Even before Trump came on the scene there was a battle between a unipolar and a multipolar world that was not only apparent but was being fought openly. Think Libya, Syria or Iraq 2, for example. In effect any nation that refused to buckle down and adopt the USA as the transnational elite's chosen vehicle to be Guardian Angel policeman of the world and do their bidding was marked for regime change.

This peculiarity of unfettered capitalism began with the end of the cold war and the Vodka soaked Yeltsin turning over Russian assets to anyone who cared to offer a bribe. Then along came Putin and shut the sale of the century down and ensured that Russian assets remained Russian - and act for which he will never be forgiven.

The result of which is this was that the neoliberal steamroller of greed met real resistance for the first time. You can't take down a nuclear power in the same way you take out a Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi or stamp on other nations for non compliance to imperial diktat (nor can you expect to invade Russia militarily and win; a lesson learned both by Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler).

Suddenly the ever spreading power of the dollar was challenged. And the neoliberal grab for world power faltered as the plans for "their" exceptional nation floundered. And to add injury to insult, China arose to challenge the US economically, making itself into an instant enemy.

The transnational neoliberal elite concluded that Russia had to be brought to heel to get their world domination plans back on track - or suffer the consequences; complete failure.

And the rest is the history we are witnessing unfold.

Quote:The Real Russian Interference in US Politics

August 27, 2018 33 Comments



If Russia were trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, it wouldn't be attempting to change the U.S. system but to prevent it from trying to change Russia's, argues Diana Johnstone.

By Diana Johnstone


The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was ostensibly a conflict between two ideologies and two socio-economic systems.

All that seems to be over. The day of a new socialism may dawn unexpectedly, but today capitalism rules the world. At first glance, it may seem to be a classic clash between rival capitalists. And yet, once again an ideological conflict is emerging, one which divides capitalists themselves, even in Russia and in the United States itself. It is the conflict between American unipolar dominance and a multipolar world.

[FONT=&amp]The defeat of communism was brutally announced in a certain "capitalist manifesto" dating from the early 1990s that actually proclaimed: "Our guiding light is Profit, acquired in a strictly legal way. Our Lord is His Majesty, Money, for it is only He who can lead us to wealth as the norm in life." The authors of this bold tract were Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who went on to become the richest manin Russia (before spending ten years in a Russian jail) and his business partner at the time, Leonid Nevzlin, who has since retired comfortably to Israel.

Loans for Shares

Those were the good old days in the 1990s when the Clinton administration was propping up Yeltsin as he let Russia be ripped off by the joint efforts of such ambitious well-placed Russians and their Western sponsors, notably using the "loans for shares" trick.In a 2012 Vanity Fairarticleon her hero, Khodorkovsky, the vehemently anti-Putin journalist Masha Gessen frankly summed up how this worked:

"The new oligarchsa dozen men who had begun to exercise the power that money broughtconcocted a scheme. They would lend the government money, which it badly needed, and in return the government would put up as collateral blocks of stock amounting to a controlling interest in the major state-owned companies. When the government defaulted, as both the oligarchs and the government knew it would, the oligarchs would take them over. By this maneuver the Yeltsin administration privatized oil, gas, minerals, and other enterprises without parliamentary approval."

This worked so well that from his position in the Communist youth organization, Khodorkovsky used his connections to get control of Russia's petroleum company Yukos and become the richest oligarch in Russia, worth some $15 billion, of which he still controls a chunk despite his years in jail (2003-2013).

His arrest made him a hero of democracy in the United States, where he had many friends, especially those business partners who were helping him sell pieces of Yukos to Chevron and Exxon. Khodorkovsky, a charming and generous young man, easily convinced his American partners that he was Russia's number one champion of democracy and the rule of law, especially of those laws which allow domestic capital to flee to foreign banks, and foreign capital to take control of Russian resources.Khodorkovsky: Interfering in U.S. politics. (Wikimedia Commons)

Vladimir Putin didn't see it that way. Without restoring socialism, he dispossessed Khodorkovsky of Yukos and essentially transformed the oil and gas industry from the "open society" model tolerated by Yeltsin to a national capitalist industry. Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev were accused of having stolen all the oil that Yukos had produced in the years 1998 to 2003, tried, convicted and sentenced to 14 years of prison each. This shift ruined U.S. plans, already underway, to "balkanize" Russia between its many provinces, thereby allowing Western capital to pursue its capture of the Russian economy.

The dispossession of Khodorkovsky was certainly a major milestone in the conflict between President Putin and Washington. On November 18, 2005, the Senate unanimously adopted Resolution 322introduced by Senator Joe Biden denouncing the treatment of the Khodorkovsky and Lebedev as politically motivated.

Who Influences Whom?

There is an alternative view of the history of Russian influence in the United States to the one now getting constant attention. It is obvious that a Russian who can get the Senate to adopt a resolution in his favor has a certain influence. But when the "deep state" and the corporate media today growl about Russian influence, they aren't talking about Khodorkovsky. They are talking about alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. They are seizing, for example, on a joking response Trump made to a reporter's snide question during the presidential campaign. In a variation of the classic "when did you stop beating your wife?" the reporter asked if he would call on Russian President Vladimir Putin to "stay out" of the election.

Since a stupid question does not deserve a serious answer, Trump said he had "nothing to do with Putin" before adding, "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.

"Many Trump opponents think this proves collusion. Irony appears to be almost as unwelcome in American politics as honesty.

When Trump revoked his security clearance earlier this month, former CIA chief JohnBrennan got his chance to spew his hatred in the complacent pages of The New York Times. Someone supposed to be smart enough to head an intelligence agency actually took Trump's joking invitation as a genuine request. "By issuing such a statement," Brennan wrote, "Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent.

"As America's former top intelligence officer, Brennan had to know that (even if it were true that Trump was somehow involved) it is ludicrous to suggest that Trump would have launched a covert intelligence operation on national television. If this were a Russian operation to hack Clinton's private server it would have been on a need-to-know basis and there is no evident need for Trump or his campaign team to have known.

Besides, Clinton's private server on the day Trump uttered this joke, July 27, 2016, had already been about nine months in possession of the Department of Justice, and presumably offline as it was being examined.

Since Brennan knows all this he could only have been lying in The New York Times.

The Russians, Brennan went on, "troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters."

But which Russians do that? And who are those "individuals?"



'Secretary of State John Kerry with Winer, then Special Envoy for Libya and Senior Advisor for MEK Resettlement, in Rome, February 1, 2016. (State Department Photo)

[/FONT]The Fixer-in-Chief

To understand the way Washington works, one can focus on the career of lawyer Jonathan M. Winer, who proudly says that in early 2017 the head of the Carnegie Endowment, Bill Burns, referred to him as "The Fixer-in-Chief." Let's see what the fixer has fixed.

Winer served in the Clinton State Department as its first Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Law Enforcement from 1994-1999. One may question the selectivity of Bill Clinton's concern for international law enforcement, which certainly did not cover violating international law by bombing defenseless countries.

In any case, in 1999 Winer received the State Department's second highest award for having "created the capacity of the Department and the U.S. government to deal with international crime and criminal justice as important foreign policy functions." The award stated that "the scope and significance of his achievements are virtually unprecedented for any single official."

After the Clinton administration, from 2008 to 2013, Winer worked as a high-up consultant at one of the world's most powerful PR and lobbying firms, APCO Worldwide. As well as the tobacco industry and the Clinton Foundation, APCO also works for Khodorkovsky. To be precise, according to public listings, the fourth biggest of APCO's many clients is the Corbiere Trust, owned by Khodorkovsky and registered in Guernsey. The trust tends and distributes some of the billions that the oligarch got out of Russia before he was jailed.

Corbiere money was spent to lobby both for Resolution 322 (supporting Khodorkovsky after his arrest in Russia) and for the Magnitsky Act. APCO president Margery Kraus is a member of the Institute of Modern Russia, which is headed by Khodorkovsky's son Pavel, with the ostensible purpose of "promoting democratic values" in other words, of building political opposition to Putin.

When John Kerry replaced Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, allowing Hillary to prepare her presidential campaign, Winer went back to the State Department.[FONT=&amp]Winer's extracurricular activities at State brought him into the public spotlight early this year when House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) named him as part of a network promoting the notorious "Steele Dossier," which accused Trump of illicit financial dealing and compromising sexual activities in Russia, in a word, "collusion" with Moscow.

[FONT=&amp]By Winer's own account,he had been friends with former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele since his days at APCO. Back at State, he regularly channeled Steele reports, ostensibly drawn from contacts with friendly Russian intelligence agents, to Victoria Nuland, in charge of Russian affairs, as well as to top Russia experts. Among these reports was the infamous "Steele dossier," opposition research on Trump financed by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

[/FONT][FONT=&amp]But dirt seemed to pass the other way too. According to a Feb. 6 Washington Post story, Winer passed on to Steele the story of Trump being urinated on by prostitutes in a Moscow hotel with Russian agents allegedly filming it for blackmail material. The Post says the story was written by Cody Shearer, a Clinton confidante. A lawyer for Winer told the paper that Winer"[/FONT]was concerned in 2016 about information that a candidate for the presidency may have been compromised by a hostile foreign power. Any actions he took were grounded in those concerns." Shearer did not respond to a request for comment from Consortium News. [FONT=&amp](Full disclosure: Cody Shearer is a member of the advisory board of the Consortium for Independent Journalism, which publishes Consortium News, and has been asked to resign.)

[/FONT]All this Democrat paid-for and created dirt was spread through government agencies and mainstream media before being revealed publicly just before Trump's inauguration. The Steele dossier was used by the Obama Justice Department to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.

Winer and the Magnitsky Act

Winer played a major role in Congress's adoption of the "Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012" (the Magnitsky Act), a measure that effectively ended post-Cold War hopes for normal relations between Washington and Moscow. This act was based on a highly contentious version of the November 16, 2009 death in prison of accountant Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky as told to Congress by hedge fund manager Bill Browder. According to Browder, Magnitsky was a lawyer beaten to death in prison as a result of his crusade for human rights.

However, as convincingly established by dissident Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov's investigative documentary (blacklisted in the U.S.), Magnitsky was neither a human rights crusader, nor a lawyer, nor beaten to death. He was an accountant jailed for his role in Browder's business dealings, who died of natural causes as a result of inadequate prison care. The case was hyped as a major human rights drama by Browder in order to discredit Russian tax fraud charges against himself.

By adopting a law punishing Magnitsky's alleged persecutors, the U.S. Congress acted as a supreme court judging internal Russian legal issues.

The Magnitsky Act also condemns legal prosecution of Khodorkovsky. Browder, on a much smaller scale, also made a fortune ripping off Russians during the Yeltsin years, and later got into trouble with Russian tax collectors. Since Browder had given up his U.S. citizenship in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes, he had reason to fear Russian efforts to extradite him for tax evasion and other financial misdeeds.

It was Winer who found a solution to Browder's predicament. As Winer wrote in The Daily Beast: "When Browder consulted me, he wanted to know what he could do to hold those involved in the case accountable. As Browder describes in his book, Red Notice, I suggested creating a new law to impose economic and travel sanctions on human-rights violators involved in grand corruption. Browder decided this could secure a measure of justice for Magnitsky. He initiated a campaign that led to the enactment of the Magnitsky Act. Soon other countries enacted their own Magnitsky Acts, including Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and most recently, the United Kingdom."

Browder: Fabulist. (Editions Kero)

Meanwhile, Russian authorities have been trying for years to pursue their case against Browder. Putin brought up the case in his press conference following the Helsinki meeting with Trump. Putin suggested allowing U.S. authorities to question the 12 Russian GRU military intelligence agents named in the Mueller indictment in exchange for allowing Russian officials to question individuals involved in the Browder case, including Winer and former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, among others. Putin observed that such an exchange was possible under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty signed between the two countries in 1999, back in the Yeltsin days when America was posing as Russia's best friend.

But the naïve Russians underestimated the craftiness of American lawyers.

As Winer wrote, "Under that treaty, Russia's procurator general can ask the U.S. attorney general … to arrange for Americans to be ordered to testify to assist in a criminal case. But there is a fundamental exception: The attorney general can provide no such assistance in a politically motivatedcase(my emphasis). I know this because I was among those who helped put it there. Back in 1999, when we were negotiating the agreement with Russia, I was the senior State Department official managing U.S.-Russia law-enforcement relations.

"The clever treaty is a perfect Catch-22. It doesn't apply to a case if it is politically motivated, and if it is Russian, it must be politically motivated. (The irony is that Mueller's indictment of 12 GRU Russian military intelligence agents appears to be more a political than a legal document. For one thing, it accused the agents of interfering in a U.S. election but never charges them under U.S. electoral law.)

On July 15, 2016, Browder's Heritage Capital Management firm registered a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice accusing both American and Russian opponents of the Magnitsky Act of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA); adopted in 1938 with Nazis in mind.

As for Russian lawyers attempting to bring their case against the Act to the U.S., the Heritage Capital Management brief declared:

"While lawyers representing foreign principals are exempt from filing under FARA, this is only true if the attorney does not try to influence policy at the behest of his client. By disseminating anti-Magnitsky material to Congress, [lawyer Natalia] Veselnitskaya is clearly trying to influence policy and is therefore in violation of her filing requirements under FARA.

"Veselnitskaya was at the infamous Trump Tower meeting in the summer of 2016 to lobby a possible incoming Trump administration to oppose the Magnitsky Act. A British music promoter, not a spokesman for the Russian government, offered dirt on Clinton in an email to Donald Trump Jr. No dirt was apparently produced and Don Jr. saw it as a lure to get him to the meeting on Magnitsky. Democrats are furiously trying to prove that this meeting was "collusion" between the Trump camp and Russia, though it was the Clinton campaign that paid for opposition research and received it from foreigners, while the Trump campaign neither solicited nor apparently received any at that meeting.

The Ideological Conflict Today

Needless to say, Khodorkovsky's Corbiere Trust lobbied hard to get Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act. This type of "Russian interference intended to influence policy" goes unnoticed while U.S. authorities scour cyberspace for evidence of trolls.

The basic ideological conflict here is between Unipolar America and Multipolar Russia. Russia's position, as Putin made clear in his historic speech at the Munich security conference in 2007, is to allow countries to enjoy national sovereignty and develop in their own way. The current Russian government is against interference in other countries' politics on principle. It would naturally prefer an American government willing to do the same.

The United States, in contrast, is in favor of interference in other countries on principle: because it seeks a Unipolar world, with a single "democratic" system, and considers itself the final authority as to which regime a country should have and how it should run its affairs.

So, if Putin were trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, he would not be trying to change the U.S. system but to prevent it from trying to change his own.

U.S. policy-makers practice interference every day. And they are perfectly willing to allow Russians to interfere in American politics so long as those Russians like Khodorkovsky, who aspire to precisely the same unipolar world sought by the State Department. Indeed, the American empire depends on such interference from Iraqis, Libyans, Iranians, Russians, Cubans all those who come to Washington to try to get U.S. power to settle old scores or overthrow the government in the country they came from and put themselves in power. All those are perfectly welcome to lobby for a world ruled by America.

Russian interference in American politics is totally welcome so long as it helps turn public opinion against "multipolar" Putin, glorifies American democracy, serves U.S. interests, including the military industries, helps break down national borders (except those of the United States and Israel) and puts money in appropriate pockets in the halls of Congress.[/FONT]

A "deeply compartmented plan" for something for sure. Just not for recruitment.

Quote:CIA and Saudi Arabia Conspired To Keep 9/11 Details Secret, New Book Says

By Jeff SteinOn 8/28/18 at 6:00 AM


SpyTalk
It's easier to bury uncomfortable facts than to confront them. So this September 11, the ceremonies marking the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., will simply honor the dead. In Manhattan, tourists and mourners will gather where the World Trade Center Towers once stood, lowering their heads in memory of the 2,606 who perished there. The services won't reflect the view that the attacks might well have been prevented.
But for hundreds of families and a growing number of former FBI agents, the grief of another 9/11 ceremony will be laced with barely muted rage: There remains a conspiracy of silence among high former U.S. and Saudi officials about the attacks.
"It's horrible. We still don't know what happened," said Ali Soufan, one of the lead FBI counterterrorism agents whom the CIA kept in the dark about the movements of the future Al-Qaeda hijackers. To Soufan and many other former national security officials, the unanswered questions about the events leading up to the September 11, 2001, attacks dwarf those about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, because "9/11 changed the whole world." It not only led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the fracturing of the Middle East and the global growth of Islamic militantism but also pushed the U.S. closer to being a virtual homeland-security police state.
"I am sad and depressed about it," said Mark Rossini, one of two FBI agents assigned to the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit, who says agency managers mysteriously blocked them from informing their headquarters about future Al-Qaeda plotters present in the United States in 2000 and again in the summer of 2001. "It is patently evident the attacks did not need to happen and there has been no justice," he said.
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The authors of a new book on 9/11 hope to refocus public attention on the cover-up. Thoroughly mining the multiple official investigations into the event, John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski find huge holes and contradictions in the official story that 9/11 was merely "a failure to connect the dots."
Duffy, a left-leaning writer and environmental activist, and Nowosielski, a documentary filmmaker, have nowhere near the prominence of other journalists who have poked holes in the official story, in particular Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, the Pulitzer Prizewinning book that was turned into a gripping multi-part docudrama on Hulu earlier this year.
But Duffy and Nowosielski come to the story with a noteworthy credential: In 2009 they scored an astounding video interview with Richard Clarke, a White House counterterrorism adviser during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. In it, Clarke raged that top CIA officials, including director George Tenet, had withheld crucial information from him about Al-Qaeda's plotting and movements, including the arrival in the U.S. of future hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. In The Watchdogs Didn't Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror, the authors assemble a compelling case of a government-wide cover-up of Saudi complicity in the affair.
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In 2002, Tenet swore to Congress that he wasn't aware of the imminent threat because it came in a cable that wasn't marked urgentand "no one read it." But his story was shredded five years later when Senators Ron Wyden and Kit Bond forced loose an executive summary of the CIA's own internal investigation of 9/11, which stated that "some 50 to 60 individuals read one or more of the six Agency cables containing travel information related to these terrorists."
Clarke went ballistic. Until then, he had trusted Tenet, a close colleague and friend, to tell the truth. In 2009, despairing at the lack of media traction on the astounding disclosure, he wrote a book about the duplicity, Your Government Failed You, which was largely ignored. So when Duffy and Nowosielski came calling, he welcomed them.
"I believed, for the longest time, that this was one or two low-level desk officers who got this [information about Hazmi and Mihdhar] and somehow didn't realize the significance," he told them. But "50five oh50 CIA officersknew this, and they included [Tenet and] all kinds of people who were regularly talking to me? Saying I'm pissed doesn't begin to describe it."
All these years later, it's still unclear why the CIA would keep such crucial details about Al-Qaeda movements from the FBI. Clarke and other insiders suspect that the spy agency had a deeply compartmented plan in the works to recruit Hazmi, Mihdhar and perhaps other Al-Qaeda operatives as double agents. If the FBI discovered they were in California, the theory goes, it would have demanded their arrest. When the CIA's recruitment ploy fizzled, Tenet and company hid the details from Clarke lest they be accused of "malfeasance and misfeasance," he said.
It's the only logical explanation for why the presence of Hazmi and Mihdhar was kept from him until after the attacks, Clarke said. "They told us everythingexcept this," he says in the video.
Tenet and two of his counterterrorism deputies, Rich Blee and Cofer Black, issued a statement calling Clarke's theory "reckless and profoundly wrong." But now Clarke has company. Duffy and Nowosielski found other key former FBI counterterrorism agents and officials who have developed deep doubts about Tenet's story. The only element they disagree on is which officials were responsible for the alleged subterfuge.
"I think if there were some conscious effort" not to tell the bureau what was going on, Dale Watson, a former FBI deputy chief of counterterrorism told them, "it was probably" carried out below Tenet, Blee and Black, by managers of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit.
But Pat D'Amuro, an even more senior former FBI counterterrorism official, told them, "There's no doubt in my mind that [withholding the information] went up further in the agency" than those managers. "And why they didn't send it over, to this day, I don't know why."
And then there's the continuing mystery of Saudi complicity with the hijackers. Duffy and Nowosielski offer a tightly focused update on what's been learned about Saudi support for Al-Qaeda in recent years. Back in 2004, the official 9/11 Commission said it found no evidence that the "Saudi government as an institution, or senior Saudi officials individually funded" Al-Qaeda.
A year later, the highly redacted CIA inspector general's report cracked open another window, saying that some agency officers had "speculated" that "dissident sympathizers within the government" (i.e., religious extremists) may have supported bin Laden. Subsequent investigations have revealed that officials from the kingdom's Islamic affairs ministry were actively helping the hijackers get settled in California.
Such information spurred several hundred families of the 9/11 attack victims to file suit against the Saudi government in federal court in New York last year, seeking unspecified monetary damages.
"Saudi intelligence has admitted that they knew who these two guys were," Andrew Maloney, an attorney for families, told Newsweeklast week. "They knew they were Al-Qaeda the day they arrived in Los Angeles. So any notion from the Saudi government saying, Oh, we just help out all Saudis here' is false. They knew. And the CIA knew."
The kingdom has turned over some 6,800 pages of documents, "mostly in Arabic," that Maloney's team is in the process of translating. "There's some interesting things in there," he said, "and some clear gaps." He said he'll return to court in October to press for more documents.
He also wants to depose Saudi officials, particularly Fahad al-Thumairy, a former Los Angeles consular official and imam of a Culver City, California, mosque attended by the hijackers. In 2003, Thumairy was intercepted after he landed in Los Angeles on a flight from Germany and deported from the U.S. "because of suspected terrorist links." But he still works for the government in Riyadh, Maloney said. "Can you believe that?"
In April, Maloney subpoenaed the FBI for documents on Thumairy and Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi spy in the U.S. who was also in contact with the hijackers. The bureau has not responded, so on September 11 he plans to file "a formal motion to compel the FBI" to produce the documents. His motion follows a sworn statement by Steven Moore, the FBI agent who headed the bureau's investigation into the hijacking of the plane that flew into the Pentagon, charging the 9/11 Commission with misleading the public when it said it "had not found evidence" of Saudi assistance to Hazmi and Mihdhar.
"There was clearly evidence that Thumairy provided assistance to Hazmi and Mihdhar," Moore wrote. And "based on the proof in our investigation," he added, "Bayoumi himself was a clandestine agent and associated with radical extremists, including Thumairy."
Moore's statement was first reported by the Florida Bulldog, a Fort Lauderdale news site that has been investigating the hijackers' contacts with flight schools. "To my knowledge," Moore stated, "Thumairy has never been the subject of a genuine law enforcement interview conducted by the actual agents who investigated him."
Maloney's additional targets are other FBI, CIA, State Department and Treasury Department personnel and documents. "There are a lot of people, former agentsI won't identify who or what agencieswho have talked to us," he said, but others, especially in the CIA's bin Laden unit, "will never talk to us or will only talk to us if they are given some kind of blanket immunity."
Getting access to them, he said, would probably require an executive order from President Donald Trumpan unlikely outcome given his administration's strong backing for the Saudi monarchy.
There may be public support for Maloney's endeavors. A 2016 poll found a slight majority of Americans (54.3 percent) believe that the government is hiding something about the 9/11 attacks. Then again, a considerable number of 9/11 "truthers" embrace conspiracy theories positing that the attacks were "an inside job" by the Bush administration and/or Israel and abetted by explosives planted in one of the World Trade Center towers.


The September 11 memorial in lower Manhattan. Spencer Platt/Getty Images But they are right about Saudi resistance to fully disclosing its relations with the hijackers. Last year, agents of the monarchy were discovered surreptitiously funding a PR effort to derail a congressional bill permitting a 9/11 families group to sue the kingdom for damages. Last September, the family group filed a 17-page complaint with the Justice Department.
Terry Strada, a leader of the group 9/11 Families & Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism, will mourn again this year, but not at the site where the towers once stood and her husband died. She plans to attend "a private service" at the Shrine of St. Joseph in Stirling, New Jersey, which she said has "a beautiful and solemn space" dedicated to all who died in the 9/11 attacks.
But she is also full of fury at the government's refusal to release all it knows about the run-up to the attacks. "It's very sad that we're still being kept in the dark about it. It's frustrating. It angers me," she told Newsweek. "It's a slap in the face. They think they're above the law and don't have to respond to the familiesand the world. It's disgusting."
But Strada evinces even more disdain for the Saudis.Responding to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's August 20 message "wishing Muslims around the world a blessed Eid al-Adha," she tweeted, "Seriously???"
Strada added, "The Saudis promote & finance the most virulent hatred toward Americans than any other nation. Murdered 3,000 on Sept 11." The "9/11 families," she wrote, "will #NEVERFORGET. #FreeTheTruth"

MARCH 27, 2015

The Long Ides of March of Aldo Moro

by LUCIANA BOHNE

How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted o'er,
In states unborn, and accents yet unknown.

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Quote:"Beware the Ides of March"or even the day after. On the morning of 16 March 1978 in Rome's central via Fani, the Red Brigades (BR) kidnapped Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, head of the Christian Democratic Party (DC), killing five agents of his entourage. The fifty-five days of his detention in a secret "people's prison" and eventual assassination by his captors on 9 May 1978 marked the climax of over thirty years of internal and external opposition to post-fascist Italy's chartering its own political and economic course by "parallel convergences." It is worth revisiting this long and twisted story as an early template for the bad faith with which the US Empire deals with the world today. It is not a story for conspiracy-phobes.

The plot of all plots: whodunnit?

Moro himself coined the phrase, "parallel convergences," hinting at dark forces behind the facade of the legitimate state. The executors of Moro's death are not in doubt. The BR condemned him to death on 29 April 1978 for "advancing counterrevolutionary programs in the service of bourgeois imperialism," shooting eleven bullets into his body curled up in the trunk of a red Renault on 9 May. Moro's phrase "parallel convergences" challenged translators at the time. Today, we understand it, in part, as the network of economic international elites, whose interest state intelligence structures servethe CIA first among peers. I asked Douglas Valentine, author of The Phoenix Program and exhaustive histories of CIA, DEA, FBI, what the phrase meant as Moro used it. Valentine said, "A CIA/military intelligence guy I knew well, Col. Tully Acampora, told me that JFK's station chief in Rome starting mid-1963, Bill Harvey, was sent there to help . . . General Giovanni di Lorenzo, head of Italy's military intelligence and security services, subvert the government of Leftist Prime Minister, Aldo Moro."

"Leftist"? Aldo Moro had toyed with the idea of joining the Socialist Party, but he was a devout Catholic and chose the DC instead. He was, however, interested in national sovereignty, the relief of emigration from the underdeveloped South, and an autonomous energy policy of trade with the Middle East. Only a year before the arrival in Rome of CIA station chief, Bill Harvey, the Mafia murdered Italian Energy Minister, Enrico Mattei, a close associate of Moro's, after Mattei's fruitful overtures for fair trade with oil-rich, Third World countries. Behind the Mafia lurked the "Seven Sisters," as Mattei dubbed the cartel of the American oil companiesand the services of the CIA together with Italian secret services. The Italian director, Francesco Rosi, made a film about this dramatic event, titled, The Mattei Affair. The journalist who helped him with research disappeared, presumed killed by the Mafia.

Cold War: Italy's "Stability" Must Be Secured

Italy's vassalage to the US in the Cold War mattered tremendouslymore than Americans know. One of the earliest directives by the then-recently established US National Security Council made no bones about Washington's intentions should the Italian Communist Party win the parliamentary elections in 1948. The US, the directive punctuated, would intervene "even at the cost of a civil war."

Throughout the Cold War, the US considered Italy a front-line state. The "iron curtain" ran vertically north south from Poland's Stettin on the Baltic Sea to Italy's Trieste on the northeast tip of the Adriatic Sea. Italy's eastern neighbor was communist Yugoslavia (until 1948 allied with Moscow) and further south, across a narrow stretch of sea, communist Albania, also allied with Moscow until 1961. Indeed, as NATO and American military bases grew to dot Italy over the decades, their missiles pointed east, at Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Furthermore, Italy's central Mediterranean location, especially Sicily's, provided the US with a key asset location for control of the Middle East. US policymakers were determined to preserve this essential geopolitical asset in their sphere of influence. As they saw it, one thing only threatened American hegemony in Italy: the vastly popular and respected Italian Communist Party (PCI), the largest communist party in Western Europe, which had been one of the two "hero" parties of the Resistance against the Nazi-fascist occupation in WW II from 8 September 1943 to 25 April 1945. In 1948, the PCI, allied with all left parties as the Popular Front, would almost certainly have won the parliamentary elections without the funding of a red-scare campaign by the CIA and the fomented fatal incidents and violent clashes at party rallies that seemed to sound the thunder of a coming civil war. Intimidated, the people voted a majority to the he DC, 48% of the vote; close behind came the Popular Front with 30% of the vote. "Without the CIA. The Communist Party . . . would surely have won the elections in 1948," writes Jack Devine, former CIA chief-of-station in Rome, in his book, Good Hunting.

In the early 1950s, Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles and Ambassador to Italy, Claire Boothe Luce, insisted that the PCI be outlawed. All Italian political parties, from extreme right to left, refused. They, justifiably pointed out that, because the PCI had been one of the main forces of the Resistance, there would be civil war in Italy if such a measure were enacted. For the Americans, communists in power endangered the security of NATO and the policy of control of the Middle East. When in 1953 William Colby became director of the CIA in Italy his task was to direct clandestine political actions to contain the influence of the PCI. As he wrote in his memoirs, "My task was to prevent that Italy fall in communist hands at the next elections." Keeping the PCI out of the executive was made a condition, agreed upon by President Harry Truman and Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi (DC), for the distribution of funds through the Marshall Plan for post-war reconstruction of Italy. Still in the 50s, a secret accord, "Plan Demagnetize," stipulated a close collaboration between the intelligence services of the US and Italy's to set back the influence of communism on Italian society.

In the Pre-Dawn of the Cold War: Mustering Their Mafia and Fascist Battalions

This communist threat had been identified and organized against as early as the allied landing in Sicily, in July of 1943. The OSS (predecessor to the CIA), founded in 1941 with 13,000 agents by OSS chief "Wild Bill" Donovan, had assigned the "Italian Section" to James Jesus Angleton, who came from a masonic family and would head the CIA's Israeli desk by 1950. Angleton recruited a "Mafia Circle"so denominated in CIA documentsto help with the allied landing in Italy. The circle was made up of Mafiosi (including Michele Sindona, who would become notorious for the crack-up of the Franklin National Bank in 1979) suggested by the gangster, Lucky Luciano, whom American naval intelligence approached in prison in Clinton, New York. The "Mafia Circle," however, was not dissolved after the Allies' smooth landing; it widened. The circle rushed to liberate other Mafiosi long imprisoned by Mussolini's regime. Officials of the American occupation put the " liberated "Mafiosi in important positions of administrative, police, and military power throughout Sicily to function as an anti-communist network of collaborators. As mayors, for example, the appointees would eventually exert regional influence on the elections and policies of senators and deputies in the parliament in Rome throughout the life of the first Republicand close ties with the Interior Ministry and its secret services.

Nor did Angleton's anti-communist recruitment stop at the Mafia. He began to gather exponents of the fascist regime, storing them as future assets in allied-occupied Sicily. Chief among them, was Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, commander of a frogman flotilla unit in the Italian Royal Navy until 1943, expert marine saboteur, collaborator from 1943 to 1945 with the Nazi puppet regime of the Repubblica of Salo', on on Lake Garda, in Northern Italy. After 1945, Borghese was convicted of Nazi-collaboration but not of war crimes, though it was certainly known that his quasi-private army participated with the SS in some of the most brutal massacres in central Italyperhaps 10,000 victims in what is known as "the war against civilians." When the partisans of Resistance leader, General Cadorna, arrested Borghese in Northern Italy on Liberation Day, 25 April 1945, Angleton drove up north in his jeep on 30 April, took charge of Borghese, dressed him in an American uniform, and took him safely to Rome. In a report to OSS, Angleton wrote that Borghese "represented a long-term interest at the heart of our work." For good measure, Borghese and his loyal army were later absorbed into "Gladio," NATO's super-secret select group of paramilitary operatives but that is another story.

In Sicily throughout the fifties, fascists, through the largesse of funding by the US, organized themselves into neo-fascist groups, with ties to the Italian secret services. The twinning of mafia and fascists, con-joined by the OSS in the 1940s, would prove a formidable force of destabilization in the 1970s, setting off an ideological war in the streets between provocateur neo-fascist groups and extra-parliamentary revolutionary communist formationsa "strategy of tension," as the violence initiated by the right came to be known. That this "tension" broke out at a moment of increasing gains by the left, threatening a communist electoral victory or a share in the executive could not have been a coincidence, Italian public opinion maintains to this day. Italy's strictly limited sovereignty as US client or asset state was being defied by gains in social democracyand the expanding popular democracy was a threat to Italy's "stability" as US vassal.

Italian Reds Are Winning

On the morning of 16 March, this threat was about to become a reality.

Aldo Moro was scheduled to call for a vote of confidence on the proposed new government of "national solidarity"a power share with the Communist Party in the cabinet and the executive branch, a first in Italy, a first in Western Europe. This was the culmination of negotiations for the compromesso storico ("historic compromise") between the DC and the PCI to make the government more representative of the electorate. Three agencies were not pleased: Moscow, because Enrico Berlinguer, leader of the PCI had recognized NATO in order to make power-sharing possible in a NATO-dominated Western European country; Washington, because from long date it had opposed the accession of the communists to the executive; and the Red Brigades, because 1) they thought the PCI should remain an opposition party 2) they regarded the compromesso as a further betrayal or weakening of the PCI's commitment to class struggle initiated by the Resistance and subsequently thwarted by too many PCI "compromises" with the ruling bourgeois parties, and 3) because the compromesso would dent the drive toward the social and political revolution to which they aspired. This was the turbulent local and geopolitical climate on that fatal morning in March.

Killed as a symbol of the liberal state or its sacrificial gravedigger?

Did the BR kill Moro as a symbol of the "bourgeois, liberal-imperialist" state, as claimed? Franco Bonisoli, with Mario Moretti and Lauro Azzolini, a member of the executive command of the Red Brigades at the time of Moro's sequestration, declared in 1998 that for the BR the state consisted of the Christian Democratic Party with Moro at its head. Since the BR by then was aiming at the heart of the state, Moro was the intended symbol. Mario Moretti, who alone among the brigatisti interrogated Moro in prison, said the assassination was the ultimate expression of their Marxist-Leninist line.

But in 1998, Aldo Moro's son, Giovanni, who had been twenty-years old when his father was killed, gave an interview to La Repubblica, insisting that Moro could not have been killed as a mere symbol but to end his political project:

Our impression [in the family] was unanimous: we all felt that he wasn't targeted as a symbol, as later maintained. What was done was a surgical intervention on Italian politics. Moro was the architect of the encounter with the communists. He was a subject at risk. And, anyway, it's enough to look at the years of the bombs. When Moro is marginalized, the bombs, too, are marginalized. His political line is strictly connected to this piece of Italian history.

The "years of lead" and the "strategy of tension": rightists and leftists target the state

To be sure, the year 1978 marked nearly a decade of assaults on members and symbols of state institutions, the media, and the judiciary, a campaign of the left. On the right, the targets were civilians massacred across Italy ("We will bury democracy under a mountain of corpses," wrote a flyer, acknowledging a massacre by Ordine NeroBlack/Fascist Order, a neo-fascist group). Liberal and left public opinion in Italy then and now holds that this terror by the right was planned and carried out in order to destabilize the multi-party state and supplant it with a decidedly rightist, pro-American, and anti-communist one. The opinion was bolstered by the findings of interminable trials and countless judiciary and parliamentary investigations into subversive activities by the neo-fascists in collusion with organs of the state, operating as extensions of external actors. In this opinion, the "years of lead," as the season of violence came to be dubbed in Italy, were the expression of a "strategy of tension," intended also neutralize the Communist Party, which commanded over 34.4% of the popular vote in 1976. The massive support for the Communist Party and its representation in Parliament led, among other progressive measures, to the addition of a Workers' Bill of Rights, enshrined in the constitution in 1970. For the Red Brigades, this wasn't enough, but it was more than enough for anti-proletarian neo-fascists.

In fact, almost simultaneously with the pending enactment of the Workers' Bill of Rights in 1970, the season of terrorism began in earnest in Milan with the bombing of the National Agricultural Bank in Piazza Fontana on12 December 1969, killing seventeen people and wounding 80. The anarchist railway worker, Giuseppe Pinelli, was detained on suspicion, committing suicide by defenestration during a break in interrogations. The absurdity of this reported account provoked the writer Dario Fo (Nobel Prize for Literature) to dramatize it as a farce in "Accidental Death of an Anarchist" (1970), the most famous and acclaimed of his plays. Movimento Ordine Nuovo, a far-right, neo-fascist organization, was suspected of planting the bomb, but in a series of chaotic trials lasting until 2005 no one was ever punished for the massacre, though a court identified two neo-fascists as the terrorists.

Only three days before the Piazza Fontana bombing, a secret neo-fascist coup, code-named "Tora, Tora," had been called off for reasons never revealed, though three trials followed the disclosure in March 1971 of the plot by the left paper Paese Sera.

In the final trial in 1984, all the accused were found not guilty of conspiring against the state. The plot is known in Italy as the golpe Borghese (the Borghese coup) because Angleton's "asset" Junio Valerio Borghese, the fascist aristocrat, known as "The Black Prince," was central to it (the Spanish word golpe gained currency in Italy after the Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973). By the time of the failed golpe Borghese in 1969, Borghese's fascist-era, quasi-private army had been being trained in the US since Angleton's time in Sicily in 1943at first twenty saboteurs; later many more. President Francesco Cossiga, who had been Interior Minister during Moro's sequestration, declared in an interview years later that the "role of the CIA was to fund anti-communist neo-fascist groups." However, in the midst of assaulting the Interior Ministry in Rome, Borghese called the operation off. Conjectures suggest that a neo-fascist coup in Italy was not exactly what Washington desired or needed at the time.

Nevertheless, the bombing in Piazza Fontana and the botched coup, with US and NATO warships allegedly waiting on the ready in the Mediterranean, were followed by a relentless frenzy of terrorist attacks. Here is a select list of the bloodiest, perpetrated by the neo-fascist groups:

1970 Gioia Tauro, Calabria: 6 dead; 27 wounded

1972 Peteano di Sagrado, Venezia Giulia: 3 dead, 1 wounded

1973 Via Fatebenefratelli, Milan: 4 dead; 46 wounded

1974 Piazza della Loggia, Brescis: 8 dead; 94 wounded

1974 Train Italicus (between Florence and Bologna): 12 dead; 48 wounded

1980 Bologna Train Station: 85 dead; 200 wounded

What role the "Parallel State"?

Something was really rotten in Italy. Traumatic attacks on civilians, subversions, coups, and false-flags prompted the writer, Pier Paolo Pasolini, to write, shortly before his own murder in 1976, a j'accuse in the pages of the Corriere della Sera: "I know the names, but I have no proof." Justice was slow or reluctant to catch up with the neo-fascist killers (there was better success with the left). Moreover, members of the secret services, the Interior Ministry and military intelligence derailed pursuit, trials, and investigationsa practice that came to be known as depistaggio, or "throwing off course." This was not all that surprising. Mussolini's secret police, army brass, and intelligence, were seamlessly integrated into the Ministries of the Interior, Foreign Affairs, and the military of the new Republic, under the supervision of the American occupation and, after 1949, NATO (and NATO's "stay behind," secret program of communist containment). This virtual continuity of the fascist regime, now interlaced with the Mafia, unopposed by the Vatican, supported by shadowy secret societies and Masonic lodges, within the new organs of power popularized the phrase "parallel state" among the Italian public during the "years of lead"one post-fascist, democratic government on show for unsuspecting citizens; another, neo-fascist, in the shadows undermining national sovereignty. Particularly the intelligence services were known to protect members of neo-fascist groups, thwarting the judiciary under the rubric of "state secret."

Pasolini's vatic words rebounded two years later over the fifty-five days of Moro's captivity and murder, when the whole political classfrom the Christian Democrats to the communists, from the socialists to the Vatican his friends, partners, and allies throughout the life of the republic, ignored the written appeals from his cell to negotiate his release. The government took the hard line: no negotiating with terrorists. The Communist Party agreed, fearing to be lumped in the same terrorist bag with the BR if they did. Pope Paul VI, from a window on St Peter's Square called for Moro's release "without conditions." The refusal to negotiate was as if Italy's politicians understood that Moro's fate was sealedthat he was already dead. The Red Brigades' condition for freeing Moro required that the state release from prison a number of their group, a not unreasonable request in cases of political sequestration, Moro noted in his letters. However, the BR also insisted on the recognition by the state of the BR as a political counterpart, as an armed political party, as a fighting force. No state could legitimize the force that would overthrow it. It was a demand that could not be met. This both closes and opens the mystery: on the one hand, the BR made an offer which was refused, and they killed him; on the other hand, they made an offer so intractable that they knew it would be refused, so his death was pre-ordainedby whom?

Giovanni Moro accuses all parties of shielding the truth:

There is still no truthhistorical, judiciary, or political . . .. Moro was killed for his political project. Even the brigatisti have not told the truth: why didn't they make public all that my father revealed under interrogation? In the letters found in 1990those never made public at the timemy father mentions Gladio for the first time. With the revelation of Gladio, the BR could have caused embarrassment to the DC, but they kept it secret. It could have destroyed the image of the state as integral and solid. Why didn't the brigatisti use it? I am sure they are lying to this day. And why did they kill him precisely when a glimmer of hope opened within the DC [for negotiations]? And, finally, why did the state do nothing to save him? Giulio Andreotti {DC] was the political head of the state . . . Francesco Cossiga (DC) was the Minister of Interior. In any other country, a Minister of the Interior to whom such a disaster happened would have been sent to cultivate roses. Instead, he became twice Prime Minister and once President of the Republic.

Losers and Winners

Who, in fact, benefitted from Moro's death? Not the BR, as the state came down hard and opportunistically on Italian leftists of all stripes, arresting 12,000, and inducing 600 to escape to foreign parts, virtually destroying the historic nucleus of the BR. Not Italy, which ditched the compromesso storico, its chance to form a coalition of national unity, representative of the whole spectrum of Italian voters. Not the two historic parties of the Resistance, the parents of the Republic, and the articulators of its progressive constitution, "founded on labor." Morally compromised by their refusal to negotiate Moro's release, both the Communist Party and the Christian Democrat Party lost the confidence and respect of the voters, plunging Italy gradually in its present-day political vacuum, a "failed state" in all but name, a virtual NATO/American military base. The right certainly benefitted, as Mussolini's old party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, morphed into Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance) to rule, in tandem with racist, anti-immigrant, separatist Lega Nord (Northern League), and with the party of opportunist media magnate, Silvio Berlusconi. The PCI became the Democratic Party of the Left and then plain Democratic Party (DP). This association of retrograde political forces together with a (counter-) reformist, neo-liberal, mutilated left rules in coalitions on and off as a virtual tributary state and logistical outpost in the American "War on Terror."

Prime Suspect: "Et tu, Kissinger?"

We must recall that only five years before Moro's assassination, Salvador Allende's government was overthrown by a coup, overseen by the CIA. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger had justified the action in part by saying, "If we allow Chile to go communist, then Italy will follow." Moro's widow testified that "a high ranking United States political figure" had threatened her husband's life, while on an official visit to Washington with the Italian delegation in 1976. She testified at the parliamentary inquest that the official said, "Either you stop your political line, or you will pay dearly." Moro's close friend and party associate, Minister Giovanni Galloni, identified the official as Henry Kissinger, at the time US Secretary of State. Textually, the words recorded in the documents of one of five trials, read like this:

"Onorevole, lei deve smettere di perseguire il suo piano politico per portare tutte le forze del suo Paese a collaborare direttamente. Qui, o lei smette di fare questa cosa, o lei la pagherà cara. Veda lei come la vuole intendere"

("Your honor, you must stop pursuing your plan of getting all the political forces of your country to collaborate directly. Either you stop this thing, or you will pay dearly. It's up to you how to interpret.")

Giovanni Moro recalls his father's theory of "parallel convergences" when he says:

I insist on repeating it: my father was the man who wanted to move Italy beyond the Cold War. There were oodles of people in Italy and outside Italy who considered him dangerous. This is the explanation that takes into account so many possible involvements.

Conclusion

What should resonate for readers in this old story is the similarity to aspects of presentday American "foreign policy." Think of the "strategy of tension" implicit in "color revolutions," planned, funded, and staged by US entities (including NGOs), aimed at effecting "regime change." Think of the mustering, arming, training, and funding of reactionary forcesfundamentalist Islamists or Neo-Nazisto "destabilize" a place by sowing terror. Think of how funding terrorist rightist groups in Italy evoked the terrorist response of the leftclassic "divide and conquer" imperial strategyand apply it to any place the US interventions have destroyed as integral statesIraq, Libya, and now Ukraine, with ongoing attempts in Syria.

What do you see? Not only parallel stories but "parallel convergences" maybe?

David Giglio found this fine interview with Hilsman from 1983, ten years before John Newman's book JFK and Vietnam was published.

In this respect it is even more startling that the book was so shocking. I attribute it to the media and academia more than anything. Ignorance and axe grinding.

https://kennedysandking.com/videos-and-i...etnam-1983

Part One

Quote:[FONT=&amp]Even though a vast majority of the population admits the saying that history is written by those who win the wars, most are unwilling to question its core and rather choose to accept that what they're being told by their government controlled education and mainstream media reflects reality. We have to keep in mind that our knowledge of the Second World War was mostly redacted by American and Western historians that carried over time a deeply fake idea of reality. In an ironic way, this makes of history a very interesting and lively subject today, since this overall incomprehension of WW2 allows a researcher to solve in July 2018 an event like the parachuting of Rudolf Hess in England on May 10th 1941, which has remained an event shrouded in mystery for 77 years. Its complexity and huge historical ramifications make it the most interesting enigma that we have left from the worst war that the world has ever known. If the event didn't hide vital information, the British government would've revealed a long time ago its classified documents on the matter. For Hess' landing in England isn't a simple war spy flick, it's actually at the heart of the shaping of our world. And Rudolf knew it. Upon his initial arrest, the Nazi first claimed that his name was Alfred Horn, then after his transfer in the hands of the British military, he finally revealed his real name and added: "I have come to save humanity."[/FONT]
[B]What actually happened?[/B]

Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess around 1934[FONT=&amp]By 1941, Rudolf Hess had just been ranked by Hitler as the Number Three in the Third Reich hierarchy and bore the title of Deputy Fuhrer. Hess had been amongst the first to embrace Hitler to lead the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; he had participated in the 1924 failed Munich Putsch that sent him along with his beloved leader in the Landsberg prison, where they wrote Mein Kampftogether, or Hitler's guidebook for the future of Germany and the rest of Europe. He was arguably the most devoted and loyal friend Hitler ever had. Hence, the parachuting of this very high ranked Nazi in England in the midst of WW2 is not to be taken lightly under any circumstance. Hess had to carry a message of the outmost importance that could not be transmitted over a telephone line, a telegram, or any other form of communication that could be intercepted by intelligence agencies that were all on full alert 24/7 all over Europe in 1941.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]"Official" history had to create a well-crafted narrative to hide the real purpose of this mission. So, it says that Rudolf Hess got a Messerschmitt Bf 110, learned to pilot the plane in a few weeks, then flew to England by himself, was able to escape most radars by flying at a very low altitude towards Scotland, but then was spotted by the DCA in Scotland and jumped off his plane wearing a parachute and was later arrested by the British police. Some have disputed this version of the flight, saying that Hess was not in command of the plane that parachuted him, and even that the plane had been escorted by the Royal Air Force in the last stage of the flight since Hess was expected by a few insiders. Whatever the truth is on this first Act, fact is that he landed with a sore ankle on British soil on May 10th 1941. This is where the plot thickens, since hereafter, every ally authority at the time judged that the essence of his mission was not to be revealed to the public. In fact, had he not landed on a farm 10 miles from his intended target on the Duke of Hamilton estate, we would have never heard of the story.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Many historians and journalists have leaned over the table as if facing a jigsaw puzzle, trying to fit the pieces to make some sense of the crazy Hess trip to England. If you're amongst the few people still interested in history and you're looking for some information on the matter, Wikipedia and multiple other mainstream narratives loosely reflect what we learn in schools. One explanation simply says that Hess had suddenly gone mad and tried to escape the fate of Germany on a solo flight. Others claim that Hess sought to win Hitler's favors back by negotiating a truce with England on his own initiative. There is also the wild theory that Hess was trying to use the British monarchy to oust Churchill of power. Different theories will range all the way to the most popular version of an official mission under the order of Hitler that needed to negotiate peace with England before he attacked the Soviet Union, which would come the next month on June 22nd 1941. In almost every theory, historians agree that Hess had chosen to meet the Duke of Hamilton, an influential member of the Anglo-German Fellowship Association, since there is overwhelming evidence that the Royal Family was in favor of the Nazis and wanted peace with Germany, as opposed to Churchill who posed as the great Nazi slayer. Most of the theories will end by saying that neither the Duke of Hamilton, nor Churchill, nor anyone holding a high-profile position accepted to meet Hess, before he was sent in prison after saying what he had to say. And whatever that was, Hess had forgotten about it by the time he was prosecuted in Nuremberg after the war, since timely amnesia got ahold of his suddenly failing brain.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]If any of the aforementioned theories held any truth, Hess would have never suffered amnesia since they all bear their good share of political correctness and the British government would have no reason to keep the Hess files secret. Any of these versions could have been released to the public, since they became over time different explanations of the Hess journey in our history books. But the roots of most theories hold no logical ground and don't even make sense, since it was Germany that was attacking England and not the other way around. Therefore, if Hess was really looking for a truce, he only needed to talk to Hitler. And if Adolf himself wanted peace with England, he just had to do nothing at all.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]That sudden Nuremberg amnesia might be the reason why Rudolf died at 93 eating daily steaks and lobsters, gardening flowers and watching TV in the golden and comfortable Spandau prison in Germany, instead of sharing the fate of most of his fellow Nazis whose lives ended at the end of a rope at the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials in 1946. Here again, the cloud of mystery around Hess has created an aura of doubt upon his official death by suicide that many swear was the murder of an invalid elder that knew too much and was ready to confess.[/FONT]
01 Jan 1946, Nuremberg, Germany The defendants at the Nuremberg Nazi trials. Pictured in the front row are: Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel and Ernst Kaltenbrunner. In the back row are: Karl Doenitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, and Fritz Sauckel.[FONT=&amp]Well, the truth about Hess in England is so much more interesting than anything mentioned above and is a master key to the full understanding of the stakes and objectives of WW2, which is why it was always hidden under the murky shadows of a historical enigma. And his mission was so important that we can now fully appreciate why such a high-ranking Nazi official was ordered to execute it.[/FONT]
[B]Historical speculation[/B]

[FONT=&amp]To confront the spectrum of narratives that our official history offers, especially in the case of an event that took place 77 years ago, independent researchers have to mostly rely on logical speculation, because of the lack of access to precious documentation that is kept confidential in locked vaults, usually for national security reasons. In the case of the Rudolf Hess trip to England, everything has been up to speculation, since no official reason or explanation was ever given by the British authorities. Every theory that has become mainstream and accepted over time is threaded over pure speculation and has absolutely nothing to substantiate it. Some were articles written by journalists at the time who claimed they had insider information that could never be verified, while other explanations were backed by simple made-up and fake information. The example of an alleged letter written by Hess that he had left for Hitler, saying that he was making this trip on his own will, has to be ranked with the rest of the propaganda. A 28-page report was discovered by Matthias Uhl of the German Historical Institute Moscow in the State Archive of the Russian Federation. The document was written in February 1948 by Hess' adjutant Karlheinz Pintsch, whom eye-witnessed Hitler's reaction when he learned that the Deputy Führer had parachuted in England. According to Pintsch, Hitler was not the least surprised, nor angry, and had full knowledge of the plan. Thus, a whole range of theories can be brushed away, since Hitler obviously had ordered the mission himself. Those theories only hold ground when facts are disregarded, which is often how mainstream media works.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]We have to accept that only one theory is right, but also that this theory won't have much hard evidence to back it up until classified documents are released to the public. Therefore, the objective is to find the most likely. We have to rely on logical analysis, but above everything, circumstantial evidence might shed a magical ray of light and reveal the truth. I will apply this system on:[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp](A) The importance of Hess in the hierarchy and the will to keep his mission secret to the rest of the world.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp](B) The timetable of the events of WW2: what happened before and after, and the impact that the mission had over the behavior changes of different nations.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]I have come to a definitive conclusion that has never been verbalized before. In fact, no one was even close to the truth. But it's the only one that stands the scrutiny of cross-examination of circumstances. At the base, the initiative of a secret underground mission outside official channels of communication, for such an important Nazi, raises a most crucial question: why was Germany trying to hide this meeting from the rest of the world?[/FONT]

Impressive 3 hour talk by ex-CIA officer Kevin Shipp about the Deep State, the Shadow Government, MICC, etc.

by Bill Kelly on his blog JFKCountercoup.com

Someone Talked - Gene Wheaton Reconsidered



SOMEONE TALKED - GENE WHEATON RECONSIDERED - Part 1 As Amended.

[ Kelly Notes: This is a first draft. My laptop is in the shop and my Pad is on the blink so I'm working off my phone. I appologize for spellings and typos and will correct them ASAP. - I think I got them all.]

It is often said by Warren Commission appologists that if there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, since no one can keep a secret, someone would have talked.

Well someone did talk, but no body paid much attention.

As Larry Hancock clearly points out in his book "Someone Would Have Talked" (JFK Lancer), John Martino talked, John Roselli talked, David Atlee Phillips talked, Antonio Veciana talked, Bradely Ayers talked, and now, most significantly, Gene Wheaton talked.

While each of the others deserve - in James Jesus Angleton's terminology, a serial of their own, I am currently concentrating on what former investigator Gene Wheaton tells us, even though it comes under the category of hearsay. While hearsay may not be admissible in court at a trial, it is admissible in grand jury hearings, and often leads to more substansive evidence, as Wheaton's story does.

In evaluating Wheaton, I use the CIA's case study that evaluates sources and defectors by considering how much new, significant and verifiable information they provide, especially new names, places and events that are not on the record or in the files. In that regard, Wheaton comes up in spades.

Wheaton first came to my attention in Larry Hancock's book "Someone Would Have Talked," which I wrote about in my JFKCountercoup blog at the time. I quoted Wheaton extensively, but I failed to follow up on the many leads he provided, something I am trying to do now.

To establish Wheaton's bonifides right off the bat we will begin with excerpts from his obituary:

Funeral Home Memorial Page for:

Milton Gene Wheaton

May 19, 1935 - December 31, 2015 (age 80)

Milton gene Wheaton passed away peacefully on Dec. 31, 2015 at the age of 80 at the Desert Reginal Medical Center in Palm Springs after suffering from a traumatic head inury due to a fall at his home in Hemet.

He was born in Pawnee, Oklahoma in a Post Office on an Indian reservation. His parents were Bert and Ruth Wheaton.....

He spent a brilliant career in the military as a criminal investigator, ending his career at the rank of Chief Warrent Officer 3.

An example of his many accomplishments was when he was awareded the U.S. Legion of Merit from President Nixon for his exceptionally meritorious conduct in his performance as the Narcotics and Smuggling advisor of the U.S. Military Mission with the Imperial Iranian Grandarmerie from May 1971 through July 1973.

He retired from the military on June 30, 1975. After that he spent many years as a private investigator consultant. Then retired and spent the remaining years in Winchester and Hemet, California......

END OBIT Excerpts

Wheaton first came into the public arena when he was mentioned in a footnote to a legal civil suit prepared by attorney Dan Sheehan for the Christic Institute against those principles involved in what would become known as the Iran-Contra affair.

Wheaton was an early whistle blower who first took his inside knowldge of the affair to then CIA director William Casey, who did nothing because he was behind it.

Wheaton realized Casey was in on it and when asked why he blew the whistle on them, he said that Casey and those invovled were taking millions of dollars from a foreign terrorist state (Iran) in exchange for US military supplies (missiles) and using the money to finance secret covert operations without the approval of Congress.

While Sheenan's case was dismissed by the judge, Sheehan was ordered to pay the defendants $900,000, that put the Christic Institute out of business, The judge said the charges were based on "frivilous" hearsay, ans jst how frivilous it was became sensational a few months later when a CIA Contra support plane was shot down and baggage kicked Eugene Hassenfraus was captured alive. Hassenfraus confessed the CIA was behind the operation and had phone numbers on his possession that linked him to ( "Shadow Warrior") Felix Rodriguez, who took pride in tracking down Che Guevera, executing him and taking his Rolex watch.

The Iran-Contra affair then played out on its own in public and behind the scenes, and Wheton went quiet, for years. Then the JFK Act of 1992 was passed by Congress ordering all of the government records on the assassination of President Kennedy be made public in full by October 2017, something that still hasn't happened.

Wheaton wrote a letter to Judge John Tunheim, the chairman of the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB), establishing himself as a responsible person, and saying he knew of people and records that the Review Board would be interested in, and Tunheim reponded favorably.

ARRB staff attorney Ann Buttermer had a telephone conversation with Wheaton, after which she wrote an outside contact report on the details. She then met Wheaton in Washington and got more details, as well as documents and records that Wheaton said supported his story.

According to Buttimer's ARRB report, Wheaton told her Cuban exiles who were originally trained to attack and kill Castro, killed Kennedy instead, considering him a traitor for his failure to support them at the Bay of Pigs. Wheaton said that "people above the Cubans wanted JFK killed for other reasons," and that "the matter is not complex, but convoluted."

While there is only the outside contact report of Buttermer's phone conversation with Wheaton, her report on their meeting in Washington is missing, and shortly after their meeting Buttermer suddenly resigned and disapeared. Malcolm Blunt notes that unlike every other ARRB staff member, there is no separate file for Buttermer, though some of her records are scattered among the ARRB files.

Wheaton then faxed the review board, but only received a generic form reply thanking him for contacting them.

Then things went quiet again, at least on the public front, for over a decade, except for English professor John Simkin, who started the JFK Assassination Debate on his Education Forum web site, and kept track of all of the important players, including Gene Wheaton.

Also during this time some determined researchers plowed through the millions of pages of documents at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Archives II in College Park, Md., where the JFK Collection is kept. Among the records released under the JFK Act are the records of the ARRB, including Wheaton's letter to Judge Tunheim, Ann Buttermer's outside contact report on their phone coversation, and the items Wheaton gave Buttermer as supporting records to what he had to say.

If how many new, significant and verifiable names are the barrometor for bonifides, then Wheaton comes clean, as there are many, they are significant, and many have been verified.

Top of the list is Carl Jenkins, who Wheaton says was his close friend, housemate and business associate in National Airlines, one of many CIA front companies that I wrote about back in the 1980s.

[See: CIAir at JFKCountercoup.blogspot.com the story of Ralph Cox and United Overseas Airlines].

As Hanckock reported in his book, "Research confirms that beyond a doubt, Carl Jenkins was indeed a senior CIA officer who worked on paramilitary activities in support of the Bay of Pigs project and that by 1963-64 he was indeed directly involved with the AM/WORLD project, with Artime (AMBIDDY) and Quintero (AMJAVA4)."

In a September, 1963 memo Jenkins wrote how the anti-Castro Cuban commandos (he was training at JMWAVE) could, "use abductions and assassinations targeted against Cuban G-2 intelligence informants, agents, officer and foreign Communists to raise the morale of people inside Cuba."

Actualy, they were planning, training and preparing to kill Castro, an operation that Wheaton and Jenkins said was redirected to JFK at Dallas.

One of the working hypothesis of this inquiry is that whoever pulled off the Dealey Plaza Operation - they were very good, had done such things before and did it again afterwards, as the careers of Carl Jenkins and the Cubans he trained confirm.

Carl Jenkins was a United States Marine Corps (USMC) Captain in Japan, where he possibly crossed paths with Oswald. Wheaton suspects that is where Wheaton recruited Oswald, as they again crossed paths in the summer of 1963 in New Orleans, where Captain Jenkins established a new USMC Active Reserve unit, and became acquainted with mob boss Carlos Marcello.

Jenkins was known as a commando infiiltration - exfiltraion specialist, working closely with the anti-Castro Cubans before the Bay of Pigs, and at JMWAVE afterwards. At JMWAVE he trained a team of Cubans who Wheaton named as Ralphel "Chi Chi" Quintero, Nester Sanchez, Nestor Pino, Felix Rodriguez, Ricardo Morales, Tony Izquierdo, and others. While we were acquainted with some of these names, like Rodrriguez, others were new.

English professor John Simkin, who was in contact with a CIA media asset who knew Quintero, asked Quintero if Wheaton was correct in his allegations, and Quintero said Wheaton knew part of the story, and if the whole story got out it would be the biggest scandle ever.

Jenkins - and some of his team of Cubans, went on to work other operations - in 1964 Quintero was sent to Euorpe to meet Rolando Cubella (AMLASH), a significant player in the lead up to the assassination of the president.

They all worked for a time in the Congo, another key place of interest to those following the Dealey Plaza drama. And then Jenkins was sent to the Dominican Republic where the dictator Trujulio was assassinated. In response the CIA sent in David Atlee Phillips as the emergency Chief of Station while LBJ sent in the Marines, just to show the generals he would give them some action when JFK wouldn't.

Another name Wheaton gave out was I. Irving Davidson, who Wheaton described as a middleman, cut-out and fixer, whose clients included Clint Murcheson of Dallas, Carlos Marcello of New Orleans and Rafael Trujulio, a client he lost. Oh, yea, Davidson's office mate was Jack Anderson, the muckraking Washington columnist who exposed the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro, a scoop he got from Roselli, probalby becaues of the Davidson connection.

A year before Larry Hancock's book came out, in 2005, Wheaton was located and interviewed on videotape by Hancock and William M. Law, a short but concise tape that was premiered at the 2005 JFK Lancer conference in Dallas. But its significance was not immediately recognized. That tape sat on the shelf for another decade, and only this year (2018) was it posted on line for the world to see.

In it, Wheaton confirms all of the above, explains why he became an Iran-Contra whistle blower - "I'm a cop," and gives us more new names, including that of a Minnesota documentary film maker Matt Ehling, who recorded "hours and hours" of tapes in which he gives more details.

Another new name is that of one of those CIA small arms and explosive experts who assisted Jenkins in training the Cuban commandos at JMWAVE.

As I listened to the tape I thought Wheaton says the CIA trainer is "Ira" Harper, and could not find anyone by that name, but after I reposted the Wheaton video interview online, a Facebook friend (Pat Dugan) said the name is "I.W." Harper.

And that hit paydirt as "I.W." Harper was, according to a Soldier of Fortune Magazine article, a CIA explosives expert, small arms specialist who also trained Contras in Nicaragua.

While I.W. Harper is the name of a Kentucky whiskey, it's Jewish founder said he named the brand after a horseman he knew, I. W. Harper. It is likely that "I.W." is a nickname applied to the legendary CIA small arms and explosives expert since its not his real name.

There's a photo of Harper in the SOF article, The Wild Bunch, a mission photo of the armed specialists who were then training Contra commandos to fight the leftist Sandinistas in the struggle for power after the fall of the Somoza regime.

Besides Jenkins, Quintero and the Cubans, Davidson and Harper, Gene Wheaton also coughed up the names of others who were in the loop - Bill Bode, Rob Owen, Vaughn Forest and others we have yet to get to.

In the meantime, we have yet to locate the Minnesota film maker who has hours of tapes of Wheaton giving more details on these affairs. If anyone has the time and inclination to track Matt Ehling down, we'd like to hear more from Mr. Wheaton, whose bonifides are established by all of the great names he provides, and a scenario he provides that rings true.

More to come in Wheaton Part 2.

[FONT=&amp]UN: Authorities Should Allow Lula to Participate in Brazilian Elections, Respect 'Political Rights'

• Argentine Nobel Peace Laureate Esquivel, center, Brazil's former Foreign Minister Amorim, right, and Former Sao Paulo Mayor Haddad gesture after visiting Brazil's former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at the Federal Police headquarters in Curitiba. | Photo: Reuters
  

As long as these guys keep this BS up, is as long as I will reply with the actual record on the matter.

It actually makes for easy pickings to show how utterly wrong they are. Will the doctrinaire left ever get over what Cockburn and Chomsky did to them on this issue?

Maybe not. But I will keep on trying.

https://kennedysandking.com/articles/ken...terpunched