Over the last few months I have been studying the media coverage of the assassination of JFK and the publication of the Warren Commission. It could be argued that the way the mainstream media accepted the official line is not very surprising given their record of recording political stories. However, what is striking is the way that the so-called Non-Communist Left (NCL) reported these events. These were people who controlled left of centre journals such as the Nation, New Republic and I.F. Stone Weekly. None of these journals were willing to question the idea that JFK had been killed by a lone gunman.
The only journal on the left that seemed to doubt the official interpretation of events was James Aronson, the editor of the National Guardian. In the first edition of the newspaper after the assassination, he used the headline: “The Assassination Mystery: Kennedy and Oswald Killings Puzzle the Nation”. Aronson could not understand why others on the left were not taking up a similar position.
In his book, Something to Guard: The Stormy Life of the National Guardian (1978), Aronson recalled that soon after the assassination he was contacted by a journalist working for the New York Times, who asked him if Oswald subscribed to the National Guardian. Aronson replied he could find no record of Oswald receiving the newspaper. Aronson took this opportunity to raise questions about the newspaper’s investigation into the assassination: “I took advantage of the call to air my doubts about the lone assassin theory being fixed in the public mind. What was the New York Times doing to validate or disapprove this theory?” The journalist replied “Look, Jim, you worked here and you know the answer: don’t look this way – they won’t do it.” (1)
Mark Lane was probably the first person to write a detailed article questioning the official story of the assassination. He later pointed out: “The obvious choice, I thought, was the Nation. Its editor, Carey McWilliams, was an acquaintance. He had often asked me to write a piece for him… McWilliams seemed pleased to hear from me and delighted when I told him I had written something I wished to give to the Nation. When he learned of the subject matter, however, his manner approached panic.” McWilliams told Lane: “We cannot take it. We don’t want it. I am sorry but we have decided not to touch that subject.” Lane got the same response from the editors of Fact who said the subject matter was too controversial. It was also rejected by The Reporter, Look, Life and the Saturday Evening Post. (2)
James Aronson “heard that a maverick New York lawyer named Mark Lane had done some careful leg and brain work to produce a thesis casting doubt on the lone-assassin theory – and even whether Oswald had actually been involved in the crime.” (3) Aronson contacted Lane who told him that the article had been rejected by thirteen publications. Aronson offered to publish the article. Lane told him that “I would send it to him but I would not authorize him to publish it. He asked why. I said that I was seeking a broader, non-political publisher and that if the piece originated on the left, the subject would likely never receive the debate that it required.”
Lane now took the article to James Wechsler, an editor of the New York Post. He also rejected it and said that Lane would never find a publisher and “urged him to forget about it”. Lane now told him about Aronson’s offer. Wechsler, according to Lane was “furious” when he heard this news. “Don’t let them publish it… They’ll turn it into a political issue.” (4)
By this time the article had been turned down by seventeen publications and so Lane decided to let Aronson publish the article in the National Guardian. The 10,000 word article, published on 19th December, 1963, was the longest story in its fifteen-year history. It was presented as a lawyer’s report to the Warren Commission and titled A Brief for Lee Harvey Oswald. Aronson argued in the introduction: “The Guardian’s publication of Lane’s brief presumes only one thing: a man’s innocence, under US. Law, unless or until proved guilty. It is the right of any accused. A presumption of innocence is the rock upon which American jurisprudence rests… We ask all our readers to study this document… Any information or analysis based on fact that can assist the Warren Commission is in the public interest – an interest which demands that everything possible be done to establish the facts in this case.” (5)
Aronson later admitted: “Few issues of the Guardian created such a stir. Anticipating greater interest we had increased the press run by 5,000, but an article in the New York Times about our story brought a heavy demand at the newsstands and dealers were calling for additional copies. Before the month was out we had orders for 50,000 reprints.” (6)
Aronson offered the article to both the United Press International and the Associated Press but both agencies rejected it. However, the article was published in several European countries and was discussed in most leading newspapers throughout the world. Some newspapers attempted to rubbish the article by describing it as “left-wing propaganda”. Bertrand Russell wrote to The Times complaining about this treatment: “Mr. Lane is no more a left-winger than was President Kennedy. He attempted to publish his evidence… in virtually every established American publication but was unsuccessful. Only the National Guardian was prepared to print his scrupulously documented material… I think it important that no unnecessary prejudice against this valuable work of Mr. Lane should be aroused, so that his data concerning a vital event may be viewed with an open mind by people of all political persuasions.”
At first the national press attempted to ignore Lane’s article. The only other publication in the United States that was willing to discuss the issue was the New Republic. In an article published on 21st December, 1963, Jack Minnis and Staughton Lynd, the authors of Seeds of Doubt: Some Questions about the Assassination, raised questions about five different categories of evidence in the case. Minnis was the research director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, while Lynd was a history professor at Spelman College. Both men were also left-wing activists who were involved with the civil rights and peace movements. (7) However, after the publication of this article the New Republic left the subject alone.
In January, 1964, Walter Winchell made a vicious attack on Mark Lane and the National Guardian in his regular newspaper column. He described the newspaper as “a virtual propaganda arm of the Soviet Union” and called Lane an “agitator” seeking to abolish the Un-American Activities Committee. (8)
It is not surprising that Winchell led the attack on Mark Lane. He was a vital figure in the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird. Carl Bernstein has argued in his article, CIA and the Media: “Joseph Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap.” (9)
Deborah Davis, was the first person to expose the workings of Operation Mockingbird in her book, Katharine the Great (1979), a biography of Katharine Graham of the Washington Post. She explained how journalists were controlled in times of crisis: “This practice, the old intelligence principle translated, contained the seeds of political blackmail: Once the newsman or his organization has been compromised, the politician can threaten to expose its lack of independence unless he (it) cooperates further. Many Mockingbirds have been faced with this choice.” (10)
The origins of this intelligence operation dates back to May, 1940, when the British Security Coordination (BSC) was established in the United States. According to William Boyd: “Churchill’s task, as he himself saw it, was clear: somehow, in some way, the great mass of the population of the US had to be persuaded that it was in their interests to join the war in Europe, that to sit on the sidelines was in some way un-American. And so British Security Coordination came into being… The aim was to change the minds of an entire population: to make the people of America think that joining the war in Europe was a ‘good thing’ and thereby free Roosevelt to act without fear of censure from Congress or at the polls in an election.” (11)
One of the first agents recruited by BSC was Allen Dulles, the future head of the CIA. Other agents from the media included: Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson, Walter Lippmann, William Allen White, Dorothy Thompson, Raymond Gram Swing, Edward Murrow, Vincent Sheean, Helen Kirkpatrick, Eric Sevareid, Edmond Taylor, Rex Stout, Edgar Ansel Mowrer and Whitelaw Reid. William Stephenson, the head of the BSC, also worked closely with editors and publishers who were supporters of American intervention into the Second World War. This included Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Henry Luce (Time Magazine and Life Magazine), Helen Rogers Reid (New York Herald Tribune), Barry Bingham (Louisville Courier-Journal), Paul C. Patterson (Baltimore Sun), Dorothy Schiff (New York Post) and Ralph Ingersoll (Picture Magazine). (12)
Franklin D. Roosevelt had assigned William Donovan to work closely with William Stephenson on BSC operations (they had in fact been close friends since the First World War). After the United States entered the war, Donovan became head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and he took over control of BSC’s media assets. After the war, the OSS was closed down but emerged two years later as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). (13)
In the 1950s Operation Mockingbird was primarily concerned with the dangers of communism. However, it remained in place to be used by the CIA in times of national emergency. The assassination of JFK fell into this category and was successfully employed to make sure that the media did not openly discuss the guilt or innocence of Lee Harvey Oswald. (14)
The shaping of the media by the CIA became public knowledge in April 1976 when the Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities was published. “In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with the U.S. journalists and media organizations.” (15)
However, in November, 1963, the public was completely unaware of Operation Mockingbird, and the media cover-up operation was very successful. Journalists who wanted to write about their doubts had to find media organisations in Europe to publish their work. In March, 1964, Thomas G. Buchanan began publishing articles about the assassination in the French newspaper, L’ Express. Buchanan claimed in the newspaper that the Warren Commission had discovered that Jack Ruby knew Lee Harvey Oswald. He argued that Ruby lent him money to pay back the State Department for the $435.71 the U.S. had loaned Oswald when he returned from the Soviet Union.
These articles caught the attention of Richard Helms of the CIA. He sent a memo to John McCone, Director of the CIA: “Buchanan’s thesis is that the assassination of President Kennedy was the product of a rightest plot in the United States. He alleges in his articles that the slain Dallas policeman, Tippett (sic) was part of the plot against President Kennedy.” Helms went onto inform McCone that a “competent” CIA informant had disclosed that a book by Buchanan on the assassination would be published by Secker and Warburg on 15th May 1964. (17) The company had a reputation for publishing left-wing but anti-communist books. This included books by George Orwell, C. L. R. James, Simone de Beauvoir, Rudolf Rocker and Günter Grass.
Helms informant was right and Buchanan’s book, Who Killed Kennedy? was published in May, 1964. Buchanan appears to have been the first writer to suggest that Lyndon B. Johnson and “Texas oil interests” were responsible for Kennedy’s death. Buchanan argues that the assassination was funded by a Texas oilman. He does not name him but later it emerged he was referring to Haroldson L. Hunt. (18)
In the book Buchanan claims that Kennedy was killed by two gunmen. One fired from the railroad bridge. Another fired from the Texas School Book Depository. According to Buchanan, Oswald was aware of the conspiracy but did not fire any shots. Oswald believed that J. D. Tippit was going to help him escape. However, his real job was to kill him “while resisting arrest”. Oswald, realized what was happening and fired first.
When Who Killed Kennedy? was eventually published in the United States, it was mainly ignored. However, Time Magazine reviewed it and made much of the fact that Buchanan was a former member of the American Communist Party. (44) The left-wing British journalist, Cedric Belfrage, who had co-founded the National Guardian but had been deported from the United States in 1955 after refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), argued in the journal, Minority of One, that it was “irrelevant whether Buchanan was a former communist or a former Zen Buddhist”. Belfrage went on to state that what was important was Buchanan’s “common sense of the assassination and the American crisis it symbolizes”. (19)
Joachim Joesten, a freelance journalist, travelled to Dallas a few weeks after the assassination of Kennedy and spent four days there, interviewing witnesses and examining key locations. He came to the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone gunman. However, he did think that he was involved in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. “I wish to make it absolutely clear that I believe Oswald innocent only as charged, but that he was involved with the conspirators in some way.” (20)
Joesten began work on his book, Oswald, Assassin or Fall Guy? Like other early authors who questioned the official version, Joesten was forced to get his book published in England (Merlin Press). Before the book was published, Joesten, who was in Hamburg, received a letter from J. Lee Rankin of the Warren Commission, requesting a copy of the book. In March 1964, the United States Embassy in West Germany requested a meeting.
John Kelin, the author of Praise from a Future Generation (2007), has pointed out: “All copies of Joesten’s book manuscript were with either publishers or literary agents, so he was unable to comply with Rankin’s request. But he did sit down with the embassy man, whom he identified only as Mr. Morris… They met at the American Consulate in Hamburg on March 21, 1964… The two men talked for about four hours, during which time Joesten told Morris anything he had learned – why he believed Oswald was innocent of killing President Kennedy and Officer Tippit, and who he thought was really responsible.” (21)
Joesten later recalled that Morris seemed “particularly concerned with the fact that I believed Oswald had been connected with both the Central Intelligence Agency and with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Joesten also told Morris that he believed General Edwin Walker organised the assassination and that it “was a military-type operation with firing from both front and rear.” Joesten also speculated that Bernard Weissman was involved in the assassination. (22)
Joesten discovered that while he was in Hamburg FBI agents went to his home in New York City to interview his wife. “Since I had been located, I couldn’t help wondering if the FBI had simply used that excuse to enter my home, talk to my wife and, to put it plainly, snoop around.” The FBI agents recorded that Mrs. Joesten said her husband had returned from Dallas convinced of Oswald’s innocence. “Mrs. Joesten advised that she definitely feels that her husband is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
Joesten’s book, Oswald, Assassin or Fall Guy?, was published in the United States by Carl Marzani in July 1964. Marzani, a former member of the American Communist Party, had been imprisoned and blacklisted during the early 1950s and in order to survive went into publishing and established the company Marzani & Munsell. According to Marzani he specialised in books that upset the status quo. In the book Joesten claimed that the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Dallas Police Department and a group of right-wing Texas oil millionaires conspired to kill Kennedy. He openly accused Police Chief Jesse Curry of being one of the key figures in the assassination.
Victor Perlo, reviewing the book in the New Times, commented that the book had been rejected by several publishers before Marzani accepted it. “The firm deserves credit for publishing and promoting the book, so that thousands of copies were sold in a short time, despite a blackout by commercial reviewers. Publisher-editor Carl Marzani edited the manuscript brilliantly… This reviewer approached the Joesten book with scepticism. Despite my low opinion of the Dallas police and the FBI, I’ve had enough experience to know that utterly senseless things do happen in America… But the Joesten book erased most of my scepticism.” (21)
The book was largely ignored by the mainstream media but was reviewed by Hugh Aynesworth in the Editor and Publisher. Aynesworth, a strong supporter of the lone gunman theory and a reporter with the Dallas Morning News, wrote: “Joesten, an ex-German who became a U.S. citizen in 1948… states that Oswald was an agent of both the FBI and the CIA (how’s that for a 24-year-old who couldn’t spell “wrist”?). It’s the same old tripe with some new flavouring.” Aynesworth uses the review to criticize Mark Lane: “Lane is the troublemaker who spent two days in Dallas in January on his investigation and now pretends to be an expert on all aspects of the weird tragedy.” (22)
Another left-wing foreign-born journalist in America was also taking a close interest in the case. Léo Sauvage, who was the political correspondent of Le Figaro, published an article on the assassination in Commentary Magazine in March 1964, where he suggested that there had been a cover-up. He pointed out that all the available evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald had “either been leaked or eagerly and even ruthlessly spelled out – whether true, half-true, or demonstrably false; whether pertinent, confused, or obviously irrelevant” by the Dallas Police. As early as 23rd November, 1963, Will Fritz of the Homicide Bureau proclaimed the case as “cinched” and the following day, only two hours after Jack Ruby “had disposed of Oswald in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters”, the case against him was declared “closed” by Police Chief Jesse Curry and by District Attorney Henry Wade. (23)
Sauvage was also amazed that by 3rd December, 1963, the FBI had leaked details of its report on the assassination to the media. This allowed the New York Journal American to headline the story with the words: “Oswald lone killer. FBI report to prove it”. Sauvage pointed out that “six days later the Justice Department, acting on instructions from the White House, delivered the now completed report directly” to the Warren Commission. Sauvage adds that on 10th December, the New York Times reported: “Oswald assassin beyond a doubt, FBI concludes. He acted alone and did not know Ruby, says report to Warren Inquiry Panel.”
Sauvage added: “Thus, after the press and television conviction of Lee Oswald in Dallas, a second press and television conviction took place in Washington. And just as the Dallas authorities had forced the hand of any jury that would have heard the Oswald case, so the FBI has forced the hand of the Warren Commission. With the help of all the mass media, Oswald’s guilt has now twice been sold to the public – despite the fact that no one had even so much as ventured to explain why a psychopathic regicide, acting (as we shall see) under circumstances that would make his capture inevitable, should renounce the ultimate satisfaction of glorying in his deed before the eyes of the world. I really do not see, therefore, why only those of us who are sceptical about the case against Oswald should await further information.”
John Kelin, the author of Praise from a Future Generation (2007) summed up Sauvage’s case against the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman: “Léo Sauvage raised a series of questions that, he declared, Oswald’s accusers should be forced to answer. Did Oswald have an alibi? Was the President’s throat wound one of entrance or of exit? Was Oswald a good enough rifleman to do what the authorities said he did? How many shots were fired? Why were no fingerprints found on the alleged assassination rifle? How come none of the theatre patrons who witnessed Oswald’s arrest came forward with impartial accounts of how he was taken into custody?” (24)
Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary Magazine added his support to Sauvage’s article: “Is the possibility of a treasonous political conspiracy to be ruled out? Not the least fantastic aspect of this whole fantastic nightmare is the ease with which respectable opinion in America has arrived at the conclusion that such a possibility is absurd; in most other countries, what is regarded as absurd is the idea that the assassination could have been anything but a political murder.” (25) Sauvage’s article greatly impressed a large number of people, including the commissioning editor of Random House and on 11th March, 1964, he signed a contract with the publisher to develop his ideas on the assassination into a full-length book.
Criticism of the lone-gunman theory did not only come from the left. In April, 1963, the ultra-conservative, Revilo P. Oliver suggested in an article Marxmanship in Dallas, that appeared in American Opinion, that Kennedy was a victim of a communist conspiracy. He also used the article to attack Kennedy’s liberal views on civil rights and his closeness to “Martin Luther King and other criminals engaged in inciting race war.” (26)
The following month, the veteran right-winger, Martin Dies, former chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUCA), argued in the same journal that Kennedy had been a victim of a communist conspiracy. However, at this time he did not have all the evidence: “I hope to discuss the circumstances linking the Soviet Union with Oswald’s murder of the President. Naturally such evidence must be circumstantial and based upon the dogmatic pattern of Communist behaviour. The Communists are too clever to leave any trace of connection with Oswald.” (27) It would seem that at this time Dies was unaware that Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and on his return had openly associated with left-wing groups such as the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Billy James Hargis, a member of the John Birch Society and a close friend of General Edwin Walker, who had been mentioned as a conspirator by Joachim Joesten in Oswald, Assassin or Fall Guy?, also claimed a communist conspiracy had killed Kennedy. In his book, The Far Left (1964), he argued: “In spite of the absolute, indisputable evidence that Lee Oswald’s mind was moulded by Communist conspiracy propaganda, that his hatred was of the American free enterprise system and all it embraces, and that no one with even the remotest connection with what is considered to be the extreme right has any remote connection with the entire hideous affair… Do they really think the American people are that stupid? There is no doubt in my mind that the Communist assassin, Lee Oswald, intended to kill the President of the United States and disappear in the confused crowd, thus letting the conservative, anti-Communist element of Dallas take the blame. But it didn’t work. God is on the throne. He saw to it that Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended by a courageous Dallas policeman, Officer Tippit, who, in turn, gave his life for the cause of freedom in attempting to arrest the Communist assassin of the President.” (28)
Another figure on the right who published a book about the assassination of Kennedy in 1964 was James Evetts Haley. His book, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, blamed it on an old political enemy, Lyndon Baines Johnson. It was a best seller and it is claimed that in Texas only the Bible outsold Haley’s book that year. In the book Haley attempted to expose Johnson’s corrupt political activities. This included a detailed look at the relationship between Johnson and Billy Sol Estes. Haley pointed out that three men who could have provided evidence in court against Estes, George Krutilek, Harold Orr and Howard Pratt, all died of carbon monoxide poisoning from car engines. Haley also suggested that Johnson might have been responsible for the death of Kennedy: “Johnson wanted power and with all his knowledge of political strategy and his proven control of Congress, he could see wider horizons of power as Vice-President than as Senate Majority Leader. In effect, by presiding over the Senate, he could now conceive himself as virtually filling both high and important positions – and he was not far from wrong. Finally, as Victor Lasky pointed out, Johnson had nursed a lifetime dream to be President. As Majority leader he never could have made it. But as Vice-president fate could always intervene.” (29)
On 1st June 1964, The New York Times published a story by Anthony Lewis with the headline, “Panel to Reject Theories of Plot in Kennedy Death”. As Jerry Policoff has pointed out: “The story amounted to a detailed preview of the Warren Report three months before the commission completed taking testimony and nearly four months before the report was released.” (30)
The press almost universally supported the Warren Commission report. The New York Times said it was “a comprehensive and convincing account. The Washington Post commented that it was “deserving acceptance as the whole truth” and The Boston Herald suggested that the Warren Commission had provided a “tremendous service”.
What was even more damaging to those who believed that Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy was that the progressive press, led by Cary McWilliams, the editor of The Nation, also supported the conclusions of the report. The main bombshell came on 8th October, when I. F. Stone, who had virtually made a living criticising government documents, pointed out in I. F. Stone’s Weekly, that “I believe the Commission has done a first-rate job, on a level that does our country proud and is worthy of so tragic an event. I regard the case against Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone killer of the President as conclusive.” (31) However, as John Kelin has pointed out, at the time Stone wrote this article: “the Warren Report had just been published and the twenty-six volumes of supporting evidence and testimony were still not available”. (32)
Stone then went on to criticise those who had argued that there had been a conspiracy. After attacking the work of Mark Lane he turned on Bertrand Russell, who he described as “my dear and revered friend”. He suggested that Russell had dismissed the conclusions of Warren Commission report without even reading it. This was completely untrue. As Russell’s assistant, Ralph Schoenman, later pointed out, he had been provided a copy of the report a week before its official release date. (33)
Stone then went onto to look at the two books that had already been published arguing that there had been a conspiracy: “The Joesten book is rubbish, and Carl Marzani – whom I defended against loose charges in the worst days of the witch hunt – ought to have had more sense of public responsibility than to publish it. Thomas G. Buchanan, another victim of witch hunt days, has gone in for similar rubbish in his book, Who Killed Kennedy? You couldn’t convict a chicken thief on the flimsy slap-together of surmise, half-fact and whole untruth in either book… All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting, in defense of the Left and of a sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology. Now I see elements of the Left using these same tactics in the controversy over the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission Report.”
Ray Marcus, who was a devoted follower of I.F. Stone and had subscribed to his journal since its first edition in January 1953, was deeply shocked by this article. Marcus later recalled: “What was totally lacking in I. F. Stone’s comments was any evidence of the critical analysis he normally employed on assessing official statements.” On 8th October, 1964, Marcus wrote Stone a long letter outlining the flaws in the Warren Report. Marcus argued that in order to accept the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman scenario, one must accept fifteen points as true. These points were explained in an eight page letter. Marcus never received a reply. (34)
Another journalist considered to be on the left at the time was Walter Lippmann. In his syndicated column, Today and Tomorrow on 29th September, 1964, Lippmann wrote that he was convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in assassinating John F. Kennedy. He added there was “no ground on which any contemporary man, here or abroad, should question the verdict”. (35) However, he later told his friend, Ronald Steel, that he suspected that Kennedy had been killed as part of a conspiracy. (36)
The complete acceptance by the media of the Warren Report caused problems for those wishing to publish books advocating a conspiracy. Léo Sauvage, who had already signed a contract with Random House, to publish his book, The Oswald Affair – an Examination of the Contradictions and Omissions of the Warren Report, was to be disappointed. A month after the publication of the report, a senior editor at Random House, Jason Epstein, wrote to Sauvage cancelling the contract: “The problem is that the Warren Report has put the Oswald matter in a different light from what I expected, and I’m now convinced that any book which attempts to question Oswald’s guilt would be out of touch with reality and could not be taken seriously by responsible critics.” (37) No other publisher in the United States was willing to bring out the book and so like other opponents of the lone gunman theory, Sauvage was forced to go to Europe to have his book published.
It has been suggested that the critics of the lone-gunman theory were particularly hurt by the support for the Warren Report from left-wing journalists. In a debate that took place on 4th December, 1964, Beverly Hills High School, Abraham Wirin, chief counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in California and a much respected figure on the left for over 30 years, told the audience that he tried to make up his own mind on important issues, but in the case of the Warren Commission he relied on the opinions of people who he could trust: “I consider Carey McWilliams and The Nation, as an individual and a newspaper, respectively, whose judgment I respect. I do not consider Carey McWilliams or The Nation, a person or a newspaper, which would participate in a fraud, or would condone it.” Wirin pointed out The Nation had carried an article in support of the Warren Report and added: “now, that carries a lot of weight with me.”
Wirin then went onto to discuss I.F. Stone’s support for the Warren Report: “Now Mr. Stone, who has defended the rights of the Left, of Communists and others to fair treatment and freedom throughout his life – who is no apologist for any Rightest… Very rarely does Mr. Stone ever commend a government agency. Very rarely. As very rarely do I.” Wirin then said something very strange: “I say thank God for Earl Warren. He saved us from a pogrom. He saved our nation. God bless him for what he has done in establishing that Oswald was the lone assassin.” (38)
Mark Lane, who was involved in the debate with Abraham Wirin, has suggested a reason why the left was so keen to support the conclusions of the Warren Report. He discovered a document dated 20th January, 1964, where President Lyndon Johnson had asked Earl Warren to squelch rumours that “were circulating in this country and overseas”. He added that these rumours were so potentially explosive that if they were “not quenched, they could conceivably lead the country to war which could cost 40 million lives”. (39)
Lane suggests that this may be connected to the memo that deputy attorney Nicholas Katzenbach sent to Lyndon Johnson, through Bill Moyers, his press secretary, on 25th November, 1963. Katzenbach insisted that: “The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin, that he did not have confederates who are still at large, and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial. I think this objective may be satisfied by making public as soon as possible a complete and thorough FBI report on Oswald and the assassination.” (40)
Were the rumours that needed to be “quenched” the same as those circulated by Revilo P. Oliver, Martin Dies and Billy James Hargis in the days following the assassination? Lane argues in Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (1991): “The CIA had concluded that Oswald had acted alone; he had not involved others in his plans and no one had directed him. Warren was respectfully cautioned, however, that if the American people received the facts, surely they would demand, in the existing volatile atmosphere, still heaving with tragedy, and against the backdrop of an escalating cold war, that immediate action be taken against the Soviet Union and Cuba. Warren agreed. Under the circumstances, he was advised that since the fate of the world was now in his hands, it was imperative that the Oswald-Kostikov connection be suppressed.” (41) Is it possible that people like Walter Lippmann, I. F. Stone and Carey McWilliams had been told that the Soviets had been involved in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy and without their support a nuclear war could not be adverted?
Then we have those strange words of Abraham Wirin: “I say thank God for Earl Warren. He saved us from a pogrom. He saved our nation. God bless him for what he has done in establishing that Oswald was the lone assassin.” Why would Wirin use the word “pogrom”? Had key figures on the left such as I.F. Stone and Carey McWilliams been told that the conspiracy to kill Kennedy was in someway involved Jewish left-wingers? If that was the case, why would they be willing to believe such stories? It is indeed a strange puzzle. Maybe the answer lies in an article that had been written by Tom Braden that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on 20th May, 1967.
Braden, who had worked with Allen Dulles at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War, was considered to be an expert in psychological warfare. When Dulles joined the CIA in December 1950 as Deputy Director of Operations one of his first acts was to recruit Braden as his assistant. Braden suggested to Allen Dulles that he should be allowed to establish the International Organizations Division (IOD) to counteract Soviet propaganda. Dulles agreed and Cord Meyer was appointed as his deputy. The IOD helped established anti-Communist front groups in Western Europe.
The IOD was dedicated to infiltrating academic, trade and political associations. The objective was to control potential radicals and to steer them to the right. Braden oversaw the funding of groups such as the National Student Association, the Congress of Cultural Freedom, Communications Workers of America, the American Newspaper Guild, the United Auto Workers, National Council of Churches, the African-American Institute and the National Educational Association.
Braden later admitted that the CIA was putting around $900,000 a year into the Congress of Cultural Freedom. Some of this money was used to publish its journal, Encounter. Braden and the IOD also worked closely with anti-Communist leaders of the trade union movement such as George Meany of the Congress for Industrial Organization and the American Federation of Labor. This was used to fight Communism in its own ranks. As Braden said: “The CIA could do exactly as it pleased. It could buy armies. It could buy bombs. It was one of the first worldwide multinationals.” (42)
This remained a highly secret operation but in 1966 stories began to appear in the New York Times suggesting that the CIA had been secretly funding left-wing groups. This in fact, was not a new claim. Joseph McCarthy had made similar accusations in 1953. He had been given this information by J. Edgar Hoover who had described the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) as “Wisner’s gang of weirdos”. In August, 1953, Richard Helms, Wisner’s deputy at the OPC, told Cord Meyer, who was Braden’s deputy at the International Organizations Division, that Joseph McCarthy and the FBI had accused him of being a communist. The FBI added to the smear by announcing it was unwilling to give Meyer “security clearance”. (43)
In September, 1953, Meyer was shown the FBI file against him. It included allegations that his wife, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was a former member of the American Labor Party. It also listed several people linked to Meyer who had “supported pro-Communist policies or have been associated with Communist front organizations or organizations pro-Communist in their sympathies.” The list included the publisher Cass Canfield, the president and chairman of Harper & Brothers. Canfield had first met Allen Dulles in 1940 when they were both working for the British Security Coordination (BSC), a highly secret British intelligence unit based in the United States set up with the approval of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination Canfield played an important role in stopping books criticising the Warren Commission being published. Canfield had indeed been receiving money from the CIA to help publish left-wing but anti-communist books. He was along with Jason Epstein of Random House, who had blocked the publication Léo Sauvage’s TheOswald Affair – an Examination of the Contradictions and Omissions of the Warren Report, a key figure in the CIA sponsored Congress of Cultural Freedom.
McCarthy’s assistant, Roy Cohn, argues in his book McCarthy (1968) that they had discovered that communist agents had infiltrated the CIA in 1953: “Our files contained allegations gathered from various sources indicating that the CIA had unwittingly hired a large numbers of double agents – individuals who, although working for the CIA, were actually communist agents whose mission was to plant inaccurate data…. We also wanted to investigate charges that the CIA had granted large subsidies to pro-Communist organizations.” Cohn complained that this proposed investigation was stopped on the orders of the White House. “Vice-President Nixon was assigned to the delicate job of blocking it… Nixon spoke at length, arguing that an open investigation would damage national security, harm our relations with our allies, and seriously affect CIA operations, which depended on total secrecy… Finally, the three subcommittee members, not opposed to the inquiry before they went to dinner, yielded to Nixon’s pressure. So, too, did McCarthy, and the investigation, which McCarthy told me interested him more than any other, was never launched.” (44)
Allen Dulles refused permission for the FBI to interrogate Frank Wisner and Cord Meyer and Hoover’s investigation also came to an end. McCarthy was in fact right when he said that the CIA was funding what he considered to be pro-communist organisations. He was wrong however in believing they had infiltrated the organisation. As Frances Stonor Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War? (1999) has pointed out it was the other way round. This has been confirmed by some members of the left who received funding from the CIA during this period. As Arthur Schlesinger later explained, the NCL was supported by leading establishment figures such as Chip Bohlen, Isaiah Berlin, Averell Harriman and George Kennan: “We all felt that democratic socialism was the most effective bulwark against totalitarianism. This became an undercurrent – or even undercover – theme of American foreign policy during the period.” (45)
It might seem strange that the non-communist left should be paid to write articles and books attacking the Soviet Union. After all they would have done that anyway. However, the important aspect of this policy was to compromise these left-wing writers by paying them money or by funding their organisations. It also put them in position where they could call on their help in times of crisis such as the assassination of John Kennedy. The support of the NCL was vitally important in the cover-up of the assassination.
Why then did the CIA start leaking information about their funding of the NCL in 1966? The reason is that most of these sponsored journalists refused to support the government policy on Vietnam. In the case of Stone, he found it to his financial advantage to oppose the policy. Stone had barely 20,000 subscribers to I.F. Weekly before the outbreak of the war. By 1969 he had over 70,000. (46)
The story of CIA funding of Non-Communist Left journalists and organizations was fully broken in the press by a small-left-wing journal, Ramparts. The editor, Warren Hinckle, met a man by the name of Michael Wood, in January 1967, at the New York’s Algonquin Hotel. The meeting had been arranged by a public relations executive Marc Stone (the brother of I.F. Stone). Wood told Hinckle that the National Student Association (NSA) was receiving funding from the CIA. At first Hinkle thought he was being set-up. Why was the story not taken to I.F. Stone? (47)
However, after further research, Hinckle was convinced that the CIA had infiltrated the Non-Communist Left: “While the ADA-types and the Arthur Schlesinger model liberal kewpie dolls battled fascism by protecting their right flank with domestic Red-baiting and Cold War one-upmanship, the Ivy League delinquents who fled to the CIA – liberal lawyers, businessmen, academics, games-playing craftsmen – hatched a master plan of Germanic ambition that entailed nothing less than clandestine political control of the international operations of all important American professional and cultural organisations: journalists, educators, jurists, businessmen, et al. The standing CIA subsidy to the National Student Association was but one slice of a very complex pie.” Hinckle even had doubts about publishing the story. Sol Stern, who was writing the article for Ramparts, “advanced the intriguing contention that such a disclosure would be damaging to the enlightened men of the liberal internationalistic wing of the CIA who were willing to provide clandestine money to domestic progressive causes.” (48)
Hinckle did go ahead with the story and took full-page advertisements in the Tuesday editions of the New York Times and Washington Post: “In its March issue, Ramparts magazine will document how the CIA has infiltrated and subverted the world of American student leaders, over the past fifteen years.” For its exposé of the CIA, Ramparts received the George Polk Memorial Award for Excellence in Journalism and was praised for its “explosive revival of the great muckraking tradition.”
On 20th May 1967 Thomas Braden, the former head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division, that had been funding the NSA, wrote an article that was published in the Saturday Evening Post entitled, I’m Glad the CIA is Immoral Braden admitted that for more than 10 years, the CIA had subsidized progressive magazines such as Encounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom – which it also funded – and that one of its staff was a CIA agent. He also admitted that he had paid money to left-wing trade union leaders such as Walter Reuther, Jay Lovestone, David Dubinsky and Irving Brown. (49)
According to Frances Stonor Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War? (1999): “The effect of Braden’s article was to sink the CIA’s covert association with the Non-Communist Left once and for all.” (50) Braden later admitted that the article had been commissioned by CIA asset, Stewart Alsop. (51) But why had the CIA decided to expose their agents in 1967. Was it because they were refusing to support government policy in Vietnam?
John Hunt, a CIA agent who worked very closely with Braden at the International Organizations Division, pointed out in a revealing interview: “Tom Braden was a company man… if he was really acting independently, would have had much to fear. My belief is that he was an instrument down the line somewhere of those who wanted to get rid of the NCL (Non-Communist Left). Don’t look for a lone gunman – that’s mad, just as it is with the Kennedy assassination… I do believe there was an operational decision to blow the Congress and the other programs out of the water.” (52)
By this time of course those figures on the Non-Communist Left such as I.F. Stone and Carey McWilliams knew they had been fooled by the CIA in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. However, all they could do was to keep their heads down and pretend it had not happened. Warren Hinkle admitted that as editor of Ramparts in November 1963, he had been reluctant to get involved in investigating the Kennedy assassination. Until he took up the case in 1967 he had left it up to the “amateurs”. He added the “nationwide grass-roots reinvestigation of the Kennedy assassination was an extraordinary phenomenon of an extraordinary decade”. (53)
A more detailed account of the way the media covered the JFK assassination can be found in my introduction of my ebook on the assassination.
1. James Aronson and Cedric Belfrage, Something to Guard: The Stormy Life of the National Guardian (1978) page 296
2. Mark Lane, Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (1991) page 19
3. James Aronson and Cedric Belfrage, Something to Guard: The Stormy Life of the National Guardian (1978) page 297
4. Mark Lane, Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (1991) page 20
5. James Aronson, National Guardian (19th December, 1963)
6. Mark Lane, The National Guardian (19th December, 1963)
7. Jack Minnis and Staughton Lind, Seeds of Doubt: Some Questions about the Assassination, New Republic (21st December, 1963)
8. Quoted by James Aronson and Cedric Belfrage, Something to Guard: The Stormy Life of the National Guardian (1978) page 298
9. Carl Bernstein, CIA and the Media, Rolling Stone Magazine (20th October, 1977)
10. Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great (1979) page 190
11. William Boyd, The Guardian (19th August, 2006)
12. At the end of the Second World War the files of British Security Coordination were packed onto semitrilers and transported to Camp X in Canada. Stephenson wanted to have some record of the activities of the agency, “To provide a record which would be available for reference should future need arise for secret activities and security measures for the kind it describes.” He recruited former BSC agents, Roald Dahl, H. Montgomery Hyde, Giles Playfair, Gilbert Highet and Tom Hill, to write the book. Stephenson told Dahl: “We don’t dare to do it in the United States, we have to do it on British territory.” Dahl commented: “He pulled a lot over Hoover… He pulled a few things over the White House, too, now and again. I wrote a little bit but eventually I called Bill and told him that it’s an historian’s job… This famous history of the BSC through the war in New York was written by Tom Hill and a few other agents.” Only twenty copies of the book were printed. Ten went into a safe in Montreal and ten went to Stephenson for distribution. The report was eventually published in 1998 as British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-45.
Other books that contain interesting information on the work of the British Security Coordination include: Jennet Conant, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington (2008), Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (1998), Nicholas J. Cull, Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign Against American Neutrality (1996) and Bill Macdonald, The True Intrepid: Sir William Stephenson and the Unknown Agents (2001).
13. Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (April, 1976)
14. ARRB Record Number 180-100092-10352
15. Thomas G. Buchanan, Who Killed Kennedy? (1964)
16. Time Magazine (12th June, 1964)
17. Cederic Belfrage, The Minority of One (October, 1964)
18. Joachim Joesten, Oswald, Assassin or Fall Guy? (1964) page 11
19. John Kelin, Praise from a Future Generation (2007) page 169
20. CE 2709, Warren Commission Vol.26 pages 79-84
21. Victor Perlo, New Times (September 1964)
22. Hugh Aynesworth, Editor and Publisher (1st August, 1964)
24. John Kelin, Praise from a Future Generation (2007) page 179
25. Norman Podhoretz, Commentary Magazine (March, 1964)
26. Revilo P. Oliver, Marxmanship in Dallas, American Opinion (February, 1964)
27. Martin Dies, Assassination and its Aftermath, American Opinion (March, 1964)
28. Billy James Hargis, Far Left (1964) page 146
29. James Evetts Haley. A Texan Looks at Lyndon (1964) page 199
30. Jerry Policoff, The Media and the Murder of John Kennedy, New Times (8th August, 1975). Included in Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond – A Guide to Cover-Ups and Investigations (1976)
31. I. F. Stone, I. F. Stone’s Weekly (5th October, 1964)
32. John Kelin, Praise from a Future Generation (2007) page 182
33. John Kelin, interview with Ralph Schoenman (14th August, 2000)
34. Ray Marcus, letter to I. F. Stone (8th October, 1964)
35. Walter Lippmann, Today and Tomorrow (29th September, 1964)
36. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1999) page 543
37. Jason Epstein, letter to Léo Sauvage (4th November, 1964)
38. Abraham L. Wirin, speech, Beverly Hills High School (4th December, 1964)
39. Mark Lane, Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (1991) page 51
40. Nicholas Katzenbach, memo to Bill Moyers (25th November, 1963)
41. Mark Lane, Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (1991) page 53
42. Tom Braden, interview included in the Granada Television program, World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA (June, 1975)
(43) Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (1980) pages 60-84
(44) Roy Cohn, McCarthy (1968) pages 63-65
(45) Arthur Schlesinger quoted by Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War? (1999) page 63
(46) D. D. Guttenplan, American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone (2011) page 432
(47) Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008) page 239
(48) Warren Hinckle, If you have a Lemon, Make Lemonade (1973) pages 172-179
(49) Tom Braden, Saturday Evening Post (20th May, 1967)
(50) Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War? (1999) page 398
(51) Tom Braden, interviewed by Frances Stonor Saunders (August 1996)
(52) John Hunt, interviewed by Frances Stonor Saunders (July 1997)
(53) Warren Hinckle, If you have a Lemon, Make Lemonade (1973) page 204
Temer has also opened the doors to the “Christian” Zionist scourge that has infected much of America, as well as other Western nations–albeit to a lesser extent–like Canada, the UK and Australia. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), led by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, arrived in Brazil mere days after Rousseff’s overthrow and just concluded its trip 24 hours ago. Rabbi Eckstein’s gang was on a mission to turn every major “mega-church” in Brazil into even stronger supporters of the usurping Zionist entity for the “cause” of combating “anti-Semitism”. The good “rebbe” and Temer aren’t strangers and thus, this entire event should be looked at not just as a consequence of the Zionist coup against the Workers’ Party (PT), but part and parcel of it. Furthermore, Rabbi Eckstein’s subversive visit should be seen in the greater context of “Christian” Zionist penetration into Brazil and Latin America as a whole.
It should be noted for the record that the Freemasonic Universal Church and other like-similar institutions were welcomed by the Brazilian military dictatorship as a counterweight to the Christian Liberation Theologians, who, despite being tortured, killed and disappeared, remained a formidable anti-Imperialist opposition current until the end of the coup regime. And how can we forget that the US-‘Israeli’-backed tyranny that did all of this murdering and maiming would never have attained power if it wasn’t for the Zionist Jew Harold Geneen, who was deathly afraid of losing his multinational ITT telecom giant to democratically-elected Brazilian President João Goulart in a wave of nationalizations. So the Zionist Jew simply called his “shabbos goy” friend CIA Director John McCone, gave him all-access to ITT’s resources and then the CIA used this new, incredibly useful instrument to push forward with the coup full throttle, ultimately deposing Goulart in 1964. It was International Jewry that crushed Brazil’s first attempt at nationalist-socialism, and it was International Jewry that crushed Brazil’s new experiment in nationalist-socialism exemplified by Dilma Rousseff and her Workers’ Party.
Quite possibly NOTHING encapsulates this entire sad affair like BreakingIsraelNews, a known gateway for Zionist propaganda, which called the illegal ouster of Dilma Rousseff “karma” for her anti-‘Israeli’ posturing and quoted a verse from the genocidal, Jewish supremacist book of Deuteronomy to drive its pro-coup point home even further. The arrogance of World Zionism is indeed boundless and this hubris is certainly driving its offensive throughout Latin America. It’s not just Brazil. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a former World Bank economist whose Jewish roots and strong ties to numerous international banks and investment firms (read: the Rothschild Octopus) make him a prime mover and shaker for the Zionist project in the region, is about to take over Peru. Argentina, once run by the fiery anti-globalist Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, is now a pro-US, pro-‘Israel’ neoliberal nightmare run by neocon Mauricio Macri. And Venezuela, home of the Bolivarian Revolution, is once again in the throes of a coup as US-Zionist-aligned oligarchs wage economic war on Caracas through the deliberate creation of food shortages and other forms of destabilizing malice. The homeland of Hugo Chavez (RIP) has long been a target of ‘Israel’–he said so himself–for El Comandante fought the Jewish New World Order tooth and nail, and considering the above-mentioned pomposity of these bloodthirsty “chosenite” coupmongers, it’s a safe bet to assume they are going to continue their efforts to crush the Bolivarian phenomenon permanently.
If Brazil and Venezuela are to survive this dark, dark period, the peoples of these respective great nations must come to terms with the simple fact that it is not merely “Imperialism” which is seeking to destroy their nationalist-socialisms and impose economic neoliberalism on their societies, but International Jewry’s ZIO-IMPERIALISM which is seeking to impose TOTAL neoliberalism on their societies in the political, financial, cultural and even spiritual sectors, hence the blatant “Christian” Zionist surge as of recent. Resistance on all fronts is the only antidote to this growing poisonous trend, and if it is not fiercely engaged in, as Venezuelan President and Chavez successor Nicolas Maduro is desperately attempting to do now, then the darkness is not only going to continue, but worsen to levels not seen since Guatemala in ’54, Brazil in ’64, Chile in ’73, Argentina in ’76 and in more recent times, Honduras in ’09, ALL PUT TOGETHER. Our full solidarity with the Latin American peoples in the face of Empire Judaica’s storm.
A nongovernmental organisation (NGO) is described as a not-for-profit organisation independent from states and international governments. They are funded by donations and facilitated by volunteers drawn from the communities they serve.
Genuine NGOs fitting this description fulfil a vital role within the nations they work regarding issues including education, healthcare, the media, the environment, technology, and economic development.
They often perform their work in parallel with government organisations and may even cooperate with their national government. At other times, they provide a necessary but constructive check and balance to deficiencies present within a state.
However, NGOs can be abused. Foreign governments and financially motivated special interests can use the structure and appeal of NGOs as vectors to project unwarranted, coercive power and influence.
Funded not by the communities they claim to serve, but by these foreign interests, they often operate under the pretext of upholding the legitimate roles and responsibilities of genuine NGOs while in reality undermining a targeted nation’s government, its people, its institutions, and national peace and stability. Ironically, such organisations also undermine the perceived legitimacy and effectiveness of real NGOs.
Foreign interests seek to do this for a number of reasons including pressuring a targeted government to make concessions regarding bilateral relations, competing with and eventually overrunning state institutions, and even replacing a nation’s entire government.
How the US State Department Took Over Myanmar’s Ministry of Information
An extreme example of this can be seen in Southeast Asia’s Myanmar, where the Ministry of Information is now firmly under the control of Pe Myint, trained in “journalism” by a US government-funded organisation posing as an NGO, called the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation.
Pe Myint is also a member of a political party supported by a large collection of US and British funded organisations (National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Open Society, USAID, etc.), which in turn was propelled into power during recent elections also influenced heavily by organisations posing as NGOs funded by these same foreign interests.
Previously an independent institution of Myanmar, the Ministry of Information is now firmly under the influence of the US State Department. This may explain uncharacteristic comments regarding “substandard democracy” published by a national newspaper it controls directed at neighbouring Thailand ahead of the August 7, 2016 Thai referendum.
Henceforth, the Ministry has been made to serve the best interests of the United States, not Myanmar, indicated by the fact that its recent comments only risk jeopardising what would otherwise be constructive and beneficial bilateral relations with Thailand.
In this example, foreign-funded organisations not only pressured the government of Myanmar to accept the conditions in which a foreign-backed opposition came to power, but these foreign-funded organisations also helped create an entirely parallel government that are now overwriting Myanmar’s sovereignty.
Recognise the Threat
These foreign-funded organisations masquerading as NGOs are more than just foreign-funded “charities,” “rights advocates,” or “media platforms.” This can be discerned simply by examining the intermediary organisations providing these groups money and examining the special interests and agendas they in turn serve.
The United State National Endowment for Democracy (NED) for example, lists among its 2013 sponsors (.pdf) petrochemical giant Chevron, Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs, US State Department-connected and privacy usurping tech-giant Google and the US Chamber of Commerce which itself represents corporations ranging from defence contractors to oil companies to banks, as well as agricultural and pharmaceutical giants. Individual donors include pro-war Republican politicians including Frank Carlucci, Paula Dobriansky, Condoleezza Rice and Robert Zoellick.
(It would be exponentially more difficult for foreign funded organisatons posing as NGOs to attract volunteers and local support if the true nature of their funding was transparently and repeatedly disclosed to the communities they allegedly serve.)
NED’s board of directors represents a similar and troubling convergence of special interests who directly contradict the alleged purpose of both NED itself, and the many organisations it funds around the world.
Unfortunately, many people who work for foreign-funded organisations posing as NGOs are unaware of such facts. Senior leadership of these organisations often go through great lengths to conceal their foreign funding to avoid scrutiny and even in some cases, to avoid properly paying people who are led to believe no funds are available and thus are asked to “volunteer” to help. Those few who are aware of this funding, are usually unaware of who and what NED and other organisations like them truly represent.
To put it simply, any organisation or institution serves only the interests of those who support it. An NGO supported by local donations and volunteers serves its local community. A foreign-funded organisation posing as an NGO serves foreign interests.
And simpler still, an organisation funded by a foreign government cannot possibly be characterised as “nongovernmental.” Even at face value, this notion strains credibility.
Case Study: Prachatai, Thailand
After being caught concealing foreign funding, Bangkok-based media platform Prachatai disclosed several million baht in US State Department funding, Open Society grants and funds from several European governments.
Remarkably, Prachatai was (and still is) soliciting donations on their website. They also have categorically failed to update their foreign funding in English (since their first and only disclosure in 2011) and have never disclosed their foreign funding to their Thai readers.
(US Ambassor Kristie Kenney in US State Department-funded Prachatai’s office in Bangkok, Thailand.)
Independent journalists attempting to ascertain the true depth of Prachatai’s connections to the US State Department were told that Prachatai had none, and that the money was provided to them unconditionally.
In reality, as revealed by Wikileaks, Prachatai’s staff remains in constant contact with the US Embassy in Bangkok, with US ambassadors and political counsellors making regular visits to their office off of Ratchada Road, and with Prachatai’s director Chiranuch Premchaiporn making regular, lengthy and detailed reports about Thailand’s internal political affairs to US Embassy staff.
In the infamous Cablegate leak, the US Embassy in Bangkok sent off as many as 7 cables regarding or referencing Prachatai and its activities within the country and in particular its defence of agitators attempting to undermine the nation’s institutions and political stability.
For the US State Department, Prachatai exists as a state-funded asset — a constant pressure point to extort concessions from the Thai government with and to coerce from them the settings in which US-backed political forces might take power.
Under the guise of defending “free speech” and “human rights,” Prachatai networks deeply with US-backed political party Pheu Thai, its street front the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD or “red shirts”) and a large number of other US-funded organisations posing as NGOs and academic associations — many of which share the office building Prachatai is currently based in.
Additionally, Prachatai communicates and coordinates regularly with foreign media staff based in Thailand, particularly those who gravitate around the swank Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand clubhouse and bar in downtown Bangkok.
Together they stage public relations events aimed at portraying the current Thai government as overbearing, dictatorial and losing popularity and control. In reality, the events include the same handful of stand-ins and utilise intentionally deceptive methods to conflate the size and impact of each staged event.
By participating in such events, the foreign media betrays the principles it allegedly represent, creating the news rather than objectively covering it. For Prachatai, posing as an NGO but clearly functioning as an extension of US interests in Thailand, it too represents a betrayal of true, community-supported activism.
Ending the Charade
In all honesty Prachatai’s activities could easily be tolerated by the Thai government, if only for one concession — that Prachatai and other organisations like it fully and repeatedly disclosed in English and in Thai, their existence as foreign-funded government organisations rather than pose as a genuine NGO.
Since it has operated for years and failed to fulfil its own responsibilities toward transparency to the society it claims to serve, it may be time for Thailand to pass legislation to force foreign-funded organisations like Prachatai to come clean.
Other nations have adopted comprehensive legislation to help protect real NGOs from those with foreign funding merely posing as such.
(The graffiti reads, “foreign agent,” written in Russian..)
In Russia, legislation now requires foreign-funded organisations to declare on all written material and verbally declare before all audio statements, their relationship with foreign interests. Those that fail to register as foreign-funded organisations or fail to disclose all of their funding, face liquidation.
While the US and the myriad organisations it was running in Moscow predictably decried the legislation as “oppressive,” some might appreciate the irony of “pro-democracy activists” resisting calls for greater transparency, a fundamental prerequisite for a democratic society.
Foreign-funded organisations posing as NGOs are more than a mere nuisance, or even simply a means by foreign governments and special interests to apply coercive pressure on a nation’s government and institutions. They represent a patient, concerted effort to compete with and eventually fully replace a nation’s existing sovereign institutions. This threat should not be underestimated nor should it be tolerated.
And beyond a threat to national security, these foreign-funded organisations attract and squander a nation’s human resources, while undermining the very legitimate and essential work performed by honest, locally-supported NGOs.
Time is running short for President Obama to make good on his 2009 promise “to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet as both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times recently reported, Obama’s advisers may have just nixed the single most important reform advocated by arms control advocates: a formal pledge that the United States will never again be the first country to use nuclear weapons in a conflict.
Ever since President Truman ordered two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, the United States has reserved the right to initiate nuclear war against an overwhelming conventional, chemical or biological attack on us or our allies. But peace advocates — and more than a few senior military officers — have long warned that resorting to nuclear weapons would ignite a global holocaust, killing hundreds of millions of people.
In a talk to the annual meeting of the Arms Control Association on June 6, Deputy National Security Advisor Benjamin Rhodes promised that President Obama would continue to review ways to achieve his grand vision of a nuclear-free world during his last months in office. Obama was reportedly considering a “series of executive actions” to that end, including a landmark shift to a “no first use” policy.
Two-thirds of adult Americans surveyed support such a policy. So do 10 U.S. senators who wrote President Obama in July, proposing a no-first-use declaration to “reduce the risk of accidental nuclear conflict” and seeking cut-backs in his trillion dollar plan for nuclear modernization over the next 30 years.
But Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz (who oversees the nuclear stockpile), and Secretary of State John Kerry all warned during a National Security Council meeting in July that declaring a policy of “no first use” would alarm America’s allies, undercut U.S. credibility, and send a message of weakness to the Kremlin at a time of tense relations with Russia.
Yet until they took charge of giant bureaucracies whose funding depends on keeping the threat of nuclear war alive, both Carter and Moniz were on record supporting “a new strategy for reducing nuclear threats” and achieving security “at significantly lower levels of nuclear forces and with less reliance on nuclear weapons in our national security strategy.”
In a 2007 manifesto, Carter, Moniz, and other centrist Democratic foreign policy experts rejected the old claim that nuclear weapons are still needed to deter non-nuclear attacks.
“Nuclear weapons are much less credible in deterring conventional, biological, or chemical weapon attacks,” they wrote. “A more effective way of deterring and defending against such non-nuclear attacks – and giving the President a wider range of credible response options – would be to rely on a robust array of conventional strike capabilities and strong declaratory policies.”
They also gave strong implicit support to a no-first-use doctrine, stating that “nuclear weapons must be seen as a last resort, when no other options can ensure the security of the U.S. and its allies.”
Risk of Overreaction
Why does a no-first-use policy matter? In a New York Times column last month, Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and head of the United States Strategic Command, emphasized the folly of introducing nuclear weapons into any conflict.
“Using nuclear weapons first against Russia and China would endanger our and our allies’ very survival by encouraging full-scale retaliation,” he and a colleague wrote. “Such use against North Korea would be likely to result in the blanketing of Japan and possibly South Korea with deadly radioactive fallout.”
A policy of no first use, backed up by a reconfiguration of U.S. nuclear forces to reduce their offensive capabilities, would lower the chance of a rival nuclear power rushing to launch early in a crisis and unleashing World War III. Today some nuclear powers like Russia have their forces on hair-trigger alert for fear of being wiped out by a U.S. surprise attack; as a result, the world is just one false alarm away from all-out nuclear war.
As two senior officials at the Arms Control Association observed recently in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Among other advantages, a clear US no-first-use policy would reduce the risk of Russian or Chinese nuclear miscalculation during a crisis by alleviating concerns about a devastating US nuclear first-strike.
“Such risks could grow in the future as Washington develops cyber offensive capabilities that can confuse nuclear command and control systems, as well as new strike capabilities and strategic ballistic missile interceptors that Russia and China believe may degrade their nuclear retaliatory potential.”
They also discounted the claim that U.S. allies such as Japan or Korea would rebel against such a change of policy: “They are highly likely to accept such a decision, since no first use will in no way weaken US military preparedness to confront non-nuclear threats to their security. . . Many US allies, including NATO members Germany and the Netherlands, support the adoption of no-first-use policies by all nuclear-armed states.”
Warnings by nuclear hawks that a common-sense doctrine of no-first-use would undercut U.S. “credibility” or project “weakness” are simply business-as-usual attempts by national security bureaucrats to inflate threats and keep the war machine in high gear. If they succeed in blocking reform, America and the rest of the world will remain at real risk of annihilation through accidental nuclear escalation.
The question now is whether President Obama will listen to the fear-mongers in his cabinet, or remember what he said in May at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial: “Among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.”
Given the exceptionally grave nature of this admission and its repercussions, one would suppose that Baer has been questioned by other media and/or the FBI and made to discuss in detail precisely who it was who cashed out and how he knew about the 9/11 plot in advance. But one would be wrong. Since making this stunning admission to the cameras of We Are Change Los Angeles, no one has ever asked Baer for more information about the case.
It is not just a double standard for the United States to have its aircraft fly so close to Russian territory; it is a refusal on the US part to be safe, to fly safe, Karen Kwiatkowski, retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, told RT.
Three American spy planes were intercepted by a Russian fighter jet while approaching Russian airspace over the Black Sea, according to US Defense officials, cited by the Reuters news agency.
“On September 7, US P-8 Poseidon surveillance airplanes tried to approach the Russian border twice… with their transponders off,” Russian Defense Ministry’s spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov said in a statement.
The SU-27 fighter jets that intercepted the US aircraft were acting “in strict accordance with international flight rules,” the statement reads.
RT:How safe is it to fly with transponders switched off? It’s well known that civil aviation is unable to recognize an aircraft if they are not turned on, is that right?
Karen Kwiatkowski: That is true. They are tracked by radar, but… this tells the planes in the sky where they are and who they are.
It is pretty dangerous [not to have transponders switched on] depending on the traffic. In some parts of the world it wouldn’t be dangerous, but certainly in a crowded airspace it is going to be a problem. Particularly in this example, when we do have a big Russian exercise in that area. There is going to be a lot of extra air traffic, and a lot of it maybe military, as well as the normal civilian and transport traffic that you are going to have. So at this particular time given the exercise, it is probably the worst time to have your transponders off.
RT:Do you think that media are going too far in accusing Russia here? Is it a case of double standards?
KK: It’s definitely double standards, but that is not unusual with the US and our policy around the world. We have one set of rules for ourselves and what we expect others to do. I do think it’s interesting that Finland in trying to deal with some of the things up in the Baltic area has proposed that in places like this Baltic Sea and around NATO, certainly the Black Sea – they have proposed, and Russia I believe has supported this, that all airplanes keep their transponders on at all times when they are in these areas.
It is the US that has not been supportive of that. I think even some of the NATO countries are supportive, but the US in particular is not. Clearly given the past history – this has happened numerous times in the past several years – we fly with transponders off when we’re in our surveillance planes. This is a traditional way of doing business to test the so-called enemy, to test their responses. We’re probing, we’re testing their responses – we’re doing it in a dangerous way, and then when something happens, we’re blaming the side that was doing exactly what we hoped and expected they would do. So it is not a good thing. It is not just a double standard – it is a refusal on the US part to be safe, to fly safe…
These things are fixable, and the fact that we’re not fixing them, the fact that we’re letting these things happen, is a little bit scary. It seems to be a policy-driven provocation, something that is geared to produce a reaction that might play into the hands of those in the United States who are looking for conflict.
US flying without transponders a provocation
Michael Maloof, former Pentagon officer said that flying without transponders turned on is extremely dangerous, that is why it was right for Russian jets to scramble to at least identify what the aircraft was.
RT:How dangerous is it to fly without transponders turned on?
Michael Maloof: It’s extremely dangerous, and it is basically a provocation for a hostile act. I think that the Russian Ministry of Defense should file a formal complaint about that. When an aircraft like that is flying without its transponders it cannot be identified, and it was only right that Russian jets scrambled to at least identify what the aircraft was. And when they did come upon it, they discovered it was one of the more sophisticated – what we call C4ISR aircraft – which has all the latest sophistication on it.
Basically, the transponders being off tells me at least that the aircraft was probing, sensing what radar systems would light up that would be alerted, and what defense systems would come on as a result in order to identify where they are actually located. But to be in that area… is almost a provocation in itself. You don’t see Russian aircraft flying within 100 km of the US border, or stationing its ships out as we’re doing in the Baltic Sea right now.
RT:This particular aircraft is capable of hacking military installations. How likely is it in your opinion, that this was why it was flying so close to Russia?
MM: Well, as I said it has, what I said it has C4ISR – that is command, control, communications, and computers: I – for intelligence; S – for surveillance; R – for reconnaissance. It is the most sophisticated system that we have in probing the electronics of a potential adversary. It is to test, to see what goes on, what defense systems are going on; they can pick up all kinds of frequencies. It is an amazing technology, but its uses are clearly for intelligence gathering. It’s the most sophisticated [type of aircraft] we have.
Son of a bitch (var. sonovabitch): Something that is very difficult or unpleasant. Used to express surprise, disappointment, anger, etc. (based on Merriam-Webster)
Rodrigo Duterte, elected president of the Philippines last May, was supposed to meet with President Obama in Laos on the sidelines of the ASEAN meeting Monday. He had referred to Obama as a putang ina (“son of a bitch”) in a news conference, and earlier to U.S. ambassador Philip Goldberg with what was reported as a homophobic slur.
(I understand that Duterte routinely uses the word bakla or “gay” to refer to elite men, but — like most Filipinos — actually is fine with gayness. The city of Davao, where he was mayor for many years, has lots of gay establishments and he had no problem with them. He supports gay marriage. When asked last year if he would mind if his son Paolo had a gay partner, he replied that he had no problem at all.
“It’s more of the human dignity than anything else,” he replied, adding in his typical manner combining English and Tagalog, “All human beings are created by God so kung rerespetuhin mo ang totoong babae, totoong lalaki, at ito namang isa kung medyo alanganin sa babae, lalaki, then he is also a creation of good. So kaya magrespetuhan tayo.” I don’t understand Tagalog but this sounds pretty tolerant. I’m inclined to think his putative homophobia is actually State Department hyperbole designed to discredit him.
By the way, have you noticed how, following the rapid unexpected legal advances gay people have made in this country since the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 2003 recognized same-sex marriages, the U.S. government itself has rapidly and shamelessly come to make homophobia — still rampant in this country, and indeed normative until recently — a cause for the vilification of selected regimes abroad? Regimes such as that in Russia — where homosexuality is, in fact, legal, and tourist literature advertises the “warm and vibrant gay club scene” and bars and saunas in St. Petersburg especially? And have you also noticed the ringing silence about close U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, where guys get tossed to their deaths off buildings if convicted of sodomy?)
Duterte has boasted about the accusations against him of extrajudicial killings of drug-traffickers in Davao while he was mayor and since he became president. I suppose he deserves condemnation. But from whom? In biblical rhetoric: Who is entitled to cast the first stone? Who has the beam in their eye, rather than the mote?
Asked by reporters last week about the likelihood that Obama would raise criticisms of his human rights record, Duterte declared elliptically, “I do not have any master except the Filipino people, nobody but nobody. You [Obama] must be respectful. Do not just throw questions. ‘Putang ina,’ I will swear at you in that [ASEAN] forum.”
The mainstream media was shocked at the insulting suggestion that the U.S. president would have to be respectful to the Filipino president or risk provoking some reactive rudeness. Asked in Beijing if he would meet as planned with Duterte, Obama affected mild amusement at the “colorful” Filipino leader, saying his staff was deciding when and if a meeting will happen. Its cancellation was announced soon afterwards. Obama would meet with the South Korean leader instead.
There seems reason to believe that Duterte, unlike any of his predecessors, is genuinely anti-imperialist. More than that, and quite surprisingly, he has expressed admiration for the Communist Party of the Philippines, and its guerrilla New People’s Army, that has been at war with the Philippines state for almost 50 years. He was actually a student of Jose Maria Sison, the party’s founder who has been in Dutch exile since 1987, in the 1960s; the two have been in touch and remain friends.
On August 26 the long-stalemated Oslo talks between Manila and the rebels resulted in an indefinite ceasefire. Meanwhile Duterte has offered the Communists cabinet posts overseeing the departments of agrarian reform, environment and natural resources, labor and employment, and social welfare and development. He has invited Sison to return home. Sison says he longs to do so but only after an agreement is finalized. This is looking increasingly possible, barring decisive U.S. intervention.
Washington, on the other hand, views the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the New People’s Army, as “terrorists.” Just as the U.S. views all left-wing armed movements as terrorists (unless and until they can be used for common purposes, as in the case of the Iranian MEK in Iraq). In 2002 U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell took the unprecedented step of blacklisting the estimable Sison personally as a “terrorist” and the U.S. (spurred by then-president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) was surely behind the Dutch authorities’ raid on his house and his brief detention in 2007 on suspicion of ordering two murders in the Philippines the year before. (He was cleared of the charges and released.)
While cozying up to the Filipino Communists, Duterte has unexpectedly responded to the World Court’s judgment in favor of the Philippines’ South China Sea territorial claims over those of China, not with a tighter embrace of the U.S. and cooler relations with China, but with outreach to Beijing. Duterte has made it clear he sees China more positively than the imperialist U.S., which seized the Philippines as a colony following the Spanish-American War of 1898, slaughtered one-tenth of the Filipino people suppressing their resistance to colonization between 1899 and 1901, acquired total control over the Filipino economy and largely retained it after according the Philippines formal independence in 1946.
U.S.-led forces suppressed the communist-led Hukbalahap rebels who had spearheaded resistance to the Japanese occupation of 1942 to 1945, treated a succession of puppet presidents with astonishing contempt, and praised as “democratic” the vicious regime of Ferdinand Marcos (president from 1965 to 1986) that declared martial law in 1972 to suppress the communist threat. The U.S. backed Marcos until the “people’s power revolution” of 1986 forced President Reagan to issue him marching orders. (Marcos settled and died in Hawai’i.)
His initially popular successor Cory Aquino first sought peace talks with the CPP. Towards this end she freed Sison, who had been captured and imprisoned in 1977. But while Sison was touring the world in the year following his release — notably, accepting a literary award for a book of poetry he had composed from the hands of the king of Thailand in October 1986 — the Aquino regime under army pressure decided to revoke his passport. Ever since he has been stuck in Utrecht, Holland, advising the CPP from abroad.
The prospect of his return to the Philippines, publicly embraced by Duterte, possibly taking a cabinet post along with other members of the CPP, must be producing shit-fits in the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon. State Department spokespeople insist that the bilateral relationship remains strong. Duterte has now expressed “regret” for calling Obama a putang ina. He says he meant nothing personal. (In fairness, he calls lots of people that, including Pope Francis. That’s just Digong’s manner of expressing himself.)
But things do not actually seem normal. Not at all.
In 1992 the U.S. was forced to close its Subic naval base and its Clark air force base in the Philippines — voted out by the national legislature. It has been trying to worm its way back in since 9/11. Recall how George W. Bush once called the limited deployment of U.S. forces in Mindanao, to aid Filipino forces in defeating the tiny (and still surviving) Abu Sayyaf group supposedly aligned with al-Qaeda, the “second stage” in the “War on Terror” after Afghanistan? Even as she was further bought by a massive injection of new military aid from the U.S., she had to request that Washington stop using that phrase because the Abu Sayyaf threat was actually tiny and Filipinos getting nervous thinking their country would be the next Afghanistan.
(For a time, Georgia and the Pankisi Gorge became the next stage, and then Yemen. The neocons clustered around Dick Cheney were determined to use the post 9/11 atmosphere to expand the U.S. military presence everywhere in the world.)
Step by step, the U.S. military has returned to the Philippines. It continued port calls in Subic Bay after 1992 and by pressing Manila to sign the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement in April 2014 has acquired access to military bases in the country on a rotational basis. Meanwhile the Philippines has played a central role in the Southeast Asia Maritime Security Initiative, a U.S.-led effort to monitor and challenge the expanding Chinese presence in the South China Sea.
This is all part of what Washington calls its “pivot to Asia” — code term for its desire to just get the job done in the Middle East as soon as possible so as to focus attention on preparing for war with the inevitably rising China. But what does Duterte mean for that pivot?
In 1947 the Truman administration ordered its European allies including France and Italy to remove any Communist members from cabinets. Never mind that these parties were popular and enjoyed a reputation as having led the anti-fascist resistance. And it’s well known that CIA dirty tricks prevented a Communist electoral victory in Italy in 1948.
How would a President Hillary Clinton react, should the CPP acquire an established role in Philippines politics, Manila withdraw from recent military and “security” agreements, and the country draw closer to the PRC? Be assured her crooked cabal is already discussing coup plans. Because that’s what they do, thinking that as the “exceptional” nation they need not (as Hillary confidante Henry Kissinger once said in relation to Chile) “stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
But that was 1970, when the U.S. had twice the share in global GDP than it has today and the world was divided by the Cold War. Ruling classes of nations forced to take sides at that time have since been obliged by market and geopolitical forces to align, re-align, and hold out options for the future. Obama cannot snap his fingers and demand that Duterte cooperate with an anti-China, pro-U.S. balikitan program. Nor will his successor be able to do so.
The next U.S. president might face an independent country whose people are attempting to resolve their own contradictions in their own way, rejecting interference from the putang ina in Washington. What could be more hopeful than that?
Gary Leupp is a Professor of History at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.
Howard Schultz, the founder and CEO of Starbucks, announces support for US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
In an interview with CNN, Schultz let slip which way he was voting, saying, “I’m hopeful that after the election – and hopefully Hillary Clinton will be elected president – that we will begin to see a level of unity and people coming together.”
When asked if he had officially backed Clinton with that statement, the CEO responded “I guess I just did. I think it’s obvious Hillary Clinton needs to be the next president.”
Starbucks, which has over 22,500 coffee stores, is one of the companies anti-Israel activists boycott.
Throughout her campaign for the 2016 US presidential race, Clinton has advocated herself as a champion for Israel. Zionist voters have in turn showed their support to her.
Howard Shultz, the chairman of Starbucks is an active Zionist.
In 1998 he was honoured by the Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah with “The Israel 50th Anniversary Friend of Zion Tribute Award” for his services to the zionist state in “playing a key role in promoting close alliance between the United States and Israel”. The Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah funds Israeli arms fairs chaired by the butcher of Jenin – General Shaul Mofaz, and the Zionist propaganda website honestreporting.com.[1]
His work as a propagandist for Israel has been praised by the Israeli Foreign Ministry as being key to Israel’s long-term PR success [2].
Recently whilst the Israeli army was slaughtering Palestinians in Jenin, Nabulus and Bethlehem he made a provocative speech blaming the Palestinians of terrorism, suggesting the intifada was a manifestation of anti- Semitism, and asked people to unite behind Israel [3].
At a time when other businesses were desperately pulling out of Israel, Starbucks decided to help Israel’s floundering economy and invest in Israel – a joint venture with Israeli conglomerate Delek Group for Starbucks outlets in Israel (Shalom Coffee Co).[4][5][6]. A bad business decision – Starbucks had heavy losses and in April 2003 Starbucks were forced to announced that all 6 Starbucks cafes in Israel will be shut down and its partnership with Delek end.[14]
It has been revealed that Starbucks still continues to support Israel by sponsoring fundraisers for Israel.[15]
Starbucks fully supports Bush’s war of terror and has opened a Starbucks in Afghanistan for the US invaders – they like to do their bit to help the occupation.[17]
ADDITIONAL INFO & REFs :
[1]
Israel 50th Anniversary Friend of Zion Tribute Award
Howard Schultz was presented with “The Israel 50th Anniversary Friend of Zion Tribute Award” by the The Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah in August 27, 1998. [a][e]
According to the Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah “The Friends of Zion award salutes leaders who have played key roles in promoting close alliance between the United States and Israel”[e]
Awards Page Mystery
Its interesting that the Israel 50th Anniversary Award given to Howard Schultz was once displayed with pride on the Starbucks website on the company’s “Awards and Accolades” page but since the boycott started biting it has mysteriously disappeared from the page![a]
Original page(above) listing Howard Shultz Israel Award as an award for Starbucks can still be seen at www.archive.org. The new page is shown below with no mention of the Israeli connection.
The Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah
1. The Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah sponsors Israeli military arms fairs chaired by the butcher of Jenin – General Shaul Mofaz, Israel’s Minister of Defense. It aims to “strengthen the special connection between the American, European and Israeli defense industries” and “to showcase the newest Israeli innovations in defense”.[f]
2. The Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah also sponsors the Zionist propaganda website “honestreporting.com“.[g]
3. The Aish HaTorah, the main beneficiary of The Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah, whilst described as an apolitical international network of Jewish education centres, produces propaganda material for Israel.
One video they produce by Rabbi Ken Spiro titled “The Islamic Connection to Jerusalem” starts “The Islamic connection begins in the 7th century, thousands of years after the original Jewish connection.” and continues to belittle Jerusalem’s Islamic heritage – propaganda to justify Israeli occupation of Jerusalem.[b]
Also featured on their site is “The Occupied Territories – A Primer” which denies the status of the West Bank and Gaza as “occupied” and argues that they be called “disputed territories”.[c]
No wonder they were praised by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu:
“I congratulate Aish HaTorah for what they’re doing, where they’re doing it, and for whom they’re doing it.”[d]
“… The key to Israel’s long-term PR success, Meir(*) believes, is on the campuses of North America and Europe. Wealthy Jews like Howard Schultz, the owner of the Starbucks chain, are helping with student projects, including seminars held in both Israel and North America, in which students hear Israeli presentations on the crisis…”
(*) Gideon Meir, the official in charge of the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s PR effort.
[3]
Starbucks CEO says anti-Semitism on the rise
Howard Shultz warns American Jews against complacency
SEATTLE – Divisions within the Jewish community were on display Thursday in Seattle as Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz criticized Palestinian inaction in the Middle East while others protested the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
“If you leave this synagogue tonight and go back to your home and ignore this, then shame on us,” Howard Schultz told a crowded temple of Jewish Americans on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.
Schultz warned other Jews against sitting back and doing nothing.
“What is going on in the Middle East is not an isolated part of the world. The rise of anti-Semitism is at an all time high since the 1930’s,” he said.
“The Palestinians aren’t doing their job they’re not stopping terrorism.”
While reaction inside the temple to Schultz’s remarks grew from a warm reception to a standing ovation, the mood outside the temple was different.
A handful of Jews gathered there to protest the Israeli government’s actions of late and their occupation of Palestinian lands.
There were similar sentiments Thursday at Seattle’s Westlake center.
“We only get the side that talks about Palestinians as terrorists. As if all the civilians right now living in a state of siege and terror are terrorists and they’re not,” said protestor Alethea Mundy, whose younger brother is in Bethlehem doing relief work for Palestinian refugees.
She’s worried about her brother, but realizes that everything is relative.
“This is what the Palestinians live with every day, two weeks is nothing for my brother,”
[4]
American-Israel Chamber of Commerce, Southeast Region e-Newsletter
JULY-AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2001
Starbucks will open its first two cafes in Tel Aviv during the first week of September and plans to open another three branches in the area by the end of the year with 15 more throughout Israel by the end of 2002. Israel-based Delek, which recently purchased a chain of US convenience stores and established its US headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, will be the majority shareholder in Starbucks Israel.
see [13] for more on Delek’s US connection.
[5]
Starbucks next market: Israel
Starbucks Coffee Co. chairman Howard Schultz loves a challenge. He opened the Japanese market during the depths of that country’s spectacular recession, and now he’s set his sights on conflict-ridden Israel.
The stores will be built through a joint venture company, Shalom Coffee Co., which will be owned by publicly traded Israeli conglomerate Delek Group and Starbucks Coffee International, Starbucks’ internationally focused wholly-owned subsidiary. No word yet on how many Starbucks stores are planned for the tiny Middle Eastern nation, which has been plagued by escalating violence between Palestinians and the Israeli military since last fall. … http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2001/04/16/daily31.html
Starbucks to open here later in year
By Sharon Berger
JERUSALEM (April 20) – The Delek Group and Starbucks Coffee International, a wholly owned subsidiary of Starbucks Coffee Company, said yesterday that they had reached an agreement to form a joint venture to open Starbucks here. The costs involved in the joint venture were not disclosed.
According to the agreement, which is expected to be signed in the next few weeks, Delek will hold 80.5 percent of the coffee chain, while Starbucks Coffee International will hold the remaining 19.5%. Starbucks will have the option to increase its share to 50% at a later date. Originally Delek and Burger King co-owner Yair Hason were negotiating for a 40% share each in a venture with Starbucks, but a few months ago the deal was cancelled.
The announcement that Starbucks will be coming is expected to be welcomed by local coffee lovers who have long been awaiting the rumored arrival of the chain which has with 3,600 stores in the US. According to the Delek Group the plan is “to open dozens of stores.” The first stores are expected to open late this year.
“We expect Israel to be an excellent market for Starbucks, with great growth opportunities,” said Peter Masien, president of Starbucks Coffee International.
Delek’s investment in the coffee chain is part of its strategy to expand into new areas, said Giora Sarig, president of Delek’s Israel Fuel Corporation, one of the three subsidiaries of the Delek Group. “We are delighted to become partners with such a world-class brand as Starbucks,” he said.
The coffee shops will not be connected to the Delek gas stations.
The local competition is not overly concerned about the entrance of the well known chain. Aroma’s operating manager Ben Balbinder told The Jerusalem Post that “more coffee stores will raise the awareness of coffee drinking.”
He added that according to his personal experience in the US, Starbucks coffee is not on the same level as that of Aroma.
Aroma, which sells one and half tonnes of coffee a month, currently has eight cafes with another three are to be opened in the next two months. Balbinder said that the local coffee market is continuing to grow and has contributed to a decision to expand aggressively in the next year and a half.
Starbucks , which has been traded on Nasdaq since 1992, has a current market capitalization of $7.8 billion, with more than 4,500 retail locations in the US, Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific Rim. It is well represented in the Middle East with stores in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.
The company was founded in 1971 and also sells tea, pastries, ice creams, other food and beverages, and coffee accessories. The company also has an on-line store as well as selling directly to restaurants, businesses, airlines, and hotels.
The Delek Group, which was founded in 1951, has three major subsidiaries: Israel Fuel Corporation, Delek Real Estate, and Delek Investments & Properties, a holding company for activities in automotive distribution and retailing, oil and gas exploration, biochemical manufacturing, convenience stores, and other retail operations. Delek is traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange at a value of NIS 2.8b.
[7]
Two “Standard replies” activists are receiving from Starbucks when they complaint about the recent speech Howard Schultz made:
First:
Thank you for contacting Starbucks Coffee Company.
Howard Schultz recently spoke at his local synagogue and shared his concern over the rise of anti-Semitism, which is linked to the growing crisis in the Middle East. Howard’s position is pro-peace and for two nations to co-exist peacefully. His comments were not intended to be anti-Palestinian in any way. As part of his comments, Howard addressed the rising concern over terrorist acts overseas, specifically relating to the bombing of a synagogue in France. Howard does not believe the terrorism is representative of the Palestinian people. Howard was speaking as a private citizen and did not interview with the media regarding this subject, however several local media outlets did run portions of his speech.
Thank you again for contacting Starbucks. If you have any further questions or concerns, please contact us at info@starbucks.com or call (800) 23-LATTE to speak with a customer relations representative.
Sincerely,
Customer Relations Starbucks Coffee Company
Second:
Thank you for contacting Starbucks Coffee Company.
Please find below the company statement regarding Howard Schultz’s speech on April 4, 2002. It is followed by Howard Schultz’s personal statement in which he is speaking as a private citizen.
April 17, 2002 – Company Statement re: Howard Schultz Speech on April 4, 2002
Starbucks Coffee Company is deeply saddened by the current events in the Middle East.
As a company working with business partners around the world, we believe it is important for us to embrace diversity as an essential component in the way we do business and treat each other with respect and dignity. Starbucks, as a commercial organization, does not get involved in international or local
politics on principle.
We are aware that our chairman, Howard Schultz, recently spoke at a private gathering and commented on the current Middle East situation. However, we are unable to comment on his speech as he was speaking as a private citizen.
April 17, 2002 – Howard Schultz Personal Statement
“I deeply regret that my speech in Seattle was misinterpreted to be anti-Palestinian,” said Howard Schultz. “My position has always been pro-peace and for the two nations to co-exist peacefully. I am deeply saddened by the current events in the Middle East.”
Attribution: Howard Schultz
If you have any additional questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us at info@starbucks.com or call us at 1-800-235-2883 to speak directly with a customer relations representative.
Sincerely,
Customer Relations
[8]
Starbucks Coffee have partnerships with:
Hotels with Starbucks:Hyatt Hotels
Marriott Hotels
Starwood Hotels (Sheraton)
Special relationship with NY Times :Starbucks Coffee Company and The New York Times announced a strategic alliance in August 2000. Under this agreement, The New York Times is using its national advertising resources to promote Starbucks products and retail locations as a destination for readers. Although other local, daily newspapers will still be offered at Starbucks, The New York Times will be the only national newspaper sold across Starbucks extensive network of company-owned locations in the United States.
Starbucks Coffee has 4,709 locations around the world in the following countries (Mulsim countries are shown in bold)
Australia
Austria Bahrain
Canada
Germany
Greece
Hawaii
Hong Kong S.A.R. Palestine (Israel )
Japan Kuwait
Lebanon
Malaysia
Mexico
New Zealand Oman
People`s Republic of China (Beijing)
People`s Republic of China (Shanghai)
Philippines Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
South Korea
Spain
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
United States
Some activists have mentioned that Starbucks provide a glossy pamphlet “We’d love to hear your thoughts” for people to write their comments on.
If the pamphlet includes free postage then we would urge all activists to use it for voicing their disgust at Starbucks CEO and at Starbucks policy to invest in apartheid Israel. Remember to provide your name and address and ask them to reply to you in writing otherwise your effort will simply be ignored.
Please read their standard response[7] before composing your complaint.
[12]
According to Yahoo Finance :
Howard Shultz’s annual pay as Chairman of Starbucks is $2.2 Million, and last year he received an additional $22.6 Million from the value on options excercised in the fiscal year.[a]
Howard Shultz also has interests in the following companies:
Drugstore.com – Director with 1,592,246 shares (indirect) [b]
eBay Inc. – Director with 112,500 shares (indirect) [c]
Boycott Mapco Express & East Coast store-gas stations
An activist has pointed out that Delek (Starbucks Israeli partners) owns Mapco Express filling stations and convenience stores in Tennessee (198 stores) and East Coast convenience store-gas stations in Virginia (36 stores). These should be boycotted.
Delek completes acquisition of Mepco Express filling stations
[31-05-01] Delek Group said that it has completed its acquisition of 234 gas stations and convenience stores in the US for $ 234.5 mm. The acquisition consists of 198 Mapco Express filling stations and convenience stores in Tennessee in consideration for $ 147 mm and 36 East Coast convenience store-gas stations in Virginia for $ 36.5 mm The concerns will continue to carry their respective brands names following the transaction. Delek also announced that it is in the process of establishing Delek USA, a wholly owned US-based subsidiary which will conduct the company’s American operations. The investment marks the Netanya-based company’s first entrance into the overseas retail gasoline markets. Company president Avinoam Finkelman said that the decision to enter international markets is mostly due to eroding returns in the domestic market, a product, he believes of increased competition and government regulatory activity.
[14]
Starbucks Exits Israel
April 2, 2003
All six Starbucks cafes in Israel will be shut down at the end of the week, Starbucks Coffee International and the Delek Group said as they announced the end of their brief partnership. All 120 of the coffee chain’s employees in Israel will be laid off.
According to Israel’s Haaretz, poor sales and Delek’s failure to find an investor to bail it out of a losing venture caused the decision to shut down the expensive coffeehouses. Starbucks Corp., the parent of Starbucks Coffee International, told Haaretz that its decision to dissolve the joint venture was driven by “market challenges,” an allusion, the newspaper said, to “Israel’s severe recession and security problems.”
Starbucks sponsors “bowl 4 Israel”, one of the fund raisers for Israel organised by Elie Haller. Her last fund raiser was a barbecue that “raised $15,000 for a paratrooper unit in the Israel Defense Forces”.[a] This time the money raised – some $50,000 was to be distributed to families of “Israeli terror victims” by the Israel Emergency Solidarity Fund (OneFamily).[a] [d] Innocent enough you may think, but you’d be wrong – apparently their definition of “terror victim” includes Israeli soldiers who were killed whilst they were butchering Palestinian women and children during the Jenin massacre (April 2002). For April 2002, their spending record includes the following entry:
“P. W. lost his brother S. in an anti-terror operation in Jenin April 8, 2002. The family is left with eight children, of whom P. is the first to get married. OneFamily (Israel Emergency Solidarity Fund) gave them $1000 toward the wedding.”[c]
So the fund rewards the families of war criminals for a job well done!
Perverted reality – provocative advert for the Israel Emergency Solidarity Fund.
In reality its this fund that rewards war criminals – the money they raise goes to,
among others, Israeli soldiers who were wounded or killed whilst they were
butchering Palestinian women and children during the Jenin massacre
No wonder the page on the web-site for bowl4israel which showed Starbucks as the sole sponsor is now mysteriously showing a blank space where Starbucks appeared.[b] A peek at the html code for the page reveals that Starbucks name and logo are still there but have been hidden – commented out – no doubt to protect it from the boycott.
Original page showing Starbucks as the sponsor
New page shows an empty space for “Event Sponsor”,
the html however reveals that the sole sponsor
Starbucks has been commented out
After Starbucks closed down its cafes in Israel[14], many Zionists were upset and accused Starbucks of succumbing to the boycott. Some even suggested boycotting Starbucks:
It is time for all Americans to boycott Starbucks Coffee. Spread the word on this. They are stopping business relations with Israel, because like so many companies, people, and leaders in the world, they do not have the moral values or courage needed to do otherwise. Add this to the fact that Starbucks does tons of business in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, as well as other radical Arab countries who are working to destroy America. Where they will not pull out of and it makes it clear their stand is with the enemies of Israel and of America. Standing is something that takes moral value and courage today.And their stand indicates the lack of quality of their product. Starbucks has chosen. NOW is the time for us to choose to boycott. Let’s call on everyone we can to boycott Starbucks.. [a]
Its interesting to observe that it was the ultra-Zionist Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that came to Starbucks rescue[b] and put down the Zionist backlash against it. (For those unaware of the activities of the ADL see http://www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-news-0313.html ). As the New York Times put it:
“Perhaps the most effective of the company’s weapons used to combat the rumor, experts said, came from the Anti-Defamation League, which lent its support. Starbucks, which is based in Seattle, did not place any messages refuting the rumor on its Web site. But the Anti-Defamation League contacted the company to investigate the matter and later circulated the company’s message to interested parties on its Web site and in telephone calls.”
It also quoted Starbucks chairman Howard Shultz, describing him as “a Jewish American who has long been supportive of Jewish organizations and causes in the United States and in Israel”, saying that the company will return to Israel in due course.[a]
See also [17] for another Zionist defence of Starbucks.
Many other Zionist groups also came to Starbucks defence including the Jewish Council for Public Affairs whose alert[d] states:
“The chairman of Starbucks is an avid Zionist who opened the stores in Israel despite the ongoing violence. Coffee is serious business in Israel, and Starbucks was unable to penetrate the market.”
Starbucks has donated a store to the US army to help in the occupation of Afghanistan. See photos below from Afghanistan of US troops thanking Starbucks for their donation:
NB: Boycott Watch is a Zionist organisation[a] which provides the above photos as part of their campaign to support Starbucks from any possible Zionist boycott for closing its stores in Israel.
[a] “Boycott Watch and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) are
leading the fight against divestment and boycott campaigns against
Israel.”
Also according to the American Forces Press Service Nov.9 2004:
Starbucks Chief Executive Officer Jim Donald said during a Capitol Hill press conference today in the office of U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks that his company would provide 50,000 pounds of free, whole-bean coffee that will be brewed and distributed by Red Cross workers to troops serving in Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.
“It’s important that we show the support – and we have shown support — for our troops overseas,” Donald explained. In fact, he said, Starbucks, headquartered in Seattle, has 80 employees in the military now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And many of Starbuck’s 85,000 employees, Donald pointed out, have friends and family members serving overseas in the military. Starbuck’s partnership with the Red Cross, he noted, “is just a way of reaching into the community and supporting troops from all over the U.S.”
Source: Starbucks, Red Cross ‘Bring a Bit of Home’ to Overseas Troops, by Gerry J. Gilmore, American Forces Press Service, Nov. 9, 2004
Please note that we cannot take responsibility for the contents of the leaflet as we did not produce it, it does however seem to be based on the research above (thanks NEdo Sul)
By Steve Jones, Robert Korol, Anthony Szamboti and Ted Walter – Europhysics News
In August 2002, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched what would become a six-year investigation of the three building failures that occurred on September 11, 2001 (9/11):
the well-known collapses of the World Trade Center (WTC) Twin Towers that morning and
the lesser-known collapse late that afternoon of the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7, which was not struck by an airplane.
NIST conducted its investigation based on the stated premise that the
WTC Towers and WTC 7 [were] the only known cases of total structural collapse in high-rise buildings where fires played a significant role.”
Indeed, neither before nor since 9/11 have fires caused the total collapse of a steel-framed high-rise—nor has any other natural event, with the exception of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which toppled a 21-story office building. Otherwise, the only phenomenon capable of collapsing such buildings completely has been by way of a procedure known as controlled demolition, whereby explosives or other devices are used to bring down a structure intentionally.
Although NIST finally concluded after several years of investigation that all three collapses on 9/11 were due primarily to fires, fifteen years after the event a growing number of architects, engineers, and scientists are unconvinced by that explanation.
Preventing high-rise failures
Steel-framed high-rises have endured large fires without suffering total collapse for four main reasons:
Fires typically are not hot enough and do not last long enough in any single area to generate enough energy to heat the large structural members to the point where they fail (the temperature at which structural steel loses enough strength to fail is dependent on the factor of safety used in the design. In the case of WTC 7, for example, the factor of safety was generally 3 or higher. Here, 67% of the strength would need to be lost for failure to ensue, which would require the steel to be heated to about 660°C);
Most high-rises have fire suppression systems (water sprinklers), which further prevent a fire from releasing sufficient energy to heat the steel to a critical failure state;
Structural members are protected by fireproofing materials, which are designed to prevent them from reaching failure temperatures within specified time periods; and
Steel-framed high-rises are designed to be highly redundant structural systems. Thus, if a localized failure occurs, it does not result in a disproportionate collapse of the entire structure.
FIG.1:WTC5 is an example of how steel- framed high-rises typically perform in large fires. It burned for over eight hours on September 11, 2001 (a), and did not suffer a total collapse (b) (Source: FEmA)
Throughout history, three steel-framed high-rises are known to have suffered partial collapses due to fires; none of those led to a total collapse. Countless other steel-framed high-rises have experienced large, long-lasting fires without suffering either partial or total collapse (see, for example, Fig. 1 a and b) [1].
In addition to resisting ever-present gravity loads and occasional fires, high-rises must be designed to resist loads generated during other extreme events — in particular, high winds and earthquakes. Designing for high-wind and seismic events mainly requires the ability of the structure to resist lateral loads, which generate both tensile and compressive stresses in the columns due to bending, the latter stresses then being combined with gravity-induced compressive stresses due to vertical loads.
FIG.2: WTC7fell symmetrically and at free-fall acceleration for a period of 2.25 seconds of its collapse (Source: NIST).
It was not until steel became widely manufactured that the ability to resist large lateral loads was achieved and the construction of high-rises became possible. Steel is both very strong and ductile, which allows it to withstand the tensile stresses generated by lateral loads, unlike brittle materials, such as concrete, that are weak in tension. Although concrete is used in some high-rises today, steel reinforcement is needed in virtually all cases.
To allow for the resistance of lateral loads, high-rises are often designed such that the percentage of their columns’ load capacity used for gravity loads is relatively low. The exterior columns of the Twin Towers, for example, used only about 20% of their capacity to withstand gravity loads, leaving a large margin for the additional lateral loads that occur during high-wind and seismic events [2].
Because the only loads present on 9/11 after the impact of the airplanes were gravity and fire (there were no high winds that day), many engineers were surprised that the Twin Towers completely collapsed. The towers, in fact, had been designed specifically to withstand the impact of a jetliner, as the head structural engineer, John Skilling, explained in an interview with the Seattle Times following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing:
“Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed,” he said. “The building structure would still be there.”
Skilling went on to say he didn’t think a single 200-pound [90-kg] car bomb would topple or do major structural damage to either of the Twin Towers.
“However,” he added, “I’m not saying that properly applied explosives—shaped explosives—of that magnitude could not do a tremendous amount of damage […] I would imagine that if you took the top expert in that type of work and gave him the assignment of bringing these buildings down with explosives, I would bet that he could do it.”
In other words, Skilling believed the only mechanism that could bring down the Twin Towers was controlled demolition.
Techniques of controlled demolition
Controlled demolition is not a new practice. For years it was predominantly done with cranes swinging heavy iron balls to simply break buildings into small pieces. Occasionally, there were structures that could not be brought down this way. In 1935, the two 191-m-tall Sky Ride towers of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago were demolished with 680 kg of thermite and 58 kg of dynamite. Thermite is an incendiary containing a metal powder fuel (most commonly aluminum) and a metal oxide (most com- monly iron(III) oxide or “rust”).
Eventually, when there were enough large steel-framed buildings that needed to be brought down more efficiently and inexpensively, the use of shaped cutter charges became the norm. Because shaped charges have the ability to focus explosive energy, they can be placed so as to diagonally cut through steel columns quickly and reliably.
FIG. 3: The final frame of NIST’s WTC 7 computer model shows large deformations to the exterior not observed in the videos (Source: NIST)
In general, the technique used to demolish large buildings involves cutting the columns in a large enough area of the building to cause the intact portion above that area to fall and crush itself as well as crush whatever remains below it.
This technique can be done in an even more sophisticated way, by timing the charges to go off in a sequence so that the columns closest to the center are destroyed first. The failure of the interior columns creates an inward pull on the exterior and causes the majority of the building to be pulled inward and downward while materials are being crushed, thus keeping the crushed materials in a somewhat confined area — often within the building’s “footprint.” This method is often referred to as “implosion.”
The case of WTC 7
The total collapse of WTC 7 at 5:20 PM on 9/11, shown in Fig. 2, is remarkable because it exemplified all the signature features of an implosion:
The building dropped in absolute free fall for the first 2.25 seconds of its descent over a distance of 32 meters or eight stories [3].
Its transition from stasis to free fall was sudden, occurring in approximately one-half second.
It fell symmetrically straight down.
Its steel frame was almost entirely dismembered and deposited mostly inside the building’s footprint, while most of its concrete was pulverized into tiny particles.
Finally, the collapse was rapid, occurring in less than seven seconds.
Given the nature of the collapse, any investigation adhering to the scientific method should have seriously considered the controlled demolition hypothesis, if not started with it. Instead, NIST (as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which conducted a preliminary study prior to the NIST investigation) began with the predetermined conclusion that the collapse was caused by fires.
FIG.4: The above graph[10]compares David Chandler’s measurement[9] of the velocity of the roofline of WTC 1 with Bažant’s erroneous calculation [11] and with Szamboti and Johns’ calculation using corrected input values for mass, acceleration through the first story, conservation of momentum, and plastic moment (the maximum bending moment a structural section can withstand). The calculations show that—in the absence of explosives—the upper section of WTC 1 would have arrested after falling for two stories (Source: Ref. [10]).
Trying to prove this predetermined conclusion was apparently difficult. FEMA’s nine-month study concluded by saying, “The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence.”NIST, meanwhile, had to postpone the release of its WTC 7 report from mid-2005 to November 2008. As late as March 2006, NIST’s lead investigator, Dr. Shyam Sunder, was quoted as saying,
Truthfully, I don’t really know. We’ve had trouble getting a handle on building No. 7.
All the while, NIST was steadfast in ignoring evidence that conflicted with its predetermined conclusion. The most notable example was its attempt to deny that WTC 7 underwent free fall. When pressed about that matter during a technical briefing, Dr. Sunder dismissed it by saying,
[A] free-fall time would be an object that has no structural components below it.
But in the case of WTC 7, he claimed,
there was structural resistance that was provided.
Only after being challenged by high school physics teacher David Chandler and by physics professor Steven Jones (one of the authors of this article), who had measured the fall on video, did NIST acknowledge a 2.25-second period of free fall in its final report. Yet NIST’s computer model shows no such period of free fall, nor did NIST attempt to explain how WTC 7 could have had “no structural components below it” for eight stories.
Instead, NIST’s final report provides an elaborate scenario involving an unprecedented failure mechanism: the thermal expansion of floor beams pushing an adjoining girder off its seat. The alleged walk-off of this girder then supposedly caused an eight-floor cascade of floor failures, which, combined with the failure of two other girder connections — also due to thermal expansion — left a key column unsupported over nine stories, causing it to buckle.
FIG. 5: High-velocity bursts of debris, or “squibs,” were ejected from point-like sources in WTC 1 and WTC 2, as many as 20 to 30 stories below the collapse front (Source: Noah K. murray).
This single column failure allegedly precipitated the collapse of the entire interior structure, leaving the exterior unsupported as a hollow shell. The exterior columns then allegedly buckled over a two-second period and the entire exterior fell simultaneously as a unit [3].
NIST was able to arrive at this scenario only by omitting or misrepresenting critical structural features in its computer modelling.[4] Correcting just one of these errors renders NIST’s collapse initiation indisputably impossible. Yet even with errors that were favorable to its predetermined conclusion, NIST’s computer model (see Fig. 3) fails to replicate the observed collapse, instead showing large deformations to the exterior that are not observed in the videos and showing no period of free fall. Also, the model terminates, without explanation, less than two seconds into the seven-second collapse.
Unfortunately, NIST’s computer modelling cannot be independently verified because NIST has refused to release a large portion of its modelling data on the basis that doing so “might jeopardize public safety.”
The case of the Twin Towers
Whereas NIST did attempt to analyze and model the collapse of WTC7, it did not do so in the case of the Twin Towers. In NIST’s own words,
The focus of the investigation was on the sequence of events from the instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower…. this sequence is referred to as the ‘probable collapse sequence,’ although it includes little analysis of the structural behaviour of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached and collapse became inevitable.”[5]
Thus, the definitive report on the collapse of the Twin Towers contains no analysis of why the lower sections failed to arrest or even slow the descent of the upper sections — which NIST acknowledges “came down essentially in free fall” [5-6]— nor does it explain the various other phenomena observed during the collapses.
When a group of petitioners filed a formal Request for Correction asking NIST to perform such analysis, NIST replied that it was
unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse
because
the computer models [were] not able to converge on a solution.
However, NIST did do one thing in an attempt to substantiate its assertion that the lower floors would not be able to arrest or slow the descent of the upper sections in a gravity-driven collapse. On page 323 of NCSTAR 1-6, NIST cited a paper by civil engineering professor Zdeněk Bažant and his graduate student, Yong Zhou, that was published in January 2002 [7] which, according to NIST, “addressed the question of why a total collapse occurred” (as if that question were naturally outside the scope of its own investigation).
FIG. 6: molten metal was seen pouring out of WTC 2 continuously for the seven minutes leading up to its collapse (Sources: WABC-Tv, NIST).
In their paper, Bažant and Zhou claimed there would have been a powerful jolt when the falling upper section impacted the lower section, causing an amplified load sufficient to initiate buckling in the columns. They also claimed that the gravitational energy would have been 8.4 times the energy dissipation capacity of the columns during buckling.
In the years since, researchers have measured the descent of WTC 1’s upper section and found that it never decelerated — i.e. there was no powerful jolt [8-9]. Researchers have also criticized Bažant’s use of free-fall acceleration through the first story of the collapse, when measurements show it was actually roughly half of gravitational acceleration [2]. After falling for one story, the measurements show a 6.1 m/s velocity instead of the 8.5 m/s velocity that would be the result of free fall. This difference in velocity effectively doubles the kinetic energy, because it is a function of the square of the velocity.
In addition, researchers have demonstrated that the 58 × 106 kg mass Bažant used for the upper section’s mass was the maximum design load—not the actual 33 × 106 kg service load [10]. Together, these two errors embellished the kinetic energy of the falling mass by 3.4 times. In addition, it has been shown that the column energy dissipation capacity used by Bažant was at least 3 times too low [2].
In January 2011 [11] Bažant and another graduate student of his, Jia-Liang Le, attempted to dismiss the lack-of-deceleration criticism by claiming there would be a velocity loss of only about 3%, which would be too small to be observed by the camera resolution. Le and Bažant also claimed conservation-of-momentum velocity loss would be only 1.1%. However, it appears that Le and Bažant erroneously used an upper section mass of 54.18 × 106 kg and an impacted floor mass of just 0.627 × 106 kg, which contradicted the floor mass of 3.87 × 106 kg Bažant had used in earlier papers.
The former floor mass is representative of the concrete floor slab only, whereas the latter floor mass includes all the other materials on the floor. Correcting this alone increases the conservation-of-momentum velocity loss by more than 6 times, to a value of 7.1%. Additionally, the column energy dissipation has been shown to be far more significant than Bažant claimed. Researchers have since provided calculations showing that a natural collapse over one story would not only decelerate, but would actually arrest after one or two stories of fall (see Fig. 4) [2, 10].
Other evidence unexplained
The collapse mechanics discussed above are only a fraction of the available evidence indicating that the airplane impacts and ensuing fires did not cause the collapse of the Twin Towers. Videos show that the upper section of each tower disintegrated within the first four seconds of collapse. After that point, not a single video shows the upper sections that purportedly descended all the way to the ground before being crushed.
Videos and photographs also show numerous high-velocity bursts of debris being ejected from point-like sources (see Fig. 5). NIST refers to these as “puffs of smoke” but fails to properly analyze them [6]. NIST also provides no explanation for the midair pulverization of most of the towers’ concrete, the near-total dismemberment of their steel frames, or the ejection of those materials up to 150 meters in all directions.
NIST sidesteps the well-documented presence of molten metal throughout the debris field and asserts that the orange molten metal seen pouring out of WTC 2 for the seven minutes before its collapse was aluminum from the aircraft combined with organic materials (see Fig. 6) [6].
Yet experiments have shown that molten aluminum, even when mixed with organic materials, has a silvery appearance — thus suggesting that the orange molten metal was instead emanating from a thermite reaction being used to weaken the structure [12]. Meanwhile, unreacted nano-thermitic material has since been discovered in multiple independent WTC dust samples [13].
As for eyewitness accounts, some 156 witnesses, including 135 first responders, have been documented as saying that they saw, heard, and/or felt explosions prior to and/or during the collapses [14]. That the Twin Towers were brought down with explosives appears to have been the initial prevailing view among most first responders. “I thought it was exploding, actually,” said John Coyle, a fire marshal.“Everyone I think at that point still thought these things were blown up” [15].
Conclusion
It bears repeating that fires have never caused the total collapse of a steel-framed high-rise before or since 9/11. Did we witness an unprecedented event three separate times on September 11, 2001? The NIST reports, which attempted to support that unlikely conclusion, fail to persuade a growing number of architects, engineers, and scientists. Instead, the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that all three buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition. Given the far-reaching implications, it is morally imperative that this hypothesis be the subject of a truly scientific and impartial investigation by responsible authorities.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Steven Jones is a former full professor of physics at Brigham Young University. His major research interests have been in the areas of fusion, solar energy, and archaeometry. He has authored or co-authored a number of papers documenting evidence of extremely high temperatures during the WTC destruction and evidence of unreacted nano-thermitic material in the WTC dust.
Robert Korol is a professor emeritus of civil engineering at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, as well as a fellow of the Canadian Society for Civil Engi- neering and the Engineering Institute of Canada. His major research interests have been in the areas of structural mechanics and steel structures. More recently, he has undertaken experimen- tal research into the post-buckling resistance of H-shaped steel columns and into the energy absorption associated with pulverization of concrete floors.
Anthony Szamboti is a mechanical design engineer with over 25 years of structural design experience in the aerospace and communications industries. Since 2006, he has authored or co-authored a number of technical papers on the WTC high-rise failures that are published in the Journal of 9/11 Studies and in the International Journal of Protective Structures.
Ted Walter is the director of strategy and development for Architects & En- gineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth), a nonprofit organization that today represents more than 2,500 architects and engineers. In 2015, he authored AE-911Truth’s Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7. He holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
References
[1] NIST: Analysis of Needs and Existing Capabilities for Full-Scale Fire Resistance Testing (October 2008).
[2] G. Szuladziński and A. Szamboti and R. Johns, International Journal of Protective Structures 4, 117 (2013).
[3] NIST: Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster (November 20, 2008).
[4] R. Brookman, A Discussion of ‘Analysis of Structural Response of WTC 7 to Fire and Sequential Failures Leading to Collapse, Journal of 9/11 Studies (October 2012).
[5] NIST: Final Report of the National Construction Safety Team on the Collapses of the World Trade Center Towers (December 1, 2005).
[6] NIST: Questions and Answers about the NIST WTC Towers Investi- gation (Updated September 19, 2011).
[7] Z. Bažant, Y. Zhou, Yong, Journal of Engineering Mechanics 128, 2 (2002).
[8] A. Szamboti and G. MacQueen, The Missing Jolt: A Simple Refu- tation of the NIST-Bažant Collapse Hypothesis, Journal of 9/11 Studies (April 2009).
[9] D. Chandler, The Destruction of the World Trade Center North Tower and Fundamental Physics, Journal of 9/11 Studies (February 2010).
[10] A. Szamboti and R. Johns, ASCE Journals Refuse to Correct Fraudulent Paper Published on WTC Collapses, Journal of 9/11 Studies (September 2014).
[11] J.-L. Le and Z. Bažant, Journal of Engineering Mechanics 137, 82 (2011).
[12] S. Jones, Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse Completely? Journal of 9/11 Studies (September 2006).
[13] N. Harrit et al., Open Chemical Physics Journal (April 2009).
[14] G. MacQueen, Eyewitness Evidence of Explosions in the Twin Towers, Chapter Eight, The 9/11 Toronto Report, Editor: James Gourley (November 2012).
[15] Fire Department of New York (FDNY): World Trade Center Task Force Interviews, The New York Times (October 2001 to January 2002).
In January of 2003, just weeks after Kissinger stepped down, it was quietly announced that Philip D. Zelikow would take on the role of executive director. As executive director, Zelikow picked “the areas of investigation, the briefing materials, the topics for hearings, the witnesses, and the lines of questioning for witnesses.” In effect, this was the man in charge of running the investigation itself.
While Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to ever visit Laos, half a century after the U.S.’s “secret war” left it with the unfortunate distinction of being the most heavily bombed country in history, he stopped short of offering an apology to one of Southeast Asia’s smallest countries.
Laos became the world’s most-bombed country per capita from 1964 to 1973 as Washington launched a secret CIA-led war to cut supplies they believed were flowing to communist fighters during the war on Vietnam.
Much of the country is still littered with ordnance, including millions of cluster munition “bomblets” that maim and kill innocent people to this day.
In his speech Tuesday in the capital of Vientiane, Obama acknowledged the secret war but stopped short, as he did in Vietnam, of offering an apology for Washington’s dirty legacy.
He pledged US$90 million, a figure close to the US$100 million the United States has spent in the past 20 years on clearing its UXO in Laos, to help the country clear unexploded ordnance that has killed or injured more than 20,000 people.
“Given our history here I believe the United States has a moral obligation to help Laos heal,” Obama told a crowd of delegates, including communist party leaders, students and monks, during a speech in the capital Vientiane.
“The remnants of war continue to shatter lives here in Laos,” he said, adding many U.S. citizens were still unaware of their country’s secret carpet bombing of the country. “Over the years thousands of Laotians have been killed or injured. Farmers tending their fields, children playing. The wounds, a missing leg or arm, last a lifetime.”
UXO remains a stubborn problem in the region and experts say it could take decades to clear landmines and bombs in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, which were beset by conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s, and in Cambodia’s case, in the 1980s and 1990s too.
In the central Lao province of Xieng Khouang, the area most heavily bombed by U.S. aircraft during the war in neighboring Vietnam, there is a trail of devastation.
About 80 percent of the people of landlocked Laos rely on agriculture, but some of it is simply too dangerous to farm. Approximately a quarter of its villages are contaminated with unexploded ordnance, says the British-based Mines Advisory Group, which helps find and destroy the bombs.
The issue has long dogged relations between the United States and Laos, a cloistered and impoverished communist nation. But both sides have moved closer in recent years and Obama’s visit is being hailed as a landmark opportunity to reset ties.
We normally think of colonizers as large countries, and the colonized as smaller and weaker nations. But this is not always the case. Colonization does not require occupation. It merely requires the subjugation of the colonized. With ambition, superior information and calculation, and the right mindset, smaller nations can (and have in the past) colonized and dominated larger and nominally more powerful countries.
India was successfully colonized by tiny Britain in the 18th century. The vehicle for colonization was the East India Company. It was only after the Indian mutiny that Britain acted directly and sent in troops to establish the British Raj. For the next 200 years India was drained of its wealth, its economy was restructured to support England’s needs and global ambitions, and its people militarized to fight and die on behalf of the British crown. The Indian leaders who remained were willing participants in this venture; those who felt otherwise were destroyed or marginalized.
In a similar vein, Israel today is in the process of colonizing the United States, which is vital to its global projection and exercise of power. The steps Israel is taking are visible to all (as was the case with British designs on India) and yet it is remarkably difficult to connect the dots while such a takeover is in process. Or, to do anything about it.
Colonization does not mean total control of everything
It means total control of what matters. The British were interested in Indian wealth, and a standing army of Indians willing to die for their wars. They couldn’t care less about India’s internal petty politics that did not directly or indirectly impact their mission. An effective “divide and conquer” strategy pit Indians against each other and discouraged any kind of coordinated response, or sedition. The British leveraged their “outsider advantage” to objectively collect data with which to calculate and coordinate which Indian princes to support in battles, and which to connive with. Like pieces on a chessboard, Indian leaders exhausted themselves through internal battles, and were prevailed to seek cover provided by the British. Small amounts of leverage can change outcomes (as the Israeli lobby AIPAC has shown, in its path to dominating Congress and regional/local US politics), and over the years the British were able control and align India to the British crown. Less than 10,000 English controlled colonial India, which at that time had a population of 300 million.
It is instructive to note that while there were relatively few white Englishmen, a class of local “brown sahibs” was developed, to actually run things. This elite class was educated in English ways, and rewarded monetarily and through social stature. Britain was too small a country to ultimately matter by itself, but by leveraging India the English could pursue their global ambitions. India was the “Jewel in the (British) Crown”.
Today, Israel has effective control of US policy in the Mideast, and similar goals. Much has already been written about Israel’s control of Congress. Israel is now edging towards control over the US Executive Branch, with both presidential candidates supported by billionaires whose #1 agenda is Israel (Saban and Adelson). The Supreme Court will be one-third Jewish, and justices have community ties and families. As Israel demonstrated through its successful intimidation of Judge Goldstone, jurists are human and everyone has their price.
Israel’s “occupation force” in the US has long included AIPAC as well as the dense network of community organizations at the State and local levels. Through relationships that have been developed over years and with unlimited funds at their disposal, the “Israel Lobby” ensures that votes go the right way, and that opponents are squashed when Israel demands unity. In 2003 at the onset of George Bush’s Iraq war this occupation force was multiplied through the inclusion of Christian Zionists.
Critics of the Israel Lobby are marginalized by whatever means available, including being called anti-Semitic. The Lobby has been effective in securing massive aid packages for Israel even though Israel’s per-capita GDP exceeds that of several European nations. Israeli insiders permeate the US government, and it is US policy that there be “no light” between the countries so that where Israel is concerned there is no debate. Israel’s top priorities are the top priorities of the US. There are of course instances where this does not happen (such as, Iran) but the direction points to a tighter colonial noose in the years ahead.
The media matters: establishing beliefs and narratives
The colonizer must be a “Sacred Object” above criticism or objective review, and dangerous critics must be either destroyed or marginalized. No Englishman in India spoke of the mother country and its ways with anything other than reverence, even though during periods of the British Raj England was in turmoil. Within England there was a free press and active debate; but this was not permitted in India, about Britain. The only acceptable posture was that of reverence.
Today Israel has a free press, and it is easy to read translations of the Hebrew language press. Israeli commentators compare Netanyahu to Hitler, Israel is called a racist apartheid state based on evidence, and the extreme violence against and ongoing abuse of Palestinians is well documented. But, these same conversations are forbidden in the US. No newspaper would report them, nor are they permitted in polite company. Transgressors are labeled anti-Semitic, whether Jewish or not.
In the US today, boycotts are seen as a permitted non-violent form of free speech. Citizens have the right to boycott whatever they want from wherever they want without risk of penalty. The sole exception is Israel.
Exceptionalism
The British conquests were “for God and country”, and therefore justified. The British were superior, the natives inferior. This setup the moral justification for the mayhem wrought by the British as they colonized Asia and the Mideast. At that time, all men were not born equal, and it took the US Constitution to establish that self-evident fact.
Israel is seeking to revert to those days, by acting as though Arab lives are inferior, and (more recently) promoting Islamophobia to serve their Christian Zionism wing. In 2003, uber Zionist Bernard Lewis posed as “Arab expert” and advised president Bush that the only language Arabs understood was force. This helped to justify the attack on Iraq, as part of a neocon plan to “creatively destroy” the sovereign Arab states in Israel’s neighborhood, to facilitate Israel’s dominance. The Nazis at Nuremberg were shown greater respect than Saddam and his Ba’at leadership, and the contempt for Arabs was in full display.
Today, Israeli Jews are in the process of destroying Palestinian society and erasing Palestinian culture, with impunity. Churches and mosques are both being destroyed, though Israel would prefer to keep the spotlight on mosques, to fan a religious war between Islam on one side, and Christians and Jews on the other.
While the Israeli press records and debates Israel’s bad behavior, Americans are forbidden to publicly debate Israeli behavior critically.
Three Recent Examples:
1/ During the Congressional debate around the Iran deal president Obama had negotiated, Senator Chuck Schumer said he would vote “against”… not because of any independent analysis, but because this is what Netanyahu wanted. In other words, he publicly said that he would follow the Israeli prime ministers’ direction, over that of his own president. Because, as he said, he was “guardian of Israel”.
A sitting US senator proclaimed allegiance to a foreign country, and nobody asked him to resign!
2/ The Israeli Prime Minister addresses the full US Congress to lobby against the Iran nuclear deal. When the deal does go through, Israel demands more US aid! And, is likely to get it. One can try various definitions of “blackmail” to see which one fits.
The US president is impotent in dealing with Israel. The so-called “pro Israel lobby” effectively functions like an agent of Israel. The Israel lobby is playing the role of the East India Company, in Britain’s colonization of India.
3/ The Israel Lobby interferes massively in US foreign policy in the region. The “mainstream” media such as NYT spins events to reflect Israel’s views (bureau chiefs are typically Jewish and resident in Israel). The Iraq war cost $1 trillion+ and cost thousands of US lives, created ISIS, and was pushed by the Lobby. Israel benefits from the distraction.
The colonization of the US by Israel is becoming increasingly explicit. It is now increasingly seen as “normal” to have a double standard: one for Israel, another for the rest of the world. The boycott-Israel movement is an example of that: you can boycott anything or anyone, but not Israel. This is true power, and the face of colonization.
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
“Screening Tests Are Useless”, on tests that find diseases that would never have hurt you. “The FDA Protects the Big Drug Companies”, on an agency funded by the companies it regulates. “The Journals’ Sins Are the Editors’ Sins”, on ghostwritten studies and captured peer review. “Opioids and ‘Pain Management’”, on how a generation was prescribed its way into addiction. “Prozac and Relatives” and “Antipsychotics Are Disastrous”, on what psychiatry does to adults and children. “Surgery: Money Before Patients”. “Failed Cancer Treatments”. “Futile CPR and Overprescribing”. “Billing Scams & Specialty Warfare”. “Hospitals Are Sharks”. Each with a Patient Tips section at the end on how to survive it.
If you have ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a prescription you didn’t ask for, or watched a parent put through a treatment that made them worse, this is the book you want on your shelf before the next appointment. … Full review
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![FIG.4: The above graph[10]comparesDavid Chandler’s measurement[9] of the velocity of the roofline of WTC 1 with Bažant’s erroneous calculation [11] and with Szamboti and Johns’ calculation using corrected input values for mass, acceleration through the first story, conservation of momentum, and plastic moment (the maximum bending moment a structural section can withstand). The calculations show that—in the absence of explosives—the upper section of WTC 1 would have arrested after falling for two stories (Source: Ref. [10]).](https://offgraun.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/screen-shot-2016-09-07-at-15-12-48.png)
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
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