08-09-2018, 12:16 AM
I've been going back and forth over the 1970's (and later) activities of the neocons and their various predecessors for a while now, and still have a lot of further reading to do. There's close to a hundred online theses in PDF that are pertinent to the subject. Yesterday I found a 400+ page essay about Carter's clashes with the defence establishment during his Presidency.
Regardless, the war on terror does seem to have been conceived through this period. Team B, American Security Council members, Nitze and Wolhstetter and others all meeting time and again to discuss what could and should be done. Both of those latter guys also had a pivotal meeting with John Singlaub just prior to his retirement in 1978 to discuss their unhappiness with the direction of Carter's defence policy. The following year, they all head off overseas to the July 1979 Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism - an event that has been slightly misread, in my opinion - to set various propaganda wheels in motion, remembering that the target of choice following that event was the Soviet Union.
But that was a propaganda initiative with people giving speeches that had been prepared long earlier, to serve an agenda that had been cooking for a while, and which simply opened doors. I wrote the below elsewhere a week ago. Just excerpting it here, with some documentation.
New to me this week - Larry Potts, a colleague and friend of Louis Freeh, worked on Zelikow's Harvard Study Group into Catastrophic Terrorism. Terry Lynn Nichols once made a declaration stating that Timothy McVeigh had participated in the Oklahoma event under instructions from Larry Potts. Matthew Meselson, the anthrax expert Zelikow hired for the group, had 'served as a resident consultant to the CIA'. From a recent piece I wrote below
The right-wing think tank The Institute for Contemporary Studies (ICS) held a couple of seminars in the late 70's. One in 1976, the other in 1979. The results of both are gathered in a couple of books, the 1976 volume DEFENDING AMERICA, and the 1980 volume FROM WEAKNESS TO STRENGTH: NATIONAL SECURITY IN THE 1980's.
The 'institute' that put both books together was 'founded in 1972 by Edwin Meese and Caspar Weinberger as a think tank dedicated to promoting Ronald Reagan's presidential candidacy'. Meese and Weinburger both later appeared throughout the Iran Contra scandal, and Weinberger joined a group of PNAC neocons to sign the 1998 letter drafted by the 'Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf', urging Clinton to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The ICS was later headed by Robert B. Hawkins Jr. Donald Rumsfeld served as the CEO of ICS in the late 1980s.
Various anti-detente folk crop up in the first ICS volume. Robert Conquest, Theodore Draper, Gregory Grossman, Walter Z. Laqueur, Edward N. Luttwak, Charles Burton Marshall, Rumsfeld's good buddy Paul Nitze, Norman Polmar, Eugene Rostow, Leonard Shapiro, Paul Seabury, W. Scott Thompson, Albert Wohlstetter. The group announced their first volume was intended to address 'growing public concern about the drift in present policy' and to 'recommend alternate courses'.
A few years later, in the intro to the ICS volume FROM WEAKNESS TO STRENGTH, the editors note that their efforts throughout the Carter admin had been unable to 'change the underlying situation', and so while their first volume was a critique, the new volume - workshopped by the participants at a gathering at Belmont House in Baltimore, Maryland in late 1979 - was organised to set forth a positive agenda to act on for policy change. Back come some of the anti-detente right wingers - "...A number of authors who had contributed to the earlier book were recruited: Edward Luttwak, Charles Burton Marshall, Paul Nitze and Albert Wolhstetter... The new project was designed to recommend a whole range of policy options, from short-term quick fixes to longer-term military strategies." Joining the group were William R Van Cleave, a member of the Committee on the Present Danger. Van Cleave's Rightweb bio notes that "..at Missouri State University, Van Cleave has been part of a circle of like-minded hawks, many of whom were part of the 1970s-era CPD and who later championed an aggressive war on terror in the wake of the 9/11 attacks." Van Cleave was later part of the group that produced the Clean Break document supported by Wolfowitz in the 90's. Also joining that Maryland group in 1979, and listed in the contents as an attendee in the FROM WEAKNESS TO STRENGTH volume - Kenneth Adelman, Donald Rumsfeld's personal assistant during the Ford administration, who would later co-write two books with Lockheed head Norm Augustine.
As part of their examination of long-term military strategies during the conference, Fred Ikle - who had worked alongside Wolfowitz and Richard Perle - presented a paper - PREPARING FOR INDUSTRIAL MOBILIZATION: THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS FULL STRENGTH, and Ikle's talk is reprinted in full through pages 55-69 of the book. In his 1979 talk, Ikle noted that a renewed military buildup would be crucial for the United States to achieve its various goals in the years ahead, but that a renewed effort towards military mobilisation would be difficult to achieve without a 'dramatic external event'.
Luttwak, present at both earlier conferences, had previously written a volume on how conspirators could carry out a Coup d'Etat - COUP D'ETAT - A PRACTICAL HANDBOOK. Listed as 'wicked, truthful and entertaining', it's a non-fiction analysis of how a secretive group could carry out an internal coup against the government of their own country.
The first three pages ago are discussion among the defence establishment folk at the December 1979 Belmont House conference talking about using a 'triggering event'. Final page - Ikle's lecture, excerpted, where he explains that a dramatic external event will be required to boost military spending.
![[Image: attachment.php?attachmentid=9592&stc=1]](https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=9592&stc=1)
![[Image: attachment.php?attachmentid=9593&stc=1]](https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=9593&stc=1)
![[Image: attachment.php?attachmentid=9594&stc=1]](https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=9594&stc=1)
Ikle's speech excerpted below. See the paragraph at bottom.
![[Image: attachment.php?attachmentid=9595&stc=1]](https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=9595&stc=1)
Regardless, the war on terror does seem to have been conceived through this period. Team B, American Security Council members, Nitze and Wolhstetter and others all meeting time and again to discuss what could and should be done. Both of those latter guys also had a pivotal meeting with John Singlaub just prior to his retirement in 1978 to discuss their unhappiness with the direction of Carter's defence policy. The following year, they all head off overseas to the July 1979 Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism - an event that has been slightly misread, in my opinion - to set various propaganda wheels in motion, remembering that the target of choice following that event was the Soviet Union.
But that was a propaganda initiative with people giving speeches that had been prepared long earlier, to serve an agenda that had been cooking for a while, and which simply opened doors. I wrote the below elsewhere a week ago. Just excerpting it here, with some documentation.
New to me this week - Larry Potts, a colleague and friend of Louis Freeh, worked on Zelikow's Harvard Study Group into Catastrophic Terrorism. Terry Lynn Nichols once made a declaration stating that Timothy McVeigh had participated in the Oklahoma event under instructions from Larry Potts. Matthew Meselson, the anthrax expert Zelikow hired for the group, had 'served as a resident consultant to the CIA'. From a recent piece I wrote below
The right-wing think tank The Institute for Contemporary Studies (ICS) held a couple of seminars in the late 70's. One in 1976, the other in 1979. The results of both are gathered in a couple of books, the 1976 volume DEFENDING AMERICA, and the 1980 volume FROM WEAKNESS TO STRENGTH: NATIONAL SECURITY IN THE 1980's.
The 'institute' that put both books together was 'founded in 1972 by Edwin Meese and Caspar Weinberger as a think tank dedicated to promoting Ronald Reagan's presidential candidacy'. Meese and Weinburger both later appeared throughout the Iran Contra scandal, and Weinberger joined a group of PNAC neocons to sign the 1998 letter drafted by the 'Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf', urging Clinton to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The ICS was later headed by Robert B. Hawkins Jr. Donald Rumsfeld served as the CEO of ICS in the late 1980s.
Various anti-detente folk crop up in the first ICS volume. Robert Conquest, Theodore Draper, Gregory Grossman, Walter Z. Laqueur, Edward N. Luttwak, Charles Burton Marshall, Rumsfeld's good buddy Paul Nitze, Norman Polmar, Eugene Rostow, Leonard Shapiro, Paul Seabury, W. Scott Thompson, Albert Wohlstetter. The group announced their first volume was intended to address 'growing public concern about the drift in present policy' and to 'recommend alternate courses'.
A few years later, in the intro to the ICS volume FROM WEAKNESS TO STRENGTH, the editors note that their efforts throughout the Carter admin had been unable to 'change the underlying situation', and so while their first volume was a critique, the new volume - workshopped by the participants at a gathering at Belmont House in Baltimore, Maryland in late 1979 - was organised to set forth a positive agenda to act on for policy change. Back come some of the anti-detente right wingers - "...A number of authors who had contributed to the earlier book were recruited: Edward Luttwak, Charles Burton Marshall, Paul Nitze and Albert Wolhstetter... The new project was designed to recommend a whole range of policy options, from short-term quick fixes to longer-term military strategies." Joining the group were William R Van Cleave, a member of the Committee on the Present Danger. Van Cleave's Rightweb bio notes that "..at Missouri State University, Van Cleave has been part of a circle of like-minded hawks, many of whom were part of the 1970s-era CPD and who later championed an aggressive war on terror in the wake of the 9/11 attacks." Van Cleave was later part of the group that produced the Clean Break document supported by Wolfowitz in the 90's. Also joining that Maryland group in 1979, and listed in the contents as an attendee in the FROM WEAKNESS TO STRENGTH volume - Kenneth Adelman, Donald Rumsfeld's personal assistant during the Ford administration, who would later co-write two books with Lockheed head Norm Augustine.
As part of their examination of long-term military strategies during the conference, Fred Ikle - who had worked alongside Wolfowitz and Richard Perle - presented a paper - PREPARING FOR INDUSTRIAL MOBILIZATION: THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS FULL STRENGTH, and Ikle's talk is reprinted in full through pages 55-69 of the book. In his 1979 talk, Ikle noted that a renewed military buildup would be crucial for the United States to achieve its various goals in the years ahead, but that a renewed effort towards military mobilisation would be difficult to achieve without a 'dramatic external event'.
Luttwak, present at both earlier conferences, had previously written a volume on how conspirators could carry out a Coup d'Etat - COUP D'ETAT - A PRACTICAL HANDBOOK. Listed as 'wicked, truthful and entertaining', it's a non-fiction analysis of how a secretive group could carry out an internal coup against the government of their own country.
The first three pages ago are discussion among the defence establishment folk at the December 1979 Belmont House conference talking about using a 'triggering event'. Final page - Ikle's lecture, excerpted, where he explains that a dramatic external event will be required to boost military spending.
Ikle's speech excerpted below. See the paragraph at bottom.