April 18, 2019

Rep. Ilhan Omar
404 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] Avenue North
Suite 203
Minneapolis MN 55401

Dear Congresswoman:

I am enclosing an article I wrote recently for a national political magazine.
I have noticed your comments on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict which have caused much controversy in the media of late. I happen to personally agree with your statements about a two state solution and Palestinian rights. I also think, like you and Bernie Sanders, that American policy there has shifted too far toward the conservative Likud.

This article shows that President Kennedy was probably the last president who was willing to stand up to the conservative strain in Israel on both atomic weapons and Palestinian rights. To the point that he was threatening to hold up funds. This apparently caused the resignation of Ben Gurion.

The reason I am forwarding it to you is that it shows that there is a precedent for your ideas, and it came from the White House. Therefore you can say that what you are saying is pretty much what JFK was saying, and you can prove it.


Sincerely,

Something is up in Sixth Floor land.

And it just may be that Perry and Hugh Aynseworth helped out.

We always talk about chain of custody in this case. Here is another example of it not existing.

Was it all a myth anyway?

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kenne...dding-ring

Lawsuit Seeks Answers on Five Men Arrested on 9/11

They were among the few individuals we know of to be arrested on 9/11. Five men were pulled over in a white Chevrolet van and taken into custody on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, after they were seen celebrating the World Trade Center attacks from a parking lot across the Hudson River in New Jersey.
The FBI had alerted local police departments to be on the lookout for the van, which was pulled over in East Rutherford, N.J., by Bergen County police. The van was searched by a bomb-sniffing dog, yielding a positive test for the presence of explosive traces, and samples were taken for testing, but the public has never been told whether actual explosive residues were found.
The men were held for 71 days, according to ABC News, before they were deported to their home country of Israel without being charged. Much of the findings of the FBI's investigation were redacted and have yet to be released to the public.
Though the story received considerable news coverage, neither the FBI nor the U.S. Department of Justice has ever adequately explained to the public why the five men were released without any criminal charges being filed. The 9/11 Commission then failed to consider any of the evidence developed during the FBI's investigation of the five men.

Now, nearly 18 years later, victims' families and advocates are looking to put an end to the mystery. On March 25 of this year, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, the Lawyers' Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, and 9/11 family member Bob McIlvaine filed a lawsuit seeking to force the FBI to assess and report the evidence it gathered during the detention of the five men. The lawsuit also calls for the FBI to address evidence of the World Trade Center's explosive demolition along with four other areas of unreported 9/11 evidence.
AE911Truth is not attached to the four latter counts of the lawsuit, since they do not relate to our mission of researching and educating the public about the World Trade Center's explosive demolition. However, we are keenly interested in compelling the FBI to address the evidence regarding the five men arrested in New Jersey Jersey because of the potential that explosives traces were present in the van. Our goal is for the FBI to report the results of any tests for explosive residues that were performed, as such results may shed further light on how the World Trade Center Twin Towers and Building 7 were destroyed.
Other types of evidence could also be relevant. For example, one FBI report indicates that a visitor's card for WTC 1 (or possibly WTC 7) was found in the white van. According to another FBI report, one of the men stated that he had been told by one of his fellow detainees on the morning of 9/11, "They are taking down the second building," and that they went to watch from the roof. The man further stated that, at the time, he thought the second tower had been demolished to prevent it from tipping over.
Whatever the FBI found during its investigation of these five men, none of it was included in the 9/11 Commission Report nor in the 2015 report by the 9/11 Review Commission, which was mandated by Congress to conduct an assessment of any evidence known to the FBI that was not considered by the 9/11 Commission. Now we are working to enforce Congress's mandate because the American people and everyone affected by 9/11 deserve to know the truth.
These men were arrested and held for 71 days. What evidence did the FBI gather about them and why was so much redacted? Why were they deported without being charged? And why have the details been kept secret all these years? With this lawsuit, AE911Truth, the Lawyers' Committee, and Bob McIlvaine are hoping to finally get answers to all these questions.
The full text of the count in the FBI Lawsuit complaint regarding the arrest and investigation of these five individuals is shown below.

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COUNT II.A.: CLAIM FOR DECLARATORY AND INJUNCTIVE RELIEF UNDER THE ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURE ACT RELATING TO DEFENDANTS' FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH THE MANDATE FROM CONGRESS THAT DEFENDANTS PERFORM AN ASSESSMENT OF ANY EVIDENCE KNOWN TO THE FBI THAT WAS NOT CONSIDERED BY THE 9/11 COMMISSION RELATED TO ANY FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTED IN ANY MANNER TO THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, SPECIFICALLY REGARDING EVIDENCE REGARDING THE ARREST AND INVESTIGATION OF THE "HIGH-FIVERS" OBSERVED AND SELF-PHOTOGRAPHED CELEBRATING THE ATTACKS ON THE WORLD TRADE CENTER ON 9/11

50. This is an action pursuant to the Administrative Procedures Act to compel agency action unlawfully withheld; to hold unlawful and set aside agency action found to be arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion; to hold unlawful and set aside agency action found to be not in accordance with law; and to hold unlawful and set aside agency action found to be in excess of statutory authority or limitations, or short of statutory right.
51. All of the foregoing and subsequent paragraphs are incorporated herein by reference.
52. Another category of evidence related to the 9/11 attacks ignored in the FBI 9/11 Review Commission's Report is the evidence regarding five individuals who were arrested on 9/11 after witnesses reported that at least three individuals in a white van (license number recorded) were seen celebrating and filming the WTC attack early in the morning of September 11, 2001.
53. The FBI has the names of the five individuals arrested and Plaintiffs' are in possession of several lengthy redacted investigative reports by the FBI regarding the arrest, interrogation and investigation of these individuals.
54. New Jersey police stopped and arrested these individuals pursuant to a bulletin issued on 9/11 by the FBI regarding the white van, and these individuals were transported by New Jersey State Police to a location where the FBI took custody of these arrestees.
55. According to the FBI's detailed reports, three individuals were witnessed celebrating (the FBI's term was "high-fiving") and filming the WTC during the terrorist attacks on the morning of 9/11/01 as early as the first aircraft strike at the WTC, prior to the second tower being struck by an aircraft, according to two separate eye-witnesses (and a third witness who observed their van arrive at the apartment building in question at 8:15 am on 9/11). The FBI held and interviewed the five persons arrested for some time (weeks).
56. These arrestees self-identified as Israelis, who were eventually deported without indictment or prosecution.
57. One of these individuals arrested has been publicly reported to have made a statement after returning to Israel to the effect that these Israelis were sent to the United States to "document the event" (indicating foreknowledge of 9/11).
58. One foreign newspaper reported, based on an interview with a family member of one of the arrestees, that these individuals had videotaped the collapse of both WTC towers.
59. The five specific individuals arrested on 9/11 in this incident were all reported to have worked for a specific moving company at the time, but evidence was obtained by the FBI indicating that the company may not have been a legitimate moving company.
60. Police and FBI investigations related to the arrest of these individuals on 9/11 are reported to have included, in addition to development of the film confiscated from the arrestees and creation of enlarged prints which showed some of the arrestees smiling as they watched one or both of the WTC towers burning, an explosives residue test on a fabric sample from a blanket found in these individuals' van and swab samples to be tested for explosive residue.
61. The white van driven by these arrestees was searched by a trained bomb-sniffing dog which yielded a positive result for the presence of explosive traces.
62. At least one WTC1 visitors' card was found in these arrestees' van. A phone number was also found in the possession of one of the arrestees which corresponded to another moving company that the FBI's Miami office believed had been used by one of the alleged 9/11 hijackers.
63. One of the arrestees stated to the FBI that one of his coworkers told him on the morning of 9/11 that "they are taking down the second building" and he and a few of his coworkers climbed onto the roof of the company's building to observe the WTC and take photographs, and at the time he stated he thought the second WTC tower had been demolished intentionally to prevent it from tipping over.
64. The FBI as part of its investigation compiled the addresses used by the alleged hijackers, the addresses used by suspected associates of the alleged hijackers, and the addresses used by the five arrestees. An FBI report indicates that one or more of these arrestees was possibly connected to a suspect in the WTC terrorist attacks.
65. The manager of the company that employed the five individuals arrested, whose name is also known by the FBI, apparently fled the country after the arrest of his five employees.
66. Some of the FBI agents who were involved with the detention and interviews of these "high-fivers" were reported to have drawn the conclusion that these arrestees were in some way involved with the 9/11 terror attacks.
67. These arrestees were eventually released and deported, apparently against the better judgment of some of the FBI agents involved in the investigation.
68. The evidence noted above regarding these "high-fivers" was not considered by the original 9/11 Commission, and was not assessed in the later 9/11 Review Commission's Report.
69. Although all of the above referenced facts and FBI investigative reports regarding these "high-fivers" were (obviously) in the possession of the FBI during the FBI 9/11 Review Commission's work, none of this evidence was assessed by the 9/11 Review Commission or reported to Congress by the 9/11 Review Commission, in violation of the mandate of Congress.
70. The actions of Defendants challenged in this Count of the Complaint are final agency actions for which there is no other adequate remedy in a court other than via the federal mandamus statute 28 U.S.C. § 1361 (addressed in Count II.B infra).
71. For all the reasons stated herein, Plaintiffs are entitled to declaratory and injunctive relief to remedy Defendants' failure to comply with their non-discretionary duty imposed by Congress requiring Defendants to have prepared an external independent assessment of any evidence known to the FBI that was not considered by the 9/11 Commission related to any factors that contributed in any manner to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, specifically in regard to the aforementioned evidence of the arrest, interrogation, and investigation of the 9/11 "High-Fivers."

COUNT II.B.: REQUEST FOR MANDAMUS RELIEF

72. All of the foregoing and subsequent paragraphs are incorporated herein by reference, specifically including the paragraphs in Count II.A.
73. The actions of Defendants challenged in this Count of the Complaint are final agency actions for which there is no other adequate remedy in a court, other than via the APA (addressed in Count II.A. supra).
74. For all the reasons stated herein, Plaintiffs are entitled to injunctive relief via the federal mandamus statute 28 U.S.C. § 1361 to remedy Defendants' failure to comply with their non-discretionary duty imposed by Congress requiring Defendants to have prepared an external independent assessment of any evidence known to the FBI that was not considered by the 9/11 Commission related to any factors that contributed in any manner to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, specifically in regard to the aforementioned evidence of the arrest, interrogation, and investigation of the 9/11 "High-Fivers."

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[TD]The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.

That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for "democratic" societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.

But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists in Trump's Washington, in league with Ecuador's Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.

Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair's "paramount crime" is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange's crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.

The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, "sow the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilisation". The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.

Assange's principal media tormentor, the Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called "the greatest scoop of the last 30 years". The paper creamed off WikiLeaks' revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.

With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book's authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.

With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding joined the police outside and gloated on his blog that "Scotland Yard may get the last laugh". The Guardian has since published a series of falsehoods about Assange, not least a discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trump's man, Paul Manafort, had visited Assange in the embassy. The meetings never happened; it was fake.

But the tone has now changed. "The Assange case is a morally tangled web," the paper opined. "He (Assange) believes in publishing things that should not be published.... But he has always shone a light on things that should never have been hidden."

These "things" are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the expose of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It all available on the WikiLeaks site.

The Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have already visited the newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of a hard drive. On this, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office clerk, Sarah Tisdall, leaked British Government documents showing when American cruise nuclear weapons would arrive in Europe. The Guardian was showered with praise.

When a court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editor going to prison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall was betrayed, prosecuted and served six months.

If Assange is extradited to America for publishing what the Guardian calls truthful "things", what is to stop the current editor, Katherine Viner, following him, or the previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, or the prolific propagandist Luke Harding?

What is to stop the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, who also published morsels of the truth that originated with WikiLeaks, and the editor of El Pais in Spain, and Der Spiegel in Germany and the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. The list is long.

David McCraw, lead lawyer of the New York Times, wrote: "I think the prosecution [of Assange] would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers... from everything I know, he's sort of in a classic publisher's position and the law would have a very hard time distinguishing between the New York Times and WilLeaks."

Even if journalists who published WikiLeaks' leaks are not summoned by an American grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning will be enough. Real journalism is being criminalised by thugs in plain sight. Dissent has become an indulgence.

In Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecuting two whistle-blowers who revealed that Canberra's spooks bugged the cabinet meetings of the new government of East Timor for the express purpose of cheating the tiny, impoverished nation out of its proper share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea. Their trial will be held in secret. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is infamous for his part in setting up concentration camps for refugees on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus, where children self harm and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed mass detention camps for 30,000 people.

Real journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the Ministry of Defence in London produced a secret document which described the "principal threats" to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists. The latter was designated the major threat.

The document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. "We had no choice," Assange told me. "It's very simple. People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power. That's true democracy."

What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake - if there are others - are silenced and "the right to know and question and challenge" is taken away?

In the 1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler, whose films helped cast the Nazi spell over Germany.

She told me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependent not on "orders from above" but on what she called the "submissive void" of the public.

"Did this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?" I asked her.

"Of course," she said, "especially the intelligentsia.... When people no longer ask serious questions, they are submissive and malleable. Anything can happen."

And did.

The rest, she might have added, is history.
JOHN PILGER, 13 APRIL 2019[/TD]
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I've been listening to Jim D's series w/Dave Emory and something they mentioned in passing triggered a couple of thoughts. Seems LHO met with a certain "Kostikov" or "Kostin", yes? Moscow's lead assassin in the Western Hemisphere, yes? Well, has anybody (WC, HSCA, etc. etc. etc.) ever identified or even alleged who this guy killed? Or who he ordered killed? Or why? (i.e. the killing of Orlando Latelier and we know who did that one, yes? Sure as hell wasn't the Russians!) And if the CIA KNEW this guy was such a killer, why didn't they OUT him and demand that Mexico throw him out?!?


Rhetorical questions to be sure, but just another couple of data points if anybody is in a debate with a Warrenista!

I had to post this in a hurry, so I confess I haven't read it! Thought it might be of interest tho.::bowtie::

It's at https://www.truthdig.com/

Title: "American History for Truthdiggers: JFK's Cold War Chains"

Between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia: Overview of the book by Paul L. Williams

by Antony C. Black

On the hot summer morning of Aug. 2, 1980 a massive explosion ripped apart the main waiting room of the Bologna railway station. Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds more injured. Though at first blamed on Italy's legendary urban guerrillas, The Red Brigades, it soon emerged that the attack had, in fact, originated from within the deep state' of the Italian government itself.



The full nature of this secret parallel state would only come to light a decade later when the Italian premier, Giulio Andreotti, under questioning from a special commission of inquiry, revealed the existence of arms caches stashed all around the country and which were at the disposal of an organization which later came to be identified as Gladio'.

The members of this group turned out to include not only hundreds of far-right figures in the intelligence, military, government, media, Church and corporate sectors, but a motley assortment of unreconstructed WW2 fascists, psychopaths and criminal underworld types to boot. And despite Andreotti's attempts to airbrush the group as patriots' it appeared evident to much of the rest of the Italian polity that these seemed rather more like pretty bad folk indeed. Little did they know. Follow-up research by the likes of Daniele Ganser, Claudio Celani, Jurgen Roth and Henrik Kruger traced connections to similar groups spread throughout Europe of which all were found to be deep state terrorist organizations, and all of which were found, ultimately, to be subservient unto the highest levels of the CIA and NATO command structures.

The moniker Gladio' (after the two-edged sword used in classical Rome) was eventually broadened to include a bewildering host of related deep state terrorist structures including: P2' In Italy, P26' in Switzerland, Sveaborg' in Sweden, Counter-Guerrilla' in Turkey and Sheepskin' in Greece. This (hardly definitive) European list was then found to have connections not only to virtually every US sponsored secret state terrorist organization the world over (including the likes of Operation Condor in Latin America), but also to many of the global drug cartels that provided the secretive wealth needed to fund and otherwise lubricate the whole rotting, corrupt shebang.

If all this sounds sinister enough, it pales in light of the detailed structure of the dazzlingly diabolical Gladio edifice. And it is to those details we now repair vis a vis an overview of the remarkable, if otherwise unheralded, 2015 work by journalist Paul L. Williams entitled, Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia'. Though there are other books on the subject worthy of honourable mention (including Daniele Ganser's seminal tome, NATO's Secret Armies', and Richard Cottrell's recent and stylishly written, Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe'), it is to Williams that I believe we owe a particular debt of gratitude in having provided a more or less fully integrated portrait of the global machinations of Operation Gladio.

Before embarking on our grim, if yet fascinating, journey it is worth first noting that whilst Gladio' was officially acknowledged and condemned by the European Parliament (in Nov., 1990; Washington and NATO having ever after refused comment' on the matter), and its multifarious organs and factions ordered dismantled, it is hardly likely that the latter was ever fully enacted. The historical context of Gladio', then, is really the quintessential backdrop to understanding the trademark false flag events of the modern era.

OF SPOOKS AND MADE MEN

The general origins of this labyrinthine network of deep state actors lay in the so-called stay-behind-armies' set up at the end of WW2 by the Allied powers (principally the US) ostensibly to act as resistance forces should the Soviets ever decide to invade Europe. Quickly, however, the raison d'etre of the armies' transmogrified into a mission to counteract, not external invasion, but internal subversion'. Such would eventually result in the undermining not just of post-war European socialism, but of Italian, Greek and later global democracy itself.

But we get ahead of ourselves.

The primal author of the stay-behind-armies', Williams informs us, was General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence during the Second World War. Having foreseen early on that the Reich was doomed to defeat, Gehlen had "concocted the idea of forming clandestine guerilla squads composed of Hitler youth and die-hard fascist fanatics" ostensibly to fend off the inevitable Soviet invasion. These guerilla units he referred to as werewolves'.

Not ones to miss a fascist opportunity when they saw it, the US Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, and the forerunner of the CIA), under the leadership of William Wild Bill' Donovan, quickly enlisted both Gehlen and SS General Karl Wolff (in 1945) in forming the Gehlen Organization (later to transform into the present-day German BND) and which received its initial funding from US Army G-2 intelligence resources.

The American point-man on this was Allen Dulles, the first president (in 1927) of the Council on Foreign Relations, and later the first head of the CIA. Duly incorporated into the American fold, the werewolves' were, given that their initial meddling took place in Italy, rebranded as gladiators'. Operation Gladio was born.

In 1947 the CIA (having, that year, superseded the OSS) was faced with its first daunting task, i.e. how to prevent the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from forming the next government. Elections were scheduled for 1948 and the PCI was a virtual shoe-in not just in Italy proper, but in Sicily as well. Fortunately, Gladio' was ready and waiting. The gladiators had been training in a special camp set up in Sardinia under the local command of the former WW2 Italian fascist leader, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese.

In addition, hundreds of American mafioso began to arrive on the shores of Italy to lend a hand with the communist problem'. The arrival of the made men' was the result of Donovan's efforts from 1943 onward in working with American mobsters Charles Lucky' Luciano and Vito Genovese to conger new (drug) funding for the OSS's off-books' operations, and to reinstall the Sicilian mafia on the island in the leadup to Operation Husky (the Allied invasion of Sicily). These forces were now unleashed on the Italian electorate, and through 1948 an average of five people a week were murdered by the CIA-backed terrorist units. The results were grimly predictable. Hallelujah, the PCI were defeated and the Christian Democrats returned to power.

Still, the threat remained. Fully half the Italian electorate were communist sympathizers and, moreover, leftist politics pervaded much of the rest of the diseased European body. More would have to be done. The problem, however, was money. There simply wasn't enough of it. Thus, the initial $200 million in funding for Gladio (which had come from the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations) was quickly exhausted. And though the National Security Act of 1947 had provided the loophole that allowed for the CIA's covert operations, it had not allowed for their overt Congressional funding. There lay the rub. Thankfully, Paul Helliwell knew how to salve the itch.

Paul Helliwell was an inner member of the original OSS (along with key scions of the Morgan, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, DuPont and Ryan families) and, according to Williams, likely the greatest unsung hero of the nicknamed Oh-So-Social' club. It was he, who having cut his teeth in the drugs-for-arms trade by shepherding opium deals with the Kuomintang (KMT, the Chinese National Army fighting against Mao Zedung), conjured the brilliant inspiration to do the very same thing in the United States itself.

Thus, it was at his suggestion that Donovan elected to forge the deep bond (and that exists to this day) between the nation's intelligence services and organized crime. Enter stage left such notables as Lucky' Luciano, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky and the Trafficante and Gambino crime clans. Quickly the streets of, first, New York, and later many an American metropolis, were flooded with heroin. These early, halcyon days would soon lead to the infamous French Connection', thence to the Golden Triangle' (where the CIA's very own Air America' transported drugs out of South East Asia during the Vietnam War) and, later, to the Balkan, Mexican, and Colombian drug cartels.

All very well and good. But, to begin with, there was yet a fly in the whole drugs-for-arms-for-terror ointment. To wit: how to pay off the mafioso without anyone noticing; indeed, how to stash, launder and hide all of this financial derring-do from the prying eyes of the authorities; you know, the real-enough authorities, the Treasury cops and so forth. How do you do that?

THE VATICAN CONNECTION

Article 2 of the Lateran Treaty of 1929 was clear and unequivocal. The Article, which served to regulate matters between the Holy See and the Italian state, expressly forbade any interference of the latter in the affairs of the former. It is hardly conceivable, of course, that the framers of the Treaty ever foresaw what such immunity could actually mean in practice. But then they probably hadn't reckoned on the fiendish formation of the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), or more colloquially, the Vatican Bank.

Established by Pope Pius XII and Bernardino Nogara in 1942, the Bank would quickly come to serve as the principal repository post-war both for the Sicilian Mafia and for the OSS/CIA wherein all of the monies and documents relating to drug trafficking and to Gladio would be stored and laundered. Already in 1945 the pope had held private audiences with Donovan to discuss the implementation of Gladio and where, as Williams reports, Donovan was knighted as an anti-Communist crusader with the Grand Cross of the Order of Sylvester. Prior to this time Pius XII had proven himself a loyal ally in working with Dulles and the OSS to establish the ratlines used to help prominent Nazis escape Europe. Now, new horizons beckoned. The first duty at hand, of course, was to destroy the communist menace in respect of the 1948 elections. To this end the pope authorized his own terror squads (under Monsignor Bicchierai) to assist the gladiators and the made men' in intimidating the Italian electorate. Task accomplished.

The second duty at hand, however, was longer term. Communism, socialism and, indeed, any Godless form of progressive government, anywhere, had to be stamped out at source. For this money would be needed. Lots of money. Untraceable money. Drug money. Now in the months before the 1948 election the CIA deposited some $65 million into the Vatican Bank. The source of these monies came from heroin produced by the Italian pharmaceutical giant, Schiaparelli, and which was then transported by the Sicilian mob into Cuba where it was cut and then distributed to New Orleans, Miami and New York by the Santo Trafficante family. Lucrative though this trade was, it was not nearly enough to suit the needs of the CIA and Gladio'. More would be required. More drug networks and more banks. Gladio was about to global.

To start with a new alliance was forged with the Corsican mafia. Unlike the Sicilian mob, the Corsicans had extensive experience in processing heroin, a skill they had picked up through years of working with Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese technicians in French Indochina. A supply route then emerged running from Burma through Turkey to Beirut and thence to Marseille. Alas, there was a slight hitch when the leftist dockworkers in Marseille, being sympathetic to the rebel army under Ho Chi Minh, refused to load and unload the boats from Indochina. No worries. A deft bit of terror administered by the Corsican boys (and funded by the CIA), and problem solved. By 1951, then, Marseille had become the center of the Western heroin industry. Voila, the French Connection'.

Meanwhile, Wild Bill Donovan had resigned' from the CIA to form the World Commerce Corporation (WCC) whose primary function was to facilitate the arms-for-drugs deals with the KMT. Paul Helliwell lent a needed hand at the helm by heading up Sea Supply, Inc., a CIA front company gainfully employed in shipping heroin from Bangkok. By 1958 the whole operation was so successful that a second supply route was established running through Saigon. Here, the help of Ngo Dinh Diem, the US installed despot of South Vietnam, proved invaluable.

Still, there was a potential cloud on the horizon, i.e. word of all these shenanigans was bound to leak out. What to do? The first reflex, naturally, was to pin the blame for the West's growing heroin problem on the Communist Chinese under Mao Zedung. Check. The second, more considered response, was to organize an ongoing campaign to deflect attention away from, and burnish the image of, the CIA. And to this end, in 1953, did the CIA establish Operation Mockingbird'. Under Mockingbird' the Agency recruited hundreds of American journalists to spread false stories and propaganda about the Company's benign' activities. Eventually, this depraved fabric of anti-journalism enlisted entire news networks including ABC, NBC, Newsweek, Associated Press, and The Saturday Evening Post. Now the guys and gals at Langley could relax. Henceforth, American (and global) eyes were dutifully prismed through the rose-coloured lens of Mockingbird'.

But back to the Vatican. The IOR, solid banking pillar of the Gladio community that it was, could hardly be expected to do all the heavy lifting itself. After all, the global heroin industry would, by 1980, be pulling in a cool $400 billion annually. En route an extensive and orchestrated financial network would be required to supplement God's Bank. As with any fine orchestra it helps to have a maestro of exquisite genius to run the show. A nice round of applause, then, for one Michele Sindona. The biography of Sindona begins, humbly enough, with his degree in tax law from the University of Messina in 1942 after which, in quick succession, he rockets to stardom as a leading financial adviser to the Sicilian mafia, an agent for the CIA, and, thereafter, a financial intimate of the Holy See. By the late 1950s Sindona had become the lynchpin in a nexus between the mob, the CIA and the Vatican that would eventually, as Williams chillingly puts it, "result in the toppling of governments, wholesale slaughter and financial devastation."

Though a full elaboration of this bewilderingly complex financial system is best left to the author, it is worth briefly savouring a few highlights. To begin with Sindona purchased Fasco AG, a Liechtenstein holding company and through which he purchased his first bank the Banca Privata Finanziaria (BPF). The BPF then became, by way of a Chicago-based intermediary bank, Continental Illinois, a principal conduit for transferring drug money from the IOR for the purposes of Gladio. In fact, it was this banking pipeline in particular which provided the filthy lucre that fueled the 1967 coup d'etat in Greece. But more on this heady stuff in a bit.

It was through his Chicago contacts that Sindona first met Monsignor Paul Marcinkus, popularly known as the Gorilla'. The Gorilla was six foot four, "a gifted street fighter…and a lover of bourbon, fine cigars and young women". Under Sindona's patronage Marcinkus would soon rise to become both Pope Paul VI's personal body guard and the head of the IOR. A third musketeer in the person of Roberto Calvi (the assistant and later full director of the famous, Milan-based Banco Ambrosiano) came to complete the three Vatican amigos. Together they would cut a dramatic, collective figure in the global banking underworld all through the anni di Piombo' (the Gladio years of lead' in Italy from 1969 to 1987). Exactly how dramatic is illustrated, par excellence, by Calvi's eventual dark demise. Who among us, old enough to remember, can forget the macabre spectacle (June, 1982) of Calvi's body hanging from Blackfriars Bridge, his feet dangling in the Thames and pockets stuffed with five masonry bricks. Sindona would also later be murdered (1986) by means of a cyanide-laced cup of coffee whilst in jail and under maximum protective custody'.

Calvi was a key figure in establishing a series of eight shell companies (six in Panama, two in Europe) through which drug lords like Pablo Escobar in South America were encouraged to deposit their ill-gotten loot. (The CIA put shoulder to wheel by helping ferry the Escobar cocaine in a fleet of planes operating out of Scranton airport in Pennsylvania). The monies were then transferred via Banco Ambrosiano to the IOR which took a 15 to 20 percent processing fee. From there funds were distributed to a host of European banks set up by Sindona for use by Gladio units spread throughout the continent. In addition to the flow of cash from the cartels, funds were bled from Banco Ambrosiano into the eight shell companies again for use by the CIA in funding its covert operations.

This points up a general operating procedure of the entire Gladio banking' system, i.e. the system, far from being designed to turn a profit, was expressly designed to lose' money; that is, to have it siphoned off into covert ops. Such explains the regular and spectacular failure of a host of CIA-related banks including: Franklin National Bank (purchased by Sindona), Castle Bank & Trust, Mercantile Bank & Trust (both set up by the ubiquitous Paul Helliwell), Nugan Hand Bank (in Australia, and from which funds were diverted to undermine Prime Minister Gough Whitlam during the Vietnam War), and the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (based in Karachi in aid, primarily, of the Southeast Asian heroin trade). Indeed, it was precisely the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano itself that brought both Calvi and Sindona to their untimely ends.

Finally, it is worth noting here that these august institutions were linked in a tight criminal embrace with many of the most prestigious financial firms in America including Citibank, the Bank of New York, and the Bank of Boston. The base of the iceberg, in short, extended far and wide. But then, what was all this money really doing?

THE TERROR

Following the thwarting of Italian democracy in 1948 the Gladio secret armies' entered into a period of what one might characterize as pregnant incubation. Thus, it was during the 1950s that the various drug supply routes and financial networks were being created, as were some of the principal political organizations. Probably the most important of the latter was Propaganda Due' otherwise known as P2'.

Created in 1877 as a Freemasonry lodge for the Piedmont nobility, it was banned by Mussolini in 1924 only to be resurrected post-war with the approval of Allen Dulles, himself a thirty-third degree Mason. The lodge, though at first dominated mainly by spooks, spies, military and mafia figures, would soon encompass a who's who of Italian political, corporate, banking and media supremos to boot. Indeed, the organization would eventually spread shoots throughout Europe as well as North and South America, and its members would come to include such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig.

A P2' denizen of especial significance was Licio Gelli. The latter's pedigree was impressive: a former volunteer in the 735th Black Shirts Battalion, a former member of the elite SS Division under Field Marshall Goering and, thereafter, a chummy employee of the US Counter Intelligence Corps of the Fifth Army. Working with William Colby, the OSS agent in France, and Allen Dulles, the OSS director, Gelli soon gained entry to the Vatican where he helped set up the Nazi escape routes to Argentina. His ties with Argentina would later prove critical in facilitating Operation Condor (the US-backed mass assassination program in 1970s and 80s South America). Moreover, in 1972, Gelli would emerge as P2's supreme Worshipful Master' under whose leadership the lodge would reach its full, horrific flowering. Finally, it is worth mentioning at this juncture that it was as a result of a police raid on Gelli's villa in 1981 that the full, tentacled structure of Gladio would come to light. But we digress.

One of the first substantive actions of Gladio was the Turkish coup of 1960. Here the incumbent Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, made the fatal mistake of believing he was really in charge and thereafter initiating a visit to Moscow to secure economic aid. The stay-behind-army' in Turkey known as Counter-Guerilla, in alliance with the Turkish military, quickly disabused him of any such delusions by arresting and executing him. Throughout the 1970s both Counter-Guerilla and its youth wing, the Grey Wolves, would stage "ongoing terror attacks…that resulted in the deaths of over five thousand students, teachers, trade union leaders, booksellers and politicians".

Counter-Guerilla would also figure in the Turkish coup of 1980 when its commander, General Kenan Evren, toppled the moderate government of Bulent Ecevit. According to Williams, US President Jimmy Carter phoned in his approval to the CIA station-chief in Ankara, Paul Henze, with a jubilant, Your boys have done it!' What they had done, of course, was set up a tyranny in which thousands more would be tortured while incarcerated. The Turkish Gladio boys would also be unleashed in the 1980s upon the PKK the Kurdistan Workers Party. All of this was in keeping with Zbigniew Brzezinski's (Carter's national security advisor) core vision of the importance of controlling Central Asia to which Turkey was both a vital portal and, thus, a key NATO ally.

Alas, Gladio would prove something of a disappointment in France, where, after having backed a series of assassination attempts against the regrettably too independent President Charles de Gaulle, it found itself on the receiving end of de Gaulle's boot. Actually, it was NATO itself at the time, headquartered in Paris that was unceremoniously kicked out of France (in 1966, whence it took up its present cozy and famously corrupt abode in Brussels). But, of course, de Gaulle was ahead of the curve and understood all too well who was really behind the mayhem and murder.

Greece, unfortunately, did not fare as well. In 1967 the Hellenic Raiding Force', a franchise of Gladio and playing to a NATO authored script entitled Operation Prometheus, overthrew the left-leaning government of George Papandreou. The ensuing military dictatorship would last until 1974 though this would hardly signal the end of Greece's tribulations. From 1980 until near the turn of the millennium, the nation would suffer under a reign of terror and political assassinations nominally attributed to November 17', an alleged Marxist revolutionary group, but which in fact (and here I briefly tag-team with authors Cottrell and Ganser) was yet another faction of Greek-Gladio known as Sheepskin'.

This illustrates a point originally brought home by Ganser's research to the effect that virtually every alleged leftist revolutionary' group said to have been operating in Europe throughout the post-war years was, in truth, either a Gladio secret army' unit or else had been completely infiltrated by state intelligence services, and was subsequently being steered by them for Gladio-style state-terrorist ends.

Such is well documented for the Red Brigades' in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof Gang' in Germany (the gang' being conveniently and cold-bloodedly exterminated on the night of the long knives', Oct.18, 1977, whilst under custody in Stammheim prison). It also, just by the by, speaks to the universally attested prior association of many a modern-day terrorist' and their police and intelligence handlers.

In Spain, during the early 70s, Stefano delle Chiaie and fellow Gladio agents from Italy provided their consulting expertise to General Francisco Franco's secret police who conducted over a thousand violent acts and some fifty murders. Following Franco's death in 1975, delle Chiaie moved to Chile to lend a fatherly hand in helping the CIA-backed Augusto Pinochet set up his death squads. In later years the Spanish Gladio unit would find gainful employment hunting down and assassinating the leaders of the Basque separatist movement.

Of Italy we have already mentioned the years of lead', but just to capture a few highlights. The strategy of tension' unleashed in 1969 in Italy the same year Condor' was unleashed in Latin America was in response to the renewed popularity of Communism throughout the country and which, itself, was partly in response to the uptick in revolutionary sentiment globally as a result of antipathy towards the US war on Vietnam. The antidote, naturally, to this woeful state of progressive affairs was a healthy dose of terror. According to Williams, "Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Advisor, issued orders to Licio Gelli through his deputy, General Alexander Haig, for the implementation of terror attacks and coup attempts." The terror attacks began on December 12, 1969 when a bomb exploded in the crowded lobby of a bank in Milan's Piazza Fontana in which seventeen people were killed and eighty-eight injured. Over the ensuing years (from 1969 to 1987) there followed more than 14,000 acts of violence with a political motivation'. The most infamous of these was, of course, the Bologna bombing in August of 1980 and which led to the initial exposure of Gladio in Italy.

Of the many attempted coups and related high-level political machinations engineered by Gladio forces in Italy (1963, 1970, 1976) and Sicily (more or less continually on tap throughout the decade), the kidnapping on March 16, 1978 and murder a month or so later of Prime Minister Aldo Moro was likely the most sensational. Moro had dared to include communists in his new coalition government. At first blamed on the usual suspects, i.e. the Red Brigades, further investigation (to begin with by journalist Carmine Mino' Pecorelli who paid with his life) led to the real usual suspects including CIA operative Mario Moretti (eventually convicted of the killing) and thence up the line to Gelli, then to Italy's interior minister Francesco Cossiga and onwards to Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The high-level intrigue did not stop at the murder of a prime minister however. At least two Popes felt the sharp end of the Gladio sword as well. In August of 1978, Pope Paul VI died. His successor, the preternaturally timid John Paul I, soon gave his handlers a very real shock when, after looking at the IOR accounts, he issued a call for reform'. The very next day the otherwise fastidiously health-conscious pontiff in office barely a month was dead. Not just dead but expired with the telltale bulging eyes and horrific grimace of acute poisoning. His autopsy was definitively thwarted by an illegal and hastily contrived embalming, and his personal papers disappeared without a trace. Archbishop Marcinkus, having been temporarily removed prior, was returned to office whilst Calvi and Sindona, also under scrutiny at the time, breathed a (temporary) sigh of relief.

Having been (almost) burned once the overseers of Gladio made sure to engineer the follow-up Papal succession. Thus did Cardinal Karol Wojtyla shuffle onto the historical proscenium as Pope John Paul II. Now, at first, John Paul worked seamlessly with the CIA and Gladio. Together they oversaw the destruction of Liberation Theology in Latin America, the continued undermining of Italian democracy, and the dispensing of black funds for Solidarity in Poland. Ah, but how the best laid plans do oft go astray. By the spring of 1981 not only were events spinning out of control for Gladio itself, but so too were they for Banco Ambrosiano, and by extension, the IOR. The Pope, inexplicably, refused to act.

Compounding this lapse was an unaccountable trifecta of moral turpitude that witnessed the Holy Father suddenly breaking into treasonous song singing the benefits of rapprochement with the Soviets; recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization; and, egads, nuclear disarmament. The order from on high was given: Kill the Pope'.

But best blame it on the Soviets. So issued the Bulgarian Thesis' wherein a lowly Bulgarian airline employee (Sergei Antonov) was set up as the patsy. In truth, the key actors in the Papal plot came straight from Gladio central casting. The starring role in the drama fell to General Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italy's military intelligence (SISMI) and the commander of the Italian Gladio units. His co-star, Theodore Shackley, was the infamous CIA mastermind who had already served as executive producer on such epics as Operation Phoenix (involving the murder of some 40,000 non-combatants in Vietnam), Operation Condor, the setting up of Nugan Hand Bank, and, along with delle Chiaie, the murder of Salvador Allende. West Germany's BND (the national security services) garnered a significant credit by harbouring and financing the two actual assassins, Mehmet Agca and Abdullah Cath (both from Turkish Gladio). And, of course, the Mighty Wurlitzer, i.e. Operation Mockingbird, figured prominently in the aftermath grinding out endless tunes on the Bulgarian Thesis' despite the fact of Agca's eventual (lone) conviction in the shooting.

The production ended all somewhat anticlimactically when the Pope (on May 13, 1981) was only seriously wounded. In a fascinating denouement, however, on Christmas Day 1983, the Pope opted to publicly forgive Agca. Italian state television was allowed to record the moment when John Paul asked his assassin from whom he had received his orders. Leaning forward to hear Agca's response the Pope appeared momentarily frozen, then clasped his hands to his face.
Though the Pontiff kept it secret, there was little need to guess at the answer.

The adventures of both Agca and Cath are the stuff of legend. Indeed, Cath figures in events well beyond the time line of Gladio proper, enough to suggest that Gladio never really shut down at all. But that, as they say, is a whole other story and one I leave to the author to take up.
* * *
Paul Williams has made a fine contribution here. Certainly, if the day ever comes when, seated across from some smug establishment interlocutor, you are taken to task for being a conspiracy monger' well, you need only lean back, smile gently, and utter but two words….'Operation Gladio'.

I was interviewed yesterday by Len Osanic from Black Ops radio about my recent court case regarding the Bloomfield collection at Library and Archives Canada and a story I wrote about Albert Osborne a few years ago. If anyone is interested in listening to it, the link is below.


https://blackopradio.com/archives2019.html

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Bolsonaro's Brazen Meeting With the CIA

On March 18, Brazil's extreme-right President Jair Bolsonaro made history. Outside the official agenda of his first official trip to the United States he paid a visit to CIA Headquarters, becoming the first ever Brazilian President to do so. In contrast, Bolsonaro has never visited ABIN, Brazil's moribund equivalent of the CIA.
On the agenda, it is assumed, were the ongoing coup attempt in Venezuela, in which the United States wants further Brazilian assistance, unrest in Nicaragua, Cuba, and Bolivia's coming election. More pertinent is what role, if any, the CIA had in Bolsonaro's own.
"No Brazilian president had ever paid a visit to the CIA, This is an explicitly submissive position. Nothing compares to this." remarked former Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, one of the world's most respected diplomats.
In June 2013, the scandal broke that Brazil, President Rousseff, several of her ministries and Oil Giant Petrobras, were all under surveillance by the National Security Agency. Brazil was supposed to be a U.S. ally, and as a result Rousseff cancelled her scheduled official visit to the United States.

At this time, Jair Bolsonaro, then a fringe extremist congressman with no realistic presidential chances, dismissed the fully documented revelations of U.S. mass spying on Brazil as a distraction, even suggesting that Dilma was concocting the scandal to distract from her own domestic problems.

[URL="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald"]Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
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[URL="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1107718669453414405"]
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During the Snowden reporting, I was repeatedly told/warned that CIA's largest permanent presence is in Brazil (due to Cold War roots when CIA helped overthrow Brazil's democratically elected government & then propped up the resulting military regime). It's worse now:
[URL="https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1107714138422370304"]Ben Norton
@BenjaminNorton


Brazil's fascist leader Bolsonaro immediately visited CIA headquarters on his first official trip to the US.

This is the perfect symbol for Latin America's far right, which has for decades drowned the left in blood thanks to the help of its CIA benefactorhttps://apnews.com/9e097b1cb92c4400b76c096da8f26910 …

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[URL="https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id=1107718669453414405"]

1,504[/URL]
8:01 PM - Mar 18, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy

[URL="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1107718669453414405"]

755 people are talking about this


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In 2016, immediately following the soft coup which removed Dilma Rousseff, Bolsonaro ally and one of Brazil's most powerful men, General Sérgio Westphalen Etchegoyen, who was then Brazil's newly named head of institutional security met with the CIA's chief in Brasilía. The secret meeting was accidentally revealed when Etchegoyen's agenda was published.
Bolsonaro's CIA visit has not only angered steadfast anti-imperialists, who the country should now look to for answers after years of naivety and complacency over the U.S. role in the country's descent into political distress it has even left conservative commentators exasperated.
The new Government was already delivering a wish list of demands, both corporate and strategic, including the lease of the long-prized Alcantâra rocket base to the United States Military, the first such presence on Brazilian soil since the second world war. The U.S. has gained enormously since the coup of 2016, advantages which have only expanded and solidified with the election of Bolsonaro.
The Brazilian President was accompanied to the CIA HQ by Sérgio Moro, the US-trained Inquisitor-Judge turned Justice Minister who was responsible for the politically motivated jailing of Bolsonaro's main competitor in the 2018 election, Lula da Silva, who was certain to win until his forced removal from the race. With this, Moro delivered the election to Bolsonaro, and was immediately rewarded with a ministerial position. The pair met Gina Haspel, the head of the agency who had been removed in 2013 after revelations of her direct role in torture of kidnapped suspects in the wake of 911. Given that Bolsonaro is an enthusiastic supporter of torture and publicly eulogises torturers of Brazil's dictatorship era, this cannot have caused him any concern.
Sérgio Moro meanwhile has long been accused of being a CIA agent or simply working in some capacity for the United States, and there has long been evidence, albeit inconclusive, to support this hypothesis. Before taking up his ministerial position, Moro headed Lava Jato (Carwash), the internationally promoted and now discredited anti-corruption operation. In recent weeks the Supreme Court has been locked in a battle over an attempt by the Department of Justice to grant the Lava Jato task force, based in the southern city of Curitiba, R$2.5bn to create a privately managed "Anti-Corruption fund", with money taken from fines paid by the investigated state controlled oil company Petrobras.
Lava Jato was conducted in collaboration with the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice. Some of that collaboration occurred on an informal basis which was in breach of Brazil's constitution and was the basis of a motion to annul the case against former president Lula. Acting Attorney General Kenneth Blanco even boasted of the DOJ role in Lula's prosecution during a speech at the NATO think tank Atlantic Council, whose special Latin America office was set up in 2013. AC has been largely supportive of Bolsonaro's ascendency, and the actions which enabled it including the impeachment of Brazil's first female President Dilma Rousseff, which the neofascist used as a springboard for his own presidential ambitions.
Moro's Lava Jato, which was based on his own 2004 study of Italy's Mani Pulite(Clean Hands), and whose concept and structure was outlined in a 2009 State Department cable, not only created two false pretexts for one President's removal (corruption and economy), it prevented the election of another (Lula), and also worked during the 2018 election to attack the reputation of his replacement, Fernando Haddad, who was later cleared of the accusations.
Moro has undoubtedly changed the course of Brazilian history with his decapitation of the centre-left Workers Party (PT), and delivered the Presidency to a Neofascist who has said that 30,000 people needed to be killed for Brazil to function, and threatened political opponents with exile, imprisonment, even machine-gunning during his election campaign.
In this context, President Jair Bolsonaro or his Justice and Security Minister Sérgio Moro having any contact with the CIA is even more bewildering and frightening.
Useful idiots
Commentators who have regularly poured professional scorn on any suggestion of U.S. involvement in Brazil are now very quiet. The intellectual gymnastics required to depict Bolsonaro's CIA visit as normal behaviour is beyond even the usual chorus of Wall Street lobbyists and foreign correspondents. Whilst observers shouldn't expect actual insight from workaday hacks, it is the journalists and commentators who strongly and consistently refuted any suggestion of a U.S. role who should face scrutiny. They won't be feeling comfortable today.
The most useful of idiots, who consciously or otherwise are embedded in an asymmetric, unconventional war; Reuters, Bloomberg in particular those connected to think tanks such as AS/COA and Atlantic Council, will find it very difficult to spin this. These are who boosted the anti Dilma Rousseff narratives of 2013-16, then denied that a coup had taken place, whilst breathlessly promoting Sérgio Moro internationally, pre-judging Lula's guilt, denying his imprisonment was politically motivated, normalising or even backing Bolsonaro during the 2018 election and behaving as if it was free and fair, business as usual.
There were chiefs at international news agencies in Brazil who threatened staff with dismissal if they used the word "Coup/Golpe" to describe what was happening on their personal social media, and vehemently denied that Sérgio Moro was a CIA agent, without prompting. Then there are the more "woke" types who acknowledge U.S. involvement in Brazil but only that which occurred 40 years or more ago and which can be safely filed away under the "Cold War". "I mean, of course we all know that American intervention is restricted to yesteryear" joked one Latin America historian about this kind of discourse.

Brazil needs and deserves an immediate and complete reappraisal from the media on what has and is being done to the country, namely the United States and allies role in it, without artificial distinction between state and corporate power. This needs to be conducted without whitewashing, without censorship by omission. Brazilians deserve honesty and thorough investigation.

We at Brasil Wire have long maintained that in addition to what was already available, which was ample, much more evidence would become available over the coming months and years that would further underline U.S. involvement in Brazil's complicated and often perplexing slow motion coup.
We did not expect anything quite so brazen and astonishing as the Brazilian President and the Justice Minister who delivered him that Presidency, visiting the CIA, the agency responsible for many of the worst injustices and atrocities the region has suffered in the modern era.