Reply #43: Actually, you have to go back to the days following WWII to.... [View All]

[Media_Lies_Daily]

...understand the roots of today's NeoCon movement. The U. S. government, together with the military-industrial complex, determined that communism was the next major enemy of Big Business. That led to the nearly simultaneous formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the CIA to "contain" the "communist threat".

The forerunner of the operations branch of the CIA, the OSS, had been involved in a number of operations during WWII, primarily in the Pacific Theater. But, the operations in which the OSS participated in the European theater included close cooperation with the French Mafia, as well as organized crime in the U. S.

As far as I can determine from my readings, the cooperation with organized crime was the beginning of the U. S. intelligence community's long association with the drug trade. They discovered that the drug trade produced a large quanity of cash that was not accountable to any budget oversight and could be used for any purpose whatsoever. Some experts have estimated that today's drug trade produces an amount of money equal to a minimum of 10% of the total combined budget of all of the intelligence agencies. That is a substantial amount of money, to say the least.

The association with organized crime also gave the intelligence community a means to conduct certain operations that could never be traced back to the U. S., such as assassinations of foreign heads of state and other operations requiring absolute deniability.

If you look closely at the combination of forces used in the late 1950s-early 1960s clandestine war against Cuba, you will find the following elements:

*the U. S. intelligence community, primarily the CIA;

*organized crime in the form of representatives from the Marcello (Louisiana/Midwest), Giancana (Chicago/Midwest), and Trafficante (Florida/Caribbean) "families";

*the U. S. military;

*and the various anti-Castro Cuban organizations.

Nearly every port along the Gulf Coast was involved in activities including but not limited to raids on Cuban holdings, gun-running, and the drug trade. Some of the more notable individuals involved in the anti-Castro operations included Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, E, Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, Bernard Barker, Richard Nixon (one of the original planners of the Bay of Pigs), George H. W. Bush, Col. Lansdale, and others too numerous to mention. You may notice that these names have been connected to a number of events in recent U. S. history such as the Cuban Task Force, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr., Indo-China/Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra....the list is endless.

IMHO, the NeoCons are direct political descendants of the people described above...and they are MUCH more powerful and therefore, MUCH more dangerous.