“They say they can’t believe it, it’s a sacrilegious shame
Now, who would want to hurt such a hero of the game?
But you know I predicted it; I knew he had to fall
How did it happen? I hope his suffering was small.
Tell me every detail, I’ve got to know it all,
And do you have a picture of the pain?” – Phil Ochs, The Crucifixion
“You are aware of only one unrest;
Oh, never learn to know the other!
Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,
And one is striving to forsake its brother.” – Goethe, Faust
President John Kennedy was assassinated by the U.S. national-security state, led by the C.I.A., on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. That is a fact beyond dispute, except for those who wish to engage in pseudo-debates to deny the obvious. I prefer not to, since there is nothing to debate.
But there is everything to mourn, even after fifty-five years, first of course for the man himself, then for those who have suffered and died for bearing witness to the truth about his assassination, and finally for the consequences of his murder, because it cut savagely into any pretense of American innocence and set the stage for the nihilistic tragedies that have followed, including the murders of Malcolm X, MLK, RFK, the September 11, 2001 attacks, and the ongoing “war on terror.”
Today, JFK’s killers have tightened their chokehold on the country and on the throats of those wishing to tell the truth. Their penetration of the corporate mass media is wide and deep, and the narratives they spin can make an innocent soul’s head spin. Everything is twisted to serve their interests. With a click of a finger, truth and falsehood rotate like spokes on a rapidly turning wheel – spooks turning spokes in a game of hide and seek meant to confuse and derange the public. Constant befuddlement is the name of this racket.
It’s a melancholy task to contemplate the parts played, consciously or unconsciously, by various actors in this deadly game, not least because one’s own naiveté prompts one sometimes to question or abandon those one once admired and to dive deeply into the twisted minds and hearts of fellow humans. What follows concerns one such man’s strange story as told by another man, whose story is perhaps stranger, and what their relationships with U.S. intelligence, if any, might suggest about our situation today.
Oh I am just a student, Sir, and only want to learn
But it’s hard to read through the risin’ smoke of the books that you like to burn
So I’d like to make a promise and I’d like to make a vow
That when I got something to say, Sir, I’m gonna say it now
Those are the words of the folk singer, Phil Ochs, from his 1966 song “I’m Going To Say It Now.” Ochs wrote and performed passionate protest songs during the 1960s that inspired many to speak and act in opposition to the Vietnam War and many other injustices. He was a fiery, sardonic activist whose music, such as “I Ain’t Marching Any More,” induced many to refuse military induction and to burn their draft cards. He, not Bob Dylan, was the committed voice of the 1960s radical anti-war folk music world, singing at events and rallies across the country, culminating at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago when the Chicago police rioted and savagely beat anti-war protesters, and Yippies and Hippies and protesters gathered in Lincoln Park to listen to Ochs sing defiant songs to keep up their spirits. But Ochs’s own spirit was broken that terrible year of so many deaths, which started his long descent into alcoholism and mental chaos that ended with his suicide in 1976.
I was one of those who was inspired by his music. I still am. Soulful and satiric, biting and beautiful, stirring and inspiriting, it has a power few can equal. But I have come to a point where I feel compelled to broach a mysterious story involving Ochs, something that when I first heard it in passing shocked me terribly. No, I thought, that can’t be true; it’s impossible.
But the more I have researched it, the truer it seems – with emphasis on the word “seems” – for there is only one source for the story, a source I don’t doubt but can’t confirm.
But either way, I have come to see the story as emblematic of the treachery and confusion sown by the CIA, its Operation Mockingbird, and its so-called Mighty Wurlitzer that have played so many for fools through its control of the corporate mass media and the production of narratives that run like little movies too perfect to be true, but too true to be false – even when they are. Screens within screens within screens. Efforts to fuck up as many people as possible in operation chaos, to derange and cleave them into split personalities within and without, and to mystify as many minds as possible.
I think Phil Ochs was one so mystified. I am wondering if in life and death he was used and abused by radically evil forces, whomever they may be.
According to Phil’s best friend from college at Ohio State, the man who taught him to play guitar, his singing partner, best man at his wedding, constant pal in their days in Greenwich Village, and life-long friend, Jim Glover, Ochs was in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, standing outside the Dal-Tex building in Dealey Plaza when JFK was driven by to be killed. Glover says Phil told him he went there as a “national security observer.”
I had read about this on some off-beat websites, but never in biographies of Ochs, or in the latest documentary about him, There But for Fortune. There seems to be an “official” ban on mentioning Glover’s claim, even though Glover appears in the books and the documentary, has been interviewed by the authors and filmmaker, and is considered by them, as Phil’s old and close friend, to be a reliable source.
Jim Glover, who was one half of the well-known folk duo, Jim and Jean, back in the 1960s, and is now an anti-war activist in Florida, says that he has told Ochs’s siblings and biographers all the details, has also reported it recently and as far back as the early 1990s to the FBI, and has put these claims out on some internet sites and openly spoken about it. These disclosures have resulted in silence from Ochs’s family and biographers. There have been no efforts to refute it, and so it circulates far outside the mainstream. Since Glover speaks of it openly and in great detail, and since it is a shocking claim with serious implications, one would think it worthy of response. But it is only greeted with silence. It seems perhaps like another example of what Thomas Merton called “the unspeakable” – “the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said.”
So I contacted Glover and asked him about it. He told me that Phil had told him months before the assassination that he was “working for National Security, something like the C.I.A.” Then, he later told him he had gone to Dallas with one of the Gambino boys as “a national security observer” and had been standing in Dealey Plaza outside the Dal-Tex building where he was filmed when JFK was shot. Jim Glover has sent me photos that he discovered decades later that he says are photos of Phil in Dealey Plaza at the exact spot he mentioned and also in the movie theater where Oswald was arrested. He thinks they are very conclusive, especially because of the Dealey Plaza location, despite their blurriness. While I think they are not dispositive, they do look like Ochs in a fuzzy sort of way.
The first two photos are outside the Dal-Tex building, after and before the assassination.
The third is inside the movie theater where Oswald was captured and taken out the front door, while the second Oswald was led out the back door.
And the last is a photo of Ochs at Ohio State in 1961 for comparison purposes.
Whatever you think of the photos, they are one piece of a larger mystery, a tale stranger than fiction. They may or may not show Ochs, as Jim Glover is certain they do, but if Ochs’s biographers trust him on other matters, why would they doubt him when he says Ochs told him he was in Dallas that day? He says they are afraid to entertain the possibility.
So we might ask the question: If Phil Ochs was in Dallas that day, what was he doing there?
Let me reiterate: The murder of President Kennedy is not a mystery, and I am not exploring it. We know he was killed in a coup carried out by the national security state led by the CIA. If you want to know why, and if you want to know why this Thanksgiving, November 22, we should give thanks for John Kennedy’s life and witness, read JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglass. It’s the only book you need to read on the assassination.
Phil Ochs is the mystery in Glover’s telling, and I am wondering about him (and Glover), what he thought he was doing getting tangled up with shadowy intelligence operatives, how that awakening knowledge subsequently affected him, how he responded, and what place guilt and fear played in his post-1963 life and death. I am proceeding as if Ochs went to Dallas at the naïve age of 22 not to harm Kennedy, but as Glover said he said, to investigate the threats against Kennedy that he had heard of in NYC through V. T. Lee of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) and others. (This is the same V.T. Lee who received a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald, who was proposing a FPCC chapter for New Orleans in May 1963, where he was performing his theatrical stunts. Lee warned Oswald not to provoke “unnecessary incidents which frighten away prospective supporters” in a place so hostile to Castro. But Oswald, of course, did the opposite to establish his fake support for Castro.)
Glover says he also knew of the plots against Kennedy that were widely circulating in leftist circles, and afterwards felt Phil and he were being set up to be implicated in the assassination in case the official cover story fell apart since he and Glover were sympathetic to Castro and Cuba. He says their phones were tapped and they were being surveilled. At this time Glover and his partner Jean were persuaded, against Ochs’s advice, to go on a Hollywood Hootenanny Tour of southern college campuses, a surreal trip that made stops in Dallas and Houston and seemed clearly connected to the Kennedy assassination as strange people got off and on the multi-bus caravan, talking about Kennedy being killed. Glover says these included George and Barbara Bush and J. Edgar Hoover, who were picked up by the bus at the Houston airport late in the day of November 22.
You would have to have a fantastic imagination to make this stuff up. Why would he? Yet his tale is truly bizarre, revealing the intricate nature of the government conspiracy to kill Kennedy and to create multiple tales of plausible deniability when others failed.
He told me that he doesn’t know who told Phil to go to Dallas, but he is unequivocal that he did. He said:
I don’t have all the answers. All I know is what Phil told me to keep us both as safe as possible. He told me I’ll never lie to you but there are things I can’t tell you. Knowing I had a big mouth if he told me things you [me] are asking, I might not be alive. His purpose as I see it was to observe, and being set up if Oswald lived, he could have been used as, ‘See a Castro sympathizer knew and was involved.’ And that would apply to me also [learning what he did on the Hootenanny Tour] and they would stop at nothing to have us both silenced permanently if Oswald or Kennedy lived because we knew too much.
Once, he said, as an example of his big mouth, he was performing at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village and told the audience that Phil had been in Dallas as a national security observer. He thinks Ochs’s manager, Al Grossman, and Bob Dylan heard it, “because Phil came over and said, ‘Are you trying to get me killed?’”
Phil, he said, was a super patriot and would never have done anything to harm Kennedy, but was tricked into going to Dallas under the assumption that he was working with those trying to prevent the assassination by investigating the plot or trying to infiltrate it and perhaps stop it. But when Ochs returned to NYC later that day, according to Glover, he was devastated by Kennedy’s assassination and at the realization that he had been used and was now compromised. That is why he cried so terribly that night and wanted to die. His youthful innocence had died.
Phil Ochs was a man of two minds and inclinations, not unusual for a coterie of musicians of that era who knew and associated with it each other, had military/intelligence family backgrounds, and were never drafted like so many young men not in college. Like so many of these musical icons – Jim Morrison, David Crosby, Frank Zappa, “Papa” John Philips, Stephen Stills, et al (as Dave McGowan chronicles in his book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, where he questions their public personae and the strange ways they gathered from far distances at one time into Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon, at the heart which was a covert military film facility, Lookout Mountain Laboratory) – Ochs had a military background. He was a conservative rebel who suddenly transformed from a conservative to a radical at Ohio State in his last year, according to Glover. He attended Staunton Military Academy with Barry Goldwater’s son and John Dean of Watergate fame and was a sergeant in the ROTC at Ohio State where at the least he was aware of military intelligence spying on radical students; he idolized John Wayne, James Dean, Marlon Brando and the American western film mythology of the cowboy and soldier; he loved John Kennedy; he sang powerful anti-war songs and would jokingly say to his audience that now that they had listened to his anti-government songs he was turning them in to the government; he was a drama king who loved heroes and wanted to be one; he was a left-winger who mocked liberals; he was a folk singer who loved Elvis. In short, he was a man of many contradictions, of highs and lows, hope and despair, driven to stop war and injustice and to become a star in the superficial entertainment culture, etc. As he fell apart in his last years, it became easy to categorize him with the facile term “manic-depressive” or “bipolar.”
I think that misses the heart of the matter, as if a term explains its reality, as if his paranoia had no basis outside his mind, as if he was just nuts to think the CIA was out to get him, as he did regularly and especially after he was attacked and choked while walking alone on a beach in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, when his vocal cords were ruptured and his voice permanently damaged.
My guess is that he was driven by guilt and fear and that his suicide at age 35 was connected to being in Dallas on the day JFK was assassinated. I think he died that day too, and that the next 13 years of his life were courageous attempts to quell his guilt for being gulled into going to Dallas and fear that he might be killed for doing so by singing out his rebellious songs in the face of his ghosts. He was a haunted man, and produced haunting songs in response to exorcise his demons, including the songs The Crucifixion and That Was the President, both about John Kennedy.
In his last years he said he was John Train (sometimes John Butler Train), not Phil Ochs, and that John Train had killed Phil Ochs in the Chelsea Hotel on the summer solstice in 1975, the solstice being a significant turning point. His biographers give various explanations for his adoption of this pseudonym, all of which, I believe, miss the mark. To say he took the name from his heroes John Wayne, John Ford, John Kennedy, and William Butler Yeats, avoids the key word: Train. It’s as if the word is unimportant or unspeakable, or the name John Train is a common name that “crazy” Phil just made up.
As he was unravelling in fear and trembling, I believe he was referring to a real John Train, a CIA operative, when he metaphorically said “on the first day of summer 1975, Phil Ochs was murdered in the Chelsea Hotel by John Train…. For the good of societies, public and secret, he needed to be gotten rid of.” Train assassinates Ochs. Then the following spring Ochs assassinates Ochs by hanging himself.
Could it just be a coincidence that there is a real John Train who from the early 1950s onward was connected to the CIA and the covert state in various activities as an asset or an agent? This John Train, who was one of the founders and funders of The Paris Review, its first managing editor, who together with the CIA’s Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton started the magazine for the CIA under its propaganda front, The Congress for Cultural Freedom. This John Train, who ran cover corporations for the CIA and was connected to George Herbert Walker Bush through the CIA’s Thomas Devine, who was involved in setting up Bush’s company Zapata Offshore. This John Train, who was deeply involved with the CIA’s activities in the early 1980s backing the CIA-supported mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan. This John Train who…. [i]
It is farfetched in the extreme to think that Phil Ochs just plucked the name John Train out of thin air. But the fact that this is asserted by his biographers makes sense when we realize that Jim Glover’s claims are ignored by Ochs’s family, his biographers, and the makers of the documentary about him. That there is a real CIA-affiliated John Train and that Glover insists Phil told him he was in Dallas on November 22, 1963 seem clearly connected. But these facts are unspeakable. I think they need to be explored.
Like Jim Glover, I don’t have all the answers about Phil Ochs. My guess and my hope is that Phil was used and was not complicit, that he naively thought by going to Dallas he was working with the good guys to protect the president from the killers, and when he witnessed the brutal murder, he felt compromised, and felt so overwhelmed with guilt and fear that life eventually became too unbearable for him. Clearly this is Glover’s story. I think it is incumbent on those who don’t believe it to explain why Glover would fabricate such an intricate tale that glorifies his friend as a true patriot, whom he claims was used by intelligence operatives and who therefore suffered for the rest of his life for trying to protect President Kennedy.
Whatever the truth in this age of “not knowing,” I think his story is a parable for our times. Whenever you think you’re getting the straight scoop, think again, and then again. The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird is still singing its siren song to convince us that the crucifixion was a one-time event, when Phil knew otherwise, right from the start and right to the end. I think he tried to warn us and wouldn’t be silenced, even in death.
On the evening of November 7, administration officials suspended CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s “hard pass.” A hard pass allows its holder “access to areas designated for journalists in the West Wing, on Air Force One, and in other secured areas during presidential trips, which are routinely covered by the White House press corps.”
The suspension followed a combative press conference during which US president Donald Trump repeatedly slammed reporters, referring to Acosta as “an enemy of the people,” and during which Acosta refused to hand a White House mic back to the intern who came to collect it when his haranguing — er, questioning — time ran out and either (depending on who you ask) accidentally brushed, or intentionally struck, the intern.
On November 13, CNN sued Trump and several other White House officials, accusing them of violating Acosta’s First Amendment (freedom of the press) and Fifth Amendment (due process) rights.
Insofar as the White House has specific and supposedly objective standards for granting hard passes to reporters, Acosta might indeed have a due process claim if yanking his pass didn’t conform to those standards. The First Amendment claim, on the other hand, seems pretty sketchy.
The First Amendment protects not only a free press but freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of peaceable assembly to petition the government for redress of grievances.
Does this mean that anyone who wants to report, speak, pray or just have a non-violent political get-together must be allowed to do so at the White House, on demand?
Well, maybe so. In Thomas Jefferson’s time, Americans could stroll the White House grounds at will and even visit with the president and first lady at lunchtime or after each day. Of course, things have changed since then, but I have no problem with the principle of the thing. The White House supposedly belongs to “the public.” Why shouldn’t we drop in any time we please?
That, however, is not what CNN contends. They’re not upset that you and I can’t plop ourselves down in White House press room chairs and start firing off questions at the president any time the spirit moves. Their lawsuit argues, rather, that because CNN is a popular cable channel and its White House correspondent is very special and important, Jim Acosta is entitled to a chair, a desk, and face time with Donald Trump.
I suspect a lawsuit on similar supposed First Amendment claims from, say, Caitlin Johnstone, Alex Jones, Chris Hedges, or the “White House Correspondent” of a small-town Kentucky newspaper would get laughed right out of court (and out of the “mainstream press”), even if they all agreed to hand the microphones back over when their time ran out.
THE SANTA SUSANA FIELD LABORATORY (ROCKETDYNE) BURNED IN THE WOOLSEY FIRE, THREATENING TOXIC EXPOSURES FROM CONTAMINATED DUST, SMOKE, ASH AND SOIL. THE DEPARTMENT OF TOXIC SUBSTANCES CONTROL DENIES RISK THAT IT CREATED BY DELAYING THE LONG PROMISED CLEANUP.
Last night, the Woolsey fire burned the contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), a former nuclear and rocket engine testing site. Footage from local television showed flames surrounding rocket test stands, and the fire’s progress through to Oak Park indicates that much of the toxic site burned.
A statement released by the California Dept. of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) said that its staff, “do not believe the fire has caused any releases of hazardous materials that would pose a risk to people exposed to the smoke.” The statement failed to assuage community concerns given DTSC’s longtime pattern of misinformation about SSFL’s contamination and its repeated broken promises to clean it up.
“We can’t trust anything that DTSC says,” said West Hills resident Melissa Bumstead, whose young daughter has twice survived leukemia that she blames on SSFL and who has mapped 50 other cases of rare pediatric cancers near the site. Bumstead organized a group called “Parents vs. SSFL” and launched a Change.org petition demanding full cleanup of SSFL that has been signed by over 410,000 people. “DTSC repeatedly minimizes risk from SSFL and has broken every promise it ever made about the SSFL cleanup. Communities throughout the state have also been failed by DTSC. The public has no confidence in this troubled agency,” said Bumstead.
Nuclear reactor accidents, including a famous partial meltdown, tens of thousands of rocket engine tests, and sloppy environmental practices have left SSFL polluted with widespread radioactive and chemical contamination. Government-funded studies indicate increased cancers for offsite populations associated with proximity to the site, and that contamination migrates offsite over EPA levels of concern. In 2010, DTSC signed agreements with the Department of Energy and NASA that committed them to clean up all detectable contamination in their operational areas by 2017. DTSC also in 2010 committed to require Boeing, which owns most of the site, to cleanup to comparable standards. But the cleanup has not yet begun, and DTSC is currently considering proposals that will leave much, if not all, of SSFL’s contamination on site permanently.
Dr. Robert Dodge, President of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles, shares the community’s concerns. “We know what substances are on the site and how hazardous they are. We’re talking about incredibly dangerous radionuclides and toxic chemicals such a trichloroethylene, perchlorate, dioxins and heavy metals. These toxic materials are in SSFL’s soil and vegetation, and when it burns and becomes airborne in smoke and ash, there is real possibility of heightened exposure for area residents.”
Dodge said protective measures recommended during any fire, such as staying indoors and wearing protective face masks, are even more important given the risks associated with SSFL’s contamination. Community members are organizing a campaign on social media to demand that DTSC release a public statement revealing the potential risks of exposure to SSFL contamination related to the fire.
But for residents such as Bumstead, worries will remain until SSFL is fully cleaned up. “When I look at that fire, all I see is other parents’ future heartache,” said Bumstead, “And what I feel is anger that if the DTSC had kept its word, we wouldn’t have these concerns, because the site would be cleaned up by now.”
# # #
Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles (PSR-LA) is the largest chapter of the national organization Physicians for Social Responsibility and has worked for the full cleanup of SSFL for over 30 years.. PSR-LA advocates for policies and practices that protect public health from nuclear and environmental threats and eliminate health disparities.
Parents vs. SSFL is a grassroots group of concerned parents and residents who demand compliance with cleanup agreements signed in 2010 that require a full cleanup of all radioactive and chemical contamination at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
Contact: Denise Duffield, 310-339-9676 or dduffield@psr-la.org, Melissa Bumstead 818-298-3192* or melissabumstead@sbcglobal.net,
During many meetings with senior members of the Syrian opposition in various European cities in 2013-2014, I would remind them that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, amongst others, host and finance the opposition due to their own self-interest and agendas; and not out of love for Syria. I would note that there is no disagreement among us Syrians about the brutality, corruption and exploitation of the Ottoman Empire during its four-century rule of Syria; we don’t want history to repeat itself. As for Saudi Arabia, I would remind the opposition of the contributions Syrian professionals made in the development of the Kingdom in past decades. We say to the Saudis “Blessed be your Wahhabism for you, but not for Syria”; Syria is a cultural and societal mosaic of ethnic, religious and sectarian components. As for the United States, we all agree that Washington supports Israel and views Syria as an adversarial state. However, Israel is a totally different matter. Since its creation, Israel has pursued aggressive and expansionist policy towards its neighbors in pursuit of two primary objectives: I – Great Israel and II – No Arab Unity And Support Arab Division.
I – Great Israel:
Great Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Since the June 1967 War and the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Israel has been in control of the land between the River and the Sea. Thus, Great Israel exists in reality, though not legally or officially until it annexes the West Bank and declares the Jewish Great Israel with Jerusalem its capital.
II –Supporting Arab division:
There are numerous documents and publications to that effect for the Arabs to read. Unfortunately, and according to international surveys, Arabs are amongst the least reading people in the world. This reminds me of the late Moshe Dayan, the Israeli Defense Minister during the June 1967 War. After the war, Dayan published some Israeli military strategies and tactics during the war. His colleagues criticized him for divulging military secrets to the Arabs. His response was not to worry; the Arabs don’t read. This problem is further compounded by the Arabs lack of interest in research or translation. Jointly, these three components form critical foundations for the development of societies and civilizations.
In the 1990’s, I participated in numerous Track II Diplomacy meetings with Israelis regarding the Syrian-Israeli Peace Process. During one of those meetings, attended by some Egyptians and Palestinians in addition to the Israelis, I gave a presentation in which I noted that the Arab region is divided into four sub-regions: The Fertile Crescent, The Arabian Peninsula, The Nile Valley and North Africa. Unlike the other three sub-regions, the Fertile Crescent faces national security threats being surrounded by three powerful and hostile neighbors: Turkey to the North, Israel to the South and Iran to the East. To deal with these multiple and omnipresent security threats, Syria and Iraq must agree to some form of unity; a joint population of 40+ million people, educated and productive endowed with natural resources including substantial oil reserves, and a large army. I emphasized the point that the purpose of such a unity is not aggressive; but defensive. I had hardly finished my presentation when the late Ze’ev Schiff, the military editor of the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz in a loud voice said “Do you think we will let you do that?”; meaning that any Arab initiative for unity must receive a prior Israeli approval which of course is not forthcoming. Mr. Schiff had previously published an article in Haaretz in 6/2/1982 proposing a plan for a future Iraq, in which he wrote that the best thing to serve Israel’s interest would be “the dissolution of Iraq into a Shiite State, a Sunni State and the separation of the Kurdish part.”
There were more comprehensive plans to break up a number of Arab states. In 1982, the Israeli journalist Oded Yinon proposed a more elaborate plan entitled “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties”, published in the Hebrew Journal Kivunim. The plan called for the dissolution of several Arab states into smaller states. The author starts with “Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces…” He continues “Breaking Egypt down territorially into distinct geographical regions…” Furthermore, “ The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as Lebanon…” His solution for the Palestinians is through “The termination of the lengthy rule of King Hussein and the transfer of power to the Palestinians…”
After Yinon, the neoconservatives in 1996 submitted a plan for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s consideration entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”. Israel’s Western frontier is secured through the peace treaty with Egypt. The frontier with Syria could be secured “by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria.” As for Iraq, it starts with “removing Saddam Hussein from power…”
In 2007, General Wesley Clark, in an interview and a lecture, said that while visiting the Pentagon just a few days after 9/11, a General explained to him that a decision has been made “to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran.”
Iraq, the first on the Pentagon war list was invaded in 2003. The Israeli journalist Ari Shavit, in a Haaretz article on April 3, 2003, notes that “the belief in war against Iraq was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals…” Syria, next on the Pentagon war list, was “a ripe fruit ready for picking” However, the picking of Syria had to wait until the start of the so-called “Arab Spring”.
Had Syrians known what was planned for them by Washington and Tel Aviv, they might have avoided the death and destruction in Syria, for patriotism and wisdom call upon the various factions in the State to put aside their differences and confront the external threats.
The ZOA, Bolton’s enthusiastic sponsor, led the campaign to remove former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster from his post after railing against McMaster’s “anti-Israel” positions, most notably his support for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran nuclear deal.
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) recently awarded U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton the “Defender of Israel Award” during its annual awards dinner, which took place in New York on Sunday night.
Other awardees included U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as well as Fox News television host Mark Levin. Both Grenell and Levin are close to Bolton, with the former having served as Bolton’s spokesman and the latter having worked closely with Bolton at the Department of Justice in the Reagan administration.
Though Bolton has received several awards from the Israel lobby in the past, due to his fervent promotion of Zionism and Israeli government policy, this more recent award is notable, as the ZOA is largely responsible for Bolton’s appointment as National Security Adviser within the Trump administration.
Indeed, beginning in August 2017, the ZOA – under the leadership of its president, Morton Klein – led the campaign to remove former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster from his post after railing against McMaster’s “anti-Israel” positions, most notably his support for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran nuclear deal.
However, McMaster had also earned the ire of American Zionists for allegedly referring to Israel as an “occupying power” and acknowledging the existence of Palestine — as Zionists at ZOA and like-minded organizations support a revisionist history of the creation of the Israeli state that asserts that Palestine as a state never existed prior to Israel’s establishment in 1948.
Leaked emails reported on by MintPress earlier this year revealed that ZOA’s campaign to remove McMaster soon won the support of Trump’s top political donor, Zionist billionaire Sheldon Adelson. It was later revealed that Adelson had been instrumental in placing Bolton in the position McMaster vacated, as Bolton had long been a confidant of the politically influential casino magnate and Adelson had previously lobbied Trump – then president-elect – to include Bolton in his cabinet.
Bolton has not disappointed his sponsors
Since his appointment in April, Bolton has promoted and helped bring to fruition policies long supported by Adelson and the ZOA – which Adelson helps fund – as well as related groups. Under Bolton’s influence, President Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA and imposed harsh sanctions against Iran, which disproportionately affect Iranian civilians. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently stated that Iranian leaders would need to fall in line if “they want their people to eat,” underscoring the fact that the Iranian people are by and large the target of the U.S. sanctions targeting Iran.
In addition, Bolton has also used his role as National Security Adviser to advocate for other troubling policies in the Middle East to the benefit of Israel, such as the continuation and expansion of the U.S.’ occupation of around 30 percent of Syrian territory.
Bolton announced in July that the U.S. would maintain its military presence in Syria until the “Iranian menace was wiped off the map.” Bolton’s announcement became administration policy just two months later in September. However, just days before Bolton took over for McMaster, Trump had announced that he wanted to remove U.S. troops from Syria “very quickly.”
Ultimately, Bolton’s recent award from the Adelson-backed ZOA for “defending Israel” is the result of events that ZOA itself helped made possible. Now that Bolton – who they helped install into power – has helped bring about the very policies they had hoped he would manifest, ZOA has granted him a “prestigious” award. Perhaps it is only fitting that he receive such thanks for the service to Zionism he was installed to provide. Indeed, it is a cause and ideology that Bolton has repeatedly supported – often at the expense of U.S. government interests and even U.S. national security.
Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.
A thinly-veiled threat to unleash the full military power of Israel on residents of the Gaza strip is apparently meant for Arabs only, since its English-language version is now gone from an Israeli military Twitter account.
Amid the latest flare-up of hostilities between Israel and Hamas militants both sides are also battling for hearts and minds online. Part of the Israeli messaging effort was a threat on Twitter, on the account of Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), a defense ministry unit that enacts policies related to civilian issues in occupied Palestinian territories.
The threat said Hamas crossed the red line with its latest attacks and that Israel will be responding with an iron fist. “Residents of Gaza look carefully at the pictures from Operation Protective Edge in 2014 – a picture is worth a thousand words,” said the account, citing a statement by COGAT chief, Major General Kamil Abu Rukon. A composition picture showing the aftermath of airstrikes from the 2014 war in Gaza and a recent retaliation [sic] by the IDF was supplied.
But hours later the entire thread was deleted – even though the original statement on the Arabic version of COGAT’s Twitter feed remained intact. Some commenters suggested that the Israeli officials realized that such thinly-veiled threats to Palestinian civilians are not meant for the English-speaking audiences and erased it. Others suggested Twitter could have deleted it following complaints about threats of violence by other users.
The 2014 Israeli offensive on Gaza claimed almost 1,500 civilian lives, according to a UN count, and caused damage to buildings estimated at some $7.8 billion, with thousands of homes obliterated or severely damaged.
Considering that Gaza Strip is one of the world’s most densely populated areas and Israel maintains a blockade of the area, effectively trapping people inside, many critics see the military campaign as a form of collective punishment of Palestinians. Israel says Hamas is responsible for the civilian suffering, because it allegedly uses civilians as human shields.
Amid the latest violence, the Israeli forces bombed a Hamas-linked TV station, branding it a propaganda outlet that made itself a legitimate military target. The decision indicates the Israeli government’s willingness to stretch it definitions in order to justify attacking non-combatants.
An article in Sunday’s New York Times entitled “Remembering the Forgotten War” demonstrates perfectly the moral bankruptcy of the philosophy of foreign interventionism. Calling for the Korean War to become more highly remembered, the author, Hampton Sides, extols some of the popular justifications for subjecting U.S. troops to death, injury, and maiming in the Korean War.
Hampton tells the story of a veteran named Franklin Chapman, who is still alive. Hampton was sent to fight in Korea, was shot several times, and also hit by shrapnel. He was taken captive by the enemy and was held as a POW for three years. Today, the 85-year -old suffers from the aftereffects of frostbite, experiences aches and pains from his wounds, and suffers severe memory loss, sometimes unable to recognize his daughter.
Sides implies that while all this is regrettable, it’s all justifiable because Korean War veterans “stopped a naked act of Communist aggression and opposed three malevolent dictators — Stalin, Mao and Kim – while helping South Korea take wing as a democracy.”
What is fascinating about Sides’s article is that it is completely bereft of any moral outrage whatsoever against the U.S. government and, specifically, the U.S. national-security establishment. Sides seems to forget something important: The reason that Chapman was there in Korea waging war was because the president of the United States and the Pentagon ordered him to be there.
I was curious about Chapman and so I looked him up. It turns out that he has written a biography that is posted online, where he tells the reason he joined the military. No, it wasn’t to stop communist aggression in Korea or to oppose three malevolent communist dictators. Chapman explains that he joined the military for one reason alone: He needed a job.
My hunch is that like many people who join the military, he believed that his job would be to defend the United States from invasion or attack. My hunch is that the last thing he ever expected was to be sent to wage a land war in Asia. But that is precisely what the U.S. government did to him. It ordered him to report to Korea to kill or be killed.
That doesn’t seem to concern Hampton Sides, any more than it concerns any interventionist. Equally important, it obviously doesn’t concern Sides that the order to send Chapman to fight in the Korean War was illegal under our form of government. The U.S. Constitution, which governs the actions of federal officials, including those in the Pentagon, prohibits the president from waging war against a foreign nation without first securing a declaration of war from Congress. It is undisputed that President Truman, who ordered U.S. soldiers into Korea, did not secure a congressional declaration of war. That means that he had no legal authority to order Chapman or any other U.S. soldier to kill or die in Korea.
In claiming that Chapman was fighting to oppose communist aggression, Sides ignores the fact that the Korean War was actually a civil war, not a war between two independent and sovereign nations. The country had been artificially divided into two halves by Soviet communist leader Joseph Stalin, who, ironically, was a partner and ally of the U.S. government during World War II. (The irony lies in the fact that Sides extols Chapman for opposing the man who had been a partner and ally of the U.S. government just a few years before.) In any event, every Korean understood that the dividing line between North and South Korea was just an artificial construct based on international politics. Even today, if you ask a person of Korean descent here in the United States where they are from, they always, without exception, say “Korea” rather than “South Korea.”
We can concede that the northern half of the country was ruled by a brutal communist regime, one that attempted to unify the country by force. But why does a nation’s civil war justify U.S. intervention? Why should U.S. soldiers be sacrificed to help out one side or another in a civil war? That’s not what most U.S. soldiers were signing up to do after World War II. They were signing up to defend the United States, not help out one side or another in another nation’s civil war. (By the way, the same principle applies to the Vietnam War, another favorite foreign war of the interventionists.)
Another aspect of the Korean War that Sides fails to mention is conscription. The U.S. military didn’t have enough men to intervene against the North Korean regime, and not enough American men were volunteering for “service.” So, Truman and the military resorted to conscription. That means that they were forcing American men, against their will, to go to Korea and kill or be killed. An interventionist would say that it was necessary to destroy the freedom of Americans to protect the “freedom” and “democracy” of South Koreans.
Sides’ expression “helping South Korea take wing as a democracy” is an interesting one. It’s interesting because South Korea’s first elected president, Syngman Rhee, was one of the most brutal dictators in the world. Immediately after taking office, he curtailed political dissent and authorized his goons to engage in indefinite detention, torture, assassination, death squads, and massacres.
On the suspension of hostilities in 1953, it was clear that the National Assembly, which elected the president, was going to boot Rhee out of office. In order to avoid that, he ordered a mass arrest of opposition politicians and then unilaterally changed the Constitution to enable him to be elected directly by the citizenry. He remained in power until 1960, when he was forced to resign after his police shot demonstrators who were protesting his regime.
This is what Sides and other interventionists call “democracy taking wing.” It brings to mind the U.S.-inspired coup in Chile in 1973, which ousted the democratically elected socialist president of the country, Salvador Allende, and installed a brutal right-wing military dictator in his stead, army Gen. Augusto Pinochet. To this day, interventionists say that the Chilean coup demonstrated that “democracy was taking wing” in Chile with the coup that nullified the presidential election, followed by a 16-year-long brutal military dictatorship entailing round-ups of some 50,000 people, torturing most of them, raping and committing gruesome sexual acts against women, and killing and disappearing around 3,000 people.
Sides and other interventionists are dead wrong about the Korean War and other foreign interventions. No U.S. soldier deserves to be ordered to faraway lands to kill or be killed or maimed, as Franklin Chapman was. If Sides or other interventionists want to go overseas and help out one side or another in some faraway civil war, they are free to do so. Just leave U.S. soldiers out of it. The job of a U.S. soldier is to defend the United States from invasion or attack, not be sent to participate in some bogus fight for “freedom” or “democracy” in a foreign country.
Judging from the mainstream media, Israel was not a major issue in the midterm election but it sure did come up a lot when candidates for office were wooing Jewish or Evangelical voters. To cite only one example, Florida Congressman Ron DeSantis criticized his opponent Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum during their gubernatorial race for receiving support from the Dream Defenders, a group favoring Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, and giving a speech welcoming members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations to his city. DeSantis claimed in a video clip that “I can find anti-Semites around him, but it’s almost like ‘we don’t want to discuss that.’”
DeSantis, who sponsored the 2013 Palestinian Accountability Act which called for the withholding of U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority until it recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, charged that Gillum would not be a “friend” of Israel. In 2017, he co-founded the Congressional Israel Victory Caucus, saying “Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East, as we share common national interests and possess similar national values. Israel is not the problem in the Middle East; it is the solution to many of the problems that bedevil the region. American policy must ensure that Israel emerges victorious against those who deny or threaten her existence.” Earlier this year, DeSantis drafted a proposal calling on the U.S. to recognize Syria’s Golan Heights as an ‘integral part’ of the State of Israel.
DeSantis boasted about his presence in Jerusalem when the U.S. Embassy was moved to that city in May and has promised as governor to visit Israel’s illegal settlements on the West Bank, which he refers to by the preferred Israeli usage as “Judea and Samaria.” He threatens critics that “If you boycott Israel, the state of Florida will boycott you.”
One might note at a minimum that for Ron DeSantis and ambitious slimeballs like him it is all about Israel due to their own political self-interest, with nothing actually in the mix for either Florida or the United States. The uninformed public buys into the narrative because it doesn’t know any better thanks to the media’s heavy slant in favor of Israel, allowing uncritical support for the Jewish state to continue under the radar unchallenged. DeSantis, a former U.S. Navy lawyer, has demonstrated that he reveres Israel even more than his former comrades in arms. In his congressional district there are a number of survivors of the U.S.S. Liberty, which was attacked in international waters by Israel on June 8, 1967, killing 34 crewmen and injuring 171 more. They report that DeSantis has been completely unsympathetic to their requests that a commission of inquiry finally be convened to determine what actually happened on that day.
In fact, Americans have never had the option of voting on the “special relationship” that Israel enjoys with the United States as no Congressman would dare run against it lest they be smeared in the media and find themselves running against an extraordinarily well funded opponent benefiting from large donations coming from out of state sources. The list of prominent politicians “taken down” by Israel is lengthy, and includes Cynthia McKinney, Adlai Stevenson III, Paul Findley, Chuck Percy, William Fulbright, Roger Jepsen, and Pete McCloskey.
It is particularly ironic that as the midterm campaigns were drawing to a close there appeared some serious investigative journalism that demonstrates precisely how Israel and Jewish groups corrupt the political process in America to provide virtually unlimited support for anything and everything that the despicable Benjamin Netanyahu and his gang of war criminals seek to do. How the process has succeeded is best illustrated by the current Israeli government’s policy of “mowing the grass” in Gaza where it is using army snipers to kill unarmed Palestinian protesters. Washington not only does not protest against the in-your-face war crime, it aids and abets it with U.S. Ambassador David Friedman justifying the military response as measured and appropriate.
Another area where Washington chooses to look the other way is regarding Israel’s nuclear arsenal, believed to consist of two hundred warheads. Under U.S. law, any country that has an undeclared nuclear weapons arsenal cannot obtain American-made weapons and cannot received aid of any type. Congress and the White House pretend that the Israeli nuclear arsenal does not exist, in spite of the fact that the Israelis themselves have more than once implicitly acknowledged it and instead of cutting aid to Israel have instead increased it. It is currently $3.8 billion per year guaranteed for the next ten years, with extra money also available if needed. No other country benefits from such largess and gives in return so little.
To be sure, the groundbreaking book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, which appeared in 2007, pulled no punches in describing how the Israel Lobby operates in the United States. It also made clear that the relationship with Israel serves no United States national interest whatsoever and exists solely because of the corruption of the political system and the media by principally Jewish individuals and groups that are dedicated to that task.
While acknowledging the great debt to Walt and Mearsheimer, it is one thing to read about something in a book and quite another thing to see it live, which is what the new evidence of Israeli interference consists of. Several years ago, the Qatari news service al-Jazeera commissioned two investigations. The first was on the activities of the Israeli Lobby in Britain and the second was on the lobby in the United States. The material consisted largely of meetings with members of Israel’s active lobby that were secretly filmed by journalists who were pretending to be supporters and who eventually managed to penetrate some of the organizations that were most active in promoting Israel’s interests.
The British expose, in two parts, aired in January, and was based on discussions and interviews that took place between June and November 2017. It demonstrated how the Israeli Embassy in London connived with government officials to “take down” parliamentarians and government ministers who were considered to be critical of the Jewish State. It also revealed how the Israeli Embassy was secretly subsidizing and advising private groups promoting Israeli interests, including associations of Members of Parliament (MPs).
The secret recording revealed how an Israeli Embassy diplomat/spy named Shai Masot connived with a senior civil servant to get rid of Foreign Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan, regarded as a supporter of an independent Palestinian state. To Masot’s additional query “Can I give you some MPs that I would suggest you would take down?” the civil servant suggested “… if you look hard enough, I’m sure there is something that they’re trying to hide… a little scandal maybe.” Another alleged pro-Arab member of Parliament Crispin Blunt was also identified and confirmed to be on a “hit list.”
It was also learned that Masot had been secretly subsidizing and advising two ostensibly independent groups, the parliamentary Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). Masot did, however, express concern that Israel’s control over incoming parliamentarians was not quite what it used to be: “For years, every MP that joined the parliament joined the LFI. They’re not doing that any more in the Labour Party. CFI, they’re doing it automatically. All the 14 new MPs who got elected in the last elections did it automatically.”
The documentary was initially a sensation in Britain but then, predictably, it went away as Israel’s loyal host of media scriveners took charge. Masot was recalled to Israel and Prime Minister Teresa May, as good a friend to Jewish money and power as one is likely to find, decided to do nothing. Her characteristically toothless reaction to the suggestion that her government officials might be removed by the clandestine activity of a foreign country was: “The Israeli ambassador has apologized… the U.K. has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed.”
The four-part series by al-Jazeera on the Lobby in the U.S. was meanwhile temporarily spiked because the Qatari government was seeking to obtain the mediation of prominent American Jews to pressure the White House to help resolve its outstanding conflict with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The documentary has remained in limbo but in the past two weeks it has surfaced and is now available. Its undercover investigative journalist, a British Jew named Tony Kleinfeld, quickly charmed his way into the inner circle of Israel’s supporters where he discovered a network of organizations that act as fronts for the Israeli government. Their activities include spying on supporters of Palestinian rights and disrupting demonstrations, with a particular focus on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which Israel has particularly targeted. They also resorted to tactics like smearing critics by generating false accusations of sexual and personal misconduct, all of which was coordinated by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The ministry’s director general is Sima Vaknin-Gil, a former senior officer with Israel’s military intelligence, and is staff consists mostly of former spies drawn from Israel’s various security agencies.
Later, Kleinfeld became involved with The Israel Project, which is a U.S. based Israeli government backed propaganda organ that claims to be “a non-partisan American educational organization dedicated to informing the media and public conversation about Israel and the Middle East.”
In a recorded conversation, Project employee Jordan Schachtel, explained the objectives and extent of a secret Facebook operation. “We’re putting together a lot of pro-Israel media through various social media channels that aren’t The Israel Project’s channels. So we have a lot of side projects that we are trying to influence the public debate with. That’s why it’s a secretive thing, because we don’t want people to know that these side projects are associated with The Israel Project.”
In another episode, the Israel on Campus Coalition’s Jacob Baime, who claimed to have a $2 million budget, described coordinating with the Israeli government, with an approach “modeled on General Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq… copied a lot from that strategy that has been working really well for us, actually” using “offensive information operations.” Baime described putting “up some anonymous website” along with targeted Facebook ads so that critics “either shut down or they spend time responding to it and investigating it, which is time they can’t spend attacking Israel. It’s psychological warfare, it drives them crazy.”
Kleinfeld also met with other groups. Foundation for Defense of Democracies was revealed as yet another agent of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, its directors meeting regularly with Israeli Embassy staff in Washington. In spite of that the Treasury Department has not compelled it to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA). It is also registered with the IRS as a tax exempt 501(c)3 “charity.” Indeed, no Jewish organization active on behalf of Israel has ever had to register under FARA and most are classified as tax exempt charities or educational foundations. Interestingly, however, the FDD’s Jonathan Schanzer lamented in his recorded conversation with Kleinfeld that “anti-Semitism as a smear is not what is used to be.”
In another bizarre episode, Kleinfeld visited the neocon dominated Hoover Institute in California where he participated in a demonstration together with a group of bored young conservative think tankers compelled by their professors to protest against a Students for Justice in Palestine conference. The think tank fellows admit that they were “astroturfing” – rent-a-crowd activism to make a small demonstration appear much larger.
Another segment includes Israeli Lobby financier Adam Milstein, who is reported to be the principal funder of Canary Mission, which has targeted some 1,900 students and academics in its profiles since 2015, smearing them as “racist,” “anti-American” and “anti-Semitic.” Jacob Baime, executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, boasts in the film that “Canary Mission is highly, highly effective to the extent that we monitor the Students for Justice in Palestine and their allies.”
In his recording, Milstein also talks about the need to “investigate” and “expose” critics of Israel, who Milstein claims are anti-Semites, as well as “anti-Christian” and “anti-freedom” activists who “terrorize us.” His foundation also funds numerous anti-Palestinian organizations, including the Israel on Campus Coalition, StandWithUs, CAMERA, the AMCHA Initiative and the FDD. Milstein also funds and is chairman of the board of the Israeli-American Council. An Israeli-born California based real estate developer, Milstein reportedly served time in federal prison after a 2009 conviction for tax evasion.
An Israeli spy at the University of California at Davis, Julia Reifkind also described to Kleinfeld how the system worked at the campus level. She used multiple fake Facebook accounts to monitor the activities of Students for Justice in Palestine. “I follow all the SJP accounts. I have some fake names. My name is Jay Bernard or something. It just sounds like an old white guy, which was the plan. I join all these groups.” The information she obtained was then passed on to her contact in the Embassy for forwarding on to Israel to be entered into their data base of enemies.
So, Israel was engaging in interfering in legitimate political activity and also generating fake news on the social media in both 2016 and 2018, the same accusation that has been leveled against Moscow, but Special Counsel Robert Mueller seems curiously uninterested. And beyond the al-Jazeera revelations, there is also the evidence that it was Israel that sought favors from the incoming Trump Administration in 2016, not Russia. So who was actually corrupting whom?
And then there are the more overt Israeli front groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) with its $100 million annual budget and 200 employees, as well as the other special arrangements to pander to Israel and the powerful American Jews who have made it their mission to use the U.S. government as a mechanism to protect and nurture Israel. Last week in Los Angeles $60 million was raised by Hollywood’s finest for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), “Their Job is to Look After Israel. Ours is to Look After Them,” the website proclaims. Last month, an additional $32 million was raised for the IDF in New York City. Donations are tax exempt, to support the armed forces of a country that is currently engaged in war crimes and that has a secret nuclear arsenal.
So, Israel was technically speaking not running in the 2018 election, but it was very much in the race. Jewish Democrats are already boasting how the presence of a couple of Israel critics in the House, who will be “reeducated” on the Middle East, will make no difference, that the party will be solid for the Jewish state with more Jewish congressmen than ever before. Indeed, the “special relationship” bond will be stronger than ever. Five committee chairmanships in the House of Representatives will be in the hands of passionate Israel firsters, including Adam Schiff at the Intelligence Committee and Eliot Engel at Foreign Affairs. On the Republican side, the House is already 100% in Israel’s pocket. And as part of the White House team we have John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. Donald Trump’s Ambassador to Israel David Friedman expressed the dual loyalty phenomenon best in a recent speech. The United States is his “country of citizenship” but Israel is the country he “loves so much.”
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
I wrote back here that the Achilles Heel of the door handle theory is Detective Sergeant Nicholas Bailey. When his name was first mentioned publicly, on 8th March, it was widely reported that he had been one of the first responders at the bench in The Maltings. However, this was thrown into confusion the following day by none other than Lord Ian Blair, former Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police, who stated the following on Radio 4’s Today Programme:
“There are some indications that the police officer who was injured had been to the house, whereas there was a doctor who looked after the patients in the open, who hasn’t been affected at all. So there maybe some clues floating around in here.’”
As I pointed out in that piece, the phrase “some indications” was somewhat disingenuous, as The Metropolitan Police would have known by that time exactly where Mr Bailey had been. And in any case, there was no particular reason for Lord Blair to reveal this information.
The point I went on to make is that if it was known that he had been poisoned, which it was; if it was known that he’d been to the house, which it was; and if it was known that the poisoning didn’t happen at The Maltings, which it was (at least according to investigators who ruled it out with surprising swiftness), then it MUST have been known that he was poisoned AT THE HOUSE. But if this was the case, why exactly was the house not locked down, with forensic scientists all over the house taking swabs? Why did it take nearly two weeks for that to happen?
As far as I can see, there are only two explanations for this. The first is sheer incompetence. That’s possible, I suppose. I mean we are talking about an organisation which somehow managed to put out a formal statement setting out the case against two suspects, which contained the wrong street name, no real details of the suspects’ movements in Salisbury, and the somewhat impossible feat of the men being at Gatwick Airport whilst the plane they were on was still in the air. There is that. But even this seems to be stretching it. As I say, it was known that Mr Bailey was poisoned, it was known that he was in two locations that the Skripals were also in, and one of these had apparently been ruled out. Which means it MUST have been …? Not hard, is it? And yet the house wasn’t swabbed until 22nd March.
The second possibility is that he wasn’t poisoned at the house at all, but it took two weeks when the house wasn’t being swabbed, when the door handle manual hadn’t been discovered, and when the police were still searching for poison in places where Mr Bailey never went, to concoct a narrative that would place the location of his poisoning away from The Maltings.
But I don’t think that Mr Bailey’s role as Achilles Heel stops at the door handle. I think he is, in many ways, the Achilles Heel of everything in this case. Was he really at The Maltings? I’m not sure. Did he really go to the house? Again, I’m really not sure. When did he fall ill and go to hospital? Again, it’s all a bit hazy. And by the way this has nothing to do with me refusing to accept official explanations; on the contrary, it is because every attempt by the authorities to explain Mr Bailey’s role and how he got poisoned have been shrouded in riddles, mysteries and enigmas.
Just in case readers jump to the wrong conclusions, for the record I am quite certain that Mr Bailey had nothing to do with the poisoning itself. I say this on the basis that he is said to have driven himself to Salisbury District Hospital after feeling ill — hardly the actions of a man who was involved in the poisoning itself (had he been involved, he would surely have been taken to a secret decontamination location, not allowed to drive himself to an NHS hospital). But his role, the time and place of his poisoning, and his subsequent disappearance since the incident all stick out like a sore thumb.
One thing that is particularly interesting is the time of Mr Bailey’s admission to Salisbury District Hospital. There are some doubts as to when this was, but since my aim in these pieces is to hold the official narrative up to scrutiny, I will go by the official statement released by The Metropolitan Police on 5th June:
“Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, a Wiltshire police officer who was amongst the first to respond to the incident, also fell seriously ill after being exposed to the nerve agent and was admitted to hospital on 6 March. Since being discharged from hospital on 22 March, Nick has continued to make good progress but remains off work.”
So according to The Met, it wasn’t until well over 30 hours, and possibly as much as 48 hours after the incident on 4th March, that Mr Bailey was admitted to hospital.
I have to say that the idea of the world’s deadliest nerve agent taking 4 hours to take effect, before acting simultaneously on a 33-year-old woman and a 66-year-old-man, with a drive, a duck-feed, a risotto lunch and white wine in between, is almost more nonsense than I can reasonably cope with. But the idea that the exact same substance contaminated Mr Bailey at approximately 5pm on the same day, but took more than a day-and-a-half to take effect on him, has a strong tendency to make my eye start twitching, and my mouth start jabbering in much the same nervous and maniacal way that Herbert Lom perfected as Commissioner Charles Dreyfus in the Pink Panther films.
Seriously, how likely is it, do you suppose, that Mr Bailey got contaminated by the world’s deadliest nerve agent on a Sunday evening, but was only hospitalised on the Tuesday? It is self-evident nonsense, is it not, but it does of course beg the question as to where he was poisoned then.
Not for the first time, I am indebted to Liane for digging out a piece of information that I had not previously come across. Here’s a report from The Mail on 17th April:
“A multimillion pound operation, involving around 190 specialist military personnel, is expected to start in the coming days, with the process lasting months. The evidence room and a police officer’s lockerinside Bourne Hill police station will be among the first areas to be cleaned, along with two ambulance stations and The Maltings area – where the Skripals were found [my emphasis].”
“Decontamination work at Salisbury’s police station and council offices, carried out after the spy poisoning, has now been completed. After extensive testing and cleaning by specialist teams Defra have handed Bourne Hill back to the Salisbury recovery group stressing it is safe to return to public use. The deep clean focused on two areas of the building, the evidence store used by Wiltshire Police and two lockers[my emphasis].”
I think we can assume that the decontamination of Bourne Hill was as a result of Mr Bailey coming back to the station, having — according to the official story — been contaminated with “Novichok” between 5pm and 6pm on 4th March at the door handle of 47 Christie Miller Road. However, not for the first time in this saga, it’s interesting what was not contaminated. There is no mention of the door at Bourne Hill Police Station being contaminated, or of anyone becoming contaminated after touching it, and yet surely Mr Bailey must have come through the door.
But it might be an automatic door, you say. Yes, it might, but the thing is the station wasn’t open. It was a Sunday, and thanks to the Municipal Department for Spending Taxpayers’ Money on the Wrong Things, it wasn’t open. And so if Mr Bailey went to Bourne Hill that night, he would have had to manually open the door. Yet just as we are asked to believe that the Skripals somehow managed to enter Zizzis and The Mill without contaminating the door handles with their contaminated hands, so we are asked to believe that Mr Bailey somehow managed to open the locked police station door without contaminating it with his contaminated hands.
But notice where the focus of decontamination was. The evidence store and two lockers. That’s very interesting, not least of which because this was not — at that time — a criminal investigation. And so how and why would the evidence store have been contaminated?
There is an obvious explanation, and it is not that Mr Bailey touched it with hands that had been contaminated at Christie Miller Road. As I say, had that been the case, he couldn’t have entered the station without contaminating the door, and perhaps other inner doors as well. No, the obvious explanation is that an item which was contaminated was placed in the evidence store. And given that the official narrative only has Mr Bailey being hospitalised on 6th March, which is the more rational explanation:
That he had been poisoned a day-and-a-half before, at the door handle of 47 Christie Miller Road, with a substance that allegedly took 4 hours to work on the Skripals?
Or that he (or a colleague) took something away from The Maltings, placed it in the evidence store at Bourne Hill, and then became contaminated when examining it on the morning of 6th March?
Yes, yes. I’m well aware that they don’t do rational in this case. But just in case you wondered, the answer is the second of those explanations is the more rational one. I’m not saying it is the explanation; just that it’s more rational than their explanation. But of course it can’t be that, can it, because then it would imply that not just Mr Bailey, but the Skripals too were not poisoned at the door handle, but perhaps by an item passed to them in The Mill or The Maltings.
Let me end with a final observation. Liane (again) recently drew attention to something very peculiar in the statement given by the OPCW Director-General, Ahmet Üzümcü, on 4th April. This was about a fortnight after a delegation from the organisation visited Salisbury to take biomedical and environmental samples. Here is what he said:
“The OPCW experts visited the locations where two of the victimswere reportedly exposed to a toxic chemical and collected several environmental samples. The team also took biomedical samples from these two victims, as well as from a third individual, a police officer reportedly exposed to a toxic chemical [my emphasis].”
Did you get that? Since they only visited the locations where two of the three victims were reportedly exposed to a nerve agent, and since Mr Bailey is not included in these three, it is implicitly stated that Mr Bailey was not poisoned at the same place as the Skripals. And since it is alleged that the Skripals were poisoned at the door handle, then Mr Bailey can’t have been poisoned there, can he?
Could it have been the evidence store or the lockers? Given that these were said to be the focus of decontamination efforts at Bourne Hill, and given that the doors he entered were apparently not contaminated, I’d say it’s a fair chance that this may have been where and how he got poisoned.
South Korea has dismissed a new report by a United States-based think tank that accused North Korea of being engaged in “deception” based on purported commercial satellite images that it said showed a number of “undeclared missile operating bases” inside the country.
The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) claimed in a report on Monday that it had identified at least 13 of an estimated 20 undeclared missile operating bases according to new commercial satellite images.
“These missile operating bases, which can be used for all classes of ballistic missile from short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) up to and including intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), would presumably have to be subject to declaration, verification, and dismantlement in any final and fully verifiable denuclearization deal,” the report said.
The images focused on the purported Sakkanmol missile base, which “currently houses a unit equipped with short-range ballistic missiles but could easily accommodate more capable medium-range ballistic warheads,” the CSIS asserted.
On Tuesday, however, South Korea’s presidential office dismissed the CSIS’s account.
A spokesman for the South’s presidential office, Kim Eui-kyeom, said the CSIS report had gone too far to accuse Pyongyang of “great deception,” since the North has not made a specific agreement to dismantle or disclose the facilities mentioned in the report.
The South Korean official also rejected the analysis of the Sakkanmol missile site, saying, “The intelligence authorities of South Korea and the US have far more detailed information from military satellites and are closely monitoring” the facility.
He said Pyongyang had not made any promise to shut down that base.
The spokesmen also explained that the existence of such a missile site was an indication of the need for talks with North Korea to halt its nuclear activities.
North Korea has been involved in rigorous diplomacy with the South. US President Donald Trump — who met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in July — has also claimed that his country’s diplomacy with Pyongyang has eliminated a purported threat posed by North Korea to the US’s national security.
Some entities in the US, however, claim that Trump’s assertion is not supported by facts.
One of the authors of the CSIS report, Lisa Collins, said, “It has been pretty clear that the North has not been willing to give up its entire nuclear program.”
“The dispersed deployment of these bases and distinctive tactics employed by ballistic missile units are combined with decades of extensive camouflage, concealment and deception practices to maximize the survival of its missile units from pre-emptive strikes and during wartime operations,” the report said.
Follow-up diplomacy between the US and North Korea have borne little fruit. But South Korea has significantly advanced in its diplomatic engagement of its long-time rival, the North.
In their June summit in Singapore, Trump and Kim agreed to work toward denuclearization. But that agreement, made in a written document, was broadly-worded.
Still, the North has taken several steps toward that goal: it has suspended missile and nuclear testing, demolished at least one nuclear test site, and agreed to allow international inspectors into a missile engine test facility and another nuclear testing site.
In return, Pyongyang is seeking relief from harsh international sanctions — mostly spearheaded by the US — imposed on the country over its nuclear and missile programs. The US, however, has not offered any such relief, hence the slowdown in further diplomacy.
Last week, Pyongyang called off a meeting between North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York after the US resumed joint military drills with South Korea.
The hippie movement of the 1960s, which began in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles and peculiar military and political ties to prominent figures in the scene like Jim Morrison and Frank Zappa are looked at with Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon author Dave McGowan. We also discuss movement pioneer Vito Paulekas, Charles Manson and the Manson Family murders, and the theory that the CIA manufactured the hippie counterculture to undermine the anti war movement, in this uncensored Antidote interview, hosted by Michael Parker.
GUEST BIO and BOOK INFO:
David McGowan was born and raised in Torrance, California, just twenty miles south of Laurel Canyon. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in psychology and has, since 1990, run a small business in the greater Los Angeles area. Currently single, he is the proud father of three daughters. He is also a lifelong music fan who still frequently keeps his radio tuned to classic rock stations. McGowan’s previous books include Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder, and Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion.
Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon
How did an uncanny amount of rock superstars emerge from the rustic Laurel Canyon scene of the mid 60s when the primary music centers of the US at that time were NYC, Nashville, and Detroit? Why were many of these future stars sons and daughters of the military/intelligence complex and extreme privilege who just happened to all arrive in LA at the same time? From the Lizard King Jim Morrison to Frank Zappa, the Mamas and Papas, the Byrds, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, even the Monkees, they all had conspicuous family heritages that did not exactly jive with what would become the free love, anti war soundtrack of a generation. Meanwhile, looming behind these musicians was a dark underbelly of Hollywood stars, young turks, the mob, shadowy intelligence assets, and charmers like little Charlie Manson who everyone liked at first.. How and why did this all happen? And what about that covert military installation on Lookout Mountain? Are you ready to have your rock and roll fantasies challenged? You may never listen to this music the same way ever again.
00:01 Welcoming author David McGowan to Antidote.
01:00 What Lookout Mountain Laboratories was designed for, and what it is now.
06:05 Jim Morrison’s father’s involvement in the Vietnam war.
09:25 Morrison as an anti-war idol and his surprisingly scarce background in music.
12:55 Hippie-era bands that all had connections to government intelligence.
15:30 Crosby, Stills and Nash’s connections to important historical figures.
18:45 Frank Zappa’s father as a chemical warfare engineer.
20:20 Jackson Browne born in post-war Germany.
23:30 Early history of The Byrds appears suspicious and possibly casted.
25:15 The rise of hippie culture and music clubs in Los Angeles.
29:10 How The Young Turks of Los Angeles contributed to the popularization of clubs.
32:00 The Hippie/Rockefeller connection.
33:25 Charles Manson as a leader and a member of the Los Angeles music scene.
37:05 The Wonderland Murders.
39:05 The surprising number of stars whose parents committed suicide.
41:10 Were these hippie musical figures groomed to undermine the anti-war movement?
46:20 Thank you and goodbye.
Each Memorial Day, countless Americans recite the standard mantra that has been inculcated within their minds from the first grade of the public (i.e., government) schools to which their parents were forced to send them: American soldiers who died in America’s wars died to protect our freedoms and defend our country.
Each Memorial Day, it is worth reminding ourselves that such is simply not the case. American soldiers who died in those wars died for our government, not to protect our freedoms or our country.
And, yes, our government and our country are two separate and distinct entities, a phenomenon reflected by the Bill of Rights, which expressly protects our country from our government. … continue
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