chicago’s Godfather, could assist. Exner had met Giancana at a few of Sinatra’s show, and so she met with Giancana at Kennedy’s behest.

Exner explained, “I feel like I was set up to be the courier. I was a perfect choice because I could come and go without notice, and if noticed, no one would’ve believed it anyway.”

By April 1960, Judith Exner served as a courier between Kennedy and Giancana. 

In all, Exner claimed she arranged 10 meetings between Giancana and Kennedy to help him get elected. The courier said that the mob boss once bragged to her that Kennedy wouldn’t have been elected if not for his connections in Cook County, Illinois.

In an extremely tight race, Kennedy needed Illinois to ascend to the White House.

For the next 18 months, Judith Exner served as the President’s personal liaison between the mob. “I thought I was in love with Jack. He trusted me and I was doing something important for him,” Exner told People in 1988, “I was 26 years old, and I didn’t have any great purpose in my life. That’s probably why I became so involved in doing this, and did it with such gusto. I guess I felt I was doing something important.”


Tragedy Strikes

The relationship between Exner and Kennedy grew strained as the FBI began to sniff around their dealings with the mob.

Exner realized that she was being followed. Acting FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was on assignment by Kennedy’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy, attorney general, to clamp down on organized crime. It’s not really known whether RFK knew that JFK had a relationship with mob-boss Sam Giancana. But in any case, Hoover investigated Giancana, and eventually implicated Exner. 

The relationship between Kennedy and Exner petered out amidst the investigations. She fell in a romantic relationship with Giancana briefly, but when he proposed, Exner put an end to it.

It was just a year following this drama that on Nov. 22, 1963, JFK was assassinated.

Exner fell into a profound depression. She attempted suicide, gave birth to an illegitimate son whom she gave up for adoption, and continued to be hounded by the FBI.

Eventually, she fell in love again with golf-pro Dan Exner. They married. But then in 1975, Exner was subpoenaed.


Judith Campbell Exner’s Later Years and Notoriety

No one knew of Exner’s role in the Kennedy affair until this time. That was when a Senate committee demanded to know her role in certain covert operations involving the White House as they had White House phone logs revealing her contact with the president.

She told the committee she had an extramarital affair with Kennedy. She also said that she had ferried secret envelopes between the president and Giancana for 18 months.

Exner subsequently published a tell-all book in 1977 called Mafia Moll: The Judith Exner Story, The Life of the Mistress of John F. Kennedy. She alleges many publishers turned her down for fear of government reprisals and she told People magazine she kept the affair secret because she thought she would be killed. And with good reason.

Just before he could also be subpoenaed, Sam Giancana was murdered — shot seven times in the head in his own kitchen.

Read more:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/judith-exner

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Giancana and Roselli were chosen by CIA director Allen Dulles and his men, who viewed Castro's Communist politics as a dire threat to the United States. But they didn't want to take him out themselves.

"Instead," Maier writes, "these Ivy League-educated spies and West Point-trained colonels wanted Mafia figures to be recruited to kill Castro in a 'gangster-type action' — a bloody, bullet-riddled mess that would be untraceable to the CIA and especially the White House.”


That last part is notable. The scheme was originally given the green light by an outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower; when Kennedy found out about it, he was all on board. Maier ascribes Kennedy's enthusiasm in part to his admiration for Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, an admiration soon shared by Dulles. That led in turn to the CIA's labs being tasked with developing Bond-style spy gadgets — including exploding cigars designed to kill the stogie-loving Castro.

To recruit Giancana and Roselli, the CIA used a "cutout," private investigator and fixer Robert Maheu, whose other main client was the odd (to put it mildly) billionaire Howard Hughes.

In addition to the web of gangsters, intelligence agencies and politicians, Maier explains the roles of anti-Castro Cuban refugees and of celebrities, especially Frank Sinatra, who was such a fanboy of Giancana he gave the mob boss a ring that matched his own.

Throughout the book, Maier ties in the bizarre three-way relationship among Giancana, Kennedy and a beautiful young woman named Judith Campbell. A regular on the party scene in Las Vegas with Sinatra and his Rat Pack, she was romantically involved with the mob boss and the president at the same time. 


But the book is not all dishy details. To get to Castro, Giancana and Roselli worked with Trafficante. They had all been associates in Havana, and the Spanish-speaking Trafficante could be a big help with contacts there, they reasoned. But, as Maier tells it, there is evidence that suggests that Trafficante's allegiance was not to his Mafia associates but to Castro — that he was a double agent.


Maier pulls no smoking gun, but he raises the inevitable questions about whether this whole hot mess was tied to the assassination of John Kennedy. Did Castro, angered by the multiple attempts on his life, seek revenge? Were the mobsters, who expected kid-glove treatment from the administration, infuriated by Attorney General Robert Kennedy's aggressive legal pursuit of organized crime?

As they aged, Giancana and Roselli saw their power in the mob diminish, but their role in the Castro plot still made them targets of investigations. 


In 1975, just before Giancana was scheduled to testify before a Senate committee about his CIA involvement, he was executed in his home. Roselli did testify, but not truthfully. In Miami in 1976, he had dinner at a restaurant with Trafficante. A few days later Roselli went to play golf and never came back. His body was found, carved into pieces, in a barrel bobbing in the waters off North Miami.


Neither murder was solved. 


Sinatra was never called to testify about his relationships with any of them. Trafficante did come before a congressional committee but was skillfully evasive. Maier writes that, after the deaths of Giancana and Roselli, when Sinatra performed in Florida, Trafficante was often in the audience, as Giancana had been in the old days.

Trafficante died of heart failure at his home in Tampa in 1987, at age 72. His true allegiances remain an enigma.


And Castro, of course, outlived them all, retaining his hold on power for over five decades and dying, by all reports peacefully, at age 90 in 2016, not an exploding cigar in sight.

https://www.tampabay.com/books/tampa-crime-boss-santo-trafficante-jr-pla...

———————————

Meanwhile the USA had to invade a country, Panama, to prevent a guy named Noriega spilling the beans about his long association with the CIA…

“Who did this? Who did this?” waiting journalists shouted through the railings, meaning who was responsible for this crude attempt at forcible regime change. “The Americans did this! The piranhas did this. They want to finish Panama!” Noriega shouted back in Spanish. Then, as if fearing the Yanquis might take another shot at him, “Pineapple Face” (as Noriega was known, due to his pock-marked skin) hurried back inside.

Noriega, who died on Monday at the age of 83, was right to be nervous. The October coup attempt marked a turning point in Washington’s attitude to a man whose rise to power it had assisted, who became a valued CIA cold war asset and go-between in Central America’s dirty wars, but who turned into a monster US spy bosses could no longer control. Noriega had outlived his usefulness. Now he was an embarrassment. So Bush made him America’s most wanted.

When Noriega subsequently launched a vicious wave of repression, threatened American personnel guarding the Panama Canal and declared a “state of war” with the US, Bush pounced. Economic sanctions and quiet diplomacy had failed. Control over the strategically and economically vital canal was threatened. And Noriega knew too much. In December 1989, Bush ordered Gen Colin Powell, then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to launch Operation Just Cause, sending 26,000 invasion troops into Panama in a rehearsal of the Powell “doctrine of overwhelming force” that was next employed two years later in the first Gulf war.

Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/30/general-manuel-noriega-fea...

The Strange Case of a Nazi Who Became an Israeli Hitman 

Otto Skorzeny, one of the Mossad’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s favorites.


From Dan Raviv — Mar 27, 2016

On September 11, 1962, a German scientist vanished. The basic facts were simple: Heinz Krug had been at his office, and he never came home.

The only other salient detail known to police in Munich was that Krug commuted to Cairo frequently. He was one of dozens of Nazi rocket experts who had been hired by Egypt to develop advanced weapons for that country.

HaBoker, a now defunct Israeli newspaper, surprisingly claimed to have the explanation: The Egyptians kidnapped Krug to prevent him from doing business with Israel.

But that somewhat clumsy leak was an attempt by Israel to divert investigators from digging too deeply into the case — not that they ever would have found the 49-year-old scientist.

We can now report — based on interviews with former Mossad officers and with Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century ago — that Krug was murdered as part of an Israeli espionage plot to intimidate the German scientists working for Egypt.

Moreover, the most astounding revelation is the Mossad agent who fired the fatal gunshots: Otto Skorzeny, one of the Israeli spy agency’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s personal favorites among the party’s commando leaders. The Führer, in fact, awarded Skorzeny the army’s most prestigious medal, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, for leading the rescue operation that plucked his friend Benito Mussolini out from the hands of his captors.


But that was then. By 1962, according to our sources — who spoke only on the promise that they not be identified — Skorzeny had a different employer. The story of how that came to be is one of the most important untold tales in the archives of the Mossad, the agency whose full name, translated from Hebrew, is “The Institute for Intelligence and Special Missions.”

Key to understanding the story is that the Mossad had made stopping German scientists then working on Egypt’s rocket program one of its top priorities. For several months before his death, in fact, Krug, along with other Germans who were working in Egypt’s rocket-building industry, had received threatening messages. When in Germany, they got phone calls in the middle of the night, telling them to quit the Egyptian program. When in Egypt, some were sent letter bombs — and several people were injured by the explosions.

Krug, as it happens, was near the top of the Mossad’s target list.

During the war that ended 17 years earlier, Krug was part of a team of superstars at Peenemünde, the military test range on the coast of the Baltic Sea, where top German scientists toiled in the service of Hitler and the Third Reich. The team, led by Wernher von Braun, was proud to have engineered the rockets for the Blitz that nearly defeated England. Its wider ambitions included missiles that could fly a lot farther, with greater accuracy and more destructive power.

According to Mossad research, a decade after the war ended, von Braun invited Krug and other former colleagues to join him in America. Von Braun, his war record practically expunged, was leading a missile development program for the United States. He even became one of the fathers of the NASA space exploration program. Krug opted for another, seemingly more lucrative option: joining other scientists from the Peenemünde group — led by the German professor Wolfgang Pilz, whom he greatly admired — in Egypt. They would set up a secret strategic missile program for that Arab country.

In the Israelis’ view, Krug had to know that Israel, the country where so many Holocaust survivors had found refuge, was the intended target of his new masters’ military capabilities. A committed Nazi would see this as an opportunity to continue the ghastly mission of exterminating the Jewish people.

The threatening notes and phone calls, however, were driving Krug crazy. He and his colleagues knew that the threats were from Israelis. It was obvious. In 1960, Israeli agents had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief administrators of the Holocaust, in far-off Argentina. The Israelis astonishingly smuggled the Nazi to Jerusalem, where he was put on trial. Eichmann was hanged on May 31, 1962.

It was reasonable for Krug to feel that a Mossad noose might be tightening around his neck, too. That was why he summoned help: a Nazi hero who was considered the best of the best in Hitler’s heyday.

On the day he vanished, according to our new information from reliable sources, Krug left his office to meet Skorzeny, the man he felt would be his savior.

Skorzeny, then 54 years old, was quite simply a legend. A dashing, innovative military man who grew up in Austria — famous for a long scar on the left side of his face, the result of his overly exuberant swordplay while fencing as a youth— he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS. Thanks to Skorzeny’s exploits as a guerrilla commander, Hitler recognized that he had a man who would go above and beyond, and stop at nothing, to complete a mission.

The colonel’s feats during the war inspired Germans and the grudging respect of Germany’s enemies. American and British military intelligence labeled Skorzeny “the most dangerous man in Europe.”

Krug contacted Skorzeny in the hope that the great hero — then living in Spain — could create a strategy to keep the scientists safe.

The two men were in Krug’s white Mercedes, driving north out of Munich, and Skorzeny said that as a first step he had arranged for three bodyguards. He said they were in a car directly behind and would accompany them to a safe place in a forest for a chat. Krug was murdered, then and there, without so much as a formal indictment or death sentence. The man who pulled the trigger was none other than the famous Nazi war hero. Israel’s espionage agency had managed to turn Otto Skorzeny into a secret agent for the Jewish state.

After Krug was shot, the three Israelis poured acid on his body, waited awhile and then buried what was left in a hole they had dug beforehand. They covered the makeshift grave with lime, so that search dogs — and wild animals — would never pick up the scent of human remains.

The troika that coordinated this extrajudicial execution was led by a future prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, who was then head of the Mossad’s special operations unit. One of the others was Zvi “Peter” Malkin, who had tackled Eichmann in Argentina and in later life would enter the art world as a New York-based painter. Supervising from a distance was Yosef “Joe” Raanan, who was the secret agency’s senior officer in Germany. All three had lost large numbers of family members among the 6 million Jews murdered by the cruel, continent-wide genocide that Eichmann had managed.

Israel’s motivation in working with a man such as Skorzeny was clear: to get as close as possible to Nazis who were helping Egypt plot a new Holocaust.

The Mossad’s playbook for protecting Israel and the Jewish people has no preordained rules or limits. The agency’s spies have evaded the legal systems in a host of countries for the purpose of liquidating Israel’s enemies: Palestinian terrorists, Iranian scientists, and even a Canadian arms inventor named Gerald Bull, who worked for Saddam Hussein until bullets ended his career in Brussels in 1990. Mossad agents in Lillehammer, Norway, even killed a Moroccan waiter in the mistaken belief that he was the mastermind behind the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by the terrorist group known as Black September. Ahmed Bouchikhi was shot down in 1973 as he left a movie theatre with his pregnant wife. The Israeli government later paid compensation to her without officially admitting wrongdoing. The botched mission delayed further Mossad assassinations, but it did not end them.

To get to unexpected places on these improbable missions, the Mossad has sometimes found itself working with unsavory partners. When short-term alliances could help, the Israelis were willing to dance with the proverbial devil, if that is what seemed necessary.

But why did Skorzeny work with the Mossad?

He was born in Vienna in June 1908, to a middle-class family proud of its military service for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From an early age he seemed fearless, bold and talented at weaving false, complex tales that deceived people in myriad ways. These were essential requirements for a commando officer at war, and certainly valuable qualities for the Mossad.

He joined Austria’s branch of the Nazi Party in 1931, when he was 23, served in its armed militia, the SA, and enthusiastically worshipped Hitler. The führer was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then seized Austria in 1938. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and World War II broke out, Skorzeny left his construction firm and volunteered — not for the regular army, the Wehrmacht, but for the Leibstandarte SS Panzer division that served as Hitler’s personal bodyguard force.

Skorzeny, in a memoir written after the war was over, told of his years of SS service as though they were almost bloodless travels in occupied Poland, Holland and France. His activities could not have been as innocuous as his book made them seem. He took part in battles in Russia and Poland, and certainly the Israelis believed it was very likely that he was involved in exterminating Jews. The Waffen-SS, after all, was not the regular army; it was the military arm of the Nazi Party and its genocidal plan.

His most famous and daring mission was in September 1943: leading commandos who flew engineless gliders to reach an Italian mountaintop resort to rescue Hitler’s friend and ally, the recently ousted Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and spirit him away under harrowing conditions.

This was the escapade that earned Skorzeny his promotion to lieutenant colonel — and operational control of Hitler’s SS Special Forces. Hitler also rewarded him with several hours of face-to-face conversation, along with the coveted Knight’s Cross. But it was far from his only coup.

In September 1944, when Hungary’s dictator, Admiral Miklos Horthy, a Nazi ally, was on the verge of suing for peace with Russia as Axis fortunes plunged, Skorzeny led a contingent of Special Forces into Budapest to kidnap Horthy and replace his government with the more hard-line Fascist Arrow Cross regime. That regime, in turn, went on to kill or to deport to concentration camps tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who had managed to survive the war up to that point.

Also in 1944, Skorzeny handpicked 150 soldiers, including some who spoke fair to excellent English in a bold plan to fend off the Allies after they landed in Normandy on D-Day in June. With the Allies advancing through France, Skorzeny dressed his men in captured U.S. uniforms, and procured captured American tanks for them to use in attacking and confusing Allied troops from behind their own lines.

The bold deception — including the act of stealing U.S. soldiers’ property — plunged Skorzeny into two years of interrogation, imprisonment and trial after the war ended. Eventually, Allied military judges acquitted him in 1947. Once again, the world’s newspapers headlined him as Europe’s most dangerous man. He enjoyed the fame, and published his memoirs in various editions and many languages, including the 1957 book “Skorzeny’s Special Missions: The Autobiography of Hitler’s Commando Ace,” published by Greenhill Books. He spun some tall-tale hyperbole in the books, and definitely downplayed his contacts with the most bloodthirsty Nazi leaders. When telling of his many conversations with Hitler, he described the dictator as a caring and attentive military strategist.

There was much that Skorzeny did not reveal, including how he escaped from the American military authorities who held him for a third year after his acquittal. Prosecutors were considering more charges against him in the Nuremberg tribunals, but during one transfer he was able to escape — reputedly with the help of former SS soldiers wearing American military police uniforms.

Skorzeny’s escape was also rumored to have been assisted by the CIA’s predecessor agency, the Office of Special Services, for which he did some work after the war. It is certainly notable that he was allowed to settle in Spain — a paradise for Nazi war veterans, with protection from the pro-Western Fascist, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. In the years that followed he did some advisory work for President Juan Peron in Argentina and for Egypt’s government. It was during this period that Skorzeny became friendly with the Egyptian officers who were running the missile program and employing German experts.

In Israel, a Mossad planning team started to work on where it could be best to find and kill Skorzeny. But the head of the agency, Isser Harel, had a bolder plan: Instead of killing him, snare him.

Mossad officials had known for some time that to target the German scientists, they needed an inside man in the target group. In effect, the Mossad needed a Nazi.

The Israelis would never find a Nazi they could trust, but they saw a Nazi they could count on: someone thorough and determined, with a record of success in executing innovative plans, and skilled at keeping secrets. The seemingly bizarre decision to recruit Skorzeny came with some personal pain, because the task was entrusted to Raanan, who was also born in Vienna and had barely escaped the Holocaust. As an Austrian Jew, his name was originally Kurt Weisman. After the Nazis took over in 1938, he was sent — at age 16 — to British-ruled Palestine. His mother and younger brother stayed in Europe and perished.

Like many Jews in Palestine, Kurt Weisman joined the British military looking for a chance to strike back at Germany. He served in the Royal Air Force. After the creation of Israel in 1948, he followed the trend of taking on a Hebrew name, and as Joe Raanan he was among the first pilots in the new nation’s tiny air force. The young man rapidly became an airbase commander and later the air force’s intelligence chief.

Raanan’s unique résumé, including some work he did for the RAF in psychological warfare, attracted the attention of Harel, who signed him up for the Mossad in 1957. A few years later, Raanan was sent to Germany to direct the secret agency’s operations there — with a special focus on the German scientists in Egypt. Thus it was Raanan who had to devise and command an operation to establish contact with Skorzeny, the famous Nazi commando.

The Israeli spy found it difficult to get over his reluctance, but when ordered, he assembled a team that traveled to Spain for “pre-action intelligence.” Its members observed Skorzeny, his home, his workplace and his daily routines. The team included a German woman in her late 20s who was not a trained, full-time Mossad agent but a “helper.” Known by the Hebrew label “saayanit” (or “saayan” if a male), this team member was like an extra in a grandly theatrical movie, playing whatever role might be required. A saayanit would often pose as the girlfriend of an undercover Mossad combatant.

Internal Mossad reports later gave her name as Anke and described her as pretty, vivacious and truly flirtatious. That would be perfect for the job at hand — a couples game.

One evening in the early months of 1962, the affluent and ruggedly handsome — though scarred — Skorzeny was in a luxurious bar in Madrid with his significantly younger wife, Ilse von Finckenstein. Her own Nazi credentials were impeccable; she was the niece of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s talented finance minister.

They had a few cocktails and were relaxing, when the bartender introduced them to a German-speaking couple he had been serving. The woman was pretty and in her late 20s, and her escort was a well-dressed man of around 40. They were German tourists, they said, but they also told a distressing story: that they had just survived a harrowing street robbery.

They spoke perfect German, of course, the man with a bit of an Austrian accent, like Skorzeny’s. They gave their false names, but in reality they were, respectively, a Mossad agent whose name must still be kept secret and his “helper,” Anke.

There were more drinks, then somewhat flamboyant flirting, and soon Skorzeny’s wife invited the young couple, who had lost everything — money, passports and luggage — to stay the night at their sumptuous villa. There was just something irresistible about the newcomers. A sense of sexual intimacy between the two couples was in the air. After the four entered the house, however, at a crucial moment when the playful flirting reached the point where it seemed time to pair off, Skorzeny — the charming host — pulled a gun on the young couple and declared: “I know who you are, and I know why you’re here. You are Mossad, and you’ve come to kill me.”

The young couple did not even flinch. The man said: “You are half-right. We are from Mossad, but if we had come to kill you, you would have been dead weeks ago.”

“Or maybe,” Skorzeny said, “I would rather just kill you.”

Anke spoke up. “If you kill us, the ones who come next won’t bother to have a drink with you, You won’t even see their faces before they blow out your brains. Our offer to you is just for you to help us.”

After a long minute that felt like an hour, Skorzeny did not lower his gun, but he asked: “What kind of help? You need something done?” The Mossad officer — who even now is not being named by colleagues — told Skorzeny that Israel needed information and would pay him handsomely.

Hitler’s favorite commando paused for a few moments to think, and then surprised the Israeli by saying: “Money doesn’t interest me. I have enough.”

The Mossad man was further surprised to hear Skorzeny name something that he did want: “I need for Wiesenthal to remove my name from his list.” Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Vienna-based Nazi-hunter, had Skorzeny listed as a war criminal, but now the accused was insisting he had not committed any crimes.

The Israeli did not believe any senior Nazi officer’s claim of innocence, but recruiting an agent for an espionage mission calls for well-timed lies and deception. “Okay,” he said, “that will be done. We’ll take care of that.”

Skorzeny finally lowered his weapon, and the two men shook hands. The Mossad man concealed his disgust.

“I knew that the whole story about you being robbed was bogus,” Skorzeny said, with the boastful smile of a fellow intelligence professional. “Just a cover story.”

The next step to draw him in was to bring him to Israel. His Mossad handler, Raanan, secretly arranged a flight to Tel Aviv, where Skorzeny was introduced to Harel. The Nazi was questioned and also received more specific instructions and guidelines. During this visit, Skorzeny was taken to Yad Vashem, the museum in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Nazi was silent and seemed respectful. There was a strange moment there when a war survivor pointed to Skorzeny and singled him out by name as “a war criminal.”

Raanan, as skilled an actor as any spy must be, smiled at the Jewish man and softly said: “No, you’re mistaken. He’s a relative of mine and himself is a Holocaust survivor.”

Naturally, many in Israeli intelligence wondered if the famous soldier for Germany had genuinely — and so easily — been recruited. Did he really care so much about his image that he demanded to be removed from a list of war criminals? Skorzeny indicated that being on the list meant he was a target for assassination. By cooperating with the Mossad, he was buying life insurance.

The new agent seemed to prove his full reliability. As requested by the Israelis, he flew to Egypt and compiled a detailed list of German scientists and their addresses.

Skorzeny also provided the names of many front companies in Europe that were procuring and shipping components for Egypt’s military projects. These included Heinz Krug’s company, Intra, in Munich.

Raanan continued to be the project manager of the whole operation aimed against the German scientists. But he assigned the task of staying in contact with Skorzeny to two of his most effective operatives: Rafi Eitan and Avraham Ahituv.

Eitan was one of the most amazing characters in Israeli intelligence. He earned the nickname “Mr. Kidnap” for his role in abducting Eichmann and other men wanted by Israeli security agencies. Eitan also helped Israel acquire materials for its secret nuclear program. He would go on to earn infamy in the 1980s by running Jonathan Pollard as an American Jewish spy in the United States government.

Surprisingly flamboyant after a life in the shadows, in 2006, at age 79, Eitan became a Member of Parliament as head of a political party representing senior citizens.

“Yes, I met and ran Skorzeny,” Eitan confirmed to us recently. Like other Mossad veterans, he refused to go on the record with more details.

Ahituv, who was born in Germany in 1930, was similarly involved in a wide array of Israeli clandestine operations all around the globe. From 1974 to 1980 he was head of the domestic security service, Shin Bet, which also guarded many secrets and often conducted joint projects with the Mossad.

The Mossad agents did try to persuade Wiesenthal to remove Skorzeny from his list of war criminals, but the Nazi hunter refused. The Mossad, with typical chutzpah, instead forged a letter — supposedly to Skorzeny from Wiesenthal— declaring that his name had been cleared.

Skorzeny continued to surprise the Israelis with his level of cooperation. During a trip to Egypt, he even mailed exploding packages; one Israeli-made bomb killed five Egyptians in the military rocket site Factory 333, where German scientists worked.

The campaign of intimidation was largely successful, with most of the Germans leaving Egypt. Israel stopped the violence and threats, however, when one team was arrested in Switzerland while putting verbal pressure on a scientist’s family. A Mossad man and an Austrian scientist who was working for Israel were put on trial. Luckily, the Swiss judge sympathized with Israel’s fear of Egypt’s rocket program. The two men were convicted of making threats, but they were immediately set free.

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, however, concluded that all of this being out in public was disastrous to Israel’s image — and specifically could upset a deal he had arranged with West Germany to sell weapons to Israel.

Harel submitted a letter of resignation, and to his shock, Ben-Gurion accepted it. The new Mossad director, commander of military intelligence Gen. Meir Amit, moved the agency away from chasing or intimidating Nazis.

Amit did activate Skorzeny at least once more, however. The spymaster wanted to explore the possibility of secret peace negotiations, so he asked Israel’s on-the-payroll Nazi to arrange a meeting with a senior Egyptian official. Nothing ever came of it.

Skorzeny never explained his precise reasons for helping Israel. His autobiography does not contain the word “Israel,” or even “Jew.” It is true that he sought and got the life insurance. The Mossad did not assassinate him.

He also had a very strong streak of adventurism, and the notion of doing secret work with fascinating spies — even if they were Jewish — must have been a magnet for the man whose innovative escapades had earned him the Iron Cross medal from Hitler. Skorzeny was the kind of man who would feel most youthful and alive through killing and fear.

It is possible that regret and atonement also played a role. The Mossad’s psychological analysts doubted it, but Skorzeny may have genuinely felt sorry for his actions during World War II.

He may have been motivated by a combination of all these factors, and perhaps even others. But Otto Skorzeny took this secret to his grave. He died of cancer, at age 67, in Madrid in July 1975.

He had two funerals, one in a chapel in Spain’s capital and the other to bury his cremated remains in the Skorzeny family plot in Vienna. Both services were attended by dozens of German military veterans and wives, who did not hesitate to give the one-armed Nazi salute and sing some of Hitler’s favorite songs. Fourteen of Skorzeny’s medals, many featuring a boldly black swastika, were prominently paraded in the funeral processions.

There was one man at the service in Madrid who was known to no one in the crowd, but out of habit he still made sure to hide his face as much as he could. That was Joe Raanan, who by then had become a successful businessman in Israel.

The Mossad did not send Raanan to Skorzeny’s funeral; he decided to attend on his own, and at his own expense. This was a personal tribute from one Austrian-born warrior to another, and from an old spy handler to the best, but most loathsome, agent he ever ran.

Read more:
https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/holocaust-remembrance-day/the-strange-cas...

Dan Raviv, a CBS News correspondent based in Washington, and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman are co-authors of five books about Israel’s espionage and security agencies, including “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars” (Levant Books, 2014). Contact them at [email protected]

 

 

 

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UK column have been doing some of the best work exposing the realities of the covid19 rollout. We recommend everyone follow their channel. This May 11 segment looks at Boris Johnson’s latest announcements and what the new five-stage ‘Covid alert system’ means for UK citizens.

It should be obvious by now, even to the most determinedly avoidant or trusting individuals that the ‘covid alert system’ and all the rest of the authoritarian baggage being unpacked has nothing to do with disease prevention and control. 

You do not need special five-stage alert systems to deal with a common coronavirus that is admitted to be harmless to 89-99% of those infected.

Let’s stop and read that again. And again. Let’s repeat it as often as needed for the meaning to penetrate to the same level of mind currently in the grip of the fear porn. 

Harmless to 80-99% of those infected.

Despite all the speculation you can read about strokes, permanent lung damage, weird bat DNA etc etc, it still does not change the fact that, according to the same official sources trying to scare you, this is a minor coronavirus that is harmless to the hugely overwhelming majority of human beings.

Put your programmed fear response aside and watch this valuable breakdown.

 

 

See the programme:

 

https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/13/watch-boris-johnson-coercing-uk-into-accepting-covid19-house-arrest/

 

See also:

 

how bill gates became the major controller of your health...

 

The only thing to fear is... opinion polls about...

 

 

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Democracy today,

democracy tomorrow.

Democracy today, democracy tomorrow… but not for a while! SDN [Sydney Democracy Network] regrets to announce to its many hundreds of thousands of readers, contributors and supporters worldwide that senior administrators at the University of Sydney decided for budgetary reasons to withdraw support for our scholarly research, publication and outreach activities. Sadly, our exciting global adventure is over. But the pages of our website will remain a public treasure, for you to value and enjoy.

 

Professor John Keane, Director

 

 

Read more:

http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org

 

see also:

beware bushit bearing gifts .....

 

 

 

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The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History. a review by Paul du Quenoy

...

That Mikaberidze could achieve this feat in modern American academia bucks one of the historical profession’s most lamentable trends—its steady reduction of military and what used to be called “diplomatic” history to virtual nonexistence. The tenured apparatchiks who nurse university-based history as it enters its death throes just don’t like those fields. Their “maps and chaps” approach is too centered on elites for their plebian sensibilities. Document-based empiricism leaves no room for the identities, feelings, and other “subjectivities” they privilege. Studying martial triumph and tragedy veers worryingly toward patriotism and national pride. And they find these high political fields so obnoxiously full of those troublesome white males. Even leftists who engage this taboo material—to discredit imperialism or try prove that America started the Cold War, for example—now sheepishly find themselves marginalized in a warped academic culture that just doesn’t want them around.

In top schools these fields are barely taught and openly derided by “scholars” more inclined to study the people who scrubbed foreign ministers’ toilets than they are to study foreign ministers. Once one of the top two or three undergraduate majors, the number of new history B.A.s has plummeted by nearly 50 percent in just the last decade, following on a gentler decline over the previous several decades. The idea of pursuing the discipline at the graduate level has now become literally laughable among the best and brightest, who are justifiably put off by administrative caprice, stagnant salaries, and an ever shrinking job market. Merely taking history courses as currently taught is downright offensive to large numbers of young people who object to the idea that they and their country are little more than bad products of scabrous racial conflict.

Two generations ago, a scholar of Mikaberidze’s caliber and acumen would have commanded a prestigious Ivy League appointment, trained dozens of brilliantly engaged minds who would have gone on to impressive careers of international significance, and influenced decisions at the highest levels of government. Thanks to the historical profession as it currently operates, he sadly has no prospects of that. We can only hope that this worthy scholar’s academic perch will remain comfortable enough for him to continue to produce books of exceptional quality and insight that will inform educated publics who rely less and less on the decaying university model of humanities education.

Paul du Quenoy is president and publisher of Academica Press.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/napoleon-and-the-fall-o...

 

 

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Following the end of WWII, both the U.S. and British intelligence agencies were concerned about the possible invasion of Western Europe by Soviet Russia. Building upon their experience of supporting resistance cells who fought against German occupation during the war, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services(O.S.S – the forerunner of the CIA) and the British Special Operations Executive (S.O.E – who were eventually absorbed within Britain’s foreign military intelligence agency M.I.6) formed a number of clandestine military units throughout Europe.

Some of these so called ‘stay behind’ paramilitary units were built around resistance groups, already in existence, more so in Scandinavian countries. Elsewhere new units were created, drawing upon local assets and activists, often including far right extremists. Neither the O.S.S nor the S.O.E were averse to using neo-Nazi terrorists as operatives. Communism was perceived as the greater threat. Its state atheism threatened the Roman Catholic Church, Marxism threatened capitalism and the power of the banks and its adherence to international socialism (proletarian internationalism,) focused upon class struggle, threatened the hierarchy of the Western establishment. More than the Soviet Union itself, it was the potential spread of communist ideology which came to be seen as the primary danger. Something to be resisted at all costs.

 

Read more:

https://in-this-together.com/operation-gladio-false-flag-evidence/

 

 

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CIA Project MK-ULTRA

The United States government funded and performed countless psychological experiments on unwitting humans, especially during the Cold War era, perhaps partially to help develop more effective torture and interrogation techniques for the US military and the CIA, but the almost unbelievable extent, range and duration of these activities far surpassed possible interrogation applications and appear to have been performed from a fundamental monstrous inhumanity. To simply read summaries of these, even without the details, is almost traumatising in itself.

In studies that began in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the US Military began identifying and testing truth serums like mescaline and scopolamine on human subjects, which they claimed might be useful during interrogations of Soviet spies. These programs eventually expanded to a project of vast scope and enormous ambition, centralised under the CIA in what would come to be called Project MK-ULTRA, a major collection of interrogation and mind-control projects. Inspired initially by delusions of a brainwashing program, the CIA began thousands of experiments using both American and foreign subjects often without their knowledge or against their will, destroying countless tens of thousands of lives and causing many deaths and suicides. Funded in part by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and jointly operated by the CIA, the FBI and the intelligence divisions of all military groups, this decades-long CIA research constituted an immense collection of some of the most cold-blooded and callous atrocities conceivable, in a determined effort to develop reliable techniques of controlling the human mind.

MK-ULTRA was an umbrella for a large number of clandestine activities that formed part of the CIA’s psychological warfare research and development, consisting of about 150 projects and sub-projects, many of them very large in their own right, with research and human experimentation occurring at more than 80 institutions that included about 50 of America’s best-known colleges and universities, 15 or 20 major research Foundations including Rockefeller, dozens of major hospitals, a great many prisons and mental institutions, and many chemical and pharmaceutical companies. At least 200 well-known private scientific researchers were part of this program, as were many thousands of physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists and other similar. Many of these institutions and individuals received their funding through so-called “grants” from what were clearly CIA front companies. In 1994 a Congressional subcommittee revealed that up to 500,000 unwitting Americans were endangered, damaged or destroyed by secret CIA and military tests between 1940 and 1974. Given the deliberate destruction of all the records, the full truth of the MK-ULTRA victims will never be known, and certainly not the death toll. As the inspector general of the US Army later stated in a report to a Senate committee: “In universities, hospitals and research institutions, an unknown number of chemical tests and experiments … were carried out with healthy adults, with mentally ill and with prison inmates.” According to one government report, “In 149 separate mind-control experiments on thousands of people, CIA researchers used hypnosis, electroshock treatments, LSD, marijuana, morphine, Benzedrine, mescaline, seconal, atropine and other drugs.” Test subjects were usually people who could not easily object – prisoners, mental patients and members of minority groups – but the agency also performed many experiments on normal, healthy civilians without their knowledge or consent.

There were 149 subprojects listed under the umbrella of MKULTRA. Project MONARCH has not been officially identified by any government documentation as one of the corresponding subprojects, but is used rather, as a descriptive “catch phrase” by survivors, therapists, and possible “insiders”. MONARCH may in fact, have culminated from MKSEARCH subprojects such as operation SPELLBINDER, which was set up to create “sleeper” assassins (i.e. “Manchurian candidates”) who could be activated upon receiving a key word or phrase while in a post-hypnotic trance. Operation OFTEN, a study which attempted to harness the power of occult forces was possibly one of several cover programs to hide the insidious reality of Project MONARCH. There were also operations BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKNAOMI, and MKDELTA.

Another CIA Operation called Midnight Climax consisted of a network of CIA locations to which prostitutes on the CIA payroll would lure clients where they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of substances including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass.[1][2]Several significant operational techniques were developed in this theater, including extensive research into sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the possible use of mind-altering drugs in field operations. In the 1970s, as another part of its mind control program, the CIA conspired with Eli Lilly and Company to produce one hundred million doses of the illegal drug LSD, enough to send almost everyone in the United States on a trip.No explanation was ever given as to what the CIA did with a hundred million doses of acid but, since much of this activity was exported, reviewing international political events during this period may bring interesting possibilities to mind.

Frank Olson Project

Another part of the CIA mind-control project was aimed at finding a “truth serum” to use on spies. Test subjects were given LSD and other drugs, often without their knowledge or consent, and some were tortured. Many people died – or were killed – as a result of these experiments, and an unknown number of government employees working on these projects were murdered for fear they would tell what they had seen, perhaps the best-known being Frank Olson whose death I have described below.[3]The project was steadfastly denied by both the government and the CIA, but was finally exposed after investigations by the Rockefeller Commission. When this information became known, the US government paid many millions of dollars to settle the hundreds of claims and lawsuits that resulted. There exists much evidence that these programs had never been terminated.

 

Read more:

https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/cia-project-mk-ultra/

 

Read also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35922

 

 

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