Where To Assign Blame In The Bergdahl Matter?~!

[Peter Lemkin]

The Real Villains of the Bergdahl Tale

June 3, 2014

By Ray McGovern


For me, the Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl affair brings back angry memories of how, in 2009, President Barack Obama caved in to be-medaled and be-ribboned generals like David Petraeus and ordered a modified-limited-hangout-type "surge" of 33,000 troops into Afghanistan. Consequential cowardice at work trading lives for political advantage as bad as it gets.
Bergdahl was quick to discern that he and his comrades were pawns of a policy doing far more harm than good in terms of helping the Afghans. Emailing from Afghanistan in late June 2009, Bergdahl pointed out the main problem in these words: "In the US army you are cut down for being honest… but if you are a conceited brown nosing shit-bag you will be allowed to do what ever you want."
President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney receive an Oval Office briefing from CIA Director George Tenet. Also present is Chief of Staff Andy Card (on right).

But how far up the line did this behavior go? Did it include Petraeus, described by CENTCOM commander Admiral William "Fox" Fallon as "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" after a meeting at which Petraeus fawned over Fallon, then his superior? (Why is it that the Fox Fallons are the ones who get sacked? Although Petraeus's charmed government career was finally done in by a sex scandal in December 2012.)
Do Fallon's epithets toward Petraeus apply equally to commander-in-chief Obama who ordered the "surge" into Afghanistan, which like its first still-born twin "surge" in Iraq two years earlier predictably did little more than get a lot of folks killed and buy some time for the architects of the two misguided adventures to get some distance between their original decisions and the ultimate failures.
Those "decent intervals" achieved by the two "surges" were purchased with the lives of about 1,000 U.S. soldiers each, not to mention the many more deaths inflicted on the Iraqi and Afghan people. But the "surges" allowed Official Washington's still-influential neocons to maintain the fiction that if only the "successful surges" had been extended indefinitely, everything would have worked out fine.
On May 28, for instance, the neocon-flagship Washington Post denounced President Obama for not maintaining U.S. military forces in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan apparently forever.
"You can't fault President Obama for inconsistency," the Post's editors wrote snidely. "After winning election in 2008, he reduced the U.S. military presence in Iraq to zero. After helping to topple Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi in 2011, he made sure no U.S. forces would remain. … And on Tuesday he promised to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2016. The Afghan decision would be understandable had Mr. Obama's previous choices proved out. But what's remarkable is that the results also have been consistent consistently bad."
Yet, while pretending that the two "surges" were super-successful may give the Post's editors and other advocates for endless war some talking points at elegant Washington dinner parties where otherwise they might not be invited or dismissed as "losers," the price for those more pleasant evenings was paid by the pawns the Bergdahls of this world who never seem to matter.
Bergdahl's disenchantment with the Afghan War and his subsequent five-year captivity at the hands of the Taliban ending only with a trade of five Taliban leaders from the Guantanamo Bay prison have prompted right-wing talk shows and even some members of Congress to decry Bergdahl as a "deserter" who betrayed his country and his comrades.
But the real betrayers were the ones who devised and prosecuted the two failed wars killing hundreds of thousands of people in the two countries and wasting the lives of nearly 7,000 U.S. soldiers (not to mention the tens of thousands maimed and otherwise damaged). Yet, the war architects and the shills remain respected members of Official Washington with their op-ed columns still read with great admiration and their sage advice sought on current crises in Syria and Ukraine.
Expecting Too Much
In 2009, as Obama was first getting rolled on the Afghan "surge," I admitted that I had expected too much from the young President who struck me as bright albeit inexperienced. In an article entitled "Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President" on March 28, 2009, I wrote:
I was wrong. I had been saying that it would be naïve to take too seriously presidential candidate Barack Obama's rhetoric regarding the need to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
I kept thinking to myself that when he got briefed on the history of Afghanistan and the oft-proven ability of Afghan "militants" to drive out foreign invaders from Alexander the Great, to the Persians, the Mongolians, Indians, British, Russians he would be sure to understand why they call mountainous Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires."
And surely he would be fully briefed on the stupidity and deceit that left 58,000 U.S. troops not to mention 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese dead in Vietnam.
John Kennedy became President the year Obama was born. One cannot expect toddler-to-teenager Barack to remember much about the war in Vietnam, and it was probably too early for that searing, controversial experience to have found its way into the history texts as he was growing up.
But he was certainly old enough to absorb the fecklessness and brutality of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. And his instincts at that time were good enough to see through the Bush administration's duplicity.
And, with him now in the White House, surely some of his advisers would be able to brief him on both Vietnam and Iraq, and prevent him from making similar mistakes this time in Afghanistan. Or so I thought.
Deflecting an off-the-topic question at his March 24, 2009 press conference, Obama said, "I think that the last 64 days has been dominated by me trying to figure out how we're going to fix the economy. … Right now the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged, and that is, are we taking the steps to improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to reopen, keep America safe?"
Okay, it is understandable that President Obama has been totally absorbed with the financial crisis. But surely, unlike predecessors supposedly unable to do two things at the same time, our resourceful new President certainly could find enough time to solicit advice from a wide circle, get a better grip on the huge stakes in Afghanistan, and arrive at sensible decisions. Or so I thought.
Getting Railroaded?
It proved to be a bit awkward waiting for the President to appear…. a half-hour late for his own presentation. Was he for some reason reluctant?
Perhaps he had a sense of being railroaded by his advisers. Perhaps he paused on learning that just a few hours earlier a soldier of the Afghan army shot dead two U.S. troops and wounded a third before killing himself, and that Taliban fighters had stormed an Afghan police post and killed 10 police earlier that morning.
Should he weave that somehow into his speech?
Or maybe it was learning of the Taliban ambush of a police convoy which wounded seven other policemen; or the suicide bomber in the Afghan border area of Pakistan who demolished a mosque packed with hundreds of worshippers attending Friday prayers, killing some 50 and injuring scores more, according to preliminary reports.
Or, more simply, perhaps Obama's instincts told him he was about to do something he will regret. Maybe that's why he was embarrassingly late in coming to the podium. One look at the national security advisers arrayed behind the President was enough to see wooden-headedness.
In her classic book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, historian Barbara Tuchman described this mindset: "Wooden-headedness assesses a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions, while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs … acting according to the wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts."
Tuchman pointed to 16th Century Philip II of Spain as a kind of Nobel laureate of wooden-headedness. Comparisons can be invidious, but the thing about Philip was that he drained state revenues by failed adventures overseas, leading to Spain's decline.
It is wooden-headedness, in my view, that permeates the "comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan" that the President announced in March 2009. Author Tuchman points succinctly to what flows from wooden-headedness:
"Once a policy has been adopted and implemented, all subsequent activity becomes an effort to justify it. … Adjustment is painful. For the ruler it is easier, once he has entered the policy box, to stay inside. For the lesser official it is better not to make waves, not to press evidence that the chief will find painful to accept. Psychologists call the process of screening out discordant information cognitive dissonance,' an academic disguise for Don't confuse me with the facts.'"
It seems only right and fitting that Barbara Tuchman's daughter, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Foundation, has shown herself to be inoculated against "cognitive dissonance."
A January 2009 Carnegie report on Afghanistan concluded, "The only meaningful way to halt the insurgency's momentum is to start withdrawing troops. The presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban."
In any case, Obama explained his decision on more robust military intervention in Afghanistan as a result of a "careful policy review" by military commanders and diplomats, the Afghan and Pakistani governments, NATO allies, and international organizations.
No Estimate? No Problem
Know why he did not mention a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) assessing the likely effects of this slow surge in troops and trainers? Because there is none. Guess why. The reason is the same one accounting for the lack of a completed NIE before the "surge" in troop strength in Iraq in early 2007.
Apparently, Obama's advisers did not wish to take the risk that honest analysts ones who had been around a while, and maybe even knew something of Vietnam and Iraq, as well as Afghanistan might also be immune to "cognitive dissonance," and ask hard questions regarding the basis of the new strategy.
Indeed, they might reach the same judgment they did in the April 2006 NIE on global terrorism. The authors of that estimate had few cognitive problems and simply declared their judgment that invasions and occupations (in 2006 the target then was Iraq) do not make us safer but lead instead to an upsurge in terrorism.
The prevailing attitude this time fits the modus operandi of Gen. David Petraeus, who late last year took the lead by default with the following approach: We know best, and can run our own policy review, thank you very much.
Which he did, without requesting the formal NIE that typically precedes and informs key policy decisions. It is highly regrettable that President Obama was deprived of the chance to benefit from a formal estimate. Recent NIEs have been relatively bereft of wooden-headedess. Obama might have made a more sensible decision on how to proceed in Afghanistan.
As one might imagine, NIEs can, and should, play a key role in such circumstances, with a premium on objectivity and courage in speaking truth to power. That is precisely why Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair appointed Chas Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council, the body that prepares NIEs and why the Likud Lobby got him ousted.
Estimates on Vietnam
As one of the intelligence analysts watching Vietnam in the Sixties and Seventies, I worked on several of the NIEs produced before and during the war. Sensitive ones bore this unclassified title: "Probable Reactions to Various Courses of Action With Respect to North Vietnam."
Typical of the kinds of question the President and his advisers wanted addressed were: Can we seal off the Ho Chi Minh Trail by bombing? If the U.S. were to introduce X thousand additional troops into South Vietnam, will Hanoi quit? Okay, how about XX thousand?
Our answers regularly earned us brickbats from the White House for not being "good team players." But in those days we labored under a strong ethos dictating that we give it to policymakers straight, without fear or favor. We had career protection for doing that.
Our judgments (the unwelcome ones, anyway) were often pooh-poohed as negativism. Policymakers, of course, were in no way obliged to take them into account, and often didn't.
The point is that they continued to be sought. Not even Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon would decide on a significant escalation without seeking our best estimate as to how U.S. adversaries would likely react to this or that escalatory step.
So, hats off, I suppose, to you, Gen. Petraeus and those who helped you elbow the substantive intelligence analysts off to the sidelines.
What might intelligence analysts have said on the key point of training the Afghan army and police? We will never know, but it is a safe bet those analysts who know something about Afghanistan (or about Vietnam) would roll their eyes and wish Petraeus luck.
As for Iraq, what remains to be seen is against whom the various sectarian factions target their weapons and put their training into practice.
The Training Mirage
In his Afghanistan policy speech, Obama mentioned training 11 times. To those of us with some gray in our hair, this was all too reminiscent of the prevailing rhetoric at the start of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
In February 1964, with John Kennedy dead and President Lyndon Johnson improvising on Vietnam, then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara prepared a major policy speech on defense, leaving out Vietnam, and sent it to the President to review. The Johnson tapes show the President finding fault:
LBJ: "I wonder if you shouldn't find two minutes to devote to Vietnam."
McN: "The problem is what to say about it."
LBJ: "I would say that we have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom. … Our purpose is to train the [South Vietnamese] people, and our training's going good."
But our training was not going good then. And specialists who know Afghanistan, its various tribes and demographics tell me that training is not likely to go good there either. Ditto for training in Pakistan.
Obama's alliterative rhetoric aside, it is going to be no easier to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat" al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan with more combat forces and training than it was to defeat the Viet Cong with these same tools in Vietnam.
Obama seemed to be protesting a bit too much: "Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course." No sir!
There will be "metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable!" Yes, sir!
And he will enlist wide international support from countries like Russia, India and China that, according to President Obama, "should have a stake in the security of the region." Right, sir!.
"The road ahead will be long," said Obama in conclusion. He has that right about that. The strategy adopted virtually guarantees that.
That is why Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan publicly contradicted his boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in late 2008 when Gates, protesting the widespread pessimism on Afghanistan, started talking up the prospect of a "surge" of troops in Afghanistan.
McKiernan insisted publicly that no Iraqi-style "surge" of forces would end the conflict in Afghanistan. "The word I don't use for Afghanistan is surge,'" McKiernan stated, adding that what is required is a "sustained commitment" that could last many years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.
McKiernan has that right. But his boss Mr. Gates did not seem to get it.
Bob Gates at the Gate
In late 2008, as he maneuvered to stay on as Defense Secretary in the new administration, Gates hotly disputed the notion that things were getting out of control in Afghanistan. The argument that Gates used to support his professed optimism, however, made us veteran intelligence officers gag at least those who remember the U.S. in Vietnam in the 1960s, the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and other failed counterinsurgencies.
"The Taliban holds no land in Afghanistan, and loses every time it comes into contact with coalition forces," Gates explained.
Our Secretary of Defense seemed to be insisting that U.S. troops have not lost one pitched battle with the Taliban or al-Qaeda. (Engagements like the one on July 13, 2008, in which "insurgents" attacked an outpost in Konar province, killing nine U.S. soldiers and wounding 15 others, apparently do not qualify as "contact.")
Gates ought to read up on Vietnam, for his words evoke a similarly benighted comment by U.S. Army Col. Harry Summers after that war had been lost.
In 1974, Summers was sent to Hanoi to try to resolve the status of Americans still listed as missing. To his North Vietnamese counterpart, Col. Tu, Summers made the mistake of bragging, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield."
Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."
I don't fault the senior military. Cancel that, I DO fault them. They resemble all too closely the gutless general officers who never looked down at what was really happening in Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the time have been called, not without reason, "a sewer of deceit."
The current crew is in better odor. And one may be tempted to make excuses for them, noting for example that if admirals/generals are the hammer, small wonder that to them everything looks like a nail. No, that does not excuse them.
The ones who were standing in back of Obama during his speech have smarts enough to have said, NO; IT'S A BAD IDEA, Mr. President. That should not be too much to expect.
Gallons of blood are likely to be poured unnecessarily in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan probably over the next decade or longer. But not their blood.
Sound Military Advice
General officers seldom rise to the occasion. Exceptions are so few that they immediately spring to mind: French war hero Gen. Philippe LeClerc, for example, was sent to Indochina right after World War II with orders to report back on how many troops it would take to recapture Indochina. His report: "It would require 500,000 men; and even with 500,000 France could not win."
Equally relevant to Obama's fateful decision, Gen. Douglas MacArthur told another young President in April 1961: "Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined."
When JFK's top military advisers, critical of the President's reluctance to go against that advice, virtually called him a traitor for pursuing a negotiated solution to the fighting in Laos, for example Kennedy would tell them to convince Gen. MacArthur first, and then come back to him. (Alas, there seems to be no comparable Gen. MacArthur today.)
Kennedy recognized Vietnam as a potential quagmire, and was determined not to get sucked in despite the misguided, ideologically-salted advice given him by Ivy League patricians like McGeorge Bundy.
Kennedy's military adviser, Gen. Maxwell Taylor said later that MacArthur's statement made a "hell of an impression on the President."
MacArthur made another comment about the situation that President Kennedy had inherited in Indochina. This one struck the young President so much that he dictated it into a memorandum of conversation: Kennedy quoted MacArthur as saying to him, "The chickens are coming home to roost from the Eisenhower years, and you live in the chicken coop."
Well, the chickens are coming home to roost after eight years of Cheney and Bush, but there is no sign that President Obama is listening to anyone capable of fresh thinking on Afghanistan. Obama has apparently decided to stay in the chicken coop. And that can be called, well, chicken.
Can't say I actually KNEW Jack Kennedy, but it was he who got so many of us down here to Washington to explore what we might do for our country.
Kennedy resisted the kind of pressures to which President Obama has now succumbed. (There are even some, like Jim Douglass in his book JFK and the Unspeakable, who conclude that this is what got President Kennedy killed.)
Mr. Obama, you need to find some advisers who are not still wet behind the ears and who are not brown noses preferably some who have lived Vietnam and Iraq and have an established record of responsible, fact-based analysis.
You would also do well to read Douglass's book, and to page through the "Pentagon Papers," instead of trying to emulate the Lincoln portrayed in Team of Rivals. I, too, am a big fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin, but Daniel Ellsberg is an author far more relevant and nourishing for this point in time. Read his Secrets, and recognize the signs of the times.
There is still time to put the brakes on this disastrous policy. One key lesson of Vietnam is that an army trained and supplied by foreign occupiers can almost always be readily outmatched and out-waited in a guerrilla war, no matter how many billions of dollars are pumped in.
Professor Martin van Creveld of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the only non-American military historian on the U.S. Army's list of required reading for officers, has accused former President George W. Bush of "launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them."
Please do not feel you have to compete with your predecessor for such laurels.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. In the Sixties he served as an infantry/intelligence officer and then became a CIA analyst for the next 27 years. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

[Tracy Riddle]

Well, Oliver North has just told the Fox news mouth-breathers that it is a truly horrendous thing to make deals with terrorists to free hostages. ::

[Kenneth Kapel]

Well Fox is a well known comedy channel, btw Ralph Peters, who called for the execution of Bergdahl has now told Fox viewers that the United States has always executed deserters. Eddie Slovik was the last American deserter and he was executed for leaving his troop during WW2, he was the first since the Civil War. Well Fox viewers are well known for their knowledge. ::hush::

[Magda Hassan]

Well, Oliver North has just told the Fox news mouth-breathers that it is a truly horrendous thing to make deals with terrorists to free hostages. ::

He would know. Why isn't he in jail?

[Peter Lemkin]

Well, Oliver North has just told the Fox news mouth-breathers that it is a truly horrendous thing to make deals with terrorists to free hostages. ::

He would know. Why isn't he in jail?

Aha! Therein your question lies the answer - not only to this matter, but just about all matters we talk about! ::prison:: The villains are running the World and the innocent ones the victims of these villains. Sadly. It is an upside-down and inside-out World full of Newspeak and Doublethink. If a war is illegal and started on a lie [or lies] based on a false-flag operation [I submit this is so, here, 100%], then how can someone 'deserting' this illegal/immoral war be guilty of any great crime. The Nuremberg Principles set the stage where 'just following orders' is not a valid excuse - no matter what one's rank. A person is also [theoretically] innocent until they wind up in a Kangaroo Kourt run by the villains to maintain their grip on their ill-gotten Empire and illegally seized powers and money.

[Peter Lemkin]

While in this article [not directly addressing Afghanistan or Bergdahl affair] he does touch on the 9-11 false flag, it was that excuse used to launch our longest war ever in Afghanistan, based on lies and multiple false-flags and false patsies.......[NO PERSON NOR GROUP in Afghanistan that wasn't on the US-Saudi payroll/spookroll was in any way really involved in 9-11. The real culprits were in the USA, IMO.] ::

"False Flag Terrorism" to Sustain America's "Humanitarian" Agenda

Sustaining the US Empire's Killing Machine. The Modus Operandi of US Led Wars

By Joachim Hagopian
Global Research, June 02, 2014






In late May 2014, President Obama rolled out his foreign policy initiatives at West Point and said nothing new. Every lie he uttered is just a retread cover for the same old, same old disastrous foreign policy the US has engaged in since the cold war began shortly after World War II. The fact is Washington has been regularly practicing this same modus operandi for over sixty years.
Through constant use of false flags deceptively blaming the designated enemy of the United States, starting with the dual threat of the Soviet Union and China's spreading Communism in the early 1950's, then in this century fabricating the al Qaeda enemy's spreading terrorism and now back to a revitalized cold war stopping the expansionist spread of Russia and China again, the US has been busily justifying its aggressive interventionist policy throughout the world.
For nearly seven decades the US Central Intelligence Agency has been the chief operating engineer and primary culprit covertly orchestrating this entire diabolical front engaging in acts of terrorism to ensure that Obama's unabashed exceptionalism in the form of an overstretched, morally bankrupt, imperialistic American Empire in decline reaches every corner of the planet.
Though false flag terrorism has been utilized throughout human history, including Nero's Great Fire as the Roman Empire literally went down in flames, its deployment in modern times has been increasingly frequent. By definition a false flag operation involves a government or organization committing egregious acts of violence on its own citizens or members in order to deceitfully blame its enemy and initiate wars. Though this presentation shall focus primarily on the US government's false flag events committed within the last 60 years, many nations other than America have also engaged in false flag operations.
The term originated when wooden ships would purposely fly the enemy flag in order to launch an attack on another ship belonging to the same navy. Hence, falsely blaming the designated enemy for terrible murderous events unfortunately ever since as a common US tactic deployed to terrorize and sway public opinion has been used as a justified excuse to declare war on many nations and groups. A few passing historical examples are presented here, the first of which was the jingoistic media-induced frenzy "Remember the USS Maine!" after it sank in the Havana harbor in 1898. Though an internal explosion ripped open the hull causing the vessel to sink killing 270 sailors, it was then used to unfairly accuse Spain for a crime it clearly did not commit in order to trigger the start of the Spanish American War.
Though President Franklin D. Roosevelt was credited with lifting America out of the despair of the Great Depression, FDR willfully withheld information he had been privy to months in advance of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Instead he chose to sacrifice most of the Pacific fleet though he ensured the fleet's crucial three aircraft carriers were safely relocated. But most importantly the US President knowingly permitted the murder of 2,403 Americans and the wounding of another 1,178. All because he felt too weak to oppose the strong anti-war sentiment of the American public, FDR let the war come to him and all those dead and suffering Americans just to enter World War II. His deceitful actions willfully ensured that mass numbers of Americans would be murdered just to start America's involvement in the most deadly war in human history.
Roosevelt's false flag crime against humanity as the first and only attack on American soil since the War of 1812 ranks despicably high. That said, sixty years later the second and only other attack on the US homeland since resulted in the loss of even more American lives and ranks as the biggest, most disgraceful false flag of them all in the entire US history 9/11. But more on that false flag later.
To demonstrate that the US does not have the cornerstone on such shameful human atrocities, Hitler regularly employed false flags. In Operation Himmler he ordered SS troopers to attack his own people among them a German radio station as antecedent events that led to blaming the Poles and invading their homeland in 1939 to ignite the Second World War. Six years earlier Hitler was responsible for setting fire to the German parliament building in order to pave his way to seizing power and suspending all liberties.
As false flag architects and firm believers in their effectiveness to stir national opinion, Gestapo commander Hermann Göring has an infamous quote illustrating this point:
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."Unfortunately his words ring true for dozens of successful false flags in history. But once in awhile one will backfire. In the early 1950's an Israeli terrorist cell planted evidence and set bombs off in several buildings including the US Embassy in Egypt to blame Egypt. But one of the bombs was accidentally detonated early enough for the Egyptian authorities to link Israel to the attacks, resulting in a scandal that brought down the then Israeli government.Operation Gladio emerged and flourished throughout the cold war period from the early 1950's through the 1980's in reaction to both a potential Soviet invasion and the very real growth of the Communist Party within pockets of Western Europe, particularly Italy where at one time one third of the voting electorate consisted of Communists. Gladio evolved into right wing state sponsored terrorism funded by NATO and the American CIA. A strategy of tension designed to instill fear into the general population was created by carrying out various false flag events such as planting bombs in crowded public markets, train stations and targeted buildings killing dozens of innocent Italian citizens then blaming it on the leftist Red Brigade.
The CIA's active involvement in staging terrorism, coups and assassinations around the world has been proven beyond a doubt despite the US government's standard official policy to cover-up, lie and deny. These state sponsored acts of terror were not limited to just Italy only but evidence exists that they were also committed in France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Germany and Switzerland and later expanded heavily in the 1990's with Gladio B in Turkey and Central Asia as well. For many decades US State Department personnel along with CIA operatives covertly working behind the scenes with NATO and various right wing reactionary groups have included high ranking European politicians, judges, security forces, military officers and organized crime drug lords to repeatedly kill hundreds of innocent civilians en masse.
In 1997 declassified documents unveiled Operation Northwoods, among the most damaging evidence to date indicating just how low and pathologically ill US military megalomaniacs running America's armed forces really are. The psychopathic killers who were the five Joint Chiefs of Staff, the very top generals of each of the military services back in 1962, conspired to execute terrorist attacks on innocent American civilians in order to blame it on Fidel Castro, thereby gaining public approval to start a war against Cuba. Perturbed over the failed Bay of Pigs debacle, the generals colluded with the CIA to propose highjacking and shooting down commercial airliners, attacks on both US Navy ships and other military targets, and bombing US citizens in Washington DC and Miami. When President John F. Kennedy learned of this sinister false flag plan just prior to its implementation, he cancelled it.
President Kennedy had inherited the CIA's Bay of Pigs fiasco leftover from the Eisenhower administration. The president's rejection of Operation Northwoods on top of his refusal to deploy the US military in the infamously botched attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro left in its wake a number of angry anti-Castro Cubans as well as miffed CIA agents and the highest ranking military officers. Conversely, the humiliating bitter pill that the Bay of Pigs forced Kennedy to swallow left a sour aftertaste, setting into motion a conflict between all parties that in retrospect have been cited as strong provocation behind Kennedy's own demise.
Further recent evidence suggests that JFK was moving to reduce the CIA's power by restructuring, not escalate a war in Vietnam and reduce the power of the privatized Federal Reserve Board that was/is the oligarch banking cabal and that these preeminent plans were the basis for his enemies within the government to assassinate him. Clearly enough evidence exists to incriminate elements within the CIA as major players in his untimely death. A number of recent investigators implicate elements of false flag operations through use of patsies in not only JFK's but his brother Robert and Martin Luther King's assassinations as well. Blaming a lone gunman with known ties to Communist enemies the Soviet Union and Cuba was used as a means to cover up the true perpetrators who were American agents within the US government.
Kennedy's successor Lyndon B. Johnson with circumstantial links to the JFK assassination himself wasted no time as Commander-in-Chief in August 1964 employing another false flag to begin yet another war. The Gulf of Tonkin incident became LBJ's immoral excuse to declare a bogus war against North Vietnam. Yet he, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and then military analyst later turned whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg knew it was a lie that North Vietnamese gunboats fired on the destroyer the USS Maddox that was sent by Washington on the mission to the Tonkin Gulf purposely to bait Hanoi into taking aggressive action. Johnson's boldface lie that "our boys are floating in the water" swept America into its then longest running war in US history. 58,213 American lives lost later with an astounding total of between nearly one to over three million human additional lives violently ended, the Vietnam War was a total tragic waste in every aspect of the word. Absolutely nothing positive came out of the first official American war defeat in US history. But the senseless slaughter and shattered lives of so many innocent Southeast Asians who never deserved such an unforgivable horrendous fate based on another US president's lie is impossible to fathom much less accept. No one can blame innocent war victims for never forgiving America for its countless brutal sins that only continue to rage against humanity uninterrupted to this very day.
To demonstrate that America is not alone as the only heavy using of false flags and that other current leaders also employ false flag operations on their own people, the September 1999 bombings of Russian apartment buildings killing 300 innocent people were falsely blamed on Chechen terrorists in order to bring about another war against Chechnya. A 2002 book written by former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko exposing the 9/99 false flag likely resulted in his poisoning death by Russian intelligence in 2006. A report from a Johns Hopkins study additionally concluded that the KGB and Russian government were in fact guilty of planting the bombs in order to ensure that Vladimir Putin would be elected the next Russian Federation president.
But perhaps the most unforgivable false flag crime against the human race committed by the most evil humans still alive on earth the neocon insiders of the Bush-Cheney administration pulled off the all time most egregious terrorist act of our lifetime the inside job that is the horror of the 9/11 attacks. Massive evidence has been accumulating over the past 13 years since the attacks on New York's World Trade Center twin towers and the Pentagon that highly incriminate the US government. President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney and their cast of neocon characters were responsible for murdering nearly 3000 Americans on September 11th, 2001 in order to justify their preplanned agenda of a permanent war on terror starting in Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent systematic dismantling of the US Constitution. Their day of infamy turns out far more diabolical than FDR's own infamy day. A coup took place where a handful of neocons single handedly overthrew what was left of democracy in America, and overnight replaced it with a fascist despotic oligarchic dictatorship. With the Patriot Act and executive orders America woke up and found itself living in a real life Orwellian nightmare of tyranny from the top on down that now appears to be reigning even more supreme under the Obama regime.
Obviously books have been written offering far more detailed accounts covering the hundreds of discrepancies that point to the sinister inside job. However, for the sake of brevity here a condensed version presenting only the most salient and glaring facts are included.
Hundreds of engineers analyzing how the twin towers came down concluded that they collapsed from internal explosionsfrom within, falling at an acceleration rate of two thirds that of freefall. Seven hours later at 5:20PM on 9/11 near the fallen towers, Building 7 never hit by a plane and only slightly damaged from fallen tower debris at half the height of the towers suddenly collapsed at absolute freefall in just 6.5 seconds. This strongly indicates that the buildings were brought down by detonations set off by explosives placed near the steel girders, and clearly not from the damage caused by jet fuel explosions near the top stories of the towers. If two planes flying into the top floors of the towers (one at the 78thfloor and the other between the 93rd and 99th floors) were to cause the buildings to collapse, which in itself is virtually impossible, the speed at which they came down would have been much slower and they would never have totally collapsed into all the dust and rubble that was left. Simple laws of physics prove that two planes and their fires could never have brought down those towers but only internal explosives carefully planted on every floor would cause the collapses the way all three buildings fell.

Larry Silverstein who leased the World Trade Center mistakenly referenced the collapse of Building 7 as "pulled it," a common expression used in building demolitions. Silverstein who had only leased the towers six months before their collapse, stood to gain a quick 1.4 billion in profit on his six month turnaround investment. Also the head of security of the World Trade Center happened to be President Bush's cousin. Additionally lots of illicit insider trading just before and after 9/11 prove certain unrevealed insiders were aware of the coming events.
Not unrelated, a BBC correspondent named Jane Standley actually reported the collapse of Building 7 over twenty minutes prior to its collapse.

Explosions resulting from burning jet fuel at near 800 degrees cannot possibly melt steel which requires temperatures of at least 1600 degrees. Yet the red-gray dust from the fallen rubble and debris shows that explosives that burn at far higher temperatures than jet fuel were used to cause the buildings to collapse. Overwhelming amounts of nano-thermite dust were detected at ground zero providing conclusive evidence that nano-thermite burning at high enough temperatures to effectively melt steel was the key ingredient in the explosives that must have been planted weeks prior to the planes colliding into the towers. The nano-thermite material in the planted explosives clearly brought the buildings down in a controlled demolition, and definitely not the planes.
Additionally there were survivors like Brian Clark who at the time of impact were on floors higher than the floor the plane flew into, yet they experienced no level of heat that prevented them from moving past the burning floor all the way down to ground level to escape to safety. This totally defies the official explanation that it was the jet fuel explosion and ensuing fire that caused the entire buildings to collapse a short time after the planes impact.
Another fact that strongly supports the contention that the buildings were brought down by an explosive demolition is the eyewitness testimony of hundreds of survivors who all heard a series of loud explosions at the ground floor level. Planes burning at the upper floor levels could never cause those explosions.
The Pentagon was never hit by a plane. No pieces or parts of the plane were ever found. And then the hole in the Pentagon was only 16 feet wide, far smaller than the size of a commercial aircraft. This provides indisputable evidence that Flight 77 never impacted the Pentagon building but that more than likely a missile did. Furthermore, the hard turn required for the alleged jetliner flown by an inexperienced terrorist could not possibly maneuver a large plane into the Pentagon. Lastly, the airspace over Washington DC is the most heavily guarded in the entire world and no plane could crash into the most defended military building on the planet. Far too much concrete evidence taken together makes the official story impossible.
With nearly a trillion dollar budget spent each year on defending the United States with the most sophisticated and powerful military and air defense in the world, yet the four jet airliners that supposedly were crashed by terrorists were somehow never intercepted by any fighter planes. There were 35 Air Force bases within close proximity on 9/11 to the four hijacked planes. Within minutes after planes go off the air traffic controller system an air defense protocol is in place to immediately release military fighter jets to intercept highjacked airliners. Yet not one fighter jet was on the scene the entire time. This implausible explanation that they could not respond in time is simply preposterous.
Another questionable phenomenon was all the military officers in charge of air defense operations near Washington on 9/11 that by tragic outcome clearly showed that they all failed to do their jobs properly. Yet to a man they were all mysteriously promoted just days after 9/11 when they ordinarily should have been demoted for clearly gross negligence… of course unless they were actually being rewarded for their complicit roles in the inside job.
Just three days after 9/11 the FBI had miraculously identified all nineteen of the alleged hijackers without providing any evidence that any were actually on the four flights. In contrast after the Pan Am flight went down over Lockerby, Scotland, two years into the investigation indictments were finally made. Then one day after 9/11 Attorney General Ashcroft announced that the intact passport of one of the alleged terrorists had been found a few blocks from ground zero. Yet the planes allegedly caused molten steel to pulverize and meltdown everything in sight into a fine powdery dust but somehow not even a burned and entirely intact undamaged passport was found. These lies would be laughable if they were not used to cover up the truth of how 2,977 victims' deaths resulted from the worst false flag in history.
The official report would lead the public to believe that fifteen of the nineteen hijacking terrorists were Saudi fundamentalist Islamists practicing the strictest form of Islam called Solafist. Yet the former American girlfriend of their alleged ringleader Mohammed Atta and his fellow terrorists were always drinking alcohol and using cocaine. While staying in Florida near NSA offices Atta is on record as an actual roommate of a CIA pilot who flew drugs during the Iran-Contra scandal in South America. While living in Hamburg Atta is also known to have met with German intelligence.
Atta and another alleged hijacker flew from Florida to Boston a couple days prior to 9/11 and left a known trail of traveling onto Portland Maine and staying out late partying and drinking at a club in Portland the night of September 10th. On the morning of 9/11 they then flew from Portland into Boston on a flight that landed a mere half hour before their alleged flight they supposedly hijacked was taking off. The FBI released a photo of them captured on an airport camera the FBI claimed was proof that they boarded the flight at Boston's Logan Airport. However, it was actually a photo of the two boarding their flight in Portland. Thus no evidence showed them ever on the flight of the plane they were purported to crash into the New York tower. In fact no evidence of any of the 19 alleged terrorists ever boarding any of the four flights on 9/11 was ever produced.
In the days and weeks following 9/11, the UK's Telegraph and CBS news tracked down several of the identified terrorists still alive in Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Newsweek reported that Atta was on record of having had a phone conversation with his father on September 12th. One by one a number of the supposed dead hijackers began showing up alive and well faraway from the 9/11 crash sites. All of these pieces of damning evidence make the official US government accounts of the September 11th attacks even more suspect and weak, only adding to the mounting strength proving that a cover-up to a very sloppy inside job was perpetrated on the American public.
The fact is the neocon network is far more America's enemy than any so called al Qaeda network. Long before 9/11, the Bushes (with roots traced back to financing Nazi Germany), Cheney and Rumsfeld all had their indelible grubby fingerprints all over US foreign policy as far back as the 70's and 80's. George Bush senior was CIA Director during the mid 1970's and on 9/11 met with the bin Laden family in another major business transaction. Later when all planes were grounded in the US, the bin Ladens were safely flown home to Saudi Arabia. There is a more than casual linkage between Osama's family and the neocons responsible for 9/11.
Donald Rumsfeld was Defense Secretary during the Ford administration. And Dick Cheney began working for Rumsfeld in 1969. From 1979-89 Cheney served as a Wyoming Congressman until President George Bush senior promoted Cheney to Secretary of Defense where he oversaw military operations in both Panama and the first Gulf War, rewarded by his boss with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. From 1995 Cheney was CEO at Halliburton, a huge and corrupt defense contractor until 2000 when he became George junior's Vice President and more the front end mastermind behind 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars than less endowed figurehead George junior. Their lives and careers have long been intertwined in government and corporate cronyism. Along with a handful of other notable neocons like Paul Wolfowitz who was Deputy Secretary of Defense under Rumsfeld and later World Bank President. These 9/11 figures saw the opportunity to use Osama bin Laden as their wanted milk carton face to their global war on terror.
The label al Qaeda was eventually attached to Osama's Islamic freedom fighters whose mission was to support fellow Moslems everywhere oppressed by Western imperialism. As the young emerging leader of the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, the US with CIA support had been financing, arming and training Osama and his randy brand of terrorists since the late 1980's and continued sponsoring their terrorist activities throughout the 1990's in Bosnia and Kosovo. Many of the Mujahideen fighters were on the US payroll. A Pentagon subcontractor called Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI) employed many of the Mujahideen terrorists in the Balkans.

Michael Springman, Chief of Visa Section at the US General Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia from 1987 to 1989 disclosed that many CIA personnel worked undercover issuing US visas to a number of the same terrorists later allegedly involved in the 9/11 attacks. The CIA was sponsoring state supported terrorism bringing them to the US and training them at various US military schools, fine tuning their terror skills. After 9/11 from an LA Times article Springman recognized a number of the terrorist hijackers amongst those freely receiving visas years before and promptly informed the FBI. In fact 15 visas belonging to the alleged 9/11 terrorists had been attained in Jeddah. But not surprisingly, the FBI never bothered getting back to Springman.
A similar story was heard from Sibel Edmonds a former FBI translator and government whistleblower who became aware of an Iranian FBI informant who had been on the payroll for ten years in April 2001 warning the FBI that al Qaeda terrorists were planning to fly airplanes into key buildings in several US cities.
Two FBI agents independent of each other, one in Arizona and the another in Minnesota, also contacted central FBI headquarters in Washington reporting a flurry of activity involving a number of Arabs enrolling in flight schools. Attorney General Ashcroft in August 2001 was approached by the FBI over reports of increasing signs of potential terrorism and Ashcroft emphatically replied that terrorism was lowest on his priority list and did not want to hear any more about impending threats. There were numerous warnings that had been reported to the federal government but obviously went unheeded. Meanwhile, since 1999 the Air Force had been doing training exercises four times a year in preparation for just such a scenario of terrorists flying planes into buildings.
Bush and Security Council Condoleezza Rice have both repeatedly gone on record denying that there were any advance warnings to alert and possibly prepare them for planes used by terrorists for this purpose… more lies. But then since 9/11 was a false flag operation, of course the neocons would ignore all warnings however obvious and blatant that the attack was about to occur… like another day of infamy.
The Patriot Act was written before 9/11 and signed into law on October 26th, 2001. Congressman Ron Paul asked about it being prepared so quickly and was told it had been sitting in the Justice Department waiting for the right time to be brought to a vote for the last twenty years.
Many in US Congress both past and current members along with numerous retired US military officers and scientists and professors from academia have questioned publicly the whitewashed bogus findings of the 9/11 Commission that the Bush administration resisted for well over a year before it was finally formed. Then he and Cheney resisted having to even testify. Yet that said, the government has conveniently dismissed those believing Washington insiders bear culpability and responsibility for 9/11 by calling them "conspiracy theorists." The derogatory name calling designed to eliminate credibility over time is offering less credence to their stonewalling lies and cover-up cracks. Instead more Americans are realizing the depth of moral depravity and evil in their resistance to truth. Movement to ultimately hold the war criminals accountable at the Hague are in process.
Two weeks after 9/11 General Wesley Clark learned of the neocon agenda formulated prior to 9/11 to take down seven sovereign nations in the Middle East and North Africa within five years. Americans learned that the myth of Saddam Hussein holding weapons of mass destruction was a complete lie. That willful deception along with the other false accusation that Hussein had direct links to terrorism became the basis for invading Iraq in March 2003. Lies perpetrated on both America and Iraq resulted in a million and a half Iraqi citizens dying in a decade long war under US occupation that has left the nation permanently embroiled in sectarian civil war violence the last two and a half years since US departure. Al Qaeda holds more of the country's territory now than ever before. Genetically deformed babies and cancer rates have soared exponentially due to US military deploying depleted uranium and flesh burning white phosphorus chemicals. US blood for oil wars decimate and destroy nations, installing regime changes with weak, corrupt puppet governments, indefinite sectarian violence and untold human misery. Meanwhile, shut out of the nation with the world's fifth largest oil reserves until the US invasion, now ExxonMobil, BP and Shell are making huge profits.
Though fortunately no US false flag has come close to reeking the same level of damage, human suffering and horrible consequences since 9/11, the US government has persisted in engaging in more recent false flag operations. Last August 21st in a Damascus suburb a chemical weapons attack launched by US and Saudi backed al Qaeda militants killed many innocent Syrian civilians with many children among the casualties. At the time, President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry were aggressively pushing to launch air strikes on Syria convinced that it was Assad's government forces that committed the attack. Yet they refused to produce any evidence because they had none. They were giving it their best psychopathic shot to inflict more death and destruction on more innocent humans knowing they were spewing more lies of deception in their thinly veiled imperialistic would-be intervention. Obama was willing to risk starting World War III as Russia and China moved their naval fleets into the area in support of their allies Syria and Iran. And Syria and Iran remain the last of those seven nations on that neocon list for regime changes.
Fortunately Kerry made an offhand rhetorical comment that Russian President Putin opportunistically seized to successfully broker a face saving deal where Assad has now turned over 92% of his chemical weapons. Of course no one ever insisted that the al Qaeda rebels who were responsible for the heinous atrocity turn over their chemical weapons likely shipped to them from Saudi Arabia.
Despite Obama's weakened position as a world leader from his grandstanding fiasco, he has not given up his goal to remove Assad from power with a recent renewed commitment to supplying al Qaeda militants with even more sophisticated weaponry that at some point risks being used against Americans. Meanwhile, the Syrian government forces are gaining the upper hand in a stalemate that has perhaps killed over 160,000 and displaced over 2.58 millionSyrian refugees from their homes. The number in Lebanon alone is up to 1.3 million in a growing international humanitarian and political crisis.
In this last year several other false flags have occurred with US-NATO involvement and support. Two months ago a planned false flag operation was uncovered when a few months earlier the Turkish Foreign Ministry Undersecretary, a National Intelligence Organization staff and a Turkish general were secretly taped while openly discussing a proposed false flag attack on its own citizens and soil in Turkey that would then be falsely blamed on Syrian government military as a precursor to a Turkish invasion into Syria. There also has been a Turkish government representative making reference to being repeatedly asked by John Kerry about whether a false flag had been executed.
Al Qaeda rebels fighting in Syria have also been instructed to destroy and desecrate holy mosques in order to be able to blame Assad forces, thereby swaying the Syrian population against their government. All these incidents demonstrate continued US commitment to using the false flag strategies with US-NATO allies as proxy perpetrators.
Finally, in every sovereign nation targeted by the US for destabilization and regime change, as recently in Ukraine, Venezuela and Syria among other nations, the US-NATO secret security and intelligence forces have trained mercenarysnipers on using the false flag tactic by posing as enemy personnel and murdering their own citizens as well as police. Back in February in both Ukraine and Venezuela during the weeks leading up to the US-NATO supported Ukrainian fascist coup and the violent unrest in Venezuela, snipers shot and killed protestors in the streets. In both situations the cold-blooded killing was designed to turn public sentiment against the alleged oppressive government security forces that were being falsely blamed. Then in both nations photos were quickly posted on social media websites to enflame citizens to openly oppose and actively overthrow their existing government, which of course with US backing did occur in Ukraine. This same tactic continues currently in Ukraine where in Odessa several weeks ago murderous thugs posing as pro-Russian militants killed many victims in a building and then set fire killing even more.
The fact is the US has always had al Qaeda on its payroll spanning the last twenty-five years. For over three years al Qaeda mercenaries have been active in both Libya and Syria, fighting US proxy wars for regime changes in Libya against the overthrow of Muammar Kaddafi and in what now appears to be a losing cause in Syria to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Therefore, it should not come as much of a surprise that the US government merely used Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda to be the patsies in a false flag operation to launch the war on terror on the false pretext of invading Afghanistan and Iraq.
Al Qaeda from the start has been a mere invention by US intelligence to declare war on a new enemy once the Soviet Union was dissolved nearly a quarter century ago. America was left as the sole world superpower but without an identifiable enemy. Hence, out of expedience, America's military and CIA must always justify their need for constant war with a known enemy to demonize and fight, in effect justifying their very existence, not to mention being the prime beneficiaries of so much allocated US taxpayer funding. Obviously much is at stake for the military security complex to lay claim to so many hard earned taxpayer dollars.
For instance in 2011 alone, $845 billion dollars were spent on defense, security and veterans benefits, comprising about 25% of the total annual budget, nearly as much as the rest of the entire world spends on its military and defense combined! And this does not include much of the secret discretionary funds allocated carte blanche without oversight to covert Special Operations training death squads for more terrorism and enemies around the world. Thus it is imperative if the theft of so much taxpayer revenue is to continue or even increase in the future, the US government must continue to engage in false flag terrorism on its own people in order to condition the American population into actually believing there remains a very real and dangerous external threat to their very survival. Once the public reaches critical mass in catching on to the US government's ponzi scam of global deceit, tragic waste and mass murder, enough angry and fed up Americans will revolt, refusing to any longer support the US Empire's killing machine. It will be then that another false flag will be foisted on citizens that will in turn lead to martial law, FEMA roundups and a probable second American civil war.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former Army officer. His written manuscript based on his military experience examines leadership and national security issues and can be consulted at http://www.redredsea.net/westpointhagopian/. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in psychology and became a licensed therapist working in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now focuses on writing.

[Kenneth Kapel]

I disagree that FDR was the culprit in regard to Pearl Harbor, IMO more likely the pro-fascist military, but that's just my opinion.Lindberg, the Chicago Tribune, & Wall Street, played a bigger role than the President. FDR fought Wall Street as they attempted to overthrown him many times. Mr. Suttons' "Wall Street & FDR" is a mess and when read closely makes no sense. Wall Street wanted FDR to be "their puppet", which he refused to be, but he did have to make concessions. In 1940 when FDR appointed Stimson as Secretary of Wall & Landon;s running mate as Secretary of the Navy the GOP has held high Defense Department ever since, even under Democratic Presidents. FDR didn't appoint these GOP'ers to these get get Mid-West GOP support, but to appease the ruling elite on Wall Street. Sutton is right that Wall Street & The City of London wanted a puppet, but FDR wasn't it. Kennedy wasn't either. Nixon didn't play ball so he was "Watergated". Clinton, Obama, Ford, and the Bushes are totally Wall Stret stooges. Btw Henry Stimson was Skull & Bones, odd isn't it that Bones members love death so much. Thank you for the posting the entire article, but I felt that I that an FDR dissent was needed. American treachery knows no bounds with a 100% mainstream price always on a bended knee. The liberal Chris Matthews has always followed "The Chicago Tribune" view of history when it comes to FDR and foreihn policy. Back in the 1950's when I attended Catholic school the nuns though that FDR was "a little pink", as was Adlai Stevenson, according to The Sisters of Notre Dame. They all, at least the ones that I had as teachers, thouth that Stevenson was "almost an atheist", I later discovered that because the former Illinois Governor was a member of the Unitarian Chuch that made him a non-believer, even though Mr. Stevenson declared himself a Christian after his 1956 defeat and responding to Norman Vincent Peale's attack on the Democratic ticket and how America was saved from going to H+++ if the Democrats won. My 7th grade nun was at her wits end the day after the 1960 election, from the way she was acting that day, with the election still in doubt, but with all points pointing to a JFK win, you would think that "Soviet America" was about to dawn. A few years later I discovered that FDR's domestic policy was, in large part, taken from Catholic social doctrine. BTW the Nuns also felt that Harry Hopkins was a Soviet Agent and the "evil genuis" behind Rosevelt. I guess that ex Worker editor Louis Budenz, who returned to the Church, and became frequent witness before HUAC, then an "expert on communism" at Notre Dame, Seton Hall, and other Catholic universities and then a columnist for "OurSunday Visitor", a weekly Catholic newspaper. Btw every nun, that taught me, believed J.Edgar Hoover was the greatest living American, that Walt Disney was the greatest producer of American entertainment, and that Bob Hope was the most patriotic American entertainer. No rightwing, near fascist, bias was shown by the nuns. That is one reason that so many Catholics, but nowhere near the percentage, hold idiotic views that work against their (mainly) middle class interests. Not that Obama and the Wall Street Democrats deserve support either.

I one thing that I can't understand is why the Clintons are held in such high esteem by rank & file Democrats. Hilllary is pro-Wall Street, a neo-con war monger in her foreign policy, as is Obama, who is a complete Wall-Street, military-industial complex tool. But to moron such as Christoper Matthews both Hillary & Obama are "center;left Deocrats. As author Thomas Frank, "Whats the Matter with Kansas, recently said "You cant have a center without having a left." I believe that Mr. Franks said this on the Chis Hays Show about a week ago.

[Peter Lemkin]

Veteran: Politicians Using Freed POW Bowe Bergdahl as "Chess Piece to Win Political Matches"

The Obama administration is seeking to contain a congressional backlash over a prisoner exchange that saw the release of American soldier Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban leaders. On Wednesday, top intelligence and military officials held a closed-door briefing for the entire Senate showing them a recent video of Bergdahl in declining health. The administration says the video helped spur action to win his release over fears his life was in danger. Opponents of the deal say the White House failed to give Congress proper notice, and may have endangered American lives by encouraging the capture of U.S. soldiers. The criticism has exploded as news spread through right-wing media that Bergdahl may have left his base after turning against the war. We are joined by Brock McIntosh, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War who served in Afghanistan from November 2008 to August 2009. McIntosh applied for conscientious objector status and was discharged last month.
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/5/vet..._pow_bowe#


AMY GOODMAN: As this controversy brews, it's on so many different levels. You've got the controversial prisoner swap and the whole issue of is this leading to the closing of Guantánamo, and then you've got Bowe Bergdahl leaving the base, not really fully understood at this point because we have not talked to Bowe Bergdahl. And once he left the base, he was not spoken to again except through Taliban videos of him. The question is being raised, did he desert? The question is being raised and he's being condemned in the mainstream media for his antiwar views.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we're going to talk more about the Bowe Bergdahl story. We go now to Brock McIntosh in Washington, D.C. He fought with Army National Guard in Afghanistan from November 2008 to August 2009. And was based near where Bergdahl was captured. McIntosh had later applied for conscientious objector status and joined Iraq veterans against the war. Brock McIntosh, welcome back to Democracy Now!
BROCK MCINTOSH: Thanks for having me.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Your initial reaction to the uproar in Congress and around the country over the prisoner swap with Bowe Bergdahl?
BROCK MCINTOSH: You just played a song called "Masters of War" and there's a lyric where it talks about you to hide behind walls, you that hide behind desks, I just wanted to know I can see through your masks. And I think that that is a perfect description of what we're seeing in Congress right now. These people who hide behind walls and hide behind desks, and are using a POW as a chess piece to win political matches. And that last week, used a wounded veteran with nearly 40 years of military service, General Shinseki, as a political chess piece. And so, I think it is outrageous we know nothing about the actual circumstances of why exactly Sergeant Bergdahl left. We don't know what his intentions were. It is all speculation at this point. All we know for sure is that he was a POW and he should have been welcomed home.
AMY GOODMAN: And Brock, tell us where you were in Afghanistan in relation to Bowe Bergdahl. You served at the same time, though didn't know each other.
BROCK MCINTOSH: Sure Amy. I served in Paktika Province initially for six months. That's where Bowe Bergdahl went missing for six months. Spent the last three months in Khost Province. Those last three months were when Bowe Bergdahl went missing. He went missing in June 30, and I left Afghanistan in August 2009.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of this whole the allegations that in the search for Bergdahl, all of these soldiers, several American soldiers were lost or killed. The only The New York Times, among the commercial media, has really raised the issue that many of these soldiers are being brought out by Republican political operative and made available to the various media. Your what you understand about these other soldiers who were killed around the same time while Bergdahl was in captivity?
BROCK MCINTOSH: Right, so I think the story that is being told in the media makes it seem as though there was a unit that received that was briefed about some rescue mission and they went out on this rescue mission to locate and extract Sergeant Bergdahl and six people died in the process. That is really not the case. Bergdahl went missing on June 30. Those six soldiers that died died two months later in four separate missions. And it is not clear to what extent those missions had anything to do with searching for Bergdahl. They certainly were not rescue missions. I mean one of them one of those deaths involved an American soldier being killed supporting an Afghan national security force mission. That is not a rescue mission. We don't know why exactly the six soldiers died. There's all sorts of things that could explain it. Let's not forget that summer season is fighting season in Afghanistan. It could have been that they died in late August and early September because it was late in the summer, and it was right before the winter, and attacks always ramp up at that time of year. It could also be explained by the fact that in 2009, the Obama administration initiated this protracted insurgency campaign and a surge in Afghanistan. So, there are all sorts of things that could explain why the soldiers died. And I think it is unfair to assert that Bergdahl went missing and therefore these soldiers died. And another thing also, in Bergdahl's unit, they had gone a few months without any fatalities. The first fatality was five days before Bergdahl went missing. So, it could have just been that he happened to have gone missing at a time when there were increased attacks and people were being killed. What's unfortunate is that he is being used, again, as a political chess piece in a political game and conservatives are using the allegations of soldiers in his unit to imply that this man wasn't a hero and therefore, President Obama is not a hero for bringing this soldier home.
AMY GOODMAN: Looking at Buzzfeed describing who Juan was just talking about, this former Bush administration official, hired then resigned, Mitt Romney foreign policy spokesperson, played a key role in publicizing critics of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. The involvement of Richard Grenell who once served as a key aide to Bush, to rather to the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. ,John Bolton, later worked on Romney's campaign. I wanted to go back, though, to 2009, to the soldiers who Bowe Bergdahl worked with in that tiny outpost that they built in Afghanistan. We had Sean Smith on a few days ago, a Guardian videographer and photographer who produced a film back in 2009 as well as one when he went to Idaho and met Bowe's father, Bob Bergdahl, which we also played and I encourage people to go to democracynow.org to see all of that. Sean Smith spent a month embedded with Bowe Bergdahl's unit in Afghanistan. In this clip, we hear from some of the soldiers stationed with Bowe.

SOLDIER ONE: These people just want to be left alone.

SOLDIER TWO: Yeah, they got dicked with from the Russians for 17 years and then now we're here.

SOLDIER ONE: Same thing in Iraq when I was there. These people just want to be left alone. Have their crops, weddings, stuff like that, that's it man.

SOLDIER TWO: I'm glad they leave them alone.

SEAN SMITH: A few weeks later, Bowe Bergdahl, pictured in this photo, disappeared. The circumstances are unclear.

AMY GOODMAN: That is from the 2009 video for The Guardian produced by Sean Smith. Michael Hastings would further right about that, the late reporter for Rolling Stone. Brock McIntosh, can you talk about your feelings when you were in Afghanistan, what was happening there? We have seen the e-mails that Michael Hastings wrote about in Rolling Stone of Bowe to his parents, talking about his disillusionment with the war. What were your thoughts and the thoughts of other soldiers? Sean Smith, a reporter for The Guardian, said it was not unusual, more so among Americans and British soldiers in Afghanistan, to be highly critical of what was happening.
BROCK MCINTOSH: It is really hard it was really hard to hear that clip, Amy, because it reminded me so much of the conversations that I had while I was in Afghanistan. There was so much talk about within my unit about these Afghan people and how they just want to be left alone. And we were all aware of the role the U.S. played during the Cold War. Using the Afghan people as a proxy to get back at the Soviet Union, using the lives of Afghans as political chess pieces and gamesmanship? And so to then be in Afghanistan to help people, to help the Afghan people felt very disingenuous. We never had any clear sense exactly why we were there, what it was that we were supposed to be doing, why these people are shooting at us, who was shooting at us. Who are we shooting at? Why are we shooting at them? And it really eats away at you and it becomes a situation where all you want to do is you just want to come home and want your buddies on your left and your right to come home. And it's what are you supposed to do in a situation where you find yourself you find yourself in a conflict that you don't agree with, where people are dying on both sides? What are you supposed to do? What recourse do you have? I did not know that the conscientious objector process existed. That's one recourse you can take. But I didn't know that that existed. There's an overwhelming lack of awareness that there's a formal process where you, when you have a conscientious shift, you can actually leave the military.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And even your commanders at times are not aware of these options. Could you talk about that confronting your own commander or your sense that you wanted to go into conscientious objector status?
BROCK MCINTOSH: Right. When I initially applied, it through my commander off guard. I actually applied on the very first day in my new unit, and so my commander was thrown off guard both because it was my first day meeting him and also because he didn't think that that process was possible. You can't just leave because you morally disagree with war. But it turns out you can. And to his credit, he read about the regulations and he actually drafted a document that we signed together saying I did not have to study, use or bear arms.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, what did that mean? Where were you, Brock?
BROCK MCINTOSH: Well, I had applied actually after about a year or so after I had come home. And I transferred from an Illinois National Guard unit to a D.C. state unit, and that is when I applied.
AMY GOODMAN: And what was that process you went through? You started serving in, what, November 2008, you were in Afghanistan 'til August 2009.
BROCK MCINTOSH: I started serving in November, August 2008. Like so many soldiers, I wanted nothing more but to just make this war work and to help the Afghan people. And again, it became increasingly frustrated when you did not know why you were there and you didn't why these people were shooting at you or who you were supposed to be or why you were shooting and who you were shooting. I wanted to make the war work. And so, in that process of trying to make the war work, I started reading about the history and culture of Afghanistan, just like Bowe's father did. And like Bowe, it became really discomforting to learn about the relationship that the U.S. has had with that country for the past 30 years and all the problems it has created for the past 30 years. And there were certain first-hand experience I had experiences I had that were unnerving, like seeing a 16-year-old bomb maker get blown up. He came to our base to be treated. And we took turns babysitting his body in one hour shifts. And when I was alone with him in this room, thinking how crazy it is that me as a 20 world and the 16-year-old are being sent to kill each other by these adult for these ideologies that we don't quite understand. It's just a sad situation.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: According to Rolling Stone magazine Bergdahl sent a final e-mail to his parents on June 27, three days before he was captured. He wrote, "The future is too good to waste on lies... And life is way to short to care for the damnation of others as well as to spend it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I've seen their ideas and I'm ashamed to even be American. The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. Is is all revolting. I am sorry for everything here... These people need help, yet what they get is the conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live. The horror that is America is disgusting." In that email, he also referred to seeing an Afghan child run over by U.S. military vehicle. Your reaction to some of those words?
BROCK MCINTOSH: I want to react to one thing to one aspect of that statement, and that was about lies. We were lied we as veterans were lied to about the Iraq war. We were lied to by the Bush administration and with the endorsement of Congress, we went into Iraq. Nearly 5000 American soldiers were killed, well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed, based on that line. There has been a lot of talk over the last few months about a lie that was told that the Phoenix VA Hospital about these secret waiting lists. I find it really ironic that Congress is so obsessed about figuring out who lied at the Phoenix VA Hospital and the circumstances of that lie that are connected to the deaths of 40 veterans, when a lie that they told killed nearly 5000 American soldiers and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians. And what they're doing is they're trying to defer blame from themselves. Congress is the reason that we have waiting lists. 'Congress is the reason that we deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and deployed over 2 million veterans and have this influx of veterans that are fighting to get V.A. health care.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, it is interesting you raise this, Brock, because last week at this time, everyone nonstop across all of the media was talking about whether General Shinseki would resign and about the horror of the V.A., the waits that people have when they come home from war, one to two years. And within two days, then that is all wiped off of the face of the media and this is the controversy that takes its place. But you see these as connected.
BROCK MCINTOSH: Well, I'm not sure if they're connected. It could be that this happened at a time when the Obama administration anticipated General Shinseki stepping down. I don't know, but I see a connection in Congress' willingness to exploit other people's service for political gamesmanship. Last week, they scapegoated General Shinseki, a wounded veteran who served for nearly 40 years, they scapegoated him to defer blame from themselves and the role that they played in creating these wait lists and failing to prepare for the cost of veterans coming home. When we went to Iraq and we went to Afghanistan, they did not set aside the necessary funds that would be required to care for our veterans to come home and to make the systematic changes that would need to be made. So the Congress played a huge role in creating those wait lists and the problems that the V.A. is facing and they scapegoated a veteran last week. And this week, they're now taking advantage of a POW and using him for political games and it is pretty sick and pretty disgusting and it's pretty shameful.
AMY GOODMAN: Brock, finally, did you ever get conscientious objector status?
BROCK MCINTOSH: I did not get conscientious objector status. You know, the process for reserve soldiers, it's supposed to take about six months, three months for active soldiers. But, the process is always there are always obstacles and barriers in the process. You always have to butt has with officers. They lose your paperwork. You really need to have legal assistance in order to get c.o. status because the process is so difficult. If more veterans were aware, more soldiers were where aware that c.o. process exists and if there were reforms made to the c.o. process, we may not have had a situation where a soldier had a conscientious change of heart and left his post because he didn't realize that there were formal recourses of actions that he could have taken. Not saying that that's the reason why Sergeant Bergdahl left, we don't know. But, the point is, I think we could avoid potential situations like this if we reform the c.o. process and if more soldiers are made aware that that process exists.

[Peter Lemkin]

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Lynch Mob Rule as Bowe Bergdahl's Hometown Surrenders to the Terrorists

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Fox News: POW Bergdahl's Dad Looks Like a Taliban Member
(image by YouTube)

This is a pretty dismal day to live in America or more accurately to live in The Homeland. The America that we knew has been gone for quite some time now although enough remains - at least in cosmetic terms to pretend that one day it may come back - that is not going to happen. The vicious, sleazy, politically motivated and most of all cowardly attacks on Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, the US Army prisoner of war just released from five years of captivity in a deal that Obama struck with the Taliban is evidence that any vestiges of a free and fair country are now gone. The haters have always been there but this disgusting display of venom is a place where even a cynic like myself didn't think that they would go. It is so completely anti-American, even Naziesque that it will leave a coating of toxic scum upon all of us long after Bergdahl's name has faded from the media and the never ending traveling carnival of perversion of political hacks and media assassins have found newly vulnerable prey to ambush and rip apart.
The collapse of our political system has been evident for quite some time now -- any country that manages to not only elect but re-elect charlatans like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama is one that is thoroughly fucked. Throw in a corrupt gaggle of incompetents, perverts, clowns, criminals, de-facto lobbyists, racists, cranks and religious fanatics in the US Congress and top it off with the cherry on the sh*t cake of a Supreme Court that is a rubber stamp on corporate looting, torturing people, mass warrantless surveillance and the restricting press freedom and you have a land destined for the scrapheap of history and hellbent at getting there as quickly as possible. The real problem is that the journey there is going to be one of great pain and if the past five days of 24/7 "Two Minutes Hate" piled upon Bergdahl and his family are any indication it will be one that must be navigated through a gauntlet of apple pie authoritarians who will make Hitler's brownshirts look like pikers when the sh*t hits the fan and they are the ones who are brought in as muscle to protect the corrupt system.
The nadir of our post September 11, 2001 descent into the abyss of fear, loathing and moral bankruptcy is that the berserkers - as instigated by the neocons and their fully weaponized media machine have intimidated Sgt. Bergdahl's home Idaho hometown of Hailey to cancel the celebration of his release after threats of violence became too much of a danger to the citizenry. The small mountain town, with a population of around 8,000 faced the very real possibility of being descended upon by hordes of revved up right-wing goons who would not have been satisfied until Hailey was ransacked and burned to the ground. While one can't blame the city for calling off the event - the safety of residents is first and foremost - it sets a very dangerous precedent in that this time the terrorists won. When a wild animal catches the scent of blood it will keep on running rogue and killing until it has been stopped by the use of equivalent force which is not going to happen. The thugs are far too valuable to the oligarchy to reign them in now, especially with the potential for social collapse if the US-EU-NATO Axis of Aggression continue to push towards a war with Russia.
But I digress.
The predatory attacks on Bergdahl, a proxy for the hated Obama has been building to a crescendo all week with absolutely no resistance from any national leadership figures, religious leaders or rational voices within the system. They have been content to continue to pour more gasoline on the fire to see just how much that it can burn and then step back to marvel at their destruction like pyromaniacs. This is sheer vengeance and the real reasons behind this horrific bursting of the festering, pus-filled wart on the ass of America is explained pretty well by Antiwar.com's always excellent Justin Raimondo whose recent column entitled "Hating on Bowe Bergdahl" exposes the arsonists behind this latest and greatest pyre of hate. I excerpt the following:

Embittered by double defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, driven out of both countries with their tails between their legs, the War Party is looking for scapegoats, and has found one in the least likely place -- the ranks of the US Army. That's right: the "support the troops" contingent is now intent on re-torturing Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a 26-year-old Idaho native held captive by the Taliban for five horrific years.
A concerted campaign, stage-managed by "Republican strategists" -- i.e. Richard Grenell, former Romney foreign policy consultant fired for being too gay -- is pitting some of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl's former comrades against the just-released prisoner-of-war. The former claim Bergdahl is a "traitor" who deserted his post: a 2012 Rolling Stone piece by Michael Hastings implies as much. Yet we really don't know what happened: in a Taliban propaganda video Bergdahl says he was caught after he "lagged behind" on patrol. And this US government cable posted by WikiLeaks contains intercepted Taliban communications hailing his capture and claiming it occurred in the course of an attack on Bergdahl's base while he was using a latrine.
We don't yet know the circumstances of his capture, and so these calls for prosecution are premature, to say the least. Not that legal niceties like evidence matter to the baying wolves of the neocon media: they want vengeance for the war they lost and were widely blamed for. Having lost on the battlefield in Afghanistan, the War Party is seeking a victory on the home front.
The persecution of Bowe Bergdahl is just the first chapter in the neocons' ongoing revisionist history of the Afghan war. And we know the theme of this work of fiction from the very first act: it's a tired replay of the old "we-were-stabbed-in-the-back" myth promulgated by failed Napoleons in every country. In the American version, they said -- and still say -- the same thing about the Vietnam war -- we were prevented from winning by squeamish liberals and anti-American war protesters, who secretly (and not so secretly) supported the Commie cause.
Now of course it is the usual anti-Muslim, anti-American hatemongers like the insipid shreiker Pamela Geller as well as the bottom-feeding scum at Front Page Magazine, the Stormfront for neocons that along with FOX News are leading the pack in working to incite pogroms in the US. Some Republicans who actually hailed the freeing of Sergeant Bergdahl until the Khmer Rouge enforcers of the Red Elephant Team forced them to purge any such sentiment or face exile or worse. Pol Pot Palin - who thrives on being the high priestess of cultural populist American dumb-assery has predictably crawled out from under her rock to feed the hate machine and the Canadian born Senator Ted Cruz is pounding the pulpit over new legislation barring any further transfers from the torture gulag at Guantanamo Bay. The haters eat it up too and the very real prospect that they are finally getting close to the peak of their long, hard fought struggle up the American political Mount Everest now that they may have finally found their Fuhrer in Cruz has them in a supremely orgasmic state.

In the ongoing vilification of Sergeant Bergdahl and his family we can see all that America has been transformed into by travelers, ideologues, war profiteers and the swine who serve them as they eat away at the foundations of this once great country like a column of ravenous Formosan termites. America has failed the moral test of modern times of simply preventing the spread of fascism - which on the 7oth anniversary of D-Day begs the question as to why so much blood has been sacrificed in vain only to allow what our grandfathers and great-grandfathers defeated in World War II to take root in The Homeland? That will be a question that will keep historians busy for decades.
As for the right-wing lynch mobs - when it all comes down to it and if Bowe Bergdahl did walk off his post in Afghanistan then that only makes him a deserter which in the hierarchy of what passes for "patriotism" towers above the chickenhawks who never had the guts to serve in the first place.

[Magda Hassan]

EXCLUSIVE: New York Times Offered Haqqani Terror Network $1.2 Million for Return of Reporter David Rohde

Jun. 8, 2014 5:43pm

The New York Times offered Haqqani Terror Network $1.2 million for return of captured reporter David Rohde, according to sources directly involved in the negotiations.
In 2008, Rohde was kidnapped in Afghanistan by the Haqqani Terror Network the same terror network that took American Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl the following year.

After significant back-and-forth, sources say, a ransom of $1 million was agreed to between the Times and the Haqqani terrorists.
Source: First photo taken of David Rohde after his escape from Haqqani captivity

But before the proverbial ink was dry, the Haqqanis came back for another bite at the apple. They also wanted the release of two prisoners to be named at a later date. The negotiators told the Haqqanis there would be no prisoner release, but with the approval of the Times offered an additional $200,000 ($100,000 for each unnamed prisoner). The Haqqanis took the deal.
The next day, before the money could be paid, David Rohde made an assisted escaped.

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/ex...vid-rohde/