The US alphabet agencies recently released some formerly classified files on JFK. There’s nothing much in them, because well… why would there be? Supposing the CIA were complicit, who’s going to release, 50 years after the event, the evidence of their own coup? We haven’t covered it here, at OffG, because it doesn’t really need any attention. It’s a charity dump, a distraction. It allows Trump to look like he’s combating the Deep State, when in fact he’s firmly on the leash. That the CIA or FBI didn’t suddenly produce proof of their complicity in JFK’s assassination is not evidence of anything.
Jonathan Freedland, writing one of his toxic editorials in The Guardian, begs to differ. The fact that the CIA didn’t release any evidence they did it… is evidence they didn’t do it, according to Freedland. His column, long on mockery and self-righteous smears but short on evidence (as usual), does nothing but demonstrate three things:
1. He is only just barely acquainted with the facts of the JFK case.
2. He has no faculty for basic logical thinking.
3. He is not averse to practicing intellectual dishonesty.
If you’ve been paying even the slightest bit of attention, none of these will come as a surprise.
But this article isn’t about JFK – we’ve written about that before, and will do again. But not today. This article isn’t about Freedland’s aggressively uninformed opinions, his cloying prose or his ill-deserved sense of moral superiority. It’s about the world-view he’s trying to market between banner ads begging for money. It’s about his smug insistence that conspiracy theories just don’t happen.
Or, to be more specific, conspiracy theories don’t happen… here.
Because, despite his deep-held belief that Conspiracy Theories are dangerous, he certainly believes in a lot of them. He thinks the Russian Government poisoned Alexander Litvinenko. He thinks Vladimir Putin had Boris Nemstov shot. He thinks Russian banks have been backing the far-right in Europe and supported Brexit. And he thinks the FSB “hacked” the American presidential election in order to get their Manchurian candidate elected.
Buzz in when you spot the connection.
These are all, by definition, conspiracy theories – but they are also all things done by the other. Conspiracies happen over there. They are done by the bad guys. We don’t do them.
…. except of course, when we do.
Two years ago, the idea that the US, Saudi Arabia, Israel and others had created ISIS as front for a proxy war on Syria was dismissed as a “conspiracy theory”. It has since been proven, many times over, to be completely true. That ISIS are US proxies is not a “conspiracy theory”, but a conspiracy fact.
Five years ago, anybody claiming that the NSA were secretly surveilling most of the world, including the governments of allied countries, would have been dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theorist and told to don their “tin-foil hat”. Edward Snowden’s revelations on the NSA internet and communications surveillance programme, of course, prove the accusation true. Freedland should remember this one, the story broke in his paper, his colleagues won awards for it, and their computers were destroyed on the orders of GCHQ. Why this constantly escapes the man’s memory is anyone’s guess. Regardless, NSA mass surveillance is not a “conspiracy theory”, but a conspiracy fact.
Fifteen years ago, anybody claiming that wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were being pushed under false pretences, in order to make money for the private sector and encircle Iran… would have been dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theorist. Now we know that the WMD dossier was “sexed up”. It is not a conspiracy theory, but a conspiracy fact.
Twenty-seven years ago, anybody claiming that “Nayirah” – the Kuwaiti nurse who famously testified that Iraqi soldiers had thrown Kuwaiti babies out of incubators – was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and had never been a nurse… would have been dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theorist. This information became public knowledge in 1991, just months after her testimony had been used to stoke public support for the first Iraq war. Nayirah being a fake witness to push war propaganda is not a “conspiracy theory”, but a conspiracy fact.
Thirty-two years ago, anybody claiming that Reagan’s government were trading with Iran in order to fund and arm a proxy army in Nicaragua to overthrow the democratic government of Daniel Ortega… would have been dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theorist. However, the whole affair came to light in 1986. Iran-Contra is not a “conspiracy theory”, but a conspiracy fact.
Fifty-three years ago, anyone claiming that Gulf of Tonkin incident had been almost entirely fabricated as an excuse to launch a full-scale war against North Vietnam… would have been dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theorist. There is a mountain of evidence has been compiled since then, that proves the “incident” never really happened. The faking of the Gulf of Tonkin incident is not a “conspiracy theory”, but a conspiracy fact.
These are just six famous, high-profile examples. There are dozens of others. Conspiracies happen. All the time. Freedland’s piece is an attack on this truth, an effort to distort reality by blurring clear definitions. He claims that:
[conspiracy theorists] perennially cast the FBI and the CIA as the key tools of dark, unseen forces.
… without making any reference to decades of state-sanctioned murder, torture and destruction that earned these agencies their well-deserved reputation.
You don’t need to be deluded to think the CIA a tool of “dark forces”, you just need to study the history of Iran. Or Chile. Or Indonesia. Or Afghanistan. Or Honduras. The list of democratic governments overthrown by the US is very long. A lot those plots were considered “conspiracy theories”, until the facts of the case eventually came out.
Operation Northwoods was a Pentagon plan to shoot-down an American passenger plane and blame it on Cuba.
Operation Paperclip was a CIA plan to smuggle Nazi scientists out of Germany and employ them in covert research for the American government.
Operation Mockingbird was a CIA plan to recruit members into of the media into intelligence work, and use them to seed propaganda.
All of these would have, at some point, been dismissed as “conspiracy theory”. They are all, now, accepted historical facts. Freedland mentions none of them. A remarkable act of hypocrisy for a man so adamantly against what he calls the “post truth age”.
Freedland would have us believe that none of these conspiracies, however well documented, actually happened. But there is another kind – the kind that definitely did happen… regardless of the lack evidence.
Now, we turn our eyes to Russia.
Russia, you see, is place where “conspiracy theories” are no longer dangerous. They are always appropriate and universally true. Nothing that happens in Russia is explicable by any means other than “the Kremlin”.
In the media and state-backed push to create a great enemy for our age, there is no crime so petty it cannot be linked to Moscow, no evidence of “Russian interference” so pathetically small it won’t be splashed across the headlines.
Just a few months ago, when a metro station in St Petersburg was bombed, the BBC suggested it was a Putin-backed false-flag within hours. No such assertion was ever made about Las Vegas. Or Westminster. Or Sandy Hook. Or Paris. Or Berlin. Or Orlando.
That the FSB poisoned Litvinenko is treated as an unquestioned fact. That MI5 murdered Princess Diana? Nothing but a laughable absurdity. It is the shallowest, almost childlike propaganda, that beatifies its own side whilst projecting all the ills of the world into the other.
This demonisation of Russia is then segued into demonisation of democracy. The Russians are currently accused of having meddled in every major election for years. The Scottish Independence Referendum, the Brexit vote, the American and French Presidential elections, the general elections in the UK and Germany, and the Dutch referendum on Ukraine. All were subject to phantom “interference”, yet to be substantiated by any real evidence. This groundless accusation is then used as an argument to overturn or ignore the results of democratic votes. Not all of them, you understand, only the ones where the wrong side won. Trump must be “removed” according to Freedland, and we must ignore the Brexit results.
Even Catalonia’s vote for independence, just the latest move in a struggle hundreds of years long, has already been linked to Putin.
Further, Russia is accused of “bankrolling the far-right in Europe”. The evidence for this? Marine Le Pen got a loan from a Russian bank “with links to the Kremlin” (whatever that means)… over ten years ago.
There is FAR more evidence of NATO and EU supporting REAL fascists and extremists – namely Right Sector in Ukraine, and ISIS et al all over the Middle East. But, while the former is an accepted media “fact”, the latter is the subject of nothing but derision.
Even our homegrown problems, through complex absurdities of “conspiracism”, are laid at the Kremlin’s door. In 2015, CNN and others accused Russia of “weaponising the refugee crisis”, as if they had caused it. As if Russia had forced us into the destruction of Libya, and then ordered Merkel to throw open Germany’s borders. Those in Eastern Europe who blamed Germany or the EU, notably Hungary’s President Viktor Orban, were said to be “friends of Putin”. As if the epithet is an argument in and of itself.
Putin and Russia have become Snowball from Orwell’s Animal Farm. An invisible but ever-present creation of the state, responsible for all our ills. And if Putin is Snowball, then Freedland, and all the media-types like him, are Squealer. Oily charlatans who twist language to suit their needs, and the needs of their employers.
If “conspiracy theories are dangerous”, then how dangerous is it to use ridiculous allegations to undermine democracy? If Conspiracy Theories damage society, why clamp-down on honest debate by dismissing all those who disagree as “Putin-bots”? If Conspiracy Theories are so offensive, why use them to vilify Russia, and stoke up public hatred of a nuclear armed superpower?
The author’s real point is quite clear – it’s not all conspiracy theories which are “dangerous”. Only Conspiracy Theories that investigate, undermine, or otherwise question the governments, institutions or agendas of Western countries are “dangerous”.
Our governments do no wrong, are benign and honest. To question that is dangerous. Their governments are malign and dishonest. To question them is a duty.
It is nothing but a long, drawn-out, argument for conformity of opinion and deadness of mind. An attack on independent thought, peppered with abuse.
First he describes “Conspiracy Theorists” as:
harmless potting-shed eccentrics, green-ink cranks whose tightly spaced letters could once safely be filed in the dustbin.
… before adding:
you might have dismissed such talk as the derangement of the bug-eyed, irrelevant fringe,
And then finally playing the anti-Semitism card:
so many conspiracy theorists… end up reaching the terminus of antisemitism. For antisemitism is itself often rooted in conspiracy theory: the belief that the secret hand behind world events, manipulating each and every development, belongs to the Rothschilds or George Soros or, when no euphemism is required, the Jews.
A baseless, childish ad hominem, that makes so little sense it contradicts his own last paragraph, and shows up his quasi-delusional mindset:
On Thursday we learned that 1,500 billionaires have now amassed $6tn of wealth, a level of inequality not seen since the Gilded Age. That’s not come about because of a secret meeting in an underground boardroom, but because of a system that is fatally flawed.
I don’t follow his argument, “don’t talk about conspiracies when we’ve got all these billionaires to worry about” doesn’t make any sense to me. It seems he’s created some new kind of logical fallacy, the argument to inequality, a derivation of “think of the children”. It’s an odd chord for Freedland to strike, and is probably a rather desperate attempt to seem “hip” to the current issues. He certainly never wrote about the perils of inequality before Corbyn-mania swept the country.
Regardless of the source of Freedland’s sudden Bolshevik leanings, he contradicts himself – and in so doing paints a picture of an insane world. He doesn’t acknowledge that two of these billionaires – Soros and the Rothschilds – he has already named as nothing but a “euphemism” for anti-Semitism.
So which is it, Jonathan? Are wealthy people the problem? Or is criticising the super-rich merely a mask for racism? Why is it acceptable to cite “inequality” as a threat to the world, but crazy to blame the main beneficiaries of said inequality?
Freedland wants us to believe we live in a world where a tiny percentage of the population control vast fortunes, but wield no political power. He decries the “flawed system”, but refuses to acknowledge that corruption or conspiracy has played any part in creating it. That is insane at best, and dishonest at worst.
He doesn’t acknowledge the unavoidable truth that super-wealthy people will wield influence over government policy. From arms-sales, to tax loop-holes, to the push to privatise the NHS, to the war in Iraq… there are dozens of examples of political power being used to further the agenda of the rich.
Hyper-wealthy individuals exerting influence over elected officials and using military and intelligence apparatus to further undeclared political agendas, is the very definition of a conspiracy theory. And it happens every single day.
If we are indeed living in the “post-truth age”, then it is not because of Donald Trump. Or Facebook. Or Russia Today.
It is because of dishonest journalism such as you’ll find in the Guardian, or the New York Times, or Buzzfeed. Because Jonathan Freedland, and his ilk, have stopped trying to hold power to account, and instead act as spokespeople for authority. Official heralds, handing down to the proles a pre-approved consensus and an a la carte menu of opinion. Labelling as “dangerous” ANY questioning of a government organisation with a proven track-record of illegal operations, whilst constantly stoking public fear of the mythic “Russian influence”. Conjuring an entirely fictional enemy from smoke and gossip, whilst throwing real crimes against humanity down the memory hole.
Freedland’s article, and all others like it, are an attack on reason itself. Denying our ability, and even our right, to question the motives and actions of the powerful, whilst asserting the moral rectitude of blind obedience. The Guardian is engaging in cultural policing, enforcing the unquestioned morality of the state and the system, at the expense of critical thinking and truth.
The Reichstag Fire was a conspiracy too. The state that rose from its ashes was only able to cover up its crimes thanks to rigid programmes of state-sponsored propaganda…faithfully carried out by a compliant and controlled media.
The two sources that originated the allegations claiming that Russia meddled in the 2016 election — without providing convincing evidence — were both paid for by the Democratic National Committee, and in one instance also by the Clinton campaign: the Steele dossier and the CrowdStrike analysis of the DNC servers. Think about that for a minute.
We have long known that the DNC did not allow the FBI to examine its computer server for clues about who may have hacked it – or even if it was hacked – and instead turned to CrowdStrike, a private company co-founded by a virulently anti-Putin Russian. Within a day, CrowdStrike blamed Russia on dubious evidence.
And, it has now been disclosed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for opposition research memos written by former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele using hearsay accusations from anonymous Russian sources to claim that the Russian government was blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump in a scheme that presupposed that Russian President Vladimir Putin foresaw Trump’s presidency years ago when no one else did.
Since then, the U.S. intelligence community has struggled to corroborate Steele’s allegations, but those suspicions still colored the thinking of President Obama’s intelligence chiefs who, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, “hand-picked” the analysts who produced the Jan. 6 “assessment” claiming that Russia interfered in the U.S. election.
In other words, possibly all of the Russia-gate allegations, which have been taken on faith by Democratic partisans and members of the anti-Trump Resistance, trace back to claims paid for or generated by Democrats.
If for a moment one could remove the sometimes justified hatred that many people feel toward Trump, it would be impossible to avoid the impression that the scandal may have been cooked up by the DNC and the Clinton camp in league with Obama’s intelligence chiefs to serve political and geopolitical aims.
Absent new evidence based on forensic or documentary proof, we could be looking at a partisan concoction devised in the midst of a bitter general election campaign, a manufactured “scandal” that also has fueled a dangerous New Cold War against Russia; a case of a dirty political “oppo” serving American ruling interests in reestablishing the dominance over Russia that they enjoyed in the 1990s, as well as feeding the voracious budgetary appetite of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Based on what is now known, Wall Street buccaneer Paul Singer paid for GPS Fusion, a Washington-based research firm, to do opposition research on Trump during the Republican primaries, but dropped the effort in May 2016 when it became clear Trump would be the GOP nominee. GPS Fusion has strongly denied that it hired Steele for this work or that the research had anything to do with Russia.
Then, in April 2016 the DNC and the Clinton campaign paid its Washington lawyer Marc Elias to hire Fusion GPS to unearth dirt connecting Trump to Russia. This was three months before the DNC blamed Russia for hacking its computers and supposedly giving its stolen emails to WikiLeaks to help Trump win the election.
“The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee retained Fusion GPS to research any possible connections between Mr. Trump, his businesses, his campaign team and Russia, court filings revealed this week,” The New York Timesreported on Friday night.
So, linking Trump to Moscow as a way to bring Russia into the election story was the Democrats’ aim from the start.
Fusion GPS then hired ex-MI6 intelligence agent Steele, it says for the first time, to dig up that dirt in Russia for the Democrats. Steele produced classic opposition research, not an intelligence assessment or conclusion, although it was written in a style and formatted to look like one.
It’s important to realize that Steele was no longer working for an official intelligence agency, which would have imposed strict standards on his work and possibly disciplined him for injecting false information into the government’s decision-making. Instead, he was working for a political party and a presidential candidate looking for dirt that would hurt their opponent, what the Clintons used to call “cash for trash” when they were the targets.
Had Steele been doing legitimate intelligence work for his government, he would have taken a far different approach. Intelligence professionals are not supposed to just give their bosses what their bosses want to hear. So, Steele would have verified his information. And it would have gone through a process of further verification by other intelligence analysts in his and perhaps other intelligence agencies. For instance, in the U.S., a National Intelligence Estimate requires vetting by all 17 intelligence agencies and incorporates dissenting opinions.
Instead Steele was producing a piece of purely political research and had different motivations. The first might well have been money, as he was being paid specifically for this project, not as part of his work on a government salary presumably serving all of society. Secondly, to continue being paid for each subsequent memo that he produced he would have been incentivized to please his clients or at least give them enough so they would come back for more.
Dubious Stuff
Opposition research is about getting dirt to be used in a mud-slinging political campaign, in which wild charges against candidates are the norm. This “oppo” is full of unvetted rumor and innuendo with enough facts mixed in to make it seem credible. There was so much dubious stuff in Steele’s memos that the FBI was unable to confirm its most salacious allegations and apparently refuted several key points.
Perhaps more significantly, the corporate news media, which was largely partial to Clinton, did not report the fantastic allegations after people close to the Clinton campaign began circulating the lurid stories before the election with the hope that the material would pop up in the news. To their credit, established media outlets recognized this as ammunition against a political opponent, not a serious document.
Despite this circumspection, the Steele dossier was shared with the FBI at some point in the summer of 2016 and apparently became the basis for the FBI to seek Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against members of Trump’s campaign. More alarmingly, it may have formed the basis for much of the Jan. 6 intelligence “assessment” by those “hand-picked” analysts from three U.S. intelligence agencies – the CIA, the FBI and the NSA – not all 17 agencies that Hillary Clinton continues to insist were involved. (Obama’s intelligence chiefs, DNI Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan, publicly admitted that only three agencies took part and The New York Timesprinted a correction saying so.)
If in fact the Steele memos were a primary basis for the Russia collusion allegations against Trump, then there may be no credible evidence at all. It could be that because the three agencies knew the dossier was dodgy that there was no substantive proof in the Jan. 6 “assessment.” Even so, a summary of the Steele allegations were included in a secret appendix that then-FBI Director James Comey described to then-President-elect Trump just two weeks before his inauguration.
Five days later, after the fact of Comey’s briefing was leaked to the press, the Steele dossier was published in full by the sensationalist website BuzzFeed behind the excuse that the allegations’ inclusion in the classified annex of a U.S. intelligence report justified the dossier’s publication regardless of doubts about its accuracy.
Russian Fingerprints
The other source of blame about Russian meddling came from the private company CrowdStrike because the DNC blocked the FBI from examining its server after a suspected hack. Within a day, CrowdStrike claimed to find Russian “fingerprints” in the metadata of a DNC opposition research document, which had been revealed by an Internet site called DCLeaks, showing Cyrillic letters and the name of the first Soviet intelligence chief. That supposedly implicated Russia.
CrowdStrike’s Dmitri Alperovitch
CrowdStrike also claimed that the alleged Russian intelligence operation was extremely sophisticated and skilled in concealing its external penetration of the server. But CrowdStrike’s conclusion about Russian “fingerprints” resulted from clues that would have been left behind by extremely sloppy hackers or inserted intentionally to implicate the Russians.
CrowdStrike’s credibility was further undermined when Voice of America reported on March 23, 2017, that the same software the company says it used to blame Russia for the hack wrongly concluded that Moscow also had hacked Ukrainian government howitzers on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.
“An influential British think tank and Ukraine’s military are disputing a report that the U.S. cyber-security firm CrowdStrike has used to buttress its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election,” VOA reported. Dimitri Alperovitch, a CrowdStrike co-founder, is also a senior fellow at the anti-Russian Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.
More speculation about the alleged election hack was raised with WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 release, which revealed that the CIA is not beyond covering up its own hacks by leaving clues implicating others. Plus, there’s the fact that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has declared again and again that WikiLeaks did not get the Democratic emails from the Russians. Buttressing Assange’s denials of a Russian role, WikiLeaks associate Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, said he met a person connected to the leak during a trip to Washington last year.
And, William Binney, maybe the best mathematician to ever work at the National Security Agency, and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern have published a technical analysis of one set of Democratic email metadata showing that a transatlantic “hack” would have been impossible and that the evidence points to a likely leak by a disgruntled Democratic insider. Binney has further stated that if it were a “hack,” the NSA would have been able to detect it and make the evidence known.
Fueling Neo-McCarthyism
Despite these doubts, which the U.S. mainstream media has largely ignored, Russia-gate has grown into something much more than an election story. It has unleashed a neo-McCarthyite attack on Americans who are accused of being dupes of Russia if they dare question the evidence of the Kremlin’s guilt.
Just weeks after last November’s election, The Washington Postpublished a front-page story touting a blacklist from an anonymous group, called PropOrNot, that alleged that 200 news sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other leading independent news sources, were either willful Russian propagandists or “useful idiots.”
Last week, a new list emerged with the names of over 2,000 people, mostly Westerners, who have appeared on RT, the Russian government-financed English-language news channel. The list was part of a report entitled, “The Kremlin’s Platform for ‘Useful Idiots’ in the West,” put out by an outfit called European Values, with a long list of European funders.
Included on the list of “useful idiots” absurdly are CIA-friendly Washington Post columnist David Ignatius; David Brock, Hillary Clinton’s opposition research chief; and U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
The report stated: “Many people in Europe and the US, including politicians and other persons of influence, continue to exhibit troubling naïveté about RT’s political agenda, buying into the network’s marketing ploy that it is simply an outlet for independent voices marginalised by the mainstream Western press. These ‘useful idiots’ remain oblivious to RT’s intentions and boost its legitimacy by granting interviews on its shows and newscasts.”
The intent of these lists is clear: to shut down dissenting voices who question Western foreign policy and who are usually excluded from Western corporate media. RT is often willing to provide a platform for a wider range of viewpoints, both from the left and right. American ruling interests fend off critical viewpoints by first suppressing them in corporate media and now condemning them as propaganda when they emerge on RT.
Geopolitical Risks
More ominously, the anti-Russia mania has increased chances of direct conflict between the two nuclear superpowers. The Russia-bashing rhetoric not only served the Clinton campaign, though ultimately to ill effect, but it has pushed a longstanding U.S.-led geopolitical agenda to regain control over Russia, an advantage that the U.S. enjoyed during the Yeltsin years in the 1990s.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Wall Street rushed in behind Boris Yeltsin and Russian oligarchs to asset strip virtually the entire country, impoverishing the population. Amid widespread accounts of this grotesque corruption, Washington intervened in Russian politics to help get Yeltsin re-elected in 1996. The political rise of Vladimir Putin after Yeltsin resigned on New Year’s Eve 1999 reversed this course, restoring Russian sovereignty over its economy and politics.
That inflamed Hillary Clinton and other American hawks whose desire was to install another Yeltsin-like figure and resume U.S. exploitation of Russia’s vast natural and financial resources. To advance that cause, U.S. presidents have supported the eastward expansion of NATO and have deployed 30,000 troops on Russia’s border.
In 2014, the Obama administration helped orchestrate a coup that toppled the elected government of Ukraine and installed a fiercely anti-Russian regime. The U.S. also undertook the risky policy of aiding jihadists to overthrow a secular Russian ally in Syria. The consequences have brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
In this context, the Democratic Party-led Russia-gate offensive was intended not only to explain away Clinton’s defeat but to stop Trump — possibly via impeachment or by inflicting severe political damage — because he had talked, insincerely it is turning out, about detente with Russia. That did not fit in well with the plan at all.
Joe Lauria is a veteran foreign-affairs journalist. He has written for the Boston Globe, the Sunday Times of London and the Wall Street Journal among other newspapers. He is the author of How I Lost By Hillary Clinton published by OR Books in June 2017. He can be reached at joelauria@gmail.com and followed on Twitter at @unjoe.
Prof Marcello Ferrada de Noli, from whom we quote the texts posted in this video, made on March 10, 2017, a unique discovery while examining anew a White Helmets movie that have been presented in 2015 at UNSC as argument for ‘No-Fly Fone’ in Syria. The prof observed that the piston in the barrel of the syringe used in a dramatic ‘life-saving’ maneuver on a child, in fact never moved –indicating that no adrenaline was ever injected. He reported the finding to his colleagues, which submitted back to him 11-12 March the statements inserted in this video. This is a new exposure of the White Helmets videos showing fake life-saving procedures that deceived UN Security Council during the White Helmets campaign to facilitate a No-Fly Zone in Syria. Further details in the new published report, “White Helmets Movie: Updated Evidence From Swedish Doctors Confirm Fake ‘Lifesaving’ and Malpractices on Children” at http://theindicter.com/white-helmets-… in TheIndicter.com/
A television interview of a top Qatari official confessing the truth behind the origins of the war in Syria is going viral across Arabic social media during the same week a leaked top secret NSA document was published which confirms that the armed opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the conflict.
And according to a well-known Syria analyst and economic adviser with close contacts in the Syrian government, the explosive interview constitutes a high level “public admission to collusion and coordination between four countries to destabilize an independent state, [including] possible support for Nusra/al-Qaeda.” Importantly, “this admission will help build case for what Damascus sees as an attack on its security & sovereignty. It will form basis for compensation claims.”
A 2013 London press conference: Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. A 2014 Hillary Clinton email confirmed Qatar as a state-sponsor of ISIS during that same time period.
As the war in Syria continues slowly winding down, it seems new source material comes out on an almost a weekly basis in the form of testimonials of top officials involved in destabilizing Syria, and even occasional leaked emails and documents which further detail covert regime change operations against the Assad government. Though much of this content serves to confirm what has already long been known by those who have never accepted the simplistic propaganda which has dominated mainstream media, details continue to fall in place, providing future historians with a clearer picture of the true nature of the war.
This process of clarity has been aided – as predicted – by the continued infighting among Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) former allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with each side accusing the other of funding Islamic State and al-Qaeda terrorists (ironically, both true). Increasingly, the world watches as more dirty laundry is aired and the GCC implodes after years of nearly all the gulf monarchies funding jihadist movements in places like Syria, Iraq, and Libya.
The top Qatari official is no less than former Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, who oversaw Syria operations on behalf of Qatar until 2013 (also as foreign minister), and is seen below with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in this Jan. 2010 photo (as a reminder, Qatar’s 2022 World Cup Committee donated $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation in 2014).
In an interview with Qatari TV Wednesday, bin Jaber al-Thani revealed that his country, alongside Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United States, began shipping weapons to jihadists from the very moment events “first started” (in 2011).
Al-Thani even likened the covert operation to “hunting prey” – the prey being President Assad and his supporters – “prey” which he admits got away (as Assad is still in power; he used a Gulf Arabic dialect word, “al-sayda”, which implies hunting animals or prey for sport). Though Thani denied credible allegations of support for ISIS, the former prime minister’s words implied direct Gulf and US support for al-Qaeda in Syria (al-Nusra Front) from the earliest years of the war, and even said Qatar has “full documents” and recordsproving that the war was planned to effect regime change.
According to Zero Hedge’s translation, al-Thani said while acknowledging Gulf nations were arming jihadists in Syria with the approval and support of US and Turkey: “I don’t want to go into details but we have full documents about us taking charge [in Syria].” He claimed that both Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah (who reigned until his death in 2015) and the United States placed Qatar in a lead role concerning covert operations to execute the proxy war.
The former prime minister’s comments, while very revealing, were intended as a defense and excuse of Qatar’s support for terrorism, and as a critique of the US and Saudi Arabia for essentially leaving Qatar “holding the bag” in terms of the war against Assad. Al-Thani explained that Qatar continued its financing of armed insurgents in Syria while other countries eventually wound down large-scale support, which is why he lashed out at the US and the Saudis, who initially “were with us in the same trench.”
In a previous US television interview which was vastly underreported, al-Thani told Charlie Rose when asked about allegations of Qatar’s support for terrorism that, “in Syria, everybody did mistakes, including your country.” And said that when the war began in Syria, “all of us worked through two operation rooms: one in Jordan and one in Turkey.”
Below is the key section of Wednesday’s interview, translated and subtitled by @Walid970721. Zero Hedge has reviewed and confirmed the translation, however, as the original rush translator has acknowledged, al-Thani doesn’t say “lady” but “prey” [“al-sayda”]- as in both Assad and Syrians were being hunted by the outside countries.
The partial English transcript is as follows:
“When the events first started in Syria I went to Saudi Arabia and met with King Abdullah. I did that on the instructions of his highness the prince, my father. He [Abdullah] said we are behind you. You go ahead with this plan and we will coordinate but you should be in charge. I won’t get into details but we have full documents and anything that was sent [to Syria] would go to Turkey and was in coordination with the US forces and everything was distributed via the Turks and the US forces. And us and everyone else was involved, the military people. There may have been mistakes and support was given to the wrong faction… Maybe there was a relationship with Nusra, its possible but I myself don’t know about this… we were fighting over the prey [“al-sayda”] and now the prey is gone and we are still fighting… and now Bashar is still there. You [US and Saudi Arabia] were with us in the same trench… I have no objection to one changing if he finds that he was wrong, but at least inform your partner… for example leave Bashar [al-Assad] or do this or that, but the situation that has been created now will never allow any progress in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council], or any progress on anything if we continue to openly fight.”
As is now well-known, the CIA was directly involved in leading regime change efforts in Syria with allied gulf partners, as leaked and declassified US intelligence memos confirm. The US government understood in real time that Gulf and West-supplied advanced weaponry was going to al-Qaeda and ISIS, despite official claims of arming so-called “moderate” rebels. For example, a leaked 2014 intelligence memo sent to Hillary Clinton acknowledged Qatari and Saudi support for ISIS.
The email stated in direct and unambiguous language that:
“the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”
Furthermore, one day before Prime Minister Thani’s interview, The Interceptreleased a new top-secret NSA document unearthed from leaked intelligence files provided by Edward Snowden which show in stunning clarity that the armed opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the war which has now claimed half a million lives.
The newly released NSA document confirms that a 2013 insurgent attack with advanced surface-to-surface rockets upon civilian areas of Damascus, including Damascus International Airport, was directly supplied and commanded by Saudi Arabia with full prior awareness of US intelligence. As the former Qatari prime minister now also confirms, both the Saudis and US government staffed “operations rooms” overseeing such heinous attacks during the time period of the 2013 Damascus airport attack.
No doubt there remains a massive trove of damning documentary evidence which will continue to trickle out in the coming months and years. At the very least, the continuing Qatari-Saudi diplomatic war will bear more fruit as each side builds a case against the other with charges of supporting terrorism. And as we can see from this latest Qatari TV interview, the United States itself will not be spared in this new open season of airing dirty laundry as old allies turn on each other.
The murder of President John F Kennedy 54 years ago has been described as the “crime of the century”. If US and Western news media cannot discuss this seminal event openly and honestly, let alone investigate it, then what does that say about their credibility?
Such systematic media denial of reality inflicts irreparable damage to their credibility. How can they be taken seriously on any other matter, whether it is claims of “Russian meddling” or about the war in Syria, or the claims justifying Washington’s aggression towards Iran and North Korea?
The astounding media denial over JFK’s assassination is a symptom of the tacit totalitarianism that passes for “Western democracy”.
The release this week of secret government papers on the killing of President Kennedy was billed as a day of revelation and reckoning. Closer to the truth is that the shocking murder of Kennedy continues to be covered-up by the US deep state.
The premise of “revelation and reckoning” is absurdly false and naive. The notion that US authorities would “finally come clean” on what happened that day in Dallas is not only flawed. It also creates the illusion that the controversy has finally been settled, thereby supposedly confirming the official version that Kennedy was assassinated by a lone malcontent, Lee Harvey Oswald.
CNN reported the release of official documents this week thus: “More than 50 years after President John F Kennedy was killed, Americans on Thursday may finally get the US government’s full accounting… to quell conspiracy theories that have long swirled around the assassination.”
The New York Timeswrote: “The final trove of sealed government records to be released” will lay to rest the “grand-daddy of all conspiracy theories”.
The evidence and truth about Kennedy’s slaying in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, on November 22, 1963, is already out there in the testimony of dozens of eye witnesses who observed the assassination or who were present in the aftermath. The assumption that the release of secret archives could shed any light is misplaced. But the media depiction of a “final trove” of documents conveniently shores up the official account that any other explanation of what really happened is that of a “conspiracy crank”.
CNN and the New York Times, as with the rest of the mainstream media in the US, claim that the release of declassified papers this week confirms the official narrative that JFK was shot dead by Lee Harvey Oswald firing a sniper rifle from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Store Depository at the president’s motorcade. That was the original conclusion from the government-led Warren Commission, which published its report on the assassination in 1964. For over 50 years, the US media have unswervingly maintained that version of events, despite abundant evidence to the contrary.
What the media have studiously ignored for all these years is the evidence and testimony from dozens of witnesses who were either excluded from the Warren Commission hearings, or their testimonies were distorted by FBI investigators. Many of them mysteriously killed.
One of the best compendiums on the Kennedy assassination is ‘JFK and the Unspeakable’ by James Douglass (2008). Other essential titles for details on the murder – details which mainstream media largely ignore – include ‘Crossfire’ by Jim Marrs, and ‘Brothers’ by David Talbot.
Among the many crucial witnesses recorded over the years, here below are a select few. Their testimonies show that the murder of Kennedy was a much darker “crime of the century” than the mainstream media would ever explore.
Shot from the front, not from the back
Doctor Charles Crenshaw led the medical staff at Dallas Parkland Hospital where the fatally wounded JFK was rushed to minutes after being shot. Crenshaw and nearly 20 other medical staff tended to the president’s wounds trying to resuscitate him. All of these medics testified that Kennedy’s fatal head wound was from a gun shot to the front of the skull which resulted in a massive exit hole at the back of his head. That one detail alone contradicts the official claim that Oswald allegedly shot JFK from the rear, as the Warren Commission contends.
The fatal shot must have come from the front, which the famous amateur video footage recorded by bystander Abraham Zapruder near the Grassy Knoll also purports to show. (Notably, a Congressional panel, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, concluded in 1979 after a reexamination of evidence that there was more than one shooter in Dealey Plaza. But this finding has never been thoroughly explored by the media. Why not?)
Critically important, Dr Crenshaw and his medical colleagues were immediately pressured by the FBI and other authorities to suppress their initial observations. They were tacitly intimidated to change their accounts to say the opposite: that the president’s head wound was caused by a shot from the rear. Crenshaw was not invited to testify before the Warren Commission during its year-long hearings. He says for years after, he and Parkland staff were subtly intimidated to keep quiet about their witness to Kennedy’s final moments. However, three decades later, in 1992, Dr Crenshaw published ‘JFK and the Conspiracy of Silence’. Ironically, it became a best-seller on the New York Times book list, in spite a huge media campaign to discredit Crenshaw’s medical expertise.
Lieutenant Commander William Bruce Pitzer was in charge of the Audio-Visual Department at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington DC where Kennedy’s remains were flown hours after the shooting. That was where the official autopsy was carried out, bizarrely, under the watchful eye of senior military personnel. Pitzer was tasked with filming the remains of the president. As he later confided to a colleague, who corroborated the film’s images, JFK’s head had a massive exit wound at the back of the skull, just as the Dallas doctors had initially maintained. Two years later, Pitzer was mysteriously found dead in his studio. He had been shot in the head, a revolver nearby. His death was officially said to be suicide, which his widow disputed. The film of the president’s remains, which Pitzer had been carefully storing, was removed from his studio by an unknown person.
The contention that Kennedy was shot from the front is not a theory. The direction of fire was witnessed by several people who were near the Grassy Knoll, the stockade-fence area which JFK’s limousine was approaching as it drove away from the Texas Book Store Depository, further up on Elm Street. If Oswald was the shooter from the depository, as the official narrative goes, then how could Kennedy have been shot fatally from the front?
Secret Service men at Grassy Knoll
Ed Hoffman, a young deaf and mute man, was watching the approaching motorcade from the flyover overlooking the knoll. Hoffman says he saw a puff of smoke emitting from where a gunman was standing against the stockade fence just as the president’s car was approaching. The shooter then quickly moved to rail lines behind the knoll where he threw his rifle to another man dressed in work overalls. The second man disassembled the rifle in a twist, shoved it into a holdall bag and proceeded to walk along the rail track away from the knoll. The shooter then swiftly walked back to the stockade fence. Several police officers on duty that day, who immediately ran towards the knoll on hearing the gunfire, reported that they were confronted by men purporting to be secret service agents. Ed Hoffman’s testimony was ignored by FBI investigators when he voluntarily came forward. But his account was verified by a railroad operator named Lee Bowers who also observed the shooting from the Grassy Knoll from the vantage point of a control tower he happened to be working in. Bowers testified his observation to respected JFK researcher and author Mark Lane. Four months later, in 1966, Bowers was killed in a single-car accident. This fate of untimely death has met several other people who spoke out about circumstances of the shooting which did not fit with the Warren Commission narrative.
Another witness on the Grassy Knoll was a young off-duty soldier, Gordon Arnold. Years later after mustering the courage, he testified that he felt the discharge of two shots fired from close behind while he was taking photos of the passing motorcade. Gordon said he ducked for cover, and before he knew it, two men lit on him, one holding a rifle and dressed in a police uniform, who demanded he empty his camera of its film. Arnold kept silent about his story for years out of fear for his life.
Jack Ruby was not a random killer of Oswald
Many serious independent investigators have disputed the Warren Commission report as being riddled with anomalies, apart from its exclusion of key witnesses. One of the glaring flaws in the Warren findings is that Lee Harvey Oswald purportedly acted alone, and that he had no connection to Jack Ruby, the Mob-connected nightclub owner who shot dead Oswald while in custody in the Dallas police station – two days after Kennedy was killed.
Rose Cheramie worked in Ruby’s Dallas club. Before her death in a bizarre road accident in 1965, Cheramie claimed that Ruby and Oswald knew each other for years. She said Oswald would often call round to the club where he would sit at Ruby’s table.
Julia Ann Mercer was stuck in traffic in Dealey Plaza on the morning of the assassination, at 11am, an hour and a half before the president’s motorcade arrived. She noticed a man getting out of a station wagon parked below the Grassy Knoll and that this man was carrying what appeared to be a concealed rifle as he proceeded to walk up to the stockade-fence area. Out of curiosity, Mercer then rolled her car alongside the parked vehicle and took a look at the driver squarely in the face. It was Jack Ruby. She didn’t know Ruby at that time. Only days later when his infamous shooting of Oswald at the police station made international headlines did Mercer recognize Ruby’s face. Her testimony was distorted by FBI investigators. It was only when Mercer later talked to various independent researchers that her crucial identification of Ruby at the scene came to light, albeit not in a mass media light.
Other witnesses further substantiate the real conspiracy that lies behind JFK’s assassination. The word “conspiracy” is not used here in the pejorative sense to demean. It conveys the literal meaning of an organized plot.
What was that plot? As James Douglass and others have cogently pieced together, after his election in 1960 JFK was increasingly viewed by the US deep state as a “rogue president”. He was firmly opposed to the unfurling arms race against the Soviet Union and wanted to pursue earnest, radical nuclear disarmament with Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 had jolted JFK on the dangers of a nuclear world war. Kennedy also wanted to normalize relations with Cuba’s Fidel Castro following the disastrous CIA-led Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 for which the president vowed he would “smash the agency into a thousand pieces”. He fired the CIA director Allen Dulles over the fiasco. Ironically, Dulles would later be appointed to the seven-member Warren Commission, supposedly tasked with uncovering the truth behind Kennedy’s assassination.
Moreover, JFK had concluded that the looming Vietnam War would be a disaster. In the summer of 1963 he was preparing orders for US military withdrawal. That move was a formidable threat to the anticipated huge profits for the military industrial complex if the war escalated, which it did after Kennedy’s death.
At the height of the Cold War, Kennedy was therefore seen as little more than a traitor by the military-security apparatus and as an obstacle to the vested economic interests of the Pentagon’s military-industrial complex. In short, he had to be got rid of by “executive action”.
The CIA had the motive to terminate Kennedy. It also had the means. CIA contract-killers were often drawn from the ranks of criminal underworld, the Mafia and far-right Cuban exiles living in Miami. This arrangement affords “plausible deniability”.
Jack Ruby, who had long been a Mafia, CIA gun-runner and fixer, was recruited into the months-long planning of the plot to ambush the president.
Oswald the CIA agent who became a scapegoat
So, what was Oswald’s connection? The 23-year-old ex-US marine had been recruited in the late 1950s by the CIA when he was posted to a U2 spy plane base in Japan. He became fluent in Russian and then “defected” to the Soviet Union. It seems that the KGB did not take Oswald seriously as a reliable would-be agent. He then returned to the US in 1962, apparently of his own volition. Significantly, for an American citizen who had renounced his country and defected to the Soviet Union, Oswald and his Russian wife were not subjected to any recriminations on their return to the US. Indeed, it seems they were given generous patronage to find accommodation, jobs, and connections.
Oswald, who became immersed in both pro- and anti-Castro Cuban political activities in the US, became embroiled in the plot to assassinate Kennedy. How much Oswald knew of CIA involvement or the agency’s true objectives is not clear. But evidence suggests that he was also working as an informer for the FBI to alert them of the plot to kill the president. Oswald was out of his depth. He probably didn’t realize how little a pawn he was in a much bigger nefarious plot.
His close involvement with the bit-player plotters explains how he was an associate of Jack Ruby. What Oswald’s true intentions were are not clear. Tragically, he may have had a misplaced belief that his role as an informant for the FBI was trying to save the president.
In the end, tragically, Oswald was made the scapegoat for the assassination. The claim that he fired a rifle from the Texas School Book Depository with three shots in a matter of seconds and hit the president twice – as the Warren Commission contends – defies credibility. Also, according to the Warren report, one of those bullets supposedly exited Kennedy’s neck and then struck Governor John Connally who was riding in front of the Limousine. Dr Crenshaw and the other doctors at Parkland Hospital initially said that the wound on Kennedy’s neck (in addition to the fatal head injury) was an entry wound – another pointer that shots were actually fired from the front, not from the back as the Warren Commission maintains. That’s not to say shots were not fired from the depository. Witnesses say they heard gunfire and saw a gunman in the upper window. But that speaks more to the elaborate CIA plot to frame Oswald, who happened to recently become employed at the depository weeks before Kennedy’s visit to Dallas.
Less than an hour after the president was shot, Oswald hurriedly entered a movie theater. Witness Jack Davis said he noticed Oswald acting strangely, sitting beside individuals, then restlessly getting up and sitting down again beside another moviegoer – this in an almost empty theater! “It was obvious he was looking for someone,” recalled Davis. It is reasonable to speculate Oswald was seeking out a FBI contact whom he was instructed to connect with in a faux-arrangement. Oswald never did meet his “contact”. He was being left out to hang and dry by the plotters.
Another movie-theater customer, George Applin, told how when police officers arrested Oswald, Applin kindly advised another seated man to move to the back of the cinema hall, away from the trouble. The man nonchalantly looked at Applin, ignored his advice, kept sitting in his seat, and then proceeded to intently observe the arrest of Oswald. Days later, Applin recognized the face of Jack Ruby as being that of the man in the cinema hall. Evidently, Ruby had expected the police officers to shoot Oswald on the spot at his arrest, especially because their colleague Officer JD Tippit had just been shot dead minutes before – supposedly by Oswald fleeing from the assassination of the president. As it turned out, the arresting officers did not kill Oswald in the movie-theater, and it would fall to Ruby to follow-up two days later at the Dallas police station.
There are many other such key witnesses to the events surrounding the assassination of JFK, recorded in the reference books cited above, among other sources. All these witnesses were ignored by the mainstream media, or excluded and distorted by the Warren Commission, or were intimidated from speaking out publicly.
State-level organization of assassination
One further crucial story is that of Air Force Sergeant Robert Vinson. On the Friday of the assassination, through sheer happenstance, he caught an unscheduled ride onboard an unmarked C-54 military cargo plane, making his way back from Washington DC to his home near Colorado Springs. During the flight in which he was the only passenger, the pilots announced the president’s death. The plane then banked to another unspoken destination. When it landed on a rough strip, Sgt. Vinson recognized the city’s skyline as Dallas. It was mid-afternoon. During the brief stop, the plane’s engines did not shut off. Two men boarded. The aircraft then took off, landing eventually at the air base at Roswell, New Mexico. It was only when Vinson finally got home on Sunday, watching the breaking news on the TV with his wife, that he recognized the face of the man accused of being the president’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. It was the same facial appearance as one of the two men who boarded at Dallas.
Vinson’s experience confirms what many other witnesses have contended. That in the plot to kill JFK and frame Oswald, there was an Oswald double, an imposter whose task was to incriminate the scapegoat. The double was used to lay down a trail of evidence purporting to frame Oswald as a Cuban or Soviet malcontent. This would explain the strange encounters at the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City only weeks before the Dallas assassination. During those encounters, the Oswald imposter dramatically proclaimed his communist allegiance. Significantly, the Soviet records show that the person claiming to be Oswald spoke very bad Russian, whereas it is known that the real Oswald was fluent in the language.
For years, Sgt. Vinson was subtly intimidated by the CIA to keep quiet about his accidental flight onboard the unmarked cargo plane. However, Vinson did come forward years later to tell researchers of his insights into the plot to kill Kennedy. He also testified that the plane he rode on was not entirely unmarked. On the tail section, the aircraft bore the insignia of the CIA.
But perhaps the absolute key witness in all this was Lee Harvey Oswald himself. His last words shouted out in defiance at the Dallas police station were: “I’m just a patsy!”
Conveniently, Oswald was silenced by the Mob, CIA-connected Jack Ruby before he could tell his side of the story in a court of law. Oswald no doubt could have lifted a very disturbing lid on who really was orchestrating the president’s assassination.
Regime change American-style
The story of JFK’s assassination is one of state-sponsored murder carried out by the deep state power structure in the US. It was a coup d’état against a president elected by the people, whom the deep state viewed as an enemy to their objectives for war and foreign intrigues.
It was a shocking, brutal blow against democracy, a “regime change”, delivered not in some distant country, but right at home in the United States.
Such was the elaborate conspiracy to murder the president, involving contract-killers and secret services, as well as the complicity of police forces, the FBI, the military, judiciary and the corporate media, that the plotters behind JFK’s killing had to be positioned at the highest level of US government – the deep state.
Nearly 54 years after Kennedy’s murder by America’s state apparatus, the cover-up continues in the form of a futile release of “secret papers”. And, suitably, the mainstream media declare that this “disclosure” is the final settling of the matter, which puts an end to “conspiracy theories”. The media’s complicity may simply be due to an inability or reluctance to question the official narrative. This is what we mean by “tacit totalitarianism” – a willingness to believe in indoctrinated thinking, such as the false Warren Commission conclusion.
No wonder the US public – which polls have consistently shown do not believe the official Warren Commission narrative, and who indeed believe instead that JFK was actually killed in a nefarious plot – no wonder the public have increasing distrust and contempt for the corporate media for being dishonest and unreliable.
For the past year, the same media have been trying to slander Russia for interfering in US democracy. The same media have also tried to conceal American state-sponsored terrorism in Syria to overthrow the government there, just like it did when it overthrew the government in Libya in 2011 and killed the country’s leader Muammar Gaddafi. And many other illegal regime-change operations carried out by the US and its Western allies, presented as noble endeavors to “defend democracy”, “fight terrorism” or “protect human rights”.
In an era when such commercially-driven mass media pontificate about “fake news” perpetrated by others it is all the more galling that the accusation comes from the very same media who specialize in mass fake news and mass fake narratives.
The US state murder of JFK in 1963 and the decades-long cover-up is perhaps the greatest condemnation of the fraud that is US mass media. The day that the president was assassinated was also the day that American pretensions of democracy took a deadly hit.
On one hand, the United States is demanding that Iranian-backed militias “leave” Iraq, claiming the fight against the self-titled “Islamic State” (IS) is over. On the other hand, the US and its European partners are still funneling weapons, cash, direct military support and organizing training for Kurdish factions in Iraq’s northern region to “beat back” IS.
Additionally, US contractors are attempting to take control of Iraq’s western highways connecting the nation to neighboring Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The contractors are to provide both security and rebuild destroyed infrastructure, also citing IS’ continued presence as a pretext for America’s continued presence in the country.
In other words, the United States is attempting to claim IS is both defeated and also yet to be defeated, attempting to craft a narrative that excludes Iraqi cooperation with Iran, Syria and Russia who are also operating in the region against IS and other militants, and gives the US and its partners exclusive control over Iraq and its future.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, anticipating an end to the fight against ISIS, said Sunday it was time for Iranian-backed militias to exit the war-torn nation of Iraq.
“Those militias need to go home,” Tillerson said. “Any foreign fighters in Iraq need to go home and allow the Iraqi people to regain control of areas that had been overtaken by ISIS and Daesh that have now been liberated. Allow the Iraqi people to rebuild their lives with the help of their neighbors.”
And while Secretary Tillerson notes that the Iraqi people should be allowed to rebuild their lives “with the help of their neighbors,” he apparently means, all of the Iraqi people’s neighbors except Iran and Syria.
Secretary Tillerson’s remarks were made in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, giving a significant clue as to which neighbors he meant Iraq should get help from. However, it was Saudi Arabia who provided the very militants the Iraqi people have been fighting with arms, cash, equipment and training in the first place.
CNN would even note that:
At the same time, at least 1,500 Saudis had traveled to Iraq and Syria to join ISIS over the years, and Baghdad had long accused Saudi Arabia of turning a blind eye to Sunni militants crossing its territory to enter Iraq to take part in the country’s sectarian conflict.
In 2007, the US military reported that around 40% of all foreign militants targeting US troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces had come from Saudi Arabia. Half of the Saudi fighters who arrived in Iraq during that time went there to be suicide bombers, the US military said.
What this apparent contradiction indicates is that the conflict in Iraq was never about defeating a spontaneous militant threat, but was instead a proxy conflict engineered by Washington with the help of partners like Riyadh, aimed against Tehran and its allies.
Kurdistan, the Other “IS”
If IS and other militant organizations fighting in Iraq and neighboring Syria represent one proxy of US, European and Persian Gulf interests, the Kurdish factions in northern Iraq seeking to carve out an independent “Kurdistan” are another.
Similarly, US and European governments are insisting that Iraqi militias begin standing down, even as US-European support for certain Kurdish factions not only continues, but expands.
The German army on Sunday announced it has restarted training Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters, despite a political and military conflict between the autonomous region and Baghdad.
The Bundeswehr has been training and supplying weapons to the peshmerga for three years to help the Iraqi Kurds beat back the “Islamic State” (IS).
It has provided some 32,000 assault rifles and machine guns, as well as the MILAN anti-tank missile, valued at some €90 million ($106 million) since September 2014. Some 150 Bundeswehr troops are in northern Iraq, and peshmerga units have also received training in Germany.
But the training mission was suspended for a week after the central government in Baghdad, backed by Iranian-trained paramilitary groups, moved to reassert control over disputed territories the Kurds have captured since June 2014.
However, if “Iranian-trained paramilitary groups” are reasserting control over disputed territories the Kurds have captured since June 2014, this means unequivocally that the threat of IS has been removed from the region and thus German military support is either unwarranted, or was never fully intended to combat IS and simply appeared as doing as much while bolstering yet another proxy force to confront and conflict with Iraq’s central government.
DW’s report also included an interesting map. It depicts “Kurdistan” as a diminutive region clinging to the northern borders of Iraq, divided between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) factions. It resembles not the foundation for a future, functional, independent nation-state, but rather a divided and weak proxy that will be forever dependent on its foreign sponsors.
Still Pursuing Balkanization
In other words, “Kurdistan” is little more than a vector through which the US and its partners seek to divide, weaken and assume hegemony over both the nation, and throughout the region.
More honest politicians and commentators, quoted in the DW article, note that there is little logic in continuing Germany’s support for Kurdish militias if the true objective was indeed fighting IS. However, it appears that the US will attempt to use willing Kurdish factions as proxies against Baghdad and to a greater extent, against Tehran, for as long as certain Kurdish leaders allow them to.
Attempts to frame “Kurdistan” as an issue of “independence” and “self-determination” fall flat upon examining that actual sociopolitical, economic and military landscape of Iraq’s northern reaches. It is clear, that for now, the future of the Kurds is being determined by Washington and its partners, not the Kurds themselves. But it will be primarily the Kurds themselves who pay the highest price in this ongoing political game, along with militias and soldiers representing Baghdad they are arrayed against to fight.
It is little secret that the US seeks to divide both Syria and Iraq along sectarian lines. US policymakers at think tanks like the Brookings Institution have literally published papers with titles like, “Deconstructing Syria: A new strategy for America’s most hopeless war,” detailing just how such divisions can be cultivated.
Such divisions diminish both nations further in their ability to influence their own destiny, let alone influence the region. With the US attempting to take control of Iraq’s western highways to reinforce a “Sunni” sphere of influence, while it arms, trains and backs Kurds in the north, the three-way partitioning of Iraq is still clearly at the center of US policy. IS, it appears, was merely a catalyst, one intentionally introduced, but one that has almost run its course.
One wonders what “catalyst” the US will turn to next, and seems content for now pretending IS both exists and doesn’t exist. But what there is little doubt of is that Washington and its partners still eagerly seek to move forward their agenda, continuing to weaken the region in an attempt to reassert its control over it.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Presidents of the 52 Major Jewish American Organizations are leading President Trump, like a puppy on a leash, into a major war with Iran. The hysterical ’52 Presidents’ and ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu are busy manufacturing Holocaust-level predictions that a non-nuclear Iran is preparing to ‘vaporize’ Israel. The buffoonish US President Trump has swallowed this fantasy wholesale and is pushing our nation toward war for the sake of Israel and its US-based supporters and agents. We will cite ten recent examples of Israeli-authored policies, implemented by Trump in his march to war (there are scores of others).
1. After many years, Israel and ‘the 52 Presidents’ finally made the US withdraw from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) because of its detailed documentation of Israeli crimes against Palestinian people. Trump complied with their demands.
2. Tel Aviv demanded a Zionist fanatic and backer of the illegal Jewish settler occupation of Palestinian lands, the bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman, be appointed US Ambassador to Israel. Trump complied, despite the ambassador’s overt conflict of interest.
3. Israel launched waves of savage bombings against Syrian government troops and facilities engaged in a war against ISIS-mercenary terrorists. Israel, which had backed the terrorists in its ambition to break-up of the secular Syrian state, demanded US support. Trump complied, and sent more US arms to the anti-government terrorists.
4. Israel denounced the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal Framework and Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed by 6 major states and UN Security Council Members, (US, France, UK, Germany, China and Russia). A furious Netanyahu demanded that President Trump follow Tel Aviv and abrogate the multiparty agreement signed by his predecessor, Barack Obama. Trump complied and the US is at risk of openly violating its international agreement.
Trump parrots Netanyahu’s falsehoods to the letter: He raves that Iran, while technically in compliance, has violated ‘the spirit of the agreement’ without citing a single instance of actual violation. The 5 other signers of the ‘Framework’, the US military and the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency have repeatedly certified Iran’s strict compliance with the accord. Trump rejects the evidence of countless experts among US allies and ‘his own generals’ while embracing the hysterical lies from Israel and the ‘52’. Who would have thought the ‘hard-nosed’ businessman Trump would be so ‘spiritual’ when it came to honoring and breaking treaties and agreements!
5. Israel and the ‘52’ have demanded that Washington imprison and fine US citizens who have exercised their constitutional First Amendment Right of free speech by supporting the international boycott, divest and sanctions (BDS) campaign, which is designed to end the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and crimes against Palestinians. Trump complied. Americans may soon face over a decade in prison and complete economic ruin for supporting a peaceful economic boycott of Israeli settler products. This will represent an unprecedented violation of the US Constitution. At present, US public employees, like teachers in certain US states, are facing job loss for refusing to sign a ‘loyalty oath’ not to boycott products from Israel’s illegal settlements. Desperate American victims of the floods and natural disasters in Texas are being denied access to public US taxpayer relief funds unless they sign similar loyalty oaths in support of Israel.
6. Israel demanded that the US appoint Zionist fanatic real estate attorney, Jason Greenblatt and real estate speculator, Jared Kushner as Middle East peace negotiators. Trump appointed South Carolina businesswoman Nikki Haley as US Ambassador to the United Nations. Israel pushed for Ms. Haley, the first US governor to criminalize support for the peaceful BDS movement.
7. Trump went against the advice of ‘his Generals’ in his own cabinet regarding Iran’s compliance with the nuclear agreement, and chose to comply with Netanyahu’s demands.
8. Trump supports the long-standing Israeli project to maneuver a Kurdish takeover of Northern Iraq, grabbing the oil-rich Kirkuk province and permanently dividing the once secular, nationalist Iraqi nation. Trump has sent arms and military advisers to the Kurds in war-torn Syria as they attempt to grab territory for a separate ‘Kurdistan’. This is part of an Israeli plan to subdivide the Middle East into impotent tribal ‘statelets’.
9. Trump rejected the Turkish government’s demand to extradite CIA-Israeli-backed Fethullah Gulen, self-exiled in the US since 1999, for his leadership role in the failed 2016 military coup d’etat.
10. Like all his predecessors, Trump is completely submissive to Israeli-directed ‘lobbies’ (like AIPAC), which operate on behalf of a foreign power, in violation of the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act. Trump chose his Orthodox Zionist son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a callow real estate investor and prominent supporter for war against Iran, as his chief foreign policy adviser.
President Trump’s irresponsible pandering to Israel and its American-Jewish agents has caused deep unease among the Generals in his cabinet, as well as among active duty and retired US military officers, who are skeptical about Tel Aviv’s push for open-ended US wars in the Middle East.
Ten Reasons Why Military Officers support America’s Nuclear Accord with Iran
The Netanyahu-Israel First power configuration in Washington succeeded in convincing Trump to tear-up the nuclear accord with Iran. This went against the advice and wishes of the top US generals in the White House and active duty officers in the field who support the agreement and recognize Iran’s cooperation.
The Generals have ten solid reasons for rejecting the Netanyahu-Trump push to shred the accord:
1. The agreement is working. By all reliable, independent and official observers, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, the US intelligence community and the US Secretary of State – Iran is complying with its side of the agreement.
2. If Trump violates the agreement, co-signed by the 6 members of the UN Security Council, in order to truckle to the whims of Israel and its gang of ‘52’, the US government will lose all credibility among its allies. The US military will be equally tainted in its current and future dealings with NATO and other military ‘partners’.
3. Violation of the agreement will force the Iranians to restart their nuclear, as well as advanced defensive weapons programs, increasing the risk of an Israeli-Trump instigated military confrontation. Any US war with Iran will be prolonged, costing the lives of tens of thousands of US troops, its land bases in the Gulf States, and warships in the Persian Gulf. Full-scale war with Iran, a large and well-armed country, would be a disaster for the entire region.
4. US generals know from their earlier experiences under the George W. Bush Administration that Zionist officials in Washington, in close collaboration with Israeli handlers, worked tirelessly to engineer the US invasion of Iraq and the prolonged war in Afghanistan. This led to the death and injury of hundreds of thousands of US military personnel as well as millions of civilian casualties in the invaded countries. The ensuing chaos created the huge refugee crises now threatening the stability of Europe. The Generals view the Israel-Firsters as irresponsible armchair warmongers and media propagandists, who have no ‘skin in the game’ through any service in the US Armed Forces. They are correctly seen as agents for a foreign entity.
5. US generals learned the lesson of the wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Somalia – where disastrous interventions led to defeats and loss of potential important regional allies.
6. US generals, who are working with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to negotiate an agreement with North Korea, know that Trump’s breaking a negotiated agreement with Iran, only reinforces North Korea’s distrust of the US and will harden its opposition to a diplomatic settlement on the Korean Peninsula. It is clear that a full-scale war with nuclear-armed North Korea could wipe out tens of thousands of US troops and allies throughout the region and kill or displace hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians.
7. US generals are deeply disturbed by the notion that their Commander in Chief, the elected President of the United States, is taking his orders from Israel and its US proxies. They dislike committing American blood and treasure for a foreign power whose policies have only degraded US influence in the Middle East. The generals want to act for and in defense of US national interests – and not Tel Aviv’s.
8. US military officials resent the fact that Israel receives the most advanced US military weapons and technology, which have been subsidized by the US taxpayers. In some cases, Israelis receive advanced US weapons before US troops even have them. They also are aware that Israeli intelligence agents (and American citizens) have spied on the US and received confidential military information in order to preempt US policy. Israel operates within the United States with total impunity!
9. US generals are concerned about negotiating accords with China over strategic military issues of global importance. The constant catering and groveling to Israel, an insignificant global economic entity, has reduced US prestige and status, as well as China’s trust in the validity of any military agreements with the Americans.
10. Trump’s total reliance on his pro-Israel advisers, embedded in his regime, at the expense of US military intelligence, has led to the construction of a parallel government, pitting the President and his Zionist-advisers against his generals. This certainly exposes the total hypocrisy of Trump’s presidential campaign promise to ‘Make America Great Again’. His practice and policy of promoting war with Iran for the sake of Israel are placing US national interest and the advice of the US generals last and will never restore American prestige.
Trump’s decision not to certify Iran’s compliance with the accord and his handing the ultimate decision on an international agreement signed by the six members of the UN Security Council over to the US Congress is ominous: He has effectively given potential war making powers to a corrupt legislature, often derided as ‘Israeli occupied territory’, which has always sided with Israeli and US Zionist war mongers. Trump is snubbing ‘his’ State Department, the Pentagon and the various US Intelligence agencies while giving into the demands of such Zionist zealots as New York Senator Charles Schumer, Netanyahu’s alter ego in the US Senate and a huge booster for war with Iran.
Conclusion
Trump’s refusal to certify Iran’s compliance with nuclear accord reflects the overwhelming power of Israel within the US Presidency. Trump’s rebuke of his generals and Secretary of State Tillerson, the UN Security Council and the 5 major cosigners of the 2015 accord with Iran, exposes the advanced degradation of the US Presidency and the US role in global politics.
All previous US Presidents have been influenced by the billionaire and millionaire die-hard Israel-Firsters, who funded their electoral campaigns. But occasionally, some ‘Commanders in Chief’ have decided to pursue policies favoring US national interest over Israel’s bellicose ambitions. Avoiding a catastrophic war in the Middle East is such a case: Obama chose to negotiate and sign a nuclear accord with Iran [though implementation was stalled]. Tel Aviv’s useful fool, Donald Trump, intends to break the agreement and drag this nation further into the hell of regional war.
In this regard, international opinion has sided with America’s generals. Only Israel and its US acolytes on Wall Street and Hollywood applaud the blustering, bellicose Trump!
Some of the newly released documents related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination reveal shocking details about plans developed by the United States government to depose the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
As Miami New Times reports, a set of documents related to Operation Mongoose — which was the Central Intelligence Agency’s plot to remove Castro from power — show that the U.S. at one point considered staging terrorist attacks against Cuban refugees that were either headed to or were already residing within the country.
A paper approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 outlined a plan to create a pretext for invading Cuba and overthrowing the Castro regime that involved killing refugees and then pinning the blame on Castro’s government.
“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area,” the report read. “The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven within the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated).”
The report also suggested committing attacks on refugees already within the country, as well as “exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots” to make it look as though the Cuban government was attacking people trying to flee to Florida.
The report also said the staged attacks could coincide with “the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement” to help turn the tide of global opinion against the tiny communist nation.
Miami New Times notes that these plans were never carried out, although that doesn’t make their inclusion in a report signed off by the Joint Chiefs of Staff any less of a shock.
NY Congressman Eliot Engel (second from left) is lead sponsor on recent anti-Iran bills. Engel, who is the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has traveled to Israel often and is one of its most fervent defenders. (Photo is from his Congressional website.)
Ever since Iran’s increasingly despotic Shah was overthrown by a popular revolution in 1979, Israel has targeted Iran for attack because of the country’s support for Palestinian rights. (The Shah had been put in place by a 1953 UK-US engineered coup against the country’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.)
The Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said recently that Iran is Israel’s number one concern, and an Iranian newspaper reported: “Iran is the primary target of the Mossad’s actions, which number in the hundreds and thousands each year.”
The Israel lobby has accordingly worked for U.S. policies against Iran, including disseminating advertisements that demonize Iran; an example is this 2010 full-page advertisement in the New York Times :
The list on the left is of the groups that sponsored the ad, as evidenced by their icons at the bottom of the ad.
Now Congress has obliged Israel and its lobby by passing four more bills against Iran. Below is a report on the latest legislation. (Photographs and some additional information in Italics have been added.)
Despite a purely partisan Republican push to alter the terms of the Iran nuclear deal, an overwhelming majority of US lawmakers from both parties continues to advance legislation to counter Iranian behavior throughout the Middle East.
The House passed four bills today and Wednesday taking aim at Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support for Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite paramilitary group fighting alongside Iranian forces on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. In addition, Iran hawks in Congress continue to press the Donald Trump administration to ban US aircraft sales to Iran and designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization.
Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah has opposed Israeli invasions and occupation. Photo is of a Beirut suburb bombed by Israel in 2006.
“The whole thing with the [nuclear deal] that irked me throughout was that during the course of the negotiations … we were told consistently that this was only about nuclear weapons,” Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Al-Monitor. “We couldn’t raise terrorism, we couldn’t raise ballistic missiles. We couldn’t raise all the other things against Iran and it frustrated me to no end.”
“I think those of us who really feel that Iran is a major cause of instability in the Middle East need to make sure that Iran is sanctioned,” Engel added.
[U.S. intelligence agencies have found no evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.]
In July, Congress passed the first round of sanctions on Iran since the 2015 nuclear accord. The Iran Ballistic Missiles and Sanctions Enforcement Act, which the House passed 423-2 today, would further expand sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile program. The Senate must now vote on the additional sanctions package before it can head to Trump’s desk.
Engel, the lead cosponsor of both Iran sanctions packages, has described today’s bill as “pretty similar” to the July sanctions package. The new version, however, would affect entities and individuals supporting Iran’s ballistic missile program even if they don’t have assets in the United States.
The House also passed three bills targeting Hezbollah on Wednesday. The US government considers Hezbollah a terrorist group and US lawmakers overwhelmingly regard it as an Iranian proxy.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) at the ‘National Leadership Assembly for Israel’ event organized by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. (National Press Club July 28, 2014 in Washington, DC.)
“They’re giving the money to Hezbollah to kill individuals and fund terrorism around the world,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said on Fox News before Wednesday’s votes. “And we’re putting an end to that, continuing to put the sanctions and the pressure on.”
The primary Hezbollah sanctions bill, the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Amendments Act, introduced by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., passed the House unanimously on Wednesday. It is designed to cut Hezbollah’s funding streams from foreign states such as Iran while cracking down on the group’s alleged racketeering activities abroad. The Jerusalem Post reported in September that Iran now gives Hezbollah roughly $800 million a year, an unprecedented level of funding.
Congressmen Ed Royce (L) and Eliot Engel (R) with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Companion legislation passed the Senate unanimously earlier this month. The House version, however, contains some extra provisions that single out Iran and Russia for their support of Hezbollah.
Specifically, the House version amends a 2010 Iran sanctions package to include Iran’s support for Hezbollah and directs the administration to sanction government entities that are already on the State Department’s state sponsor of terrorism list if they support Hezbollah. Iran, Syria and Sudan are currently the only three countries on that list.
Engel, the lead cosponsor of the Royce bill, told Al-Monitor that he’s optimistic its Iran provisions will survive reconciliation with the Senate version.
“I think ultimately they won’t disappear because I think both sides of the aisle understand that Iran’s a threat and even those who want to keep the [Iran deal] don’t want to take the pressure off Iran,” said Engel. “When we do things and wrap it up for the year, I think the Iran sanctions have to be in there.”
The House also unanimously passed legislation from Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., to impose overlapping sanctions on foreign states and individuals for providing support to Hezbollah due to its alleged use of human shields. The sanctions in both Hezbollah bills would target the same individuals and entities, but its supporters say the Gallagher bill still has value.
“The purpose of these bills, especially the reporting part, is to highlight the various harmful actions which Congress wants to expose with regard to Hezbollah,” said Joseph Gebeily, the president of the Lebanese Information Center, a think tank critical of Hezbollah.
Gebeily added that the Gallagher bill “puts more focus on the United Nations Security Council’s responsibility in disarming Hezbollah and preventing its military operations in Lebanon.” The bill requires the US ambassador to the United Nations to “secure support for a resolution that would impose multilateral sanctions against Hezbollah for its use of civilians as human shields.”
Lastly, a resolution offered by Rep. Ted Deutch, R-Fla., to urge the European Union to designate the political wing of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization passed the House unanimously. While the EU considers Hezbollah’s paramilitary wing to be a terrorist group, US lawmakers have repeatedly voiced their frustration that it does not extend that designation to Hezbollah parliamentarians and Cabinet officials in Lebanon.
Congressional Representatives Ilyana Ros-Lehtinen and Ted Deutch with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Deutch’s website says: “Congressman Ted Deutch is a passionate supporter of Israel whose advocacy for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship stretches back to his youth. Ted spent his summers at Zionist summer camp, worked as a student activist in high school and college, and served in leadership roles on several local and national Jewish organizations throughout his professional career. Today, Ted serves as Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s influential Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee, where he continues to champion Israel’s security during a time of great volatility in the Middle East.”
And House lawmakers aren’t done.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, continues to push for adoption of his bill urging the State Department to designate the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has a companion bill in the Senate.
US Rep. Michael McCaul (sixth from left) led a 2015 bipartisan Congressional delegation to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump himself designated the IRGC as a terrorist-supporting entity when he declined to certify the nuclear deal earlier this month, but the move falls short of what some in Congress are asking for.
“There’s not really an expansion of sanctions on the IRGC,” said Kenneth Katzman, an Iran sanctions expert at the Congressional Research Service. Trump’s executive order “has a slight travel restriction, obviously, but how many IRGC people … are going to realistically get visas to come to the United States?”
McCaul agrees more could be done.
“The president, when he sanctioned the IRGC, went a long ways in terms of getting the idea of it,” he told Al-Monitor. “However, they didn’t designate it as a foreign terrorist organization. So I’d like to complete that.”
McCaul told Al-Monitor that his bill is currently held up by staff on the House Judiciary Committee who believe that designating terrorist organizations should remain strictly within the purview of the administration.
“Maybe we’ll work with leadership to put it to the floor anyway,” he said.
Iran hawks in the House are also fighting to preserve legislation that would that would bar US aircraft manufacturers, such as Boeing and Airbus, from selling civilian airliners to Iran. Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., included the language in a spending package in September.
Congressman Peter Roskam speaks at AIPAC fundraiser in Chicago, 2013. (Video here.) Roskam co-chairs the House Republican Israel Caucus and is a member of the bipartisan Israel Allies Caucus.
The 2015 nuclear deal paves the way for such sales, but Roskam and others fear that Iran could use the civilian airliners to transport troops to fight on behalf of the Syrian regime. The Senate version of the appropriations bill, however, does not contain such language.
The latest dump of newly-declassified documents relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy has sent researchers and journalists into a frenzy – but among the more interesting releases are files relating to the US Central Intelligence Agency’s long-running campaign to assassinate Fidel Castro.
The Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) ultimately unsuccessful campaign to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro is well known.
Over the course of his 49-year-long reign (1959-2008), Fabian Escalante, retired chief of Cuban counterintelligence, estimates the agency targeted him on no fewer than 638 separate occasions: 38 times under President Dwight Eisenhower, 42 under John F. Kennedy, 72 under Lyndon B. Johnson, 184 under Richard Nixon, 64 under Jimmy Carter, 197 under Ronald Reagan, 16 under George H. W. Bush and 21 under Bill Clinton.
However, the newly-released trove of previously classified documents relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy have shed new light on some notorious schemes — and indicate Escalante’s estimate may have been incorrect.
Suits and Seashells
One document summarizes the CIA’s infamous plan to use James B. Donovan — the US lawyer and negotiator recently immortalized by the movie “Bridge of Spies” — to give Castro a contaminated diving suit as a gift, while the two negotiated the release of Bay of Pigs prisoners.
“It is known Castro likes to skindive. The plan is to dust the inside of the suit with a fungus producing madera foot, a disabling and chronic skin disease, and also contaminating the suit with tuberculosis bacilli in the breathing apparatus,” the paper said.
Donovan didn’t go through it, giving El Caballo an uncontaminated suit as a genuine gesture of friendship instead.
Another notorious plot documented in the files involved a “booby-trap seashell” that would be submerged in an area Castro liked to dive in — the eye-catching shell was to be loaded with explosives, and detonate once lifted. However, after investigation, it was determined “there was no shell in the Caribbean area large enough to hold a sufficient amount of explosive, which would be spectacular enough to attract the attention of Castro.”
Another scheme involved a CIA agent in Cuba who was in the process recruiting a high-ranking Cuban government official in 1963.The pair coincidentally met in Europe on the day of JFK’s assassination, and the agent offered the would-be recruit a ballpoint pen equipped with a hypodermic needle — when the pen’s lever was pushed, “[a] needle came out and poison could be injected into someone.”
The offer was turned down, because it would have required the killer to get too close to Castro, removing all chances of escape.
My Two Cents
One 1975 document describes an early-1960s CIA scheme, “Operation BOUNTY,” that established a system of financial rewards for Cubans who “[killed or delivered] alive known Communists.”
The CIA let Cubans know of the plan by dropping leaflets in the air, which stipulated the rules around Castroite bounty hunting — rewards would be paid upon presentation of a leaflet, along with “conclusive” proof of death, and the victim’s Communist party membership card.
Cubans would receive an amount commensurate with the ranking of the Communist they’d slain — up to US$100,000 for government officials and US$57,500 for “department heads.” However, Castro’s capture or execution, for reasons unclear, would only earn the perpetrator a measly two cents.
Evidently though, perhaps due to the Castro’s continued existence, it was decided in 1964 (according to an FBI memo) to offer Sicilian-American gangster Sam Giancana US$150,000 to hire “some gunman to go into Cuba” and kill the leader.
However, it was later felt the price was too high, with sums being reduced to US$100,000 for Fidel, and US$20,000 apiece for the metaphorical heads of Raul Castro and Che Guevara.
Ultimately though, then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy shut down the plan.
He was outraged at the deal, as he was attempting to prosecute Giancana, and demanded the CIA “never undertake the use of mafia people again” without first checking with the Department of Justice, because “it would be difficult to prosecute such people in the future.”
Intelligence Failures
It’s not merely in the field of assassination the CIA failed.
Some of the files, dating to the early days of the revolution in 1959, suggest Castro’s government is not long for the world.
One document from June that year predicts an impending uprising against El Commandante.
“Conditions are getting so bad in Cuba a counterrevolution will occur from within Cuba… powerful interests, such as bankers, sugar institute, et cetera, are extremely dissatisfied,” the memo reads.
Another document from September, this time authored by the FBI, suggests Cuban exiles in the US are so determined to get rid of Castro he “cannot last more than two months.”
National Security Council meeting notes on the covert CIA program ‘Operation Mongoose’ have revealed the lengths to which the US was willing to go to remove Fidel Castro’s Cuban government.
The 1962 file, released Thursday as part of a cache of previously classified documents on the assassination of John F Kennedy, states that the NSC considered a plan of “attacking and harassing Soviet personnel within Cuba.” However, the document doesn’t provide any finer details on the proposal.
Members of the council also debated targeting the island nation’s crops by “introducing biological agents which would appear to be of natural origins” – an idea supported by then-National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.
“Mr. Bundy said that he had no worries about any such sabotage which could clearly be made to appear as the result of local Cuban disaffection or of a natural disaster, but that we must avoid external activities such as release of chemicals, etc., unless they could be completely covered up,” the document reads.
Other suggested measures included distributing explosives to Cuban insurgents, using balloons to drop leaflets over the country, employing submarines to broadcast anti-government radio messages and “counterfeiting” operations.
The NSC also explored the possibility of infiltrating Cuban radio and TV channels but acting on advice from council member and former American broadcast journalist, Edward R Murrow, decided against the move.
“Mr Murrow explained the far-reaching reactions that the Cubans could mount against US radio stations, and said that he felt on balance it would not be profitable to provoke this kind of electronic warfare,” the minutes read.
Conspiracy theories have abounded since Kennedy was shot while traveling in an open-top limousine in Dallas in November 1963.
The report from the Warren Commission in September 1962 said that Lee Harvey Oswald had fired the shots from the Texas School Book Depository building. Oswald was later killed while in the custody of Dallas police by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner.
The US government released 2,800 classified files on the assassination of JFK Thursday night, with President Donald Trump saying that the public deserves to be “fully informed about all aspects of this pivotal event.”
After intense lobbying from the CIA, FBI and State Department, some documents remain unreleased. The files will now undergo a further six-month review. A new deadline has been set for their release in April 2018.
In the past, America has witnessed “McCarthyism” from the Right and even complaints from the Right about “McCarthyism of the Left.” But what we are witnessing now amid the Russia-gate frenzy is what might be called “Establishment McCarthyism,” traditional media/political powers demonizing and silencing dissent that questions mainstream narratives.
Sen. Joe McCarthy with lawyer Roy Cohn (right)
This extraordinary assault on civil liberties is cloaked in fright-filled stories about “Russian propaganda” and wildly exaggerated tales of the Kremlin’s “hordes of Twitter bots,” but its underlying goal is to enforce Washington’s “groupthinks” by creating a permanent system that shuts down or marginalizes dissident opinions and labels contrary information – no matter how reasonable and well-researched – as “disputed” or “rated false” by mainstream “fact-checking” organizations like PolitiFact.
It doesn’t seem to matter that the paragons of this new structure – such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and, indeed, PolitiFact – have a checkered record of getting facts straight.
For instance, PolitiFact still rates as “true” Hillary Clinton’s false claim that “all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies” agreed that Russia was behind the release of Democratic emails last year. Even the Times and The Associated Press belatedly ran corrections after President Obama’s intelligence chiefs admitted that the assessment came from what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called “hand-picked” analysts from only three agencies: CIA, FBI and NSA.
And, the larger truth was that these “hand-picked” analysts were sequestered away from other analysts even from their own agencies and produced “stove-piped intelligence,” i.e., analysis that escapes the back-and-forth that should occur inside the intelligence community.
Yet, the Times and other leading newspapers routinely treat these findings as flat fact or the unassailable “consensus” of the “intelligence community.” Contrary information, including WikiLeaks’ denials of a Russian role in supplying the emails, and contrary judgments from former senior U.S. intelligence officials are ignored.
The Jan. 6 report also tacked on a seven-page addendum smearing the Russian television network, RT, for such offenses as sponsoring a 2012 debate among U.S. third-party presidential candidates who had been excluded from the Republican-Democratic debates. RT also was slammed for reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protests and the environmental dangers from “fracking.”
How the idea of giving Americans access to divergent political opinions and information about valid issues such as income inequality and environmental dangers constitutes threats to American “democracy” is hard to comprehend.
However, rather than address the Jan. 6 report’s admitted uncertainties about Russian “hacking” and the troubling implications of its attacks on RT, the Times and other U.S. mainstream publications treat the report as some kind of holy scripture that can’t be questioned or challenged.
Silencing RT
For instance, on Tuesday, the Times published a front-page story entitled “YouTube Gave Russians Outlet Portal Into U.S.” that essentially cried out for the purging of RT from YouTube. The article began by holding YouTube’s vice president Robert Kynci up to ridicule and opprobrium for his praising “RT for bonding with viewers by providing ‘authentic’ content instead of ‘agendas or propaganda.’”
The article by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Nicholas Confessore swallowed whole the Jan. 6 report’s conclusion that RT is “the Kremlin’s ‘principal international propaganda outlet’ and a key player in Russia’s information warfare operations around the world.” In other words, the Times portrayed Kynci as essentially a “useful idiot.”
Yet, the article doesn’t actually dissect any RT article that could be labeled false or propagandistic. It simply alludes generally to news items that contained information critical of Hillary Clinton as if any negative reporting on the Democratic presidential contender – no matter how accurate or how similar to stories appearing in the U.S. press – was somehow proof of “information warfare.”
As Daniel Lazare wrote at Consortiumnews.com on Wednesday, “The web version [of the Times article] links to an RT interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that ran shortly before the 2016 election. The topic is a September 2014 email obtained by Wikileaks in which Clinton acknowledges that ‘the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia … are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.’”
In other words, the Times cited a documented and newsworthy RT story as its evidence that RT was a propaganda shop threatening American democracy and deserving ostracism if not removal from YouTube.
A Dangerous Pattern
Not to say that I share every news judgment of RT – or for that matter The New York Times – but there is a grave issue of press freedom when the Times essentially calls for the shutting down of access to a news organization that may highlight or report on stories that the Times and other mainstream outlets downplay or ignore.
And this was not a stand-alone story. Previously, the Times has run favorable articles about plans to deploy aggressive algorithms to hunt down and then remove or marginalize information that the Times and other mainstream outlets deem false.
Nor is it just the Times. Last Thanksgiving, The Washington Post ran a fawning front-page article about an anonymous group PropOrNot that had created a blacklist of 200 Internet sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other independent news sources, that were deemed guilty of dispensing “Russian propaganda,” which basically amounted to our showing any skepticism toward the State Department’s narratives on the crises in Syria or Ukraine.
So, if any media outlet dares to question the U.S. government’s version of events – once that storyline has been embraced by the big media – the dissidents risk being awarded the media equivalent of a yellow star and having their readership dramatically reduced by getting downgraded on search engines and punished on social media.
Meanwhile, Congress has authorized $160 million to combat alleged Russian “propaganda and disinformation,” a gilded invitation for “scholars” and “experts” to gear up “studies” that will continue to prove what is supposed to be proved – “Russia bad” – with credulous mainstream reporters eagerly gobbling up the latest “evidence” of Russian perfidy.
There is also a more coercive element to what’s going on. RT is facing demands from the Justice Department that it register as a “foreign agent” or face prosecution. Clearly, the point is to chill the journalism done by RT’s American reporters, hosts and staff who now fear being stigmatized as something akin to traitors.
You might wonder: where are the defenders of press freedom and civil liberties? Doesn’t anyone in the mainstream media or national politics recognize the danger to a democracy coming from enforced groupthinks? Is American democracy so fragile that letting Americans hear “another side of the story” must be prevented?
A Dangerous ‘Cure’
I agree that there is a limited problem with jerks who knowingly make up fake stories or who disseminate crazy conspiracy theories – and no one finds such behavior more offensive than I do. But does no one recall the lies about Iraq’s WMD and other U.S. government falsehoods and deceptions over the years?
Often, it is the few dissenters who alert the American people to the truth, even as the Times, Post, CNN and other big outlets are serving as the real propaganda agents, accepting what the “important people” say and showing little or no professional skepticism.
And, given the risk of thermo-nuclear war with Russia, why aren’t liberals and progressives demanding at least a critical examination of what’s coming from the U.S. intelligence agencies and the mainstream press?
The answer seems to be that many liberals and progressives are so blinded by their fury over Donald Trump’s election that they don’t care what lines are crossed to destroy or neutralize him. Plus, for some liberal entities, there’s lots of money to be made.
For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union has made its “resistance” to the Trump administration an important part of its fundraising. So, the ACLU is doing nothing to defend the rights of news organizations and journalists under attack.
When I asked ACLU about the Justice Department’s move against RT and other encroachments on press freedom, I was told by ACLU spokesman Thomas Dresslar: “Thanks for reaching out to us. Unfortunately, I’ve been informed that we do not have anyone able to speak to you about this.”
Meanwhile, the Times and other traditional “defenders of a free press” are now part of the attack machine against a free press. While much of this attitude comes from the big media’s high-profile leadership of the anti-Trump Resistance and anger at any resistors to the Resistance, mainstream news outlets have chafed for years over the Internet undermining their privileged role as the gatekeepers of what Americans get to see and hear.
For a long time, the big media has wanted an excuse to rein in the Internet and break the small news outlets that have challenged the power – and the profitability – of the Times, Post, CNN, etc. Russia-gate and Trump have become the cover for that restoration of mainstream authority.
So, as we have moved into this dangerous New Cold War, we are living in what could be called “Establishment McCarthyism,” a hysterical but methodical strategy for silencing dissent and making sure that future mainstream groupthinks don’t get challenged.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
Reknowned economist M. Shahid Alamoffers this excellent critique of Noam Chomsky’s defective analysis of the relative influence of Oil versus the Israel lobby over US foreign policy: … continue
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