Who are we fighting in Afghanistan?

[Octafish]

The Taliban?

ISIS?

The Soviets?

The television screen doesn't say.

Help me out, please.

Help us out.

[Act_of_Reparation]

1. It's a conspiracy.

Obviously.

[Octafish]

6. That's what Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.) wrote.

You must be a medium, Act_of_Reparation. The general's long gone, but his wisdom remains.

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

Because Afghanistan sure seems like a conspiracy, uh, I mean "racket."

Those interested can read "War Is a Racket" here.

[Act_of_Reparation]

18. I'm not psychic so much as you are predictable.

And while climbing up on that soapbox for an impromptu lecture might give you the warm-and-tinglies, you'd be hard pressed around these parts to find someone who hasn't read "War is a Racket"... and all the more to actually relate the text to your specious, anecdotal OP.

Oh, and it took me literally less than 10 seconds to find an article from a mainstream news source that clearly indicates who we are fighting in Afghanistan -- in the goddamned headline.

Afghan forces on offensive against Taliban in Sangin

Guess CNN isn't in on the conspiracy.

[Octafish]

19. You missed my point, then.

It wasn't to lecture you. It was to make show people who don't have a clue as to who we fight -- or why we are fighting -- in Afghanistan the rationale for war. Lots of money to be made, no matter who we vote for.

CNN, for what it's worth, takes orders.

As for conspiracy, what do you think the war in Afghanistan is?

[Act_of_Reparation]

22. I think the arc of history bends towards chaos.

I think correlation does not imply causality.

I think the war in Afghanistan is a quagmire perpetuated as much by realpolitik as it is by business interests.

[Octafish]

51. You got it. You know who else really understands ''Realpolitik''?

PNAC and the Bilderbergers:

Both Bilderberg and PNAC ideologies are versions of real politik. Their main proponents such as PNAC cofounder William Kristol and Bilderberg codirector David Rockefeller subscribe to the use of power, manipulation, and deception to attain their ends. "We are on the verge of a global transformation," said David Rockefeller on September 23, 1994. "All we need is a the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order." Such a willingness to turn a national crisis to political advantage is reminiscent of the Bush administrations (sic) use of the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for invading Iraq. It is also markedly akin to the PNAC's chillingly prophetic statement, made one year prior to the 9/11 attacks, that "the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."

Philosophically, the replacement of PNAC with Bilderberg as the ruling ideology of the time may representative (sic) a Hegelian synthesis between a thesis (PNAC) and antithesis (Bilderberg). Unfortunately, this synthesis may be moving from a nationalistic culture of control to one of global proportions.

-- Elliot D. Cohen, "Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Project" p. 117 (2010)

ONLINE:

https://books.google.com/books?id=wcfHAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=pnac+bilderberger+realpolitik&source=bl&ots=YOSXOuHh13&sig=Gh8ubHHrTzwbJRbS7xOYXJZ2LAg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiHkIPwnYTKAhXBdz4KHeLaCZUQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=pnac%20bilderberger%20realpolitik&f=false

[CanSocDem]

65. Game, Set and Match.

Well done Octafish. The only thing scarier than the truth about the American Empire is the vast numbers of earnest young citizens shaking their heads in disbelief.

k&r

.

[Act_of_Reparation]

98. Yeah, that's fascinating.

So no politician would ever consider realpolitik without some cigar-chomping businessman pulling his strings?

[Logical]

84. Maybe tied to the JFK shooting?? nt

[Octafish]

88. The same people - those who profit - work for war.

LBJ and Nixon wanted war in Vietnam. People like George W Bush, his father, and his grandfather have all used their public office in benefice of Big Oil, including in Vietnam.

CIA Helped Bush Senior In Oil Venture

A Real News exclusive, first published on The Huffington Post
By Russ Baker | January 7, 2007

Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.

Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.'

But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency.

According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush's original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The '75 memo describes Devine as an “oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush.” The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963.

“Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil,” the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine's role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.

CONTINUED...

http://whowhatwhy.org/2007/01/07/cia-bush-senior-oil-venture/

Kennedy thought profits from national resources should go toward things that make life better for a nation's citizens. It really is a Democratic thing.

[DisgustipatedinCA]

78. You're not able to answer the question.

I'm often not able to answer questions. In those cases, I stay quiet.

[Act_of_Reparation]

95. No question was asked.

Keeping quiet when wanting for answers is a good start. You should try doing the same when you have nothing to say.

[Octafish]

121. So why don't you follow your own advice?

What's that called when one holds others to a higher standard than one's self?

There's a word for it.

[7wo7rees]

129. Sorry, I may get an alert for this but it just seems to me

that you are just being a jerk and disrespecting one of the most respected DU'ers here. And it is really getting tiresome. Sorry.

[annabanana]

87. I guess you haven't an answer either. . . .n/t

[Act_of_Reparation]

96. As a rule, I only provide answers to questions asked in earnest.

Bullshit rhetorical questions need not apply.

[ChisolmTrailDem]

128. Please provide an answer to the question posed in the OP: Who are we fighting in Afganistan. nt

[ViseGrip]

126. We're fighting the POPPY MANUFACTURES....WE WANT TO CONTROL THE HEROIN TRADE AS ALWAYS!

[Wilms]

2. .

&feature=youtu.be&t=77

[Octafish]

11. You converted me into a Monkees fan.

I thought I'd never write that, seeing how Jimi Hendrix Experience was their warm-up band. I've always been a Ray Nitschke fan.

You hear that Al Qaeda is re-opening camps in Afghanistan?

NYT: As U.S. Focuses on ISIS and the Taliban, Al Qaeda Re-emerges

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/us/politics/as-us-focuses-on-isis-and-the-taliban-al-qaeda-re-emerges.html

Is this National Recycle Enemies week?

[Downwinder]

20. from the Ministry of Truth?

[Octafish]

21. We've always been at pre-emptive war with Eurasia.

Like the Gulf of Tonkin, it's getting me down that no one remembers Eastasia.



Or that Ho Chi Minh served with the United States in the fight against Japan during World War II. During the Eisenhower years, the USA, for some rea$on, sided with the French colonialists in their claim against the North.

[Downwinder]

27. Did Shrub spill the beans with his comment

about creating our own reality?

Bin Laden always looked like he came direct from Central Casting.

Is the reason we can't have terrorist trials stateside because they don't exist in reality?

[GreatGazoo]

40. Adam Curtis doc for the BBC...

[KingCharlemagne]

92. Historical note: I think the comment to which you allude came, non from Shrub, but from

Karl Rove. Ron Suskind first reported it in, IIRC, the New Yorker and subsequently republished it in his The One Percent Doctrine, attributing it only to a high-placed administration official who has come to be understood as Rove. Bush doesn't have the cognitive chaps to come up with the notion.

[mwrguy]

3. Brown people

They talk funny and worship diffrnt.

[Octafish]

12. Brown people are ottomanitacally enemy.

They're crappy work habits, too.

Democrats Pay Black Staffers 30% Less

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/11/washington-s-race-pay-gap.html

PS: Is that a picture of Malcolm 10?

[muriel_volestrangler]

23. You know whose side we're on in Afghanistan? The "brown people", as you beautifully put it

That's the actual people, as in the adult inhabitants who elected a government. The people they are fighting against are men (as opposed to the government and the electorate, which include women) who just want power without the hassle of needing anyone to agree with them. They just kill people, or threaten to, to get their way. As it happens, those people talk funny, even to each other, having several languages, but the violent men are less diverse. And nearly all of them worship differently from most of the USA, but we find that the nasty men with guns are the ones who hate those who worship a little differently from them, while the reasonable people in government are far more forgiving of religious differences.

There, that was simple, wasn't it? We're fighting the bad guys. That's what someone who wants to put it in simplistic terms needs to know.

[Octafish]

33. Which bad guys?

Because what you wrote doesn't make that clear to a simpleton like me.

I do remember hearing one black woman who had an oil tanker named after her say something about mushroom clouds, but the ones who lied America into war? No, they are for the most part white men -- rich, white men.

[muriel_volestrangler]

34. Your memory is apalling

You appear unable to tell the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan. I suggest you write to the government of Afghanistan to ask them to explain their country to you. Or read a book. Or a newspaper.

[Octafish]

61. I wish I could forget the time Obama repeated Bush line Taliban never offered up bin laden.

"...Under the banner of this domestic unity and international legitimacy -- and only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden -- we sent our troops into Afghanistan..." -- President Barack Obama, Dec. 2, 2009

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-address-nation-way-forward-afghanistan-and-pakistan

Seeing how it was so long ago, I can understand how you might have forgotten or not.

Bush rejects Taliban offer to hand Bin Laden over

Taliban demand evidence of Bin Laden's guilt

Staff and agencies
guardian.co.uk,
Sunday 14 October 2001 22.19 BST

President George Bush rejected as "non-negotiable" an offer by the Taliban to discuss turning over Osama bin Laden if the United States ended the bombing in Afghanistan.

Returning to the White House after a weekend at Camp David, the president said the bombing would not stop, unless the ruling Taliban "turn over, turn his cohorts over, turn any hostages they hold over." He added, "There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty". In Jalalabad, deputy prime minister Haji Abdul Kabir - the third most powerful figure in the ruling Taliban regime - told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, but added: "we would be ready to hand him over to a third country".

SNIP...

Taliban 'ready to discuss' Bin Laden handover if bombing halts

The Taliban would be ready to discuss handing over Osama bin Laden to a neutral country if the US halted the bombing of Afghanistan, a senior Taliban official said today.

Afghanistan's deputy prime minister, Haji Abdul Kabir, told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US.

"If the Taliban is given evidence that Osama bin Laden is involved" and the bombing campaign stopped, "we would be ready to hand him over to a third country", Mr Kabir added.

CONTINUED...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5

From 2009, you might remember:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7133118

[Ghost Dog]

67. This is correct. n/t

[Rex]

38. Waste of time.

Too many hurt fee fees over this one, I guess war is the best thing for people we will never meet...but you know carpet of bombs or gold...they decided bombs and you know how we love to bomb people!

That was a sad post, full of frustration at not having the conviction to say what they really mean. Kinda like this fucked up war thingy we got going on.

[Octafish]

62. You should see what they're planning for the Home Front.

Ellen Brown details:

Bail-Ins Begin: a Crisis Worse than ISIS?

EXCERPT...

Once your money is deposited in the bank, it legally becomes the property of the bank. Gilani explains:

Your deposited cash is an unsecured debt obligation of your bank. It owes you that money back.

If you bank with one of the country’s biggest banks, who collectively have trillions of dollars of derivatives they hold “off balance sheet” (meaning those debts aren’t recorded on banks’ GAAP balance sheets), those debt bets have a superior legal standing to your deposits and get paid back before you get any of your cash.

. . . Big banks got that language inserted into the 2010 Dodd-Frank law meant to rein in dangerous bank behavior.

The banks inserted the language and the legislators signed it, without necessarily understanding it or even reading it. At over 2,300 pages and still growing, the Dodd Frank Act is currently the longest and most complicated bill ever passed by the US legislature.

Proper fucked.

[CJCRANE]

76. A lot of Afghans don't like their government.

They think it's utterly corrupt.

[Docreed2003]

35. While its most certainly a position of some in the right...

Afghanistan, being perched in Central Asia, strategically located along the Silk Road, and having survived invaders at least since the time of Alexander, is a beautiful country rich in culture. While there is a large portion that look Arab, there are groups with blonde and red hair with blue eyes and others with strong Asian features.

[bigwillq]

4. The Brown People

They're very, very, very bad.

( )

[GummyBearz]

5. Why would Obama fight people because they are brown??

As commander in chief I don't believe he would allow that to happen on a massive, institutionalized scale. So back up your claim.

[bigwillq]

7. Because they're terrarists

All of them. And they don't worship our gOD.

[GummyBearz]

9. We have a commander in chief who knows that is not true, what a ridiculous thing to say

Back up your claim, I'd like to see evidence that Obama hates brown people who worship a different "gOD"

[bigwillq]

24. I was being sarcastic (kind of)

Did you not see in my original message?

Chill.

I know Obama does not hate brown people who worship a different "gOD"

Not everything is about Obama.

We were in that region before Obama.

Chill.

[Octafish]

13. They are soooo ungrateful.

It's sad.

[font size="4"]There Is "No War on Terror"[/font size]

by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

One of the most telling signs of the political naiveté of liberals and the Left in the United States has been their steadfast faith in much of the worldview that blankets the imperial state they call home. Nowhere has this critical failure been more evident than in their acceptance of the premise that there really is something called a "war on terror" or "terrorism"[1]-however poorly managed its critics make it out to be-and that righting the course of this war ought to be this country's (and the world's) top foreign policy priority. In this perspective, Afghanistan and Pakistan rather than Iraq ought to have been the war on terror's proper foci; most accept that the U.S. attack on Afghanistan from October 2001 on was a legitimate and necessary stage in the war. The tragic error of the Bush Administration, in this view, was that it lost sight of this priority, and diverted U.S. military action to Iraq and other theaters, reducing the commitment where it was needed. __Of course we expect to find this line of criticism expressed by the many former supporters who have fled from the sinking regime in Washington.[2] But it is striking that commentators as durably hostile to Bush policies as the New York Times's Frank Rich should accept so many of the fundamentals of this worldview, and repeat them without embarrassment. Rich asserts that the question "Who lost Iraq? is but a distraction from the more damning question, Who is losing the war on terrorism?" A repeated theme of Rich's work has been that the Cheney - Bush presidency is causing "as much damage to fighting the war on terrorism as it does to civil liberties." Even in late 2007, Rich still lamented the "really bad news" that, "Much as Iraq distracted America from the war against Al Qaeda, so a strike on Iran could ignite Pakistan, Al Qaeda's thriving base and the actual central front of the war on terror."[3]

Other expressions of faith in something called the "war on terror" abound. Thus in a long review of several books in which she urged "[r]evamping our approach to terrorism" and "recapturing hearts and minds" around the world, Harvard's Samantha Power, a top lieutenant in the humanitarian brigade, wrote that "most Americans still rightly believe that the United States must confront Islamic terrorism-and must be relentless in preventing terrorist networks from getting weapons of mass destruction. But Bush's premises have proved flawed."[4] Most striking was Power's expression of disappointment that "millions-if not billions-of people around the world do not see the difference between a suicide bomber's attack on a pizzeria and an American attack on what turns out to be a wedding party"-the broken moral compass residing within these masses, of course, who fail to understand that only the American attacks are legitimate and that the numerous resultant casualties are but "tragic errors" and "collateral damage."[5]

Like Samantha Power, the What We're Fighting For statement issued in February 2002 by the Institute for American Values and signed by 60 U.S. intellectuals, including Jean Bethke Elshtain, Francis Fukuyama, Mary Ann Glendon, Samuel Huntington, Harvey C. Mansfield, Will Marshall, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Michael Novak, Michael Walzer, George Weigel, and James Q. Wilson, declared the war on terror a "just war." "Organized killers with global reach now threaten all of us," it is asserted in one revealing passage. "In the name of universal human morality, and fully conscious of the restrictions and requirements of a just war, we support our government's, and our society's, decision to use force of arms against them."[6] The idea that "killers with global reach" who are far more deadly and effective than Al Qaeda could be found at home doesn't seem to occur to these intellectuals. And like Power, they also make what they believe a telling distinction between the deliberate killing of civilians, as in a suicide bombing, and "collateral damage"-type casualties even in cases where civilian casualties are vastly larger and entirely predictable, though not specifically intended.[7] Throughout these reflections, the purpose is to distinguish our murderous acts from theirs. It is the latter that constitute a "world-threatening evil...that clearly requires the use of force to remove it."[8]

In the same mode, Princeton University international law professor Richard Falk's early contributions to The Nation after 9/11 found a "visionary program of international, apocalyptic terrorism" behind the events. "It is truly a declaration of war from the lower depths," Falk wrote, a "transformative shift in the nature of the terrorist challenge both conceptually and tactically.There is no indication that the forces behind the attack were acting on any basis beyond their extraordinary destructive intent.We are poised on the brink of a global, intercivilizational war without battlefields and borders." Some weeks later, in a nod to "just war" doctrine, Falk argued that the "destruction of both the Taliban regime and the Al Qaeda networkare appropriate goals.[T]he case [against the Taliban] is strengthened," he added, "to the degree that its governing policies are so oppressive as to give the international community the strongest possible grounds for humanitarian intervention."[9]

Peter Beinart, a liberal-leaning former editor of the New Republic and the author of the 2006 book The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals-Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, wrote in the aftermath of Cheney - Bush's 2004 re-election: "Today, the war on terrorism is partially obscured by the war in Iraq, which has made liberals cynical about the purposes of U.S. power. But, even if Iraq is Vietnam, it no more obviates the war on terrorism than Vietnam obviated the battle against communism. Global jihad will be with us long after American troops stop dying in Falluja and Mosul. And thus, liberalism will rise or fall on whether it can become, again, what (Arthur) Schlesinger called 'a fighting faith'."[10]

Even David Cole and Jules Lobel, authors of a highly-regarded critique of Cheney - Bush policies on "Why America Is Losing the War on Terror," take the existence of its "counterterrorism strategy" at face value; this strategy has been a "colossal failure," they argue, because it has "compromised our spirit, strengthened our enemies and left us less free and less safe." The U.S. war in Iraq "permitted the Administration to turn its focus from Al Qaeda, the organization that attacked us on 9/11, to Iraq, a nation that did not. The Iraq war has by virtually all accounts made the United States, the Iraqi people, many of our allies and for that matter much of the world more vulnerable to terrorists. By targeting Iraq, the Bush Administration not only siphoned off much-needed resources from the struggle against Al Qaeda but also created a golden opportunity for Al Qaeda to inspire and recruit others to attack US and allied targets. And our invasion of Iraq has turned it into the world's premier terrorist training ground."[11]

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/War_On_Terrorism/ThereIsNoWarOnTerror.html

Bad people get what they deserve. Especially when they cross the white guy with money. Look at all the friends that horsefucking sonofabitch has.

[gratuitous]

8. You know, the bad guys

Duh.

[Octafish]

14. Speaking of money... You know who's getting RICH off the war on ISIS?

KA-CHING: The Company Getting Rich Off the ISIS War

For the Middle East, the growth of the self-proclaimed Islamic State has been a catastrophe.
For one American firm, it’s been a gold mine.

by Kate Brannen
The Daily Beast, 08.02.15

The war against ISIS isn’t going so great, with the self-appointed terror group standing up to a year of U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

But that hasn’t kept defense contractors from doing rather well amidst the fighting. Lockheed Martin has received orders for thousands of more Hellfire missiles. AM General is busy supplying Iraq with 160 American-built Humvee vehicles, while General Dynamics is selling the country millions of dollars worth of tank ammunition.

SOS International, a family-owned business whose corporate headquarters are in New York City, is one of the biggest players on the ground in Iraq, employing the most Americans in the country after the U.S. Embassy. On the company’s board of advisors: former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz—considered to be one of the architects of the invasion of Iraq—and Paul Butler, a former special assistant to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.

The company, which goes by “SOSi,” says on its website that the contracts it’s been awarded for work in Iraq in 2015 have a total value of more than $400 million. They include a $40 million contract to provide everything from meals to perimeter security to emergency fire and medical services at Iraq’s Besmaya Compound, one of the sites where U.S. troops are training Iraqi soldiers. The Army awarded SOSi a separate $100 million contract in late June for similar services at Camp Taji. The Pentagon expects that contract to last through June 2018.

A year after U.S. airstrikes began targeting the so-called Islamic State in Iraq, there are 3,500 U.S. troops deployed there, training and advising Iraqi troops. But a number that is not discussed is the growing number of contractors required to support these operations. According to the U.S. military, there are 6,300 contractors working in Iraq today, supporting U.S. operations. Separately, the State Department is seeking janitorial services, drivers, linguists, and security contractors to work at its Iraqi facilities.

While these numbers pale in comparison to the more than 163,000 working in Iraq at the peak of the Iraq War, they are steadily growing. And with the fight against ISIS expected to take several years, it also represents a growing opportunity for defense, security, and logistics contractors, especially as work in Afghanistan begins to dry up.

“It allows us to maintain the façade of no boots on the ground while at the same time growing our footprint,” said Laura Dickinson, a law professor at George Washington University whose recent work has focused on regulating private military contractors.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/02/the-company-getting-rich-off-of-the-isis-war.html

The reason We the People don't know who is making money off all the wars without end is We the People don't have the proper security clearance. If we did, it's possible we would put a handle on these warmongering gangsters and their traitor hirelings.

[tblue37]

120. Sibel Edmonds knew, so she was fired and slapped with a gag order when she tried to tell. nt

[WinkyDink]

10. Can you handle the truth? It's to OWN THE LAND. GOOGLE "Mineral wealth of Afghanistan"!!!!

http://www.livescience.com/47682-rare-earth-minerals-found-under-afghanistan.html

Despite being one of the poorest nations in the world, Afghanistan may be sitting on one of the richest troves of minerals in the world, valued at nearly $1 trillion, according to U.S. scientists.

Afghanistan, a country nearly the size of Texas, is loaded with minerals deposited by the violent collision of the Indian subcontinent with Asia. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) began inspecting what mineral resources Afghanistan had after U.S.-led forces drove the Taliban from power in the country in 2004. As it turns out, the Afghanistan Geological Survey staff had kept Soviet geological maps and reports up to 50 years old or more that hinted at a geological gold mine.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-war-is-worth-waging-afghanistan-s-vast-reserves-of-minerals-and-natural-gas/19769
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is all about the future of the United States, and having enough minerals to power our space stations, weaponry, medical and scientific equipment, etc. Everything that keeps us dominant.

[Octafish]

17. Trillions for Billionaires!

Most of the most profitable businesses on the planet are in the mineral extraction line.

In 2014, three of the Top 10 most profitable corporations were oil companies.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2015/10/24/24-7-wall-st-most-profitable-companies/74501312/

You know, when it comes to valuable property, especially real property, you need to have the best protection money can buy, the Government of the United States (formerly known as "We the People&quot , War Inc.

You know who gets called a "conspiracy theorist" for mentioning the BFEE around now?

Greg Palast.

Just for mentioning Barrick Gold, one of Poppy Bush's favorite charities, the secret government did all it could to silence The Guardian and Greg Palast...



Their offense, of course, was telling the truth. They had the audacity to mention the "Why" and "How" behind Poppy's chums getting the free stuff in the form of once public property.

Poppy Strikes Gold

Sunday, April 27, 2008
Originally Posted July 9, 2003
By Greg Palast

EXCERPT...

And while the Bush family steadfastly believes that ex-felons should not have the right to vote for president, they have no objection to ex-cons putting presidents on their payroll. In 1996, despite pleas by U.S. church leaders, Poppy Bush gave several speeches (he charges $100,000 per talk) sponsored by organizations run by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, cult leader, tax cheat—and formerly the guest of the U.S. federal prison system. Some of the loot for the Republican effort in the 1997–2000 election cycles came from an outfit called Barrick Corporation.

The sum, while over $100,000, is comparatively small change for the GOP, yet it seemed quite a gesture for a corporation based in Canada. Technically, the funds came from those associated with the Canadian's U.S. unit, Barrick Gold Strike.

They could well afford it. [font color="green"]In the final days of the Bush (Senior) administration, the Interior Department made an extraordinary but little noticed change in procedures under the 1872 Mining Law, the gold rush–era act that permitted those whiskered small-time prospectors with their tin pans and mules to stake claims on their tiny plots. The department initiated an expedited procedure for mining companies that allowed Barrick to swiftly lay claim to the largest gold find in America. In the terminology of the law, Barrick could "perfect its patent" on the estimated $10 billion in ore—for which Barrick paid the U.S. Treasury a little under $10,000. Eureka![/font color]

Barrick, of course, had to put up cash for the initial property rights and the cost of digging out the booty (and the cost of donations, in smaller amounts, to support Nevada's Democratic senator, Harry Reid). Still, the shift in rules paid off big time: According to experts at the Mineral Policy Center of Washington, DC, Barrick saved—and the U.S. taxpayer lost—a cool billion or so. Upon taking office, Bill Clinton's new interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, called Barrick's claim the "biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy." Nevertheless, because the company followed the fast-track process laid out for them under Bush, this corporate Goldfinger had Babbitt by the legal nuggets. Clinton had no choice but to give them the gold mine while the public got the shaft.

Barrick says it had no contact whatsoever with the president at the time of the rules change.(1) There was always a place in Barrick's heart for the older Bush—and a place on its payroll. In 1995, Barrick hired the former president as Honorary Senior Advisor to the Toronto company's International Advisory Board. Bush joined at the suggestion of former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who, like Bush, had been ignominiously booted from office. I was a bit surprised that the president had signed on. When Bush was voted out of the White House, he vowed never to lobby or join a corporate board. The chairman of Barrick openly boasts that granting the title "Senior Advisor" was a sly maneuver to help Bush tiptoe around this promise.

CONTINUED...

http://www.gregpalast.com/poppy-strikes-gold/

Wow. So his flock of supporters in the media and elsewhere wanted it known: George Herbert Walker Bush did do something nice when he was President. It just happened to be that it was for a rich, powerful corporation.

The story continues, in which Mr. Palast details how said gold mining company employed fascist tactics to take over the mine, part of which involved bulldozing the miners homes and mines, some with the miners still inside. Let that, uh, sink in. For his trouble in reporting the story, Barrick threatened to sue.

The Truth Buried Alive

—By Greg Palast, From The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin/Plume, 2003)

Source: UTNE Reader
April 2003 Issue

EXCERPT...

Bad news. In July 2001, in the middle of trying to get out the word of the theft of the election in Florida, [font color="red"]I was about to become the guinea pig, the test case, for an attempt by a multinational corporation to suppress free speech in the USA using British libel law. I have a U.S.-based Web site for Americans who can’t otherwise read my columns or view my BBC television reports. The gold-mining company held my English newspaper liable for aggravated damages for my publishing the story in the USA. If I did not pull the Bush-Barrick story off my U.S. Web site, my paper would face a ruinously costly fight.(1)[/font color]

Panicked, the Guardian legal department begged me to delete not just the English versions of the story but also my Spanish translation, printed in Bolivia. (Caramba!)

The Goldfingers didn’t stop there. [font color="green"]Barrick’s lawyers told our papers that I personally would be sued in the United Kingdom over Web publications of my story in America, because the Web could be accessed in Britain. The success of this legal strategy would effectively annul the U.S. Bill of Rights.[/font color] Speak freely in the USA, but if your words are carried on a U.S. Web site, you may be sued in Britain. The Declaration of Independence would be null and void, at least for libel law. Suddenly, instead of the Internet becoming a means of spreading press freedom, the means to break through censorship, it would become the electronic highway for delivering repression.

And repression was winning. InterPress Services (IPS) of Washington, DC, sent a reporter to Tanzania with Lissu. They received a note from Barrick that said if the wire service ran a story that repeated the allegations, the company would sue. IPS did not run the story.

I was worried about Lissu. On July 19, 2001, a group of Tanzanian police interest lawyers wrote the nation’s president asking for an investigation–instead, Lissu’s law partner in Dar es Salaam was arrested. The police were hunting for Lissu. They broke into his home and office and turned them upside down looking for the names of Lissu’s sources, his whereabouts and the evidence he gathered on the mine site clearance. This was more than a legal skirmish. Over the next months, demonstrations by vicims’ families were broken up by police thugs. A member of Parliament joining protesters was beaten and hospitalized. I had to raise cash quick to get Lissu out, and with him, his copies of police files with more evidence of the killings. I called Maude Barlow, the “Ralph Nader of Canada”, head of the Council of Canadians. Without hesitation, she teamed up with Friends of the Earth in Holland, raised funds and prepared a press conference–and in August tipped the story to the Globe & Mail, Canada’s national paper.

CONTINUED...

http://www.mapcruzin.com/palast-2.htm

So. Greg Palast did something very bad from the BFEE perspective: He told the truth, including the bits about the buried alive gold miners, as it happens. So, the Big Corporation sued and sued and sued. With their deep pockets, they can buy justice, judges, prime ministers, presidents and whoever and whatever else they need to turn a buck, or, as in the case above, get some free stuff in cash out of the public's ground.

[polly7]

43. Great post, Octafish. nt.

[WinkyDink]

130. And yet there are millions of americans who think that 3000 American lives in NYC would mean

anything to the BFEE---other than as catalysts.

[polly7]

44. +1000. nt.

[klyon]

70. and cell phones

<<This is all about the future of the United States, and having enough minerals to power our space stations, weaponry, medical and scientific equipment, etc. Everything that keeps us dominant. >>

and our cell phones that everyone now must own the newest model

[KentuckyWoman]

15. Everyone wants Afghanistan for the location and resources

Whether it's to mine the resources or lock them up pretty much every power in the world wants their fingers in Afghanistan.

[Octafish]

29. Bush, Enron, UNOCAL and the Taliban

Seeing how the other half lives.



Bush, Enron, UNOCAL and the Taliban

by TOM TURNIPSEED
CounterPunch, JANUARY 10, 2002

The Bush Administration’s entanglement with ENRON is beginning to unravel as it finally admits that Enron executives entered the White House six times last year to secretly plan the Administration’s energy policy with Vice-President Cheney before the collapse of the Texas-based energy giant. Meanwhile, even more trouble for our former-Texas-oil-man-turned-President is brewing with reports that unveil UNOCAL, another big energy company, for being in bed with the Taliban, along with the U.S. government in a major, continuing effort to construct pipelines through Afghanistan from the petroleum-rich Caspian Basin in Central Asia. Beneath their burkas, UNOCAL is being exposed for giving the five star treatment to Taliban Mullahs in the Lone Star State in 1997. The “evil-ones” were also invited to meet with U.S. government officials in Washington, D.C.

According to a December 17, 1997 article in the British paper, The Telegraph, headlined, “Oil barons court Taliban in Texas,” the Taliban was about to sign a “($?)2 billion contract with an American oil company to build a pipeline across the war-torn country. … The Islamic warriors appear to have been persuaded to close the deal, not through delicate negotiation but by old-fashioned Texan hospitality. … Dressed in traditional salwar khameez,Afghan waistcoats and loose, black turbans, the high-ranking delegation was given VIP treatment during the four-day stay.”

At the same time, U.S. government documents reveal that the Taliban were harboring Osama bin Laden as their “guest” since June 1996. By then, bin Laden had: been expelled by Sudan in early 1996 in response to US insistence and the threat of UN sanctions; publicly declared war against the U.S. on or about August 23, 1996; pronounced the bombings in Riyadh and at Khobar in Saudi Arabia killing 19 US servicemen as ‘praiseworthy terrorism’, promising that other attacks would follow in November 1996 and further admitted carrying out attacks on U.S. military personnel in Somalia in 1993 and Yemen in 1992, declaring that “we used to hunt them down in Mogadishu”; stated in an interview broadcast in February 1997 that “if someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters.” Evidence was also developing which linked bin Laden to: the 1995 bombing of a U.S. military barracks in Riyadh which killed five; Ramzi Yuosef, who led the 1993 World Trade Center attacks; and a 1994 assassination plot against President Clinton in the Philippines.

Back in Houston, the Taliban was learning how the “other half lives,” and according to The Telegraph, “stayed in a five-star hotel and were chauffeured in a company minibus.” The Taliban representatives “…were amazed by the luxurious homes of Texan oil barons. Invited to dinner at the palatial home of Martin Miller, a vice-president of Unocal, they marveled at his swimming pool, views of the golf course and six bathrooms.” Mr. Miller, said he hoped that UNOCAL had clinched the deal.

Dick Cheney was then CEO of Haliburton Corporation, a pipeline services vendor based in Texas. Gushed Cheney in 1998, “I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It’s almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight. The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But we go where the business is.” Would Cheney bargain with the harborers of U.S. troop killers if that’s where the business was?

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2002/01/10/bush-enron-unocal-and-the-taliban/

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

16. Some combination of scary bogeymen. We lost.

But, we'll call it a victory when we finally get the hell out.

[Octafish]

31. I was hoping we would have closed the books back in 2009.

Not criticizing President Obama, just criticizing his Administration.



Six Americans died there last week.

Talking about victory: And that hospital we bombed? Anyone remember that?

[bobthedrummer]

25. WHY EVIL DOERS, that's who, SIR!

They are bloodthirsty brainwashed killers on drugs, TERRORISTS!

Afghan spy chief resigns after rows with president
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/10/afghan-spy-chief-resigns-after-rows-with-president

K&R

[Octafish]

52. He may be the only uncorrupted guy in that whole bunch.

Rahmatullah Nabil sacked a big part of the Afghani DEA when it came out most were heroin addicts in 2013.

http://www.voanews.com/content/reu-afghan-intelligence-agency-sacks-65-herion-addicts/1774623.html

It reminds me more and more of the sadness around the time the Soviet backed republican Afghan fell in 1979 and the hell just would go on for generations except it's 2016 tomorrow.

[arcane1]

26. Allowing our favored industries first dibs at a trillion dollar's worth of raw materials

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/rare-earth-afghanistan-sits-1-trillion-minerals-n196861

[Octafish]

58. That is a lot of awesome. Plus, the location!

EXCERPT...

Grandmaster of the Great Game

Obama’s Geopolitical Strategy for Containing China

By Alfred W. McCoy
TomDispatch.com, Sept. 15, 2015

In ways that have eluded Washington pundits and policymakers, President Barack Obama is deploying a subtle geopolitical strategy that, if successful, might give Washington a fighting chance to extend its global hegemony deep into the twenty-first century. After six years of silent, sometimes secret preparations, the Obama White House has recently unveiled some bold diplomatic initiatives whose sum is nothing less than a tri-continental strategy to check Beijing’s rise. As these moves unfold, Obama is revealing himself as one of those rare grandmasters who appear every generation or two with an ability to go beyond mere foreign policy and play that ruthless global game called geopolitics.

Since he took office in 2009, Obama has faced an unremitting chorus of criticism, left and right, domestic and foreign, dismissing him as hapless, even hopeless. “He's a poor ignoramus; he should read and study a little to understand reality," said Venezuela’s leftist president Hugo Chavez, just months after Obama’s inauguration. “I think he has projected a position of weakness and... a lack of leadership,” claimed Republican Senator John McCain in 2012. “After six years,” opined a commentator from the conservative Heritage Foundation last April, “he still displays a troubling misunderstanding of power and the leadership role the United States plays in the international system.” Even former Democratic President Jimmy Carter recently dismissed Obama’s foreign policy achievements as “minimal.” Voicing the views of many Americans, Donald Trump derided his global vision this way: “We have a president who doesn’t have a clue.”

But let's give credit where it's due. Without proclaiming a presumptuously labeled policy such as “triangulation,” “the Nixon Doctrine,” or even a “freedom agenda,” Obama has moved step-by-step to repair the damage caused by a plethora of Washington foreign policy debacles, old and new, and then maneuvered deftly to rebuild America’s fading global influence.

Viewed historically, Obama has set out to correct past foreign policy excesses and disasters, largely the product of imperial overreach, that can be traced to several generations of American leaders bent on the exercise of unilateral power. Within the spectrum of American state power, he has slowly shifted from the coercion of war, occupation, torture, and other forms of unilateral military action toward the more cooperative realm of trade, diplomacy, and mutual security -- all in search of a new version of American supremacy.

Obama first had to deal with the disasters of the post-9/11 years. Looking through history’s rearview mirror, Bush-Cheney Republicans imagined the Middle East was the on-ramp to greater world power and burned up at least two trillion dollars and much of U.S. prestige in a misbegotten attempt to make that illusion a reality. Since the first day of his presidency, Obama has been trying to pull back from or ameliorate the resulting Bush-made miasmas in Afghanistan and Iraq (though with only modest success), while resisting constant Republican pressures to reengage fully in the permanent, pointless Middle Eastern war that they consider their own. Instead of Bush's endless occupations with 170,000 troops in Iraq and 101,000 in Afghanistan, Obama's military has adopted a more mobile Middle Eastern footprint of advisers, air strikes, drones, and special operations squads. On other matters, however, Obama has acted far more boldly.

CONTINUED...

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176044/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy,_maintaining_american_supremacy_in_the_twenty-first_century/

[johnnypanic42]

77. ^^This, and of course to save face

If we were to end the war without a clear "victory", then bigwigs risk the people getting upset about all the loved ones who were lost in the past years. Plus everyone who came back with crippling physical and emotional pain, only to find little help back home. It's much more convenient to keep up appearances than to start giving out explanations.

[valerief]

28. We're fighting FOR heroin. Rich people must get richer, after all. nt

[Octafish]

64. Same Ol' World Odor

From Alfred McCoy (2010):

Indeed, as Air Force One headed for Kabul Sunday, National Security Adviser James L. Jones assured reporters that President Obama would try to persuade Afghan President Hamid Karzai to prioritize "battling corruption, taking the fight to the narco-traffickers." The drug trade, he added, "provides a lot of the economic engine for the insurgents."

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175225/tomgram:_alfred_mccoy,_afghanistan_as_a_drug_war__/

From 2013:

(Afghani Intel Head) Rahmatullah Nabil sacked a big part of the Afghani DEA when it came out most were heroin addicts in 2013.

http://www.voanews.com/content/reu-afghan-intelligence-agency-sacks-65-herion-addicts/1774623.html

From the other day:

Afghan spy chief resigns after rows with president

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/10/afghan-spy-chief-resigns-after-rows-with-president

What William Colby is reported to have said after being fired as head of CIA in 1976 and before his fatal boating accident in 1996:

"The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It's possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government."

http://www.alternet.org/story/152337/america_wages_eternal_war_on_drugs,_empowering_the_very_enemies_it_seeks_to_destroy

It all stinks.

[Glassunion]

30. The Nazis, cause they bombed Pearl Harbor. Crack a book for Pete's sake.

[Octafish]

66. The American Dream

Thing really is going up in smoke.

[Matrosov]

32. Everybody

Who doesn't love freedum, Murica, and French Fries.

[Octafish]

94. We need more guns to protect our ideals.

Pentagon Spent $150 Million on Afghanistan "Villas," Security for Lavish Compounds

Thursday, 03 December 2015 00:00
By Sam Knight, The District Sentinel | Report

The Pentagon spent $150 million in Afghanistan renting "villas" and private security contractors for Department of Defense employees there - officials from a now-defunct economic development arm called the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO).

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said "it is unclear what benefit the US received" from the outlays, and that the expenditures appear to have been made without a prior cost-benefit analysis.

SIGAR John Sopko said that TFBSO could have saved taxpayers "tens of millions of dollars" if it had chosen to house personnel "at DOD facilities in Afghanistan." He made the statements in a Nov. 25 letter to Defense Secretary Ash Carter. The correspondence was published this week by SIGAR.

Included among the lavish services Sopko inquired about were luxury commodities provided by private military contractors.

"Triple Canopy provided TFBSO personnel with queen size beds in certain rooms, a flat screen TV in each room that was 27 inches or larger, a DVD player in each room, a mini refrigerator in each room, and an 'investor villa' that had 'upgraded furniture' and 'western-style hotel accommodations,'" the comptroller noted.

"In terms of food, Triple Canopy was required to provide service that was ';at least 3 stars,' with each meal containing at least two entrée choices and three side order choices, as well as three course meals for 'Special Events," Sopko added.

The first director of TFBSO, Paul Brinkley, may have made the decision to locate staff outside of US military bases, but the former federal employee "has not cooperated with our requests for information," SIGAR noted.

[font color="green"]"Wherever possible, we avoided depending on the military," Brinkley said in the passage a 2014 book highlighted by SIGAR in the Nov. 25 letter. "The goal was to show private companies that they could set up operations in Afghanistan themselves without needing military support."
[/font color]

CONTINUED...

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33887-pentagon-spent-150-million-on-afghanistan-villas-security-for-lavish-compounds

The wealthiest times in human history and kids are living in cars.

[malaise]

36. Well we can eliminate the producers of heroin

for sure - heroin is now destroying the white middle class children of America

[Octafish]

104. The Politics of Afghan Opium (2002)

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR - ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch, March 6, 2002

Though Britain has been blaring its support for America’s “War on Terror”, there is public disquiet in the UK at one aspect of the new era of freedom now prevailing in Afghanistan: the renewal of opium cultivation, banned with unprecedented and near total success by Mullah Omar in July of 2000.

In order to receive US aid, Hamid Karzai’s coalition had to make a pro forma announcement in January that opium cultivation is still forbidden, but the extent of this renewed commitment to abstention from Afghanistan’s prime cash crop was almost simultaneously displayed in the unceremonious ejection of Afghanistan’s drug control agency from its offices in Kabul, with the drug czar’s desk being kicked physically into the street.

A couple of weeks ago the London Guardian reported in a headline that “MI5 (Britain’s counter-intelligence agency) fears flood of Afghan heroin”. The ensuing story by Nick Hopkins and Richard Norton Taylor led with the news that “Police and intelligence agencies have been warned that Britain is facing a potentially huge increase in heroin trafficking because of massive and unchecked replanting of the opium crop in Afghanistan The expectation is that the 2002 crop will be equivalent to the bumper one of three years ago, which yielded 4,600 tonnes of raw opium.”

The Guardian went on to report a new assessment by the UN office for drug control and crime prevention, based in Vienna, that after the war the West stands to lose the “best ever opportunity” to suffocate the illegal trade. Afghanistan is the source of 75% of the world’s heroin and 90% of Britain’s supply.

Opium poppies are primarily grown in the south and east of Afghanistan, the regions domination by the Pashtuns, the ethnic fraction that sustained the Taliban until such support became an obvious poor bet.

In political terms, it’s a safe forecast to say that no serious effort will be made to interfere with the opium crop. To do so would be to deal the Karzai regime as a serious a blow as did Mullah Omar to loyalty to the Taliban when he banned opium cultivation (an act variously explained as a last-ditch attempt to get recognition from the West, or as a price support tactic, restricting supply).

These developments lend a certain irony to the enormously costly ads bought by the US government on Superbowl Sunday to inform America’s consumers of illegal drugs that to buy cocaine or heroin is to help terrorism. To the contrary, at last so far as Afghanistan is concerned, to buy heroin and morphine is to provide a sure market for Afghanistan’s farm sector, which employs as many as 200,000 in the fields harvesting the opium from the poppy heads. A sure income to the opium farmers means a cut for the rural barons whose support in essential for the future well-being of America’s selected government, headed by Karzai.

Meanwhile, readers here in the US of the magazine Vanity Fair can marvel at the tact displayed by Maureen Orth in her article in the March issue on “Afghanistan’s Deadly Habit”, about “the symbiotic connection between drugs and terrorism”. The impression given by Orth is that only with the coming to power of the Taliban in 1996 did the opium industry “grow so quickly that in 1999 Afghanistan produced 5,000 tons of opium, more than 70 per cent of the world’s supply”.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2002/03/06/the-politics-of-afghan-opium/

[malaise]

110. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

They were correct but then some rational heads remember Vietnam

[PowerToThePeople]

37. Eurasia. Or was that Eastasia?

Big brother will tell us.

Whoever it is, I hate them!

I love big brother.

[Octafish]

105. Got a box of rocks to boot for ever...

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again;
but already it was impossible to say which was which."

They are monsters, toadies of what seem like "a planet full of Hitlers."


However, as long as two of us still care about democracy we are in the mix. A few quotes:

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.” — Gandhi


And one from Epictetus:

“For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death or hardship.” — Epictetus


And one from a great general:

"Grab 'em by the nose and kick 'em in the pants." — Patton

[Fozzledick]

122. Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Doubleplusgood!

[Rex]

39. The M$M likes this war, not enough are complaining and the ones that do

don't get any national air time...so it is a money train for the M$M and defense contractors. Really probably should have to legally change their name to death merchants...not that it would slow down sales!

[Octafish]

112. Maybe the big enemy isn't overseas at all.

An example of who says what gets mentioned:

Correspondence and collusion between the New York Times and the CIA

Mark Mazzetti's emails with the CIA expose the degradation of journalism that has lost the imperative to be a check to power

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 August 2012 14.58 EDT

EXCERPT...

But what is news in this disclosure are the newly released emails between Mark Mazzetti, the New York Times's national security and intelligence reporter, and CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf. The CIA had evidently heard that Maureen Dowd was planning to write a column on the CIA's role in pumping the film-makers with information about the Bin Laden raid in order to boost Obama's re-election chances, and was apparently worried about how Dowd's column would reflect on them. On 5 August 2011 (a Friday night), Harf wrote an email to Mazzetti with the subject line: "Any word??", suggesting, obviously, that she and Mazzetti had already discussed Dowd's impending column and she was expecting an update from the NYT reporter.

SNIP...

Even more amazing is the reaction of the newspaper's managing editor, Dean Baquet, to these revelations, as reported by Politico's Dylan Byers:

"New York Times Managing Editor Dean Baquet called POLITICO to explain the situation, but provided little clarity, saying he could not go into detail on the issue because it was an intelligence matter.

CONTINUED with LINKS...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/correspondence-collusion-new-york-times-cia

Gee. What should be in American newspapers, stuff like why are we fighting in Afghanistan and whatever happened to that scrap of paper thing, the Constitution, are not discussed at all.

[Holly_Hobby]

41. "Somebody" is making a lot of money off their poppy crops n/t

[Octafish]

127. The Real ''Surge''

The world supply of opium increased 5-fold between 1980 and 2010, according to the UN.“Afghanistan account[s] for around 90% of global illicit opium production in recent years. By itself, Afghanistan provides 85% of the estimated global heroin and morphine supply, a near monopoly.”(see pp 37-38).

SOURCE: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/09/the-real-afghanistan-surge-is-in-heroin-production-and-tripled-opium-cultivation-since-the-us-military-arrived-un-and-us-government-documents.html

Interesting times, ours, Holly_Hobby. No matter what: Happy New Years to You and Yours!

[Scuba]

42. Check the checklist ...

[tabasco]

46. The US invasion of Afghanistan was justified and fully supported by many allies.

The criminal Bush regime had other priorities and launched an illegal invasion of Iraq. Obama was forced to finish the mission that Bush forgot.

[Scuba]

47. Sorry, but 9/11 should have been treated like the crime it was.

Declaring war and invading a country that had no involvement was a mistake of epic proportions.

[tabasco]

49. That's like, your opinion, man. n/t

[Scuba]

50. Did you note that we're still wasting lives and money in Afghanistan, 15 years later?

It's almost five years since Bin Laden was killed, and we're still there.

[Rex]

54. Er uh...er uh...well that is besides the point!

Look, we can only talk about this using the most narrow focus available! Millions of us will not rest until this is treated like a crime.

[tabasco]

59. Thanks to Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq.

I thought I made that clear but maybe not.

[Rex]

53. Yeah and millions of us agree with it, man.

Deal with it?

[tabasco]

60. There's like 300 million in the US alone.

How many millions you talkin' about, man?

[EX500rider]

68. "but 9/11 should have been treated like the crime it was"

....right, just send the US marshals up to the gates of the Al-Qaeda camp and tell them we have a arrest warrant for their leader, that should work out fine, right? lol

[Scuba]

71. If that's the only way you can think of to apprehend criminals you're not very thoughtful.

We had enormous international good-will and could have enrolled Interpol and other law enforcement agencies, helped beef them up with a tiny fraction of what we spent, and apprehended them without declaring a war without end.


Declaring war was a huge mistake.

[EX500rider]

72. Speaking of not very thoughtful...

.....zero law enforcement agencies have the ability to take down a al-qaeda camp in Afghanistan.
And al-qaeda had already declared war on the US, after that it's on, regardless of what we do or declare.

[Scuba]

74. "Beef up " means to add to. And legitimizing the CRIME by ...

... declaring war was a mistake.


15 years later we'really still paying the price.

[EX500rider]

75. So you think law enforcement...

.....should have heavy lift capabilities, tanks and Strykers, heavy machine guns and rockets launchers, air support via Apaches and fighter bombers, not to mention recon units and satellite tasking? lol...how is that any different then sending in the military?

Do you actually picture someone with a bullhorn shouting "come out with your hands up-you're under arrest!" and it working?
And I'd say 15 years later the Taliban & Al-qaeda are still paying the price.

[Scuba]

79. Ever hear of a SWAT team? 'Cause that's what took out Bin Laden.

The Taliban and Al Qaeda seem to be doing pretty well if 15 years later the most bloated military in the world can't eradicate them.

You know, the one with all the heavy lift capabilities, tanks, etc.

[EX500rider]

80. Yeah he was hiding in a house with a few guards..

.....not at a military camp in Afghanistan with hundreds of soldiers with heavy machine guns and RPG's like he was circa 2001...

And the Taliban went from running a country to just plain running.

[Scuba]

81. Hey if you want to defend one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history, be my guest.

[EX500rider]

82. Taking down the Taliban is the worst blunder in YOUR opinion...

.....not so much everybody else.
Leaving the Taliban to offer sanctuary and bases to Al-Qaeda and terrorise the local population with the most criminal & medieval government on the planet sounds like a terrible idea to me.

[Scuba]

83. In case you haven't noticed, we haven't taken them down, 15 years and a trillion dollars later.

We also managed to legitimize a criminal organization. Not smart.

[EX500rider]

86. Actually we did...they are no longer the government of Afghanistan..

....instead they are a guerrilla force on the run. And they were much more "legitimate" as the government of Afghanistan then a outlaw guerrilla force.

[TipTok]

90. The difference between a SWAT team and a US tier one military unit..

... Is the difference between peewee football and the Denver Broncos.

[msanthrope]

109. Seal Team Six is no fucking SWAT Team. Your ignorance of basic tactical

protocol does not help your argument.

[Octafish]

124. Condescension works great for building animus among the lower ranks.

Carry on, Admiral!

[truebluegreen]

103. Al Qaeda was, like, 50 guys total

before our Excellent Middle East Adventure(s). What rational person or persons would think the World's Greatest Military Evah was the best way to take on a bunch of low-life assholes with box cutters? In Afghanistan or Iraq?....and why not Saudi Arabia if that was actually the idea?

"...al-qaeda had already declared war on the US...." is a bunch of hooey. Talk about doing their work for them.

[EX500rider]

108. Maybe you missed the African Embassy bombings...

....or the bombing of the USN Cole, or the 1st World Trade Center bombing or the 2nd WTC attack...

50 guys total?
By 2001, the Taliban controlled as much as 90% of the country, with the Northern Alliance confined to the country's northeast corner. Fighting alongside Taliban forces were some 28,000–30,000 Pakistanis and 2,000–3,000 Al Qaeda militants

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%9314)

[truebluegreen]

119. Wikipedia? Srsly?

But OK. If you must. One TRILLION dollars in Afghanistan and four TRILLION dollars in Iraq--not to mention thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost--and FOR WHAT? To kill or capture maybe 3000 guys? (but never mind the funding)

BTW, the first WTC attack was not al Qaeda, The Taliban is not al Qaeda either and is not "on the run", al Qaeda has metastasized, ISIS has appeared out of nowhere apparently--or out of our tragically and pathetically misguided and ineffectual policies.

Why stop with those attacks? Why not go back to the Iran hostages? Oh, right--that might actually lead to wondering about the cause of that fiasco....

Or you can just keep buying into right wing BS, hook, line and
.
.
.
sinker.

I'm just going to guess what you will do.

[TipTok]

89. Which law enforcement agency would you have sent?

I am genuinely curious? Which government partner had the capacity and the will and the access to cooperate?

[KingCharlemagne]

93. Historical note: the Taliban agreed to extradite bin Laden to a court with international

jurisdiction, if the U.S. would present its evidence. The U.S. Secretary of State refused to do so and the bombing commenced shortly thereafter. From the Taliban's normal request and Powell's absurd and disgusting rejection, I knew the fix was in and began protesting against Bush and the war, starting in November of 2001.

[tabasco]

45. If by "we" you mean NATO and Afghan Army forces

the enemy is primarily the Taliban but also other fuckwit fundamentalist assholes who wish to remain in the 9th century.

The U.S. contributes 9,800 troops (less than a division) to the NATO force of 13,000, but that number is planned to drop to 5,500 next year. The Afghan Army contains 170,000 troops.

[Rex]

55. So 15 years later and why are we still there? How many decades do we need to be there?

None. 9/11 was a crime and should have been investigated like one...but you just ignore 15 years of no gains with your cute statement there.

[JEB]

48. We are saving their mineral resources and poppies

from a 9th century existence and privatizing a lot of tax dollars in the process. Hooray for corporate priorities.

[Octafish]

102. Strange Victory

How the US Managed to Make Afghanistan the World’s Top Heroin Exporter

by JACK BALKWILL
CounterPunch, July 15, 2015

Afghan Brigadier General Abdul Sama was accused recently of smuggling over 40 pounds of heroin.

It should come as no surprise that an Afghan general was caught smuggling heroin, the surprise is that any high official in that country should be charged with a crime for profiting from the trade in illegal drugs while under the watchful eye of American forces.

Under American occupation, Afghanistan quickly became the world’s leader in opium production, producing over 90% of the world’s supply. The Taliban had almost shut down opium production prior to the US invasion in 2001 to the chagrin of international drug runners, and no doubt the international banking industry, which earns big profits laundering billions of dollars in illegal drug money annually. Illegal drugs account for about 8% of all international trade.

Few Americans are aware of the long history of the CIA’s running illegal drugs internationally, thanks to the untiring efforts of the mainstream press. Were citizens aware, few would be surprised that heroin production has skyrocketed under US occupation of Afghanistan.

The tragic case of journalist Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News is a case in point, and represents perhaps the widest-known attempt at suppressing the story of CIA drug-running endeavors, with the mainstream US press shamelessly and dutifully attacking Webb for attempting to expose the inconvenient truth.

That truth: in the 1980’s, the CIA was actively shipping cocaine from Central America into the USA using its own “airline” in order to earn money to circumvent a Congressional ban on continued support for the terrorist Contras, a Reagan-administration-backed counterinsurgency seeking to overthrow democracy in Nicaragua on behalf of US ruling interests. Webb lost his job, and was blackballed from his profession for telling the truth and eventually either was murdered or committed suicide from the pressures our corrupt system can apply against a citizen who blows the whistle.

Former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official Michael Levine wrote that he discovered heroin was being smuggled into the USA inside the bodies of US troops who had died in Vietnam during the sixties. After reporting this ghoulish information, he was transferred and told that it was a CIA operation and he should shut his mouth about it.

After being transferred to South America, Levine then reported on massive cocaine smuggling and was again told to shut his mouth as it too was a CIA operation and he should go along with the program.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/09/us-managed-to-make-afghanistan-the-worlds-top-heroin-exporter/

[JEB]

113. They are just pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.

Thanks for being such a great resource. Bookmarking to follow all the informative links.

[Rex]

56. We are not fighting, we are making sure the opium drug lords have security from

the fundies that want to blow everything into little pieces. We LOVE wasting life and money and HATE it when someone else does it and leaves us out.

What will be totally pathetic is even after 5 more years you will still get the same stupid robot replies with zero critical thinking. This is the perfect war, forgotten and nobody in power cares enough to stop it so the rich can keep making billions off of death and misery.

[Octafish]

101. Well said. Remember when Seymour Hersh had a job at The New Yorker?

The story follows one Richard (PNAC/Another Pearl Harbor) Perle. Just after September 11 and the Washington-Wall Street axis of war profiteering was heating up, Perle hit up Adnan (Iran-Contra/BCCI) Khashoggi for $100 million to make his new "Trireme Partnerships" private disaster investment bank take off.



Khashoggi's money would help launch the Carlyle Group-like investment group Perle founded. The petromoney was not for arms, directly. It was for investing in companies that were going to be making a killing off of homeland security related areas.

Interesting selling point: Perle already had secured financing from in from Boeing and some other bigwigs like Henry Kissinger.

One of the most important articles The New Yorker ever published:

Lunch with the Chairman

by Seymour M. Hersh
17 March 2003

At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.

Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.

The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.

Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

CONTINUED...

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/17/030317fa_fact

A bit on the new TRIREME business...

At Hollinger, Big Perks in A Small World

By Steven Pearlstein
Wednesday, November 19, 2003; Page E01

It's amazing the coincidences you find digging into Hollinger International, the publishing empire that includes Chicago's Sun-Times and London's Daily Telegraph and is quickly slipping from Conrad Black's control.

Let's start with the board of directors, which includes Barbara Amiel, Conrad's wife, whose right-wing rants have managed to find an outlet in Hollinger publications.

And there's Washington superhawk Richard Perle, who heads Hollinger Digital, the company's venture capital arm. Seems that Hollinger Digital put $2.5 million in a company called Trireme Partners, which aims to cash in on the big military and homeland security buildup. As luck would have it, Trireme's managing partner is none other than . . . Richard Perle.

Perle, of course, has been pushing hard for just such a military buildup from his other perch at the Pentagon's secretive and influential Defense Policy Board, where there are a number of other Friends of Hollinger.

CONTINUED (archived nowadays)...

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-309818.html

Where's Justice? Where's Democracy? Who cares!? The to-bomb list grows longer every day. It's why I keep bringing up Dallas and the Flock shifts discussion to the trivial.

[Wounded Bear]

57. Who are we NOT fighting in Afghanistan?

I think that might be a shorter list.

[Octafish]

114. Germany?

From the Escalating Escalator to Nowhere Department:

German government prepares new combat mission in Afghanistan

By Johannes Stern
World Socialist Web Site, 16 November 2015

The German government is making plans to send another 100 troops to Afghanistan, raising the size of its deployed force to 980 personnel. These plans were reported last week in a blog post by military journalist Thomas Wiegold, who cited sources within the government.

The report was then effectively confirmed by Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) defence spokesman Rainer Arnold, who told the Berliner Zeitung, “The order is not being changed. But the Bundeswehr [army] must be put in a position to fulfill it.”

According to Spiegel Online, the cabinet will decide the text of the mandate for 2016 on Wednesday. Subsequently, the Bundestag (parliament) will debate and then vote on it in its last session before the Christmas break. According to the magazine, the Bundeswehr will also remain in northern Afghanistan longer than originally planned. The training mission in Mazar-i-Sharif, the fourth-largest city in the country, will be continued until at least the end of 2016.

The US halted its military withdrawal from Afghanistan in mid-October. Under the new plans of the Pentagon, the current contingent of about 9,800 US troops is to be maintained over the coming year. Contrary to earlier withdrawal plans, the strength of the American troops is only to be reduced at the end of 2016 or even the beginning of 2017.

So far, the German government and a majority of the media are trying to play down the escalation. The claims that German soldiers will not participate in “combat operations” has been repeated ad nauseam.

Wiegold reports, however, that the mandate of the Bundeswehr would be changed in one point. “In the new mandate, support for the Afghan consultative level by German forces will no longer be limited to meetings and the like, but would also be possible in the situation on the ground,” Wiegold writes.

In plain language, this means that German soldiers can “accompany” and “advise” Afghan forces trained by them in combat situations. One need not be a military expert to understand the consequences of this decision. The German “trainers” and “advisers” will be directly involved in hostilities and if necessary “defend” themselves. The official announcement of new Bundeswehr combat operations in Afghanistan is then only a matter of time.

CONTINUED...

Lots of countries on this escalator heading down. Perhaps our Deutscher allies can better train the locals to ally with our main shared "democratic" ideal, the worship of property.

[TBF]

63. Bad people. Don't you like cheap oil?

[Octafish]

115. All the oil in the world won't bring back a lost life.

How NAZIs think: "Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat." - Hermann Goering

How free people think: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Why our elected officials these days have such a hard time choosing between the two is a real baffler.

Stop World War for Oil and Empire and Budget Dilemma Solved

Fewer and fewer politicians stand up for We the People anymore.



It's getting old:

Bush Family Values: War, Wealth, Oil

Four generations have created an unsavory web of links that could prove an election-year Achilles' heel for the president

by Kevin Phillips
February 8, 2004 by The Los Angeles Times

Four generations have created an unsavory web of links that could prove an election-year Achilles' heel for the president.

SNIP SADLY THERE'S SO MUCH THERE...

Washington lawyer Jack Blum, the ace investigator for Kerry's subcommittee back then, is said to be advising him now, which could be meaningful. Ironically, the Bush family's century of involvement in oil, armaments and global intrigue has never been at the center of the national debate since the Bushes starting running for president in 1980.

The reason? Insufficient public knowledge. The only Bush biography published before George H.W. Bush won election in 1988 was a puff job written by a former press secretary, and the biographies of George W. Bush in 2000 barely mentioned his forefathers. Millions of Republicans who have loyally voted for Bushes in three presidential elections simply have no idea. Here are circumstances and biases especially worth noting.

The Bushes and the military-industrial complex: George H. Walker and Samuel Prescott Bush were the dynasty's founding fathers during the years of and after World War I. Walker, a St. Louis financier, made his mark in corporate reorganizations and war contracts. By 1919, he was enlisted by railroad heir W. Averell Harriman to be president of Wall Street-based WA Harriman, which invested in oil, shipping, aviation and manganese, partly in Russia and Germany, during the 1920s. Sam Bush, the current president's other great-grandfather, ran an Ohio company, Buckeye Steel Castings, that produced armaments. In 1917, he went to Washington to head the small arms, ammunition and ordnance section of the federal War Industries Board. Both men were present at the emergence of what became the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Prescott Bush, the Connecticut senator and grandfather of the current president, had some German corporate ties at the outbreak of World War II, but the better yardstick of his connections was his directorships of companies involved in U.S. war production. Dresser Industries, for example, produced the incendiary bombs dropped on Tokyo and made gaseous diffusion pumps for the atomic bomb project. George H.W. Bush later worked for Dresser's oil-services businesses. Then, as CIA director, vice president and president, one of his priorities was the U.S. weapons trade and secret arms deals with Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the moujahedeen in Afghanistan.

In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about how "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." That complex's recent mega-leap to power came under George H.W. Bush and even more under George W. Bush — with the post-9/11 expansion of the military and creation of the Department of Homeland Security. But armaments and arms deals seem to have been in the Bushes' blood for nearly a century.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0208-05.htm

The politicians and their backers have gamed the system to serve the Military Industrial Complex and its owners.

PS: Thank you for grokking, TBF: Unlike oil, each human life is infinitely valuable.

[TBF]

116. ...

[kwassa]

69. We are fighting the people that assassinated JFK.

Everyone knows that.


(now including tag so I don't get another hide from the humor-impaired.)

[Octafish]

73. ''Money trumps peace.'' -- appointed pretzeldent George Walker Bush, Feb. 14, 2007

While Corporate McPravda ignored the remark and accompanying smirk fir the last eight years, I remember Cindy Sheehan tried to bring it to our nation's attention.

Bush's family has direct ties to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963:

Poppy Bush warned FBI -- AFTER -- JFK assassinated.

In the hour of the death of President John F. Kennedy, Texas oilman George Herbert Walker Bush named a suspect to the FBI in a "confidential" phone call. He then added he was heading for Dallas. Skeptics need not take my word for it, that's what Poppy told the FBI:



Here's a transcript of the text:

TO: SAC, HOUSTON DATE: 11-22-63

FROM: SA GRAHAM W. KITCHEL

SUBJECT: UNKNOWN SUBJECT;
ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT
JOHN F. KENNEDY

At 1:45 p.m. Mr. GEORGE H. W. BUSH, President of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company, Houston, Texas, residence 5525 Briar, Houston, telephonically furnished the following information to writer by long distance telephone call from Tyler, Texas.

BUSH stated that he wanted to be kept confidential but wanted to furnish hearsay that he recalled hearing in recent weeks, the day and source unknown. He stated that one JAMES PARROTT has been talking of killing the President when he comes to Houston.

BUSH stated that PARROTT is possibly a student at the University of Houston and is active in political matters in this area. He stated that he felt Mrs. FAWLEY, telephone number SU 2-5239, or ARLINE SMITH, telephone number JA 9-9194 of the Harris County Republican Party Headquarters would be able to furnish additional information regarding the identity of PARROTT.

BUSH stated that he was proceeding to Dallas, Texas, would remain in the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel and return to his residence on 11-23-63. His office telephone number is CA 2-0395.

# # #

Gee. Why was Poppy Bush in Dallas when JFK was assassinated?

Could it be, he was on official business? I suspect he was on Secret Government business. After all, his eldest son bragged during his Texas Air National Guard and Harvard grad school days that his daddy was CIA.

Here's an FBI document from the same week of the assassination in which FBI Director J Edgar Hoover briefed one "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency." Some strange coincidence there, wot?



Here's a transcript of the above:

Date: November 29, 1963

To: Director
Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Department of State

From: John Edgar Hoover, Director

Subject: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY
NOVEMBER 22, 1963

Our Miami, Florida, Office on November 23, 1963, advised that the Office of Coordinator of Cuban Affairs in Miami advised that the Department of State feels some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in U. S. policy, which is not true.

Our sources and informants familiar with Cuban matters in the Miami area advise that the general feeling in the anti-Castro Cuban community is one of stunned disbelief and, even among those who did not entirely agree with the President's policy concerning Cuba, the feeling is that the President's death represents a great loss not only to the U. S. but to all of Latin America. These sources know of no plans for unauthorized action against Cuba.

An informant who has furnished reliable information in the past and who is close to a small pro-Castro group in Miami has advised that these individuals are afraid that the assassination of the President may result in strong repressive measures being taken against them and, although pro-Castro in their feelings, regret the assassination.

The substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. W. T. Forsyth of this Bureau.

# # #

I do remember that GHWB was head of the CIA when the Church Committee was looking into the CIA assassination programs. He made things all friendly-like and turned what had been a serious hunt for truth under previous DCI Colby into another dog-and-pony show that was big on show and light on facts.

Regarding Dallas: Now I don't know if Poppy was a trigger man, was only there to watch what happened or what just happened to be there. I do know Poppy Bush has never explained these memos. He's never even admitted where he was the day JFK was killed.

Seeing how he would go on to become President, as would his dim son and the remote possibility of a second Jebthro! getting the job, I believe it's vitally important that we learn the Truth.

Why should anyone care? The United States and the world haven't been the same since November 22, 1963. And not a single major player in the nation's mass media have stepped up and demanded a real investigation. So, it's up to us, We the People.

What's more, Poppy Bush sheltered mass-murdering jet-bombing terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles.

So yes, I think you are correct, even though you say you are being sarcastic. Thanks for the remembering.

[Rex]

85. The corporate media seems to conveniently forget to report a lot of things.

Poppy knows where the bodies are buried.

[Octafish]

91. That seems like synchronicity, so much serendipity.

Through a Glass Darkly

Alexander Cockburn
Lies Of Our Times (p. 12-13)
November 1991

"What was surprising to me was Reagan’s condition. He was exhausted to the point of incoherence throughout much of the interview and could not remember the substance of any subject that had been discussed apart from Mitterrand’s expression of anticommunism. I had not seen Reagan at such close range since the assassination attempt nearly four months earlier, and was shocked at his condition.... Reagan simply was unable to recall the contents of the talks in which he had just participated.... The interview concluded at a signal from Deaver, who did not seem to find the president’s condition unusual.”

Thus ran Lou Cannon’s recollections of an interview with the Commander-in-Chief in 1981, as set forth in his book President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), published earlier this year. But how did Cannon describe Reagan’s condition to the readers of the Washington Post when he wrote up his interview? In the July 23, 1981, Washington Post,Cannon’s story appeared under the headline “Reagan Describes Summit Meeting as ‘Worth Its Weight in Gold.’ ” Cannon’s report gives the impression of a lucid chief executive returning home after a fruitful colloquy with other western leaders at the economic summit held in Ottawa in mid-July. Cannon did mention in the tenth paragraph that “Reagan appeared tired to the point of near-exhaustion,” but this observation was quickly qualified by the opinion of “aides” that the president had been doing a lot of prep for the conference and was also worried about the Middle East.

Cannon shared his brief session with Reagan aboard Air Force One with Hedrick Smith of the New York Times, who similarly gave his readers the impression of a president in touch with things rather than the incoherent old man they had actually encountered. As did Cannon, Smith wove the few quotable remarks from Reagan into a tapestry of attributed presidential dicta passed on — and no doubt confected— by Meese, Deaver, and Speakes. It is clear from Cannon’s account of the conference itself that Reagan was fogged up throughout the actual conference, occasionally interjecting trivial observations or homely jokes into the proceedings and then relapsing into bemused silence. Cannon’s memoir is one more indication of the cover-up that took place in the wake of Hinckley’s assassination bid on March 30, 1981. At the time of the shooting, the press was full of phrases like “bouncing back,” “iron constitution,” and other terms indicating that Reagan had emerged from the ordeal in good shape. In fact Reagan very nearly died on the operating table and was a dotard afterwards. He never fully recovered.

Conclusion: Unless a president is actually dead, the White House press corps can be relied upon to present him as both sentient and sapient, no matter how decrepit his physical and mental condition.

SOURCE in PDF form:

http://liesofourtimes.org/public_html/1991/Nov1991%20V2%20N10/Nov1991%20V2%20N10.pdf

Old news to you, Rex-San, never screened on CIABCNNBCBSFoxNooseNutworks. The coup d'grace was "serving" Pruneface as veep. We may yet recover...



At a dinner during Republican National Convention, Detroit, 1980.

George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of ‘Counter-Terrorism’

By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58

A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.

During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.

Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.

The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: [font size="5"][font color="green"]As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.[/font color][/font size]

SNIP...

Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.

SNIP...

NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985

The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.

[font color="red"]The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.

The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.

Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified.[/font color] The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.

CONTINUED...

CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.

Nobody's touched CIA ever since. And Reagan is a saint.

[MrMickeysMom]

99. This has been a year of some interesting books, don't you think?

I can't read them faster... I'm not retired yet!

None of this should shock anyone, but somehow it does. But maybe the way these books have been suppressed by the media gives you as to WHY. It's a clue about the cozy CIA relationship of the NYT's Wa-Po, WSJ. They've suppressed through time...

The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government," about how Dulles’ time at the CIA helped shape the current national security state. Talbot discusses Dulles’ close ties to The New York Times, the CIA-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and more.

I should read Talbot's book next.

Happy New Year, my friend!

[Octafish]

100. Media Blackout shows it is Great Book.

Rupert Murdoch and friends in Corporate McPravda are ignoring what it means for how the Inited Stste has become a safe zone for traitors, warmongers, and plutocrats.

“Every president has been manipulated by national security officials”: David Talbot exposes America’s “deep state”

From World War II though JFK, "The Devil's Chessboard" explores how Allen Dulles used the CIA as a tool of elites

LIAM O'DONOGHUE
Salon.com, Oct. 15, 2015

This year’s best spy thriller isn’t fiction – it’s history. David Talbot’s previous book, the bestseller “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” explored Robert F. Kennedy’s search for the truth following his brother’s murder. His new work, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,” zooms out from JFK’s murder to investigate the rise of the shadowy network that Talbot holds ultimately responsible for the president’s assassination.

This isn’t merely a whodunit story, though. Talbot’s ultimate goal is exploring how the rise of the “deep state” has impacted the trajectory of America, and given our nation’s vast influence, the rest of the planet. “To thoroughly and honestly analyze (former CIA director) Allen Dulles’s legacy is to analyze the current state of national security in America and how it undermines democracy,” Talbot told Salon. “To really grapple with what is in my book is not just to grapple with history. It is to grapple with our current problems.”

Just as America’s current national security apparatus has used terrorism as a justification for spying on American citizens, torture, and the annihilation of innocent civilians as collateral damage, Talbot places these justifications in a Cold War context, by showing how spymaster Allen Dulles shrugged off countless atrocities using the threat of communism. For readers unfamiliar with Dulles’ history, the first few chapters are like being splashed in the face with a bucket of ice water. Talbot’s assertion that Dulles is a psychopath is hard to dismiss after the intelligence agent is shown covering up the Holocaust prior to America’s intervention into World War II by keeping crucial information exposing the horrors of concentration camps from reaching President Roosevelt. Allen Dulles and his fellow Cold Warriors saw Russia, a U.S. ally during World War II – not Nazi Germany – as the real enemy.

Jumping from geopolitical strategy to the psychological realm, Talbot details how it was not only enemies who had reason to fear Dulles, but his own friends and family, as well. The book veers into a dark, terrifying investigation of the MKUltra Project, a hideous “mind control program” developed by the CIA during Dulles’ reign as director, that dosed unsuspecting people with LSD, pushed the limits of sleep deprivation and engaged in other deeply unethical experiments. The program has been exposed, bit by bit, over decades, thanks to lawsuits and previous investigative reporting, but Talbot sheds light on how Dulles subjected his own son and attempted to “enroll” his wife in these hideous “therapies.”

By the time “The Devil’s Chessboard” eventually climaxes with the events that unfolded in Dallas in 1963, Talbot’s argument that Dulles had both the power and temperament to execute such a plot is more than believable. “Dulles’ favorite word about someone was whether they were useful or not,” Talbot said. “And that’s the way he thought of everyone – to what extent could he use them.”

CONTINUED...

It's connecting the dots the CIA Controlled & Corporate Owned News will never mention, even if their secret Swiss bank accounts depended on it.

This is exactly what we've so hard worked to see, MrMickeysMom. You and me and everybody who gives a darn about where the nation has gone. Finally, the truth is getting into the light of day.

Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! Happy New Year to you and yours, my Friend!

[KingCharlemagne]

97. And it's 1-2-3, what are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't

give a damn. Next stop's Afghanistan.

Or something like that.

[Octafish]

123. One Definition of Insanity

[WinkyDink]

131. ;-)

[madinmaryland]

106. Kaos...

'nuff said.

[Octafish]

125. A Strategy of Tension

GLADIO: THE SECRET U.S. WAR TO SUBVERT ITALIAN DEMOCRACY

by Arthur E. Rowse
Covert Action Quarterly, Dec. 1994

EXCERPT...

THE STRATEGY OF TENSION

Despite the failure of Plan Solo, the CIA and the Italian right had largely succeeded in creating the clandestine structures envisioned in Operation Demagnetize. Now the plotters turned their attention to a renewed offensive against the left.

To win intellectual support, the secret services set up a conference in Rome at the luxurious Parco dei Principi hotel in May 1965, for a "study" of "revolutionary war." The choice of words was inadvertently revealing, since the conveners and invited participants were planning a real revolution, not just warning of an imaginary communist takeover. The meeting was essentially a reunion of fascists, right-wing journalists, and military personnel. ``The strategy of tension'' that emerged was designed to disrupt normality with terror attacks in order to create chaos and provoke a frightened public into accepting still more authoritarian government. 20

Several "graduates" of this exercise had long records of anticommunist actions and would later be implicated in some of Italy's worst massacres. One was journalist and secret agent Guido Giannettini. Four years earlier, he had conducted a seminar at the U.S. Naval Academy on "The Techniques and Prospects of a Coup d'Etat in Europe." Another was notorious fascist Stefano Delle Chiaie, who had reportedly been recruited as a secret agent in 1960. He had organized his own armed band known as Avanguardia Nationale (AN), whose members had begun training in terror tactics in preparation for Plan Solo. 21

General De Lorenzo, whose SIFAR had now become SID, soon enlisted these and other confidants in a new Gladio project. They planned to create a secret parallel force alongside sensitive government offices to neutralize subversive elements not yet ``purified.'' Known as the Parallel SID, its tentacles reached into nearly every key institution of the Italian state. Gen.Vito Miceli, who later headed SID, said he set up the separate structure "at the request of the Americans and NATO." 22

SNIP...

THE BOLOGNA TRAIN STATION BOMBING

A huge explosion at the Bologna train station two years after Moro's death may have whitened the hair of many Italians - not just for the grisly toll of 85 killed and more than 200 injured - but for the official inaction that followed. Although the investigating magistrates suspected neofascists, they were unable to issue credible arrest warrants for more than two years because of false data from the secret services. By that time, all but one of the five chief suspects, two of whom had ties to SID, had skipped the country. 74 The T4 explosive found at the scene matched the Gladio material used in Brescia, Peteano and other bombings, according to expert testimony before Judge Mastelloni. 75

In the trial, the judges cited the "strategy of tension and its ties to 'foreign powers.'" They also found the secret military and civilian structure tied into neofascist groups, P-2, and the secret services. 76 In short, they found the CIA and Gladio.

But their efforts to exact justice for the Bologna bombing came to nothing when, in 1990, the court of appeals acquitted all the alleged "brains." P-2 head Gelli went free, as did two secret service chiefs whose perjury convictions were overturned. Four gladiators convicted of participating in an armed group also won appeals. That left Peteano as the only major bombing case with a conviction of the actual bomber, thanks to Vinciguerra's confession.

The sorry judicial record in these monstrous crimes showed how completely the Gladio network enveloped the army, police, secret services and the top courts. Thanks to P-2, with its 963 well-placed brothers, 77 the collusion also extended into the top levels of media and business.

CONTINUED...

http://www.mega.nu/ampp/gladio.html

On the other side of the stage, Kontrol.

[bluedigger]

107. And what are we fighting for?

Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, the next stop is Afghanistan.

[Octafish]

118. He's a Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man

"Different from other movements and revolutions in this country: We have no enemies."

[raouldukelives]

111. We are fighting ourselves.

Like the swaggering gunslinger Jack Palance in Shane. We toss our spare handgun at sheep herders feet and insult them until they pick it up.

"You all saw it. He had a gun."

Rinse, lather, repeat.

[Octafish]

117. Operation CYCLONE

Haven't seen Pew Research's results, but some do remember the question:

“Money started pouring in. CIA agents starting going all over the Muslim world recruiting people to fight in the great jihad. Bin Laden was one of the early prize recruits. He was not only an Arab. He was also a Saudi. He was not only a Saudi. He was also a multimillionaire, willing to put his own money into the matter. Bin Laden went around recruiting people for the jihad against communism.

I first met him in 1986. He was recommended to me by an American official of whom I do not know whether he was or was not an agent. I was talking to him and said, ‘Who are the Arabs here who would be very interesting?’ By here I meant in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He said, ‘You must meet Osama.’ I went to see Osama. There he was, rich, bringing in recruits from Algeria, from Sudan, from Egypt, just like Sheikh Abdul Rahman.”

https://medium.com/dan-sanchez/they-sow-the-cyclone-we-reap-the-blowback-dc938c9075a3#.g1tebi6fi

PS: Thank you for understanding exactly what it's about, Raoulito-san. Shane did the right thing too, and he kept his hands off Jean Arthur, who was dynamite in "Arizona."