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In Final Days, Trump Gave Up on Forcing Release of Russiagate Files, Nunes Prober Says

By Aaron Maté | RealClearInvestigations | February 25, 2021

After four years of railing against “deep state” actors who, he said, tried to undermine his presidency, Donald Trump relented to US intelligence leaders in his final days in office, allowing them to block the release of critical material in the Russia investigation, according to a former senior congressional investigator who later joined the Trump administration.

Kash Patel, whose work on the House Intelligence Committee helped unearth US intelligence malpractice during the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe, said he does not know why Trump did not force the release of documents that would expose further wrongdoing. But he said senior intelligence officials “continuously impeded” their release – usually by slow-walking their reviews of the material. Patel said Trump’s CIA Director, Gina Haspel, was instrumental in blocking one of the most critical documents, he said.

Patel, who has seen the Russia probe’s underlying intelligence and co-wrote critical reports that have yet to be declassified, said new disclosures would expose additional misconduct and evidentiary holes in the CIA and FBI’s work.

“I think there were people within the IC [Intelligence Community], at the heads of certain intelligence agencies, who did not want their tradecraft called out, even though it was during a former administration, because it doesn’t look good on the agency itself,” Patel told RealClearInvestigations in his first in-depth interview since leaving government at the end of Trump’s term last month, having served in several intelligence and defense roles (full interview here).

Trump did not respond to requests seeking comment sent to intermediaries.

Although a Department of Justice inspector general’s report in December 2019 exposed significant intelligence failings and malpractice, Patel said more damning information is still being kept under wraps. And despite an ongoing investigation by Special Counsel John Durham into the conduct of the officials who carried out the Trump-Russia inquiry, it is unclear if key documents will ever see the light of day.

Patel did not suggest that a game-changing smoking gun is being kept from the public. Core intelligence failures have been exposed – especially regarding the FBI’s reliance on Christopher Steele’s now debunked dossier to secure FISA warrants used to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But he said the withheld material would reveal more misconduct as well as major problems with the CIA’s assessment that Russia, on Vladimir Putin’s orders, ordered a sweeping and systematic interference 2016 campaign to elect Trump. Patel was cautious about going into detail on any sensitive information that has not yet been declassified.

‘Continuously Impeded’ in Public Disclosure

Patel’s work on the House Intelligence Committee, under the leadership of its former Republican chairman, Devin Nunes, is widely credited with exposing the FBI’s reliance on Steele and misrepresentations to the FISA court. Yet congressional Democrats and major media outlets portrayed him as a behind-the-scenes saboteur who sought to “discredit” the Russia investigation.

The media vitriol unnerved Patel, who had previously served as a national security official in the Obama-era Justice Department and Pentagon – a tenure that exceeds his time working under Trump. Patel says that ensuring public disclosure of critical information in such a consequential national security investigation motivated him to take the job in the first place.

“The agreement I made with Devin, I said, ‘Okay, I don’t really want to go to the Hill, but I’ll do the job on one basis: accountability and disclosure,” Patel said. “Everything we find, I don’t care if it’s good or bad or whatever, from your political perspective, we put it out.’ So the American public can just read it themselves, with a few protections here and there for some certain national security measures, but those are minimal redactions.”

That task proved difficult. The House Intelligence Committee’s disclosure efforts, Patel said, “were continuously impeded by members of the intelligence community themselves, with the same singular epithets that you’re going to harm sources and methods. … And I just highlight that because, we didn’t lose a single source. We didn’t lose a single relationship, and no one died by the public disclosures we made because we did it in a systematic and professional fashion.”

“But each time we forced them to produce [documents],” Patel added, “it only showed their coverup and embarrassment.” These key revelations he helped expose include Justice official Bruce Ohr’s admission that he acted as a liaison to Steele even after the FBI officially terminated him; former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s false statements about leaks related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation; and the FBI’s reliance on the Steele dossier to spy on Page. “There is actually a law that prevents the FBI and DOJ from failing to disclose material to a court just to hide an embarrassment or mistake, and it came up during our investigation. It helped us compel disclosure.”

Assessing the ‘Intelligence Community Assessment’

For Patel, a key document that remains hidden from the public is the full report he helped prepare and which Trump chose not to declassify after pressure from the intelligence community: The House Intelligence Committee report about the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).

The ICA is a foundational Russiagate document. Released just two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, it asserted that Russia waged an interference campaign to help defeat Hillary Clinton. Despite widespread media accounts that the ICA reflected the consensus view of all 17 US intelligence agencies, it was a rushed job completed in a few weeks by a small group of CIA analysts led by then-CIA Director John Brennan, who merely consulted with FBI and NSA counterparts. The NSA even dissented from a key judgment that Russia and Putin specifically aimed to help install Trump, expressing only “moderate confidence.”

The March 2018 House report found that the production of the ICA “deviated from established CIA practice.” And the core judgment that Putin sought to help Trump, the House report found, resulted from “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments.”

Along with that March 2018 report, Patel and his intelligence committee colleagues produced a still-classified document that fleshed out the ICA’s “tradecraft failings” in greater detail.

“We went and looked at it [the ICA], and looked at the underlying evidence and cables, and talked to the people who did it,” Patel says. According to Patel, the ICA’s flaws begin with the unprecedentedly short window of time in which it was produced during the final days of the Obama White House. “In two to three weeks, you can’t have a comprehensive investigation of anything, in terms of interference and cybersecurity matters.”

Patel said that still classified information undermines another key claim – that Russia ordered a cyber-hacking campaign to help Trump. The March 2018 House report noted that the ICA’s judgments, “particularly on the cyber intrusion sections, employed appropriate caveats on sources and identified assumptions,” but those were drowned out by partisan insistence that Russia was the culprit.

Constrained from discussing the material, Patel said its release “would lend a lot of credence to” skepticism about the Mueller report’s claim that Russia waged a “sweeping and systematic” interference campaign to install Trump.

That skepticism was bolstered in July 2019 when the Mueller team was reprimanded by a US District judge for falsely suggesting in its final report that a Russian social media firm acted in concert with the Kremlin. (Mueller’s prosecutors later dropped the case against the outfit.)

“We had multiple versions, with redactions, at different levels of classifications we were willing to release,” Patel said. “But that was unfortunately the one report, which speaks directly to [an absence of concrete evidence] that’s still sitting in a safe, classified. And unfortunately, the American public – unless Biden acts – won’t see it.”

Confirming earlier media reports from late last year, Patel says it was Trump’s CIA Director Gina Haspel who personally thwarted the House report’s release. The report sits in a safe at CIA headquarters in Langley. “The CIA has possession of it, and POTUS chose not to put it out,” Patel says. He does not know why.

‘Outrageous’ Reliance on CrowdStrike

Another key set of documents that the public has yet to see are reports by Democratic National Committee cyber-contractor CrowdStrike – reports the FBI relied on to accuse Russia of hacking the DNC. The FBI bowed to the DNC’s refusal to hand over its servers for analysis, a decision that Patel finds “outrageous.”

“The FBI, who are the experts in looking at servers and exploiting this information so that the intelligence community can digest it and understand what happened, did not have access to the DNC servers in their entirety,” Patel said. “For some outrageous reason the FBI agreed to having CrowdStrike be the referee as to what it could and could not exploit, and could and could not look at.”

According Patel, Crowdstrike CEO Shawn Henry, a former top FBI official under Mueller, “totally took advantage of the situation to the unfortunate shortcoming of the American public.”

CrowdStrike’s credibility suffered a major blow in May 2020 with the disclosure of an explosive admission from Henry that had been kept under wraps for nearly three years. In December 2017 testimony before the House Intel Committee showed he had acknowledged that his firm “did not have concrete evidence” that Russian hackers removed any data, including private emails, from the DNC servers.

“We wanted those depositions declassified immediately after we took them,” Patel recalled. But the committee was “thwarted,” he says, by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under Dan Coats, and later by Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff once Democrats took control of Congress in January 2018. According to Patel, Schiff “didn’t want some of these transcripts to come out. And that was just extremely frustrating.” Working with Coats’ successor, Richard Grenell, Patel ultimately forced the release of the Henry transcript and dozens of others last year.

Still classified, however, are the full CrowdStrike reports relied on by the FBI, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Patel said their release would underscore Henry’s admission while raising new questions about why the government used reports from DNC contractors – the other being Fusion GPS’ Steele dossier – for a consequential national security case involving a rival Republican campaign.

Doubting Reliability of CIA’s Kremlin Mole

The CIA relied on another questionable source for its assertion that Putin personally ordered and orchestrated an interference campaign to elect Trump: a purported mole inside the Kremlin. The mole has been outed as Oleg Smolenkov, a mid-level Kremlin official who fled Russia in 2017 for the United States where he lives under his own name. According to the New York Times, some CIA officials harbored doubts about Smolenkov’s “trustworthiness.”

Patel said he could not comment on whether he believes Smolenkov relayed credible information to the CIA. “I’m sort of in a bind on this one, still, with all the classified information I looked at, and the declassifications we’ve requested, but have not yet been granted.”

Patel did suggest, however, that those who have raised skepticism about the CIA’s reliance on Smolenkov are “rightly” trying to “get to the bottom” of the story. “But until that ICA product that we created, and some of the other documents are finally revealed – if I start talking about them, then I’m probably going to get the FBI knocking at my door.”

Will Key Documents Be Released?

On his last full day in office, President Trump ordered the declassification of an additional binder of material from the FBI’s initial Trump-Russia probe, Crossfire Hurricane. A source familiar with the documents covered under the declassification order confirmed to RealClearInvestigations that it does not contain the House committee’s assessment of the January 2017 that Patel wants released. Nor does it contain any of the CrowdStrike reports used by the FBI.

In addition to those closely guarded documents, Patel thinks that there is even more to learn about the fraudulent surveillance warrants on Carter Page. The public should see “the entire subject portion” of the final Carter Page FISA warrant, Patel said, as well as “the underlying source verification reporting” in which the FBI tried to justify it, despite relying on the Steele dossier. By reading what the FBI “used to prop up that FISA, the American public can see what a bunch of malarkey it was that they were relying on,” Patel added. “The American public needs to know about and read for themselves and make their own determination as to why their government allowed this to happen. Knowingly.

“And that’s not castigating an entire agency. We’re not disparaging the entire FBI because of Peter Strzok [the FBI agent dismissed, in part, because of anti-Trump bias] and his crew of miscreants. Same thing goes for the intelligence community. If they did some shoddy tradecraft, the American public has a right to know about it in an investigation involving the presidential election.”

February 26, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Russophobia | CIA, FBI, United States | Leave a comment

Woolsey’s Silly Conspiracy Theory

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | February 25, 2021

R. James Woolsey, who served as CIA director from 1993 to 1995 under President Clinton, has just come out with a new book about the Kennedy assassination that is straight out of a 1964 time warp. Co-authored by the late Ion Mihai Pacepa, a two-star general of the secret police in communist Romani who later defected to the United States, the book, entitled Operation Dragon, posits an old 1964 conspiracy theory that some people in the U.S. national-security establishment were peddling back in 1964 — that the communists conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to kill JFK.

In the process, Woolsey does what the mainstream press has done for 60 years — he simply ignores the mountain of circumstantial evidence that assassination researchers have uncovered since the 1960s that inexorably points the finger of guilt at the U.S. national-security establishment, which was conducting all sorts of Cold War national-security regime-change operations in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.

That was perhaps the biggest benefit of the shroud of national-security state secrecy that was imposed on the Kennedy assassination. The malefactors knew that if they could just keep a secrecy cap on the assassination and its aftermath, there was a good chance that their assassination and cover-up could succeed.

There is no better evidence of this phenomenon than the autopsy that the U.S. national-security establishment performed on the body of President Kennedy just a few hours after his death.

What does Woolsey say about the autopsy? He says nothing. He doesn’t mention it at all, just as the mainstream press never mentions it. Total, absolute silence. Instead, Woolsey keeps his mind firmly embedded in an old 1964 assassination conspiracy theory — that those evil communists conspired to kill President Kennedy because they hated him so much.

Why is the JFK autopsy so important? Because it provides a key to understanding the who of the assassination. The U.S. national-security establishment knew that. That’s why military officials encased the autopsy in strict national-security state secrecy from the very beginning.

As Woolsey knows, there is one irrefutable fact in the Kennedy assassination: the autopsy on Kennedy’s body was carried out by the U.S. national-security establishment. That is, not by the Soviets. Not by Nikita Khrushchev. Not by the communists. Not by Fidel Castro. Not by the Mafia. Not by the Mossad. It was conducted solely by the U.S. national-security establishment.

A shroud of national-security state secrecy was immediately over the autopsy, which was conducted just a few hours after the assassination. Participants were told never to reveal what they had seen. They were forced to sign secret written secrecy oaths. They were threatened with severe action if they ever talked.

The secrecy worked for years and even decades. But assassination researchers, seeing mysteries and anomalies arise in the circumstances surrounding the autopsy, kept pressing, Finally, in the 1990s — thirty years after the assassination — the Assassination Records Review Board partially broken through the dam of autopsy secrecy.

The result? As I detail in my two books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2 and as Douglas Horne, who served on the ARRB, details in his five-volume work Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, the circumstantial evidence overwhelmingly establishes a fraudulent autopsy conducted by the U.S. national-security establishment.

Why would the national-security establishment conduct a fraudulent autopsy? There can be only one reason — cover-up. What other purpose would a fraudulent autopsy serve?

‘The natural question arises: Who would the Pentagon and the CIA be covering up for? Certainly not for the communists or the Soviets. As Woolsey documents so well, the Pentagon and the CIA hated the communists and the Soviets. As Woolsey himself would readily acknowledge, there is no reasonable possibility at all that the Pentagon and the CIA would have wanted to cover up an assassination of a U.S. president by the Reds, who, the Pentagon and the CIA steadfastly maintained throughout the Cold War, were coming to get us as part of a supposed international communist conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow.

Keep in mind, after all, that the plan to conduct a fraudulent autopsy would have had to originate prior to the assassination itself, especially since it was launched immediately on the death of President Kennedy. That was when a team of Secret Service agents, brandishing guns and implicitly threatening the use of deadly force on Parkland Hospital medical personnel, forced their way out of Parkland with Kennedy’s body. Saying that they were operating on orders, they refused to permit the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, to conduct the autopsy, as Texas law required. They took the body to Dallas Love Field, where new President Lyndon Johnson was waiting for it. Johnson then took the body and placed it in the hands of the military in Maryland.

How could they have launched their autopsy scheme without knowing who had conducted the assassination? That’s how we know they did it. The fraudulent autopsy had to have been built into the assassination plan itself.

Of course the national-security establishment’s fraudulent autopsy on President Kennedy’s body is the last thing that James Woolsey is going to discuss in his new book on the Kennedy assassination. He’s still stuck back in 1964, when some in the U.S. national-security establishment were peddling the false conspiracy theory blaming the Kennedy assassination on the Reds.

February 25, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Timeless or most popular | CIA, JFK Assassination, United States | Leave a comment

Killing Revolution in Bahrain, U.S.-UK Plotted Regime Change in Libya, Syria

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 19, 2021

Ten years ago this month, the Middle East and North Africa were convulsed by uprisings and subterfuges. The Arab Spring is generally thought of as a single wave of pro-democracy movements that swept the vast region. Far from it, however, the events were a mixed bag in which Western powers were not on the right side of history, as Western media would portray. Indeed, these powers played a nefarious role to ensure that the Arab Spring was kneecapped in order to cripple any progressive potential.

A look at the contemporaneous events in Bahrain, Libya and Syria shows the baleful role that the United States, Britain and other European NATO powers actually played. The Arab Spring certainly encompassed many more nations, but the specific events in those three mentioned Arab countries highlight the pernicious agenda of the Western powers which has left an ongoing legacy of misery, failure, conflict and terrorism for the entire Middle East and North Africa region.

As reported in a previous commentary, the American and British governments played an instrumental role in suppressing a popular revolution in Bahrain, which began on February 14, 2011, against a despotic but pro-Western monarchy – the Khalifa regime – which is also a surrogate for the richer and more powerful House of Saud regime in neighboring Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were given a green light by the Americans and British to invade the Persian Gulf island on March 14, 2011, to brutally put down a month-long uprising by a majority of Bahrainis who were demanding free and fair elections, human rights and independent rule of law.

The irony is that Washington and London were claiming to support these same democratic values in other Arab countries which were undergoing unrest.

On March 15, 2011, Western governments and media hailed what they called was the beginning of a “pro-democracy” uprising in Syria against the government of President Bashar al Assad. Then on March 19, the United States, Britain and other NATO powers began a military intervention in Libya said to be in the name of “protecting human rights” from the armed forces under control of the head of that state Muammar Gaddafi.

The Americans and British were compelled to move quickly to suppress the Bahraini revolt because it potentially threatened the entire chain of absolute Gulf Arab monarchies. If democracy were to emerge in Bahrain that would be destabilizing for the other oil-rich Gulf states whose authoritarian rule is vital for sustaining the global petrodollar system and Western imperial interests in the Middle East, not least of all lucrative military exports. Sacrificing Bahrain’s democratic aspirations was the price that Washington and London were all too willing to pay, without a qualm.

To this day, Bahrain’s democratic aspirations are violently repressed by the monarchy in league with Saudi rulers, as well as American and British complicity, including media silence.

When the Saudis received the green light for invading Bahrain on March 14, 2011, the quid quo pro, according to Pepe Escobar, was that American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got assurance from the Gulf monarchies that they would ensure no objection among the 22-nation Arab League for the imminent NATO military intervention in Libya. Thus the suppression in Bahrain paved the way five days later for the NATO blitzkrieg on Libya, a relentless eight-month aerial bombing campaign that culminated in the overthrow and murder of Gaddafi on October 20.

Subsequently, Libya would precipitously descend from the foremost developed nation in Africa into a war-torn failed state riven by civil war, jihadist warlords and human trafficking which has plagued Europe to this day. It is grotesque that the Americans, British and other NATO powers justified their criminal aggression on Libya in the name of protecting human rights and promoting democracy as part of the Arab Spring events.

What’s even more reprehensible, the failed state of Libya would soon become a supply route for the CIA and British MI6 to deploy jihadist mercenaries and weaponry for the NATO and Arab sponsored regime-change operation unfolding in Syria.

On March 15, 2011, one day after the Anglo-American sponsored operation to kill the democracy movement in Bahrain, events took on a sinister development in Syria. In the southern Syrian city Daraa on the border with Jordan, rooftop snipers killed security forces and anti-government protesters. The Western media immediately hailed the beginning of a pro-democracy movement in Syria against the central Assad government in Damascus. But scarcely reported then or since was that the snipers were covertly deployed by NATO powers in what would ignite a regime-change war. That war, which lasted for nearly 10 years and continues to destabilize Syria’s northern border, was cynically and disingenuously portrayed by Western media as a pro-democracy uprising when in reality it was a covert war of aggression by NATO powers, financed by Gulf Arab regimes and involving jihadist mercenaries recruited from dozens of countries.

Libya was a key link in the CIA and MI6 operation know as Timber Sycamore which funneled terrorist fighters and weapons to Syria to propagate the secret NATO war to overthrow President Assad. That operation eventually failed largely because of the military intervention in late 2015 by Russia in support of the Syrian government. Support from Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah was also vital in defeating the Western powers’ regime-change plan.

The legacy from events a decade ago still reverberate to this day. Several members of the current Biden administration bear responsibility for the destruction, including the present Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Libya is a divided nation racked by economic collapse despite its vast oil wealth. Syria is war-torn with a death toll of perhaps 500,000 and struggling with reconstruction because of American and European sanctions against the Assad government. The terrorism that was spawned in those countries for the Western objective of regime change continues to haunt the Middle East and beyond.

And, as for Bahrain, a long-suffering people who simply demanded democracy were and continue to be brutally suppressed by despotic Arab regimes at the behest of the United States and Britain – two nations that claim to be exemplars to the rest of the world for democracy, human right and rule of law.

February 22, 2021 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular | Bahrain, CIA, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, UK, United States | Leave a comment

Conspiracy Theories Are Caused By Government Secrecy

By Caitlin Johnstone | February 14, 2021

The DC Circuit has ruled that the CIA is under no obligation to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests pertaining to its involvement with insurgent militias in Syria, overturning a lower court’s previous ruling in favor of a Buzzfeed News reporter seeking such documents.

As Sputnik’s Morgan Artyukhina clearly outlines, this ruling comes despite the fact that mainstream news outlets have been reporting on the Central Intelligence Agency’s activities in Syria for years, and despite a US president having openly tweeted about those activities.

“In other words, the CIA will not be required to admit to actions it is widely reported as having done, much less divulge documents about them to the press for even greater scrutiny,” Artyukhina writes, calling to mind the Julian Assange quote “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”

The CIA’s brazen collaboration with dangerous extremist factions seeking to topple Damascus, and its equally brazen refusal to provide the public with any information about the extent of its involvement in Syria from the earliest stages of the violence in that nation onwards, will necessarily provide fodder for conspiracy theories.

It is public knowledge that the CIA was involved in the Syrian war to some extent, it is public knowledge that the CIA has a well-documented history of doing extremely evil things, and it is public knowledge that the US government has long sought control over Syria. Due to the agency’s refusal to be transparent about the exact nature of its involvement in that nation, people are left to fill in the knowledge gaps with their own speculation.

Of course they will do this. Why wouldn’t they? Why would anyone give the lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering, psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency the benefit of the doubt and assume their actions in Syria have been benevolent just because the hard facts have been hidden behind a wall of government secrecy?

Yet they will be expected to. Anyone with a sufficient degree of influence who comes right out and says the CIA knowingly armed violent jihadists with the goal of orchestrating regime change in Syria will be attacked as a crazy conspiracy theorist by the narrative managers of the establishment media. If their words are really disruptive to establishment narratives, there will be calls to deplatform, unemploy, and ban them from social media.

And really such is the case with all the melodramatic garment rending about the dangers of conspiracy theories today. All the fixation on the way unregulated speech on the internet has contributed to the circulation of conspiracy theories conveniently ignores the real cause of those theories: government secrecy.

If the most powerful government in the world were not hiding a massive amount of its behavior behind increasingly opaque walls of secrecy, people would not need to fill in the gaps with theories about what’s happening, because there would be no gaps; they would simply see what’s happening.

“But Caitlin!” one might object. “How could America engage in all its military operations around the world if it didn’t keep information about its behaviors a secret?”

Exactly, my smooth-brained friend. Exactly.

Government secrecy is indeed necessary for winning wars. Government secrecy is also necessary for starting those wars in the first place. US government agencies have an extensive history of using false pretenses to initiate military conflicts; if they could not hide the facts behind a veil of government opacity, the public would never engage in them. The American people would never have allowed their sons to go to Vietnam if they’d known the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a lie. They’d never have sent their sons and daughters to invade Iraq if they’d known weapons of mass destruction were a lie. They would lose the support of the public, and the international community would refuse to back them.

Protecting the lives of foreign military and intelligence personnel is the primary argument against government transparency in the United States, a premise which takes it for granted that there need to be foreign military and intelligence personnel at all. The only reason the lives of troops and intelligence officers would be endangered without massive walls of government secrecy is because those personnel are out there facilitating imperialist acts of mass murder and tyranny. The argument is essentially “Well we can’t tell you the truth about what’s happening in our government, because it would mean we’d have to stop doing extremely evil things.”

The argument that the internet needs strict censorship to eliminate dangerous conspiracy theories takes it as a given that simply eliminating government secrecy is impossible, which in turn takes it as a given that the US government cannot simply stop inflicting grave evils around the world. Our ability to share information with each other online is therefore ultimately being increasingly choked off by monopolistic Silicon Valley megacorporations because no one in charge can fathom the idea of the United States government ceasing to butcher human beings around the world.

That is the real underlying argument over internet censorship today. Should people have free access to information about what their own government is doing, or should their government be permitted to do evil things in secret while people who form theories about what they’re doing are shoved further and further away from audibility? That’s the real debate here.

The powerful should not be permitted to keep secrets from the public. They should not be permitted to jail journalists who try to reveal those secrets to the public, and they should not be permitted to collaborate with monopolistic corporations to censor people who form theories about those secrets. The amount of secrecy you are entitled to should be directly inverse to the amount of power that you have.

The US government has powerful agencies whose literal job is to conspire. The fact that people are punished and condemned for forming theories about how that conspiring might take place, even while those agencies are completely lacking in transparency, is abusive.

If the government was not doing evil things in secret, then it wouldn’t need secrecy. If the government didn’t have secrecy, there would be no conspiracy theories. Stop pointing your attacks at powerless people who are just trying to figure out what’s going on in the world amidst a sea of government secrecy and propaganda, and point your attacks instead at the power structures that are actually responsible for the existence of conspiracy theories in the first place.

February 14, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | CIA, United States | Leave a comment

Opening the CIA’s Can of Worms

By Edward Curtin | February 13, 2021

“The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime.

This is true. The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an international audience. We have long been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.

Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.

For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in The Secret Team; that CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War and Joel Whitney in Finks, among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in “courting the Compatible Left” since right wingers were already in the Agency’s pocket. All this is documented and not disputed. It is shocking only to those who don’t do their homework and see what is happening today outside a broad historical context.

With the rise of alternate media and a wide array of dissenting voices on the internet, the establishment felt threatened and went on the defensive. It therefore should come as no surprise that those same elite corporate media are now leading the charge for increased censorship and the denial of free speech to those they deem dangerous, whether that involves wars, rigged elections, foreign coups, COVID-19, vaccinations, or the lies of the corporate media themselves. Having already banned critics from writing in their pages and or talking on their screens, these media giants want to make the quieting of dissenting voices complete.

Just today The New York Times had this headline: Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims. Notice the lack of the word alleged before “false virus claims.” This is guilt by headline. It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram’s ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook that owns Instagram. That ban should follow soon, as the Times’ reporter Jennifer Jett hopes, since she accusingly writes that RFK, Jr. “makes many of the same baseless claims to more than 300,000 followers” at Facebook. Jett made sure her report also went to msn.com and The Boston Globe.

This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow. What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.

Which brings me to the recent work of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, both of whom have strongly and rightly decried this censorship. As I understand their arguments, they go like this.

First, the corporate media have today divided up the territory and speak only to their own audiences in echo chambers: liberal to liberals (read: the “allegedly” liberal Democratic Party), such as The New York Times, NBC, etc., and conservative to conservatives (read” the “allegedly” conservative Donald Trump), such as Fox News, Breitbart, etc. They have abandoned old school journalism that, despite its shortcomings, involved objectivity and the reporting of disparate facts and perspectives, but within limits. Since the digitization of news, their new business models are geared to these separate audiences since they are highly lucrative choices. It’s business driven since electronic media have replaced paper as advertising revenues have shifted and people’s ability to focus on complicated issues has diminished drastically. Old school journalism is suffering as a result and thus writers such as Greenwald and Taibbi and Chris Hedges (who interviewed Taibbi and concurs: part one here) have taken their work to the internet to escape such restrictive categories and the accompanying censorship.

Secondly, the great call for censorship is not something the Silicon Valley companies want because they want more people using their media since it means more money for them, but they are being pressured to do it by the traditional old school media, such as The New York Times, who now employ “tattletales and censors,” people who are power hungry jerks, to sniff out dissenting voices that they can recommend should be banned. Greenwald says, ‘’They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous ‘disinformation.’” Thus, the old school print and television media are not on the same page as Facebook, Twitter, etc. but have opposing agendas.

In short, these shifts and the censorship are about money and power within the media world as the business has been transformed by the digital revolution.

I think this is a half-truth that conceals a larger issue. The censorship is not being driven by power hungry reporters at the Times or CNN or any media outlet. All these media and their employees are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled. These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so. If they do not play their part in this twisted and intricate propaganda game, they will suffer. They will be eliminated, as are pesky individuals who dare peel the onion to its core. For each media company is one part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus – a system, a complex – whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many. The CIA and media as parts of the same criminal conspiracy.

To argue that the Silicon valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense. These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc. They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s program to control, use, and infiltrate the media. Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today.

In Surveillance Valley, investigative reporter Yasha Levine documents how Silicon valley tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are tied to the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex in surveillance and censorship; how the Internet was created by the Pentagon; and even how these shadowy players are deeply involved in the so-called privacy movement that developed after Edward Snowden’s revelations. Like Valentine, and in very detailed ways, Levine shows how the military-industrial-intelligence-digital-media complex is part of the same criminal conspiracy as is the traditional media with their CIA overlords. It is one club.

Many people, however, might find this hard to believe because it bursts so many bubbles, including the one that claims that these tech companies are pressured into censorship by the likes of The New York Times, etc. The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives it its marching orders.

That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon valley monopolies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.

But for whom do these intelligence agencies work? Not for themselves.

They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world’s wealth through the stories they tell. It is a symbiotic relationship. As FDR put it bluntly in 1933, this coterie of wealthy forces is the “financial element in the larger centers [that] has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” Their wealth and power has increased exponentially since then, and their connected tentacles have further spread to create what is an international deep state that involves such entities as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, those who meet yearly at Davos, etc. They are the international overlords who are pushing hard to move the world toward a global dictatorship.

As is well known, or should be, the CIA was the creation of Wall St. and serves the interests of the wealthy owners. Peter Dale Scott, in “The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld,” says of Allen Dulles, the nefarious longest running Director of the CIA and Wall St. lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell, “There seems to be little difference in Allen Dulles’s influence whether he was a Wall Street lawyer or a CIA director.” It was Dulles, long connected to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, international corporations, and a friend of Nazi agents and scientists, who was tasked with drawing up proposals for the CIA. He was ably assisted by five Wall St. bankers or investors, including the aforementioned Frank Wisner who later, as a CIA officer, said his “Mighty Wurlitzer” was “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.” This he did by recruiting intellectuals, writers, reporters, labor organizations, and the mainstream corporate media, etc. to propagate the CIA’s messages.

Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges are correct up to a point, but they stop short. Their critique of old school journalism à la Edward Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing of Consent model, while true as far as it goes, fails to pin the tail on the real donkey. Like old school journalists who knew implicitly how far they could go, these guys know it too, as if there is an invisible electronic gate that keeps them from wandering into dangerous territory.

The censorship of Robert Kennedy, Jr. is an exemplary case. His banishment from Instagram and the ridicule the mainstream media have heaped upon him for years is not simply because he raises deeply informed questions about vaccines, Bill Gates, the pharmaceutical companies, etc. His critiques suggest something far more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian order that involves total surveillance, control, eugenics, etc. by the wealthy led by their intelligence propagandists.

To call him a super spreader of hoaxes and a conspiracy theorist is aimed at not only silencing him on specific medical issues, but to silence his powerful and articulate voice on all issues. To give thoughtful consideration to his deeply informed scientific thinking concerning vaccines, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc., is to open a can of worms that the powerful want shut tight.

This is because RFK, Jr. is also a severe critic of the enormous power of the CIA and its propaganda that goes back so many decades and was used to cover up the national security state’s assassinations of his father and uncle, JFK. It is why his wonderful recent book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, that contains not one word about vaccines, was shunned by mainstream book reviewers; for the picture he paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting the mass media that have been its mouthpieces. These worms must be kept in the can, just as the power of the international overlords represented by the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset must be. They must be dismissed as crackpot conspiracy theories not worthy of debate or exposure.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., by name and dedication to truth seeking, conjures up his father’s ghost, the last politician who, because of his vast support across racial and class divides, could have united the country and tamed the power of the CIA to control the narrative that has allowed for the plundering of the world and the country for the wealthy overlords.

There is a reason Noam Chomsky is an exemplar for Hedges, Greenwald, and Taibbi. He controls the can opener for so many. He has set the parameters for what is considered acceptable to be considered a serious journalist or intellectual. The assassinations of the Kennedys, 9/11, or a questioning of the official Covid-19 story are not among them, and so they are eschewed.

To denounce censorship, as they have done, is admirable. But now they need go up to the forbidden gate with the sign that says – “This far and no further” – and jump over it. That’s where the true stories lie. That’s when they’ll see the worms squirm.

February 13, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | CIA, COVID-19 Vaccine, Gates Foundation, New York Times, United States, WHO | Leave a comment

Don’t Impeach Trump. Impeach the Deep State for Its Conspiracy to Kill the Constitution

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute| February 8, 2021

Let’s be clear about one thing: the impeachment of Donald Trump is a waste of time and money.

Impeaching Trump will accomplish very little, and it will not in any way improve the plight of the average American. It will only reinforce the spectacle and farce that have come to be synonymous with politics today.

While the nation allows itself to be distracted by yet more bread-and-circus politics, the American kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians and corporate thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of the people) continues to suck the American people into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry are powerless to defend themselves against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

So here’s what I propose: let’s impeach the Deep State and its cabal of government operatives from every point along the political spectrum (right, left and center) for conspiring to expand the federal government’s powers at the expense of the citizenry.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.

Even now, we are being pushed and prodded towards a civil war, not because the American people are so divided but because that’s how corrupt governments control a populace (i.e., divide and conquer).

These are dangerous times.

These are indeed dangerous times but not because of violent crime, which remains at an all-time low, or because of terrorism, which is statistically rare, or because the borders are being invaded by foreign armies, which data reports from the Department of Homeland Security refute, or because a pandemic is spreading like a contagion, or even because raging mobs of so-called domestic terrorists are trying to overthrow elections.

No, the real danger that we face comes from none other than the U.S. government and the powers it has granted to its standing armies to rob, steal, cheat, harass, detain, brutalize, terrorize, torture and kill American citizens with immunity.

The danger “we the people” face comes from masked invaders on the government payroll who crash through our doors in the dark of night, shoot our dogs, and terrorize our families.

This danger comes from militarized henchmen on the government payroll who demand absolute obedience, instill abject fear, and shoot first and ask questions later.

This danger comes from greedy, power-hungry bureaucrats on the government payroll who have little to no understanding of their constitutional limits.

This danger comes from greedy politicians and corporations for whom profit trumps principle.

This danger comes from a surveillance state that grows more and more ominous.

Consider, if you will, all of the dastardly, devious, diabolical, dangerous, debilitating, deceitful, dehumanizing, demonic, depraved, dishonorable, disillusioning, discriminatory, dictatorial schemes inflicted on “we the people” by a bureaucratic, totalitarian regime that has long since ceased to be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Americans have no protection against police abuse.

Americans are little more than pocketbooks to fund the police state.

Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty.

Americans no longer have a right to self-defense.

Americans no longer have a right to private property.

Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police.

Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity.

Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy.

Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice.

Americans no longer have a representative government.

We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age, let’s call it the age of authoritarianism. In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.

It is not overstating matters to say that Congress, which has done its best to keep their unhappy constituents at a distance, may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America.

In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism: a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.

Sound familiar?

History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a totalitarian state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

From Clinton to Bush, Obama to Trump, and now Biden, it’s as if we’ve been caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the powers-that-be want us to remain distracted, divided, alienated from each other based on our politics, our bank accounts, our religion, our race and our value systems.

Yet as George Orwell observed, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

February 8, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception | CIA, FBI, United States | Leave a comment

Biden’s Nominee For New Cabinet-Level Science Position Is Epstein-Linked Geneticist

By Whitney Webb | The Last American Vagabond | February 2, 2021

CRISPR gene-editing expert Eric Lander, Biden’s director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, is awaiting Senate confirmation to serve in a new Cabinet-level position in the Biden administration. Jeffrey Epstein, the eugenicist pedophile and sex trafficker, bragged about funding Lander’s research and was photographed taking part in at least one meeting with him.

Shortly before he took office, [proclaimed] President Joe Biden announced that he would be elevating the director Office of Science and Technology Policy to a cabinet-level position, meaning that his nominee to lead that office, geneticist Eric Lander, would require confirmation by the US Senate. Lander is currently serving as director of that office, but has yet to serve in cabinet-level capacity as he awaits confirmation.

Mainstream media reports described Biden’s move to place Lander in his cabinet as “meant to highlight his commitment to science,” which has been used to contrast his approach with that of Trump, who was accused of second-guessing “authoritative” voices from academia and the medical establishment. Lander is deemed to be one such “authoritative” voice, having previously served as external co-chair on former President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

However, Biden placing Lander in this role begs the question of exactly what type of science he will promote in his new position, as eugenicist and intelligence-linked pedophile Jeffrey Epstein bragged on his website about having “had the priviledge [sic] of sponsoring” Lander’s research via the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation. Lander’s spokesperson told the New York Times in 2019 that “Mr. Epstein appears to have made up lots of things and this seems to be among them,” regarding whether or not Lander had indeed received funding from Epstein.

In addition to the issue of funding from Epstein, Lander, who is also a biology professor at MIT, is known to have met with Epstein at least once, as he was pictured taking part in a 2012 meeting with Epstein at the office of Harvard’s Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist who received millions in funding from Epstein. After Epstein’s 2019 arrest, Lander claimed that he had been invited to the meeting by Nowak and had been unaware of who was set to attend the event. He additionally stated that he “later learned about [Epstein’s] more sordid history” and denied having had a relationship with Epstein.

Yet, there remains the issue that Epstein himself included Lander in a list of scientists he sponsored, with the other scientists on that list having indeed been supported by Epstein in some fashion. If we are to believe Lander, it remains unclear why Epstein, before he became so infamous, would falsely claim to fund Lander and why Lander would wait to deny any association until only after Epstein’s arrest. Given that the other scientists listed alongside Lander on Epstein’s website did receive funding from his foundation, it seems unlikely that Epstein would deceptively throw in Lander’s name among a list of several other scientists he was funding at a time, particularly when he was not yet publicly controversial and did not present such a grave risk to his associates’ reputations.

However, Lander’s denials seem to have been more than sufficient for some mainstream media outlets following his nomination to serve in the Biden administration, with some outlets now claiming that Lander was not reported to have received funding from Epstein, despite Epstein’s own claims to the contrary. For instance, BuzzFeed wrote on January 19, 2021 that Lander “has not been reported to have received any money from Epstein”.

The Broad Institute, Silicon Valley and Intelligence

Despite Lander’s denials of a personal relationship, Epstein also had very close ties to Lander’s employer, MIT. Epstein donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the institution and Epstein was also used as a channel for making donations to MIT by billionaire Bill Gates. Gates has yet to explain why he would funnel his donations through Epstein as opposed to publicly donating via his well-known “philanthropic” foundation. Epstein’s funding of the MIT Media Lab in particular led to the resignation of its former director Joi Ito in September 2019 following Epstein’s arrest and subsequent “suicide.”

In addition, Epstein was particularly close to one of the biggest names at MIT, the late artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky. Minsky once organized a two-day symposium on artificial intelligence at Epstein’s private island in 2002 and Epstein victims have alleged that they were forced by Epstein to engage in sex acts with Minsky. Both Minsky and Eric Lander were corporate fellows of the Thinking Machines corporation, a DARPA contractor that made supercomputers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That company’s various components were acquired by a web of intelligence-linked companies like CIA-linked Oracle and IBM while many of its former engineers left for Sun Microsystems, where future Google CEO Eric Schmidt was then serving as Chief Technology Officer.

Lander, more recently, has again become closely associated with tech companies deeply tied to the US national security state as the founding director of the Broad Institute, an independent genomic research institution partnered with both MIT and Harvard. Incidentally, MIT and Harvard are the two academic institutions most closely linked to Epstein’s “philanthropy,” particularly in the field in which the Broad Institute specializes.

The Broad Institute depends heavily on “private philanthropy” according to its website and its board of directors includes Apple chairman, Arthur Levinson; chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute, James Manyika; current chairman and former CEO of IBM, Louis Gerstner Jr; and former Google CEO and current chair of the National Security Commission on AI, Eric Schmidt. Also on the board is Seth Klarman, owner of the Times of Israel and a major donor to the DNC in the last election cycle. Klarman’s family foundation has donated heavily to the Broad Institute. In addition, Klarman announced his rejection of former President Trump in a coordinated PR push alongside Leslie Wexner, Epstein’s main backer who was integral to his intelligence activities and sex trafficking operation, in 2018. More recently, he was outed as the main financing source for the dysfunctional Iowa Caucus app in the most recent DNC primaries.

Right before Lander joined the Biden administration, the Broad Institute announced a new partnership with tech giants Microsoft and Google subsidiary Verily, further reflecting the Broad Institute’s ties to Silicon Valley. As part of that partnership, Microsoft and Google will share the companies’ cloud data and AI technologies with a “global network of more than 168,000 health and life sciences partners” to accelerate the Terra platform. Terra, originally developed by the Broad Institute and Google’s Verily, is an “open data ecosystem” focused on biomedical research, specifically the fields of cancer genomics, population genetics, and viral genomics. The biomedical data Terra amasses includes not only genetic data but also medical-imaging, biometric signals, and electronic health records.

In the case of Google, the data accessed via this partnership will likely inform their obvious AI healthcare ambitions, some of which are being pursued in partnership with the US military. Google recently announced a partnership with the Pentagon to “predictively diagnose” cancer and COVID-19 using AI. Google’s ties to the US military have become overt in recent years and the company is well represented on the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI), which is chaired by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In the case of Microsoft, the company was recently awarded the massive JEDI cloud contract by the Pentagon, though litigation may soon change that. Microsoft also recently launched a new “secret” cloud service for US intelligence and classified government data systems and, like Google, are also well represented on the NSCAI.

In addition, Microsoft as well as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have ties to Israeli intelligence, particularly Israel’s Unit 8200. Microsoft’s ties to Start-Up Nation Central, Unit 8200 fronts, and Isabel Maxwell (Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister) have been discussed at length in previous articles. Eric Schmidt, among other connections, helped finance and launch Team8, the start-up accelerator for Unit 8200 alumni set up by the unit’s former commander Nadiv Zafrir. Team8 controversially hired Mike Rogers, former director of the US intelligence agency the NSA, and is also associated with the private company IronNet Security of another former NSA director, Keith Alexander.

These US-Israel intelligence ties are notable given the Epstein connections explored earlier in this article, as many of Epstein’s activities – from sex trafficking and sexual blackmail to money laundering – were done on behalf of both US and Israeli intelligence agencies, specifically factions within both intelligence communities that share ties to the same organized crime syndicate.

Those same factions are as intimately involved in the activities of Silicon Valley, making it no coincidence that, following his first arrest in 2007, Epstein attempted to rebrand as a hi-tech investor and patron of “transhumanist”-related sciences, showing that the interest of his benefactors had moved from sexual blackmail and human trafficking to the electronic forms of blackmail and the trafficking of data.

Just months before his 2019 arrest, Epstein would brag about having blackmail on prominent Silicon Valley figures and is known to have entertained LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Epstein’s close associate Ghislaine Maxwell had similarly directed her attention at Silicon Valley following Epstein’s first arrest and her sisters, Isabel and Christine, have been intimately involved in Silicon Valley and hi-tech contractors for US intelligence for decades.

Praising Eugenicists for “pushing the frontiers of science”

Aside from the intelligence connections via Silicon Valley and Jeffrey Epstein, Lander has also courted controversy for a controversial toast he led in honor of eugenicist James Watson in 2018. On Watson’s 90^th birthday, Lander praised Watson for “inspiring all of us to push the frontiers of science to benefit humankind.” Watson, though best remembered as the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix structure, was also a notorious eugenicist who stated his belief that people of African descent have genetically inferior intelligence on numerous occasions. Watson first began to retreat from public life in 2007, when he told the BBC that Western government projects in Africa were likely to fail because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really”.

After offering the toast, Lander was later forced to apologize for his public praise of James Watson. Yet, since his nomination to serve in the “diversity-focused” Biden administration, some former critics of Lander’s praise of Watson have now warmed up to the MIT geneticist, citing the fact that his deputy, Alondra Nelson, is an African American woman.

Lander’s relationship with James Watson goes back to Lander’s extensive work as part of the Human Genome Project, a project in which Watson was also intimately involved. Though the Human Genome Project is normally credited to three scientists that “independently” all had the same idea in 1990, the original call for the Human Genome Project was first published in 1986 by geneticist Walter Bodmer. Bodmer joined the Eugenics Society, today called the Galton Institute, as a young man back in the 1960s and soon after went to work with Stanford biologist/geneticist Joshua Lederberg. Lederberg was a key scientific advisor to US presidents and the US military during the course of his decades-long career. Bodmer then served as the Eugenics Society/Galton Institute president from 2008 to 2014. One of the organization’s current officers, David J. Galton, wrote that the Human Genome Project that Bodmer originally proposed had “enormously increased . . . the scope for eugenics . . . because of the development of a very powerful technology for the manipulation of DNA.”

Once the Human Genome Project was underway, James Watson was placed in charge of the US government-funded effort backing the project, via National Center for Human Genome Research. Watson would use that position to fund seven genome centers involved in large-scale gene mapping projects, including at MIT. Much of the sequencing for the Human Genome Project was done by the MIT-affiliated Whitehead Institute, where Lander worked on the gene sequencing project and other projects up until the Broad Institute was spun off from the Whitehead Institute’s Center for Genome Research and formally launched in 2004.

The Whitehead Institute was co-founded by David Baltimore, who served as its founding director and went on to be President of Rockefeller University. Baltimore is currently on Lander’s Broad Institute. As an aside, Joshua Lederberg was another past President of Rockefeller University and Jeffrey Epstein had previously served on the university’s board after being personally appointed by David Rockefeller. The Rockefeller family’s ties to eugenics are discussed at length in this documentary and Epstein’s obsession with eugenics has been detailed in several reports since his 2019 arrest and “suicide”.

Given the associations with eugenicists like Jeffrey Epstein and James Watson, it is essential to spread awareness of these ties as Lander awaits Senate confirmation, as the Senate could be pressured by the public to raise these issues at Lander’s upcoming confirmation hearing. Yet, the fact that Lander was even nominated for this position at all, particularly following the Epstein scandal, is stunning as he should have been investigated and, at minimum, blacklisted from serving in public office. Lander’s nomination to such a prominent post is unsettling confirmation of the continued influence and power of the network that not only created Jeffrey Epstein, but financed and protected his nefarious activities, for decades.

February 5, 2021 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | CIA, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, United States | Leave a comment

Was Fraud in the 2020 Election Inconceivable?

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF |February 4, 2021

One of the fascinating aspects of the 2020 presidential election fraud brouhaha was the mainstream media’s certainty that there was no fraud, without even performing the semblance of an investigation. The media mindset was based on the concept of inconceivability — that it was just inconceivable that anything like that could happen in the United States. That sort of thing only happens in foreign countries, the inconceivable mindset holds.

Yet, consider all the things that the the U.S. deep state did, in secret, to prevent Salvador Allende from becoming president of Chile.

In the run-up to the 1964 Chilean presidential election, the CIA secretly spent almost $6 million in support of Allende’s opponent, Eduardo Frei. According to Wikipedia, the “CIA considered its role in the victory of Frei a great success.” The CIA concluded that Frei would not have won without the secret assistance of the CIA.

What business did the U.S. deep state have embroiling itself in a foreign election? It held that Allende, as a socialist or a communist, would pose a grave threat to U.S. “national security” if he were elected president of Chile.

Six years later, Allende ran again and achieved a plurality of votes. Since the Chilean Constitution required a majority, the election was thrown into the hands of the Chilean parliament.

The CIA took its stash of secret U.S. taxpayer money and used it in an attempt to bribe the members of the Chilean parliament to not elect Allende.

At the same time, the CIA did everything it could to instigate a military coup, notwithstanding the fact that a coup would violate Chile’s constitution. The CIA took the position that the Chilean constitution was irrelevant, given that an Allende presidency would pose a threat to “national security,” both in Chile and the United States. Given that the U.S. Constitution itself did not authorize foreign military coups, the CIA’s position was that it was irrelevant as well since “national security,” the CIA believed, was sovereign and supreme over the Constitution.

The overall commander of the Chilean armed forces, Gen. Rene Schneider, balked at the CIA’s coup proposal. His position was that the Chilean constitution controlled. Since it did not provide a coup as a way to remove a democratically elected president, the Chilean armed forces would not participate in the U.S. deep state’s illegal scheme.

To accelerate the possibility of a coup, the CIA conspired to violently kidnap Schneider. During the kidnapping attempt, Schneider was shot dead. (No CIA official or any other U.S. official has ever been brought to justice for the murder of Rene. Schneider.)

The kidnapping and murder of an innocent man ended up boomeranging for the U.S. deep state. The Chilean people were so outraged over Schneider’s murder that the Chilean parliament rejected the CIA’s bribes and ended up electing Allende president.

The U.S. deep state wasn’t finished. For the next three years, the CIA did everything it could to stir up economic chaos in the country in order to encourage people to desire a military coup to “save” the country. For example, the CIA secretly instigated a national truckers’ strike in the hope of preventing food from reaching the Chilean populace.

Finally, on September 11, 1973, amidst the economic crisis produced by Allende’s socialist economic policies and the CIA’s interventionist policies, and with the encouragement and support of the U.S. deep state, the Chilean deep state initiated a military coup in which the national-security branch of the national government went on the attack against the executive branch of the government. In what would prove to be an eerie confirmation of former President Dwight Eisenhower about the dangers that a “military-industrial complex” poses to a democracy, Chile’s military-intelligence branch of the government prevailed over Allende’s executive branch, leaving him dead.

Chile’s national-security establishment, again with the full support of the U.S. national-security establishment, proceeded to take full control over the government and rounded up, incarcerated, tortured, raped, sexually abused, executed, or disappeared over 50,000 supporters of Allende.

Now, it’s very true that it’s possible that there was no fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. But given all that the U.S. deep state did to prevent Allende from being president of Chile, can we really say that it is inconceivable that the U.S. deep state would do whatever it deemed necessary to prevent a U.S. presidential candidate that it deemed to be a threat to “national security” from becoming president?

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics.

February 4, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | CIA, United States | Leave a comment

CIA Counterterror Chief Suggests Going To War Against ‘Domestic Insurgents’

By Steve Watson | Summit News | February 4, 2021

The former head of the CIA Counterterrorism Center has suggested that counterinsurgency tactics used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan should be applied to ‘domestic extremists’ inside the US.

NPR reports that Robert Grenier, who directed the CIA’s Counterterrorism program from 2004 to 2006, declared “We may be witnessing the dawn of a sustained wave of violent insurgency within our own country, perpetrated by our own countrymen.”

In an op-ed for The New York Times last week, Grenier suggested that “extremists who seek a social apocalypse … are capable of producing endemic political violence of a sort not seen in this country since Reconstruction.”

Grenier, also a former CIA station chief in Pakistan and Afghanistan, grouped together “the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, ‘Christian’ national chauvinists, white supremacists and QAnon fantasists” and claimed they are all “committed to violent extremism.”

Grenier labeled dissenters an “insurgency” and called for them to be “defeated” like an enemy army.

In further comments to NPR, Grenier stated that “as in any insurgency situation, you have committed insurgents who are typically a relatively small proportion of the affected population. But what enables them to carry forward their program is a large number of people from whom they can draw tacit support.”

Grenier also stated that insurgents may emerge from groups who “believe that the election was stolen,” or those “who don’t trust NPR or The New York Times.”

“The most violent elements that we are concerned about right now see former President Trump as a broadly popular and charismatic symbol,” the CIA spook added, before comparing Trump to Saddam Hussein.

“You know, just as I saw in the Middle East that the air went out of violent demonstrations when [Iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein was defeated and seen to be defeated, I think the same situation applies here,” he proclaimed.

Grenier suggested that Trump should be convicted at the upcoming impeachment trial as a ‘national security imperative’ because “So long as he is there and leading the resistance, if you will, which he shows every sign of intending to do, he is going to be an inspiration to very violent people.”

Grenier then compared Americans to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, noting that in Afghanistan “the thrust of our campaign there was, yes, to hunt down al-Qaida, but primarily to remove the supportive environment in which they were able to live and to flourish. And that meant fighting the Taliban.”

“I think that is the heart of what we need to deal with here,” he added.

Listen

Linking to Grenier’s comments, journalist Glenn Greenwald quipped that wedding guests throughout America should watch out for drone missiles.

If you’re planning a wedding on US soil in the next couple of years, probably best to assign one of the guests to k… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…—
Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 03, 2021

The call to treat Americans as terrorist insurgents comes on the heels of a Department of Homeland Security warning that those dissatisfied with the election result may rise up and commit acts of terrorism in the coming weeks.

“Information suggests that some ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence,” stated the bulletin issued last week through the DHS National Terrorist Advisory System — or NTAS.

The bulletin added that ‘extremists’ may be “motivated by a range of issues, including anger over COVID-19 restrictions, the 2020 election results, and police use of force.”

February 4, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | CIA, New York Times, NPR, United States | Leave a comment

The Impotence of the Supreme Court

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF |February 3, 2021

Imagine if the DEA established a torture and prison camp in, say, Odessa, Texas. Whenever DEA agents arrest someone suspected of violating America’s drug laws, the suspect is taken to the DEA camp, where he is tortured into giving up names of people involved in the drug trade. Prisoners are denied a trial for years, perhaps forever. If a trial is ever held, a tribunal of DEA officials determines guilt or innocence. Hearsay evidence is admitted at trial — the accused are not permitted to cross-examine witnesses against them. Attorney-client communications are monitored and supervised. Meanwhile, the DEA initiates an assassination program that brings swifter “justice” to drug-law violators. It enables DEA agents to simply kill drug suspects without any indictment or trial at all.

There is no doubt that the U.S. Supreme Court would declare all of this unconstitutional. That is precisely the type of thing that our ancestors wished to avoid. That’s why they enacted the Bill of Rights. They weren’t satisfied with just the Constitution. They knew that the federal government would attract the type of people who would set up these types of camps. They wanted a Bill of Rights to specifically spell out express restrictions on the powers of federal officials.

Take the Fifth Amendment. It expressly states that no person shall “be deprived of life” without “due process of law.” Due process means formal notice of an accusation, such as a grand-jury indictment,” and a trial. That means no assassination because assassination involves killing someone without an indictment or trial.

Thus, if the DEA established an assassination program for drug suspects, it would quickly be declared unconstitutional.

Consider the Sixth Amendment. It states “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right of speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury….”

Why did our ancestors include that provision? Because they knew that without it, federal officials would jail people indefinitely, perhaps for the rest of their lives. They also knew that if they didn’t make it clear in the Bill of Rights, federal officials would use judges or tribunals, not juries, to decide guilt or innocence.

Thus, if the DEA established our hypothetical system, there is no doubt that the Supreme Court would declare it unconstitutional.

The Sixth Amendment also guarantees the right of an accused to confront witnesses against him. That entails the right to cross examine them. With the use of hearsay evidence, that right is destroyed. Thus, there is no doubt that the Supreme Court would declared the DEA’s “judicial” system unconstitutional.

Given that the Supreme Court would declare our hypothetical DEA torture and prison camp and “judicial” system unconstitutional, why hasn’t it done the same with the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s torture and prison camp at Guantanamo Bay?

After all, that camp has all the characteristics of our hypothetical DEA camp. Moreover, military and CIA officials are every much federal officials as DEA officials. As such, they are just as subject to the Bill of Rights as other federal officials, There is no exception in the Bill of Rights for the military or the CIA.

So, why the difference? Why do the Pentagon and the CIA get a pass on violating the Bill of Rights while the DEA doesn’t?

The answer is very simple: In a national security state, the military-intelligence establishment is sovereign and supreme. It runs the show. It permits the Supreme Court, along with the president and the Congress, to have the veneer of power but it is the ultimate decider of how the federal government is going to run.

It all turns on power. In the final analysis, government is force. It is through force and the threat of force that its commands and orders are carried out. The Supreme Court’s orders are enforced by U.S. Marshalls. Imagine a team of U.S. Marshalls appearing at the Pentagon and CIA headquarters with an order to shut down the torture and prison center at Gitmo. What do they do when the Pentagon and the CIA ignore them? They do nothing because the amount of force wielded by a team of U.S. Marshalls is minuscule compared to the military and intelligence force they are facing.

Everyone in the federal government fully understands this phenomenon. The national-security establishment is all-powerful within the federal government. Its powers are omnipotent. When it comes to enforcing the Bill of Rights against the omnipotent power of the Pentagon and the CIA, the Supreme Court knows full well that it is impotent.

February 3, 2021 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | CIA, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

Taliban Warns of ‘Consequences’ Amid Reports That Biden Has Scrapped Trump Pledge on Afghan Pullout

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 31.01.2021

The Trump administration reached a peace deal with the Taliban last February, with the agreement envisioning a complete pullout of foreign troops from Afghanistan by May 2021, intra-Afghan peace talks, and a pledge by the militant group not to allow the country to become a haven for terrorists.

The Biden administration has nixed its predecessor’s commitment to pull all NATO forces out of Afghanistan by May, Reuters has reported, citing four senior NATO officials speaking on condition of anonymity.

“There will be no full withdrawal by allies by April-end,” one of the officials said.

In mid-January, the Pentagon confirmed that it had met Trump’s order to shave US troop numbers in Afghanistan down to 2,500 troops total. The draw-down came despite efforts by Congress to freeze the withdrawal until a report ‘assessing the impact’ of such a pullout was completed. Trump fired Defence Secretary Mark Esper several days after the November election, replacing him with Christopher Miller over disagreements on plans to withdraw US forces from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Conditions have not been met,” Reuters’ source said. “And with the new US administration, there will be tweaks in the policy, the sense of hasty withdrawal which was prevalent will be addressed and we could see a much more calculated exit strategy.”

The US and its NATO allies have been in Afghanistan for nearly 20 years. After invading the Central Asian nation in late 2001 to topple the Taliban regime for its harbouring of Saudi al-Qaeda terror leader Osama bin Laden, NATO spent years hunting the man in the war-torn country. In 2011, he was discovered living comfortably in a secure compound in a wealthy neighbourhood in Abbottabad in neighbouring Pakistan, and was killed in a SEAL Team Six raid. Photos or other material evidence of his death were never released.

Reuters’ NATO sources said the issue of Afghanistan will likely be a key topic for discussion at an alliance meeting next month.

NATO estimates that about 10,000 foreign troops remain stationed in Afghanistan, with the troop numbers expected to remain unchanged until after May despite commitments outlined by Trump before he left office.

A State Department spokesman insisted that Biden remains committed to bringing a “responsible end to the ‘forever wars'”, but was also adamant about “protecting Americans from terrorist and other threats”.

Taliban Feels Betrayed, Warns of ‘Consequences’

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told the news agency that the militant group remains committed to the peace deal signed in Doha last February, and doesn’t want to hear any more “excuses” from NATO.

“No doubt if the Doha deal is not implemented there will be consequences, and the blame will be upon that side which does not honour the deal,” he said. “Our expectations are also that NATO will think to end this war and avoid more excuses for prolonging the war in Afghanistan,” Mujahid said.

The war in Afghanistan has cost the US over $2 trillion, and the lives of more than 2,350 military personnel. Hundreds of NATO coalition troops, over 62,000 Afghan security personnel and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have also been killed in the war.

The NATO war in Afghanistan is just part of the war-torn country’s generations-long conflict, which began in 1978 after a pro-Soviet government took power in Kabul, prompting a CIA intervention and the funnelling of billions of dollars in military and financial assistance to the Mujahideen – precursors of the Taliban. Moscow was sucked into intervening in the conflict in late 1979 in an attempt to save the Kabul government, sparking the decade-long Soviet-Afghan War, which ended in 1989 with the complete pullout of Soviet forces. In 1992, the Afghan government collapsed, and for much of the 1990s, the Taliban and other militias divided up the country, turning it into a feudal failed state.

January 31, 2021 Posted by aletho | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Afghanistan, CIA, NATO, United States | Leave a comment

What Happened to JFK and a Foreign Policy of Peace?

By Rick Sterling | Global Research | January 27, 2021

Sixty years ago, John F Kennedy (JFK) was inaugurated as president of the USA. In less than three years, before he was assassinated in November 1963, he initiated major changes in foreign policy.

These foreign policy changes are documented in books such as “JFK and the Unspeakable” (2008) and “Betting on the Africans” (2012). One of the foremost scholars on JFK, James Di Eugenio, has an excellent new article of the Kennedy foreign policy at Covert Action : “Deconstructing JFK: A Coup d’Etat over Foreign Policy?”. Despite this literature, many people in the West do not realize the extent to which JFK was an exception. This article will briefly review some of the actions he took while alive, and what happened after he was gone.

While JFK was a staunch advocate for capitalism and the “free world”, in competition with the Soviet Union and communism, he promoted acceptance of non-aligned countries and supported nationalist movements in Africa, the Middle East and Third World generally. In the summer before he was killed, he reached out to the Soviet Union and proposed sweeping changes to promote peace and prevent war.

The previous Eisenhower administration was hostile to post WW2 nationalist movements in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In 1953 the CIA supervised the overthrow of Iran’s elected government. They supported the Saudi monarch and undermined the popular Egyptian Nasser. In contrast, Kennedy was sympathetic to the “winds of change” in Africa and beyond. He criticized France’s repression of the Algerian independence movement and was sympathetic to Patrice Lumumba leading the Congo’s independence from Belgium. Kennedy worked with UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold to preserve Congo’s independence and try to restore Lumumba to power. The CIA managed to have Patrice Lumumba executed three days before Kennedy’s inauguration.

Under Kennedy, the United States started voting against the European colonial powers in Africa. Kennedy provided tangible aid to Nasser in Egypt. After Kennedy’s death, the US policy returned to support for European powers and CIA intervention. The US supported NATO ally Portugal in its wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau. The US supported secessionist and tribal forces in the Congo, Angola, Somalia, and many other countries with hugely damaging results. The US supported apartheid South Africa until the end. The US supported the sectarian Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser.

This was also a critical time for Israel Palestine. JFK was more objective and balanced that most US politicians. Just 22 years old in 1939, Kennedy visited Palestine and wrote his observations / analysis in a 4 page letter to his father. He is thoughtful and recognizes the Palestinian perspective. He speaks of the “unfortunately arrogant, uncompromising attitude” of some Jewish leaders. In May 2019, more documents were released from the National Security Archives. They show that JFK, as president, was intent on stopping Israel from surreptitiously building a nuclear weapon. In a letter to the new Israeli Prime Minister Eshkol, Kennedy gives a diplomatic ultimatum that US support of Israel will be “seriously jeopardized” if Israel did not comply with inspection visits to the Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona. After JFK’s death, the Johnson administration was submissive to Israel and pro-Israel supporters. Johnson showed the ultimate political subservience by preventing the rescue and hiding Israeli treachery regarding the USS Liberty. The Israeli attack killed 34 and injured 172 US sailors. Would Israel have had the arrogance and chutzpah to do this if Kennedy had been in the White House? Unlikely.

The invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs took place just three months after Kennedy took office. The CIA and generals expected Kennedy to provide US air support for the anti-Castro attackers. Kennedy said no and resolved to get rid of the long-standing CIA Director who had managed the operation. Allen Dulles and two Deputy Directors were forced to resign by the end of the year. The Pentagon, CIA and anti-Castro Cubans were furious at JFK. When the Soviet Union sent nuclear capable missiles to Cuba, the hawks demanded that the US attack. Kennedy opposed this and ended up negotiating an agreement whereby the US removed its nuclear missiles in Turkey as Soviet nuclear missiles were removed from Cuba.

Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country with vast natural resources and strategic location. President Sukarno led the country to independence and was a leader in the global Non-Aligned Movement seeking a middle ground between the poles of the USA and Soviet Union. The Eisenhower/Dulles administration tried to overthrow Sukarno. In contrast, JFK changed the policy from hostility to friendship. Sukarno invited JFK to visit the country and the invitation was accepted. Following JFK’s assassination, the policy returned to hostility and just two years later, in 1965, the US engineered a coup leading to the murder of about half a million Indonesian citizens suspected of being communist.

JFK visited Vietnam in 1951 as the French colonial powers were trying to assert their control. He saw the situation as 400,000 French soldiers were losing to the Vietnamese nationalist movement. Thus, when he became president, he was skeptical of the prospects. President Kennedy authorized an increase of US military advisers but never sent combat troops. As the situation deteriorated, JFK finally decided the policy was wrong. In October 1963 Kennedy issued National Security Action Memorandum 263 directing US withdrawal to begin in December and be completed by the end of 1965. After JFK’s death, President Johnson reversed course and began sending massive numbers of US soldiers to Vietnam. Twelve years later, after 58,000 American and about two million Vietnamese deaths, the US military departed Vietnam.

The Soviet Union was the largest communist country and primary challenger to the US and capitalist system. The Cold War included mutual recriminations and a huge amount of military spending as both sides designed and produced ever more hydrogen bombs, air and sea delivery systems. During the Cuba crisis, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khruschev both realized how dangerous the situation was. Nuclear war could have accidentally or intentionally begun. In June1963, JFK delivered the commencement address at American University. It was probably his most important speech yet is little known. JFK called for a dramatic change in US posture, from confrontation to mutual acceptance. He called for re-examination of US attitudes toward peace, the Soviet Union, the Cold War and peace and freedom within the USA itself. He called for a special communication line between Washington and Moscow to allow direct communications between the two leaders. And then Kennedy declared that the US would end nuclear testing as a first step toward general and complete disarmament.

In the last months before his death, JFK opened secret communications with Soviet Premier Khruschev and used a journalist to communicate directly with Fidel Castro. JFK proposed face-to-face talks aimed at reconciliation with Cuba.

Kennedy’s initiatives toward reconciliation and peace were opposed by the CIA and militarist elements in the government. As reported in the NY Times, Kennedy privately told one of his highest officials he “wanted to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds”. Before that could happen, JFK was assassinated, and his policy changes reversed.

From Moscow to Cairo to Jakarta, Kennedy’s death was met with shock and mourning. Leaders in those countries sensed what the assassination meant.

The day after JFK’s funeral, President Johnson supplanted Kennedy’s planned withdrawal from Viet Nam with National Security Action Memorandum 273. This resulted in 12 years of aggression and bloodshed in southeast Asia. Coups were carried out in the Dominican Republic and Indonesia. US resumed support for South African apartheid and Portuguese colonial wars. Assassination attempts on Fidel Castro escalated while military coups took place in numerous Latin American countries. In the Middle East, the US solidified support for Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The author of “JFK and the Unspeakable”, Jim Douglas, writes “President Kennedy’s courageous turn from global war to a strategy of peace provides the why of his assassination. Because he turned toward peace with our enemies, the Communists, he found himself at odds with his own national security state.”

Rick Sterling is a journalist based in the SF Bay Area. He can be reached at rsterling1@protonmail.com

January 30, 2021 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | CIA, Israel, JFK Assassination, United States | Leave a comment

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Former Insiders Criticize Iran Policy as U.S. Hegemony

By GARETH PORTER | CounterPunch | February 27, 2013

“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.

More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony. … continue

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