Seymour Hersh: Many in Joint Spec'l Ops Command ... Kinghts of Malta

[Ed Jewett]

Hersh: Many Within Joint Special Operations Command Are, "Members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta."

January 18th, 2011 Via: Foreign Policy:
"What I'm really talking about is how eight or nine neoconservative, radicals if you will, overthrew the American government. Took it over," he said of his forthcoming book. "It's not only that the neocons took it over but how easily they did it how Congress disappeared, how the press became part of it, how the public acquiesced."
Hersh then brought up the widespread looting that took place in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. "In the Cheney shop, the attitude was, What's this? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they're all worried about some looting? … Don't they get it? We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get all the oil, nobody's gonna give a damn.'"
"That's the attitude," he continued. "We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command."
He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta."
Hersh may have been referring to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a Roman Catholic organization commited to "defence of the Faith and assistance to the poor and the suffering," according to its website.
"Many of them are members of Opus Dei," Hersh continued. "They do see what they're doing and this is not an atypical attitude among some military it's a crusade, literally. They seem themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function."
"They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins," he continued. "They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there's a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community."
Posted in Elite, Religion, War | Top Of Page

[Magda Hassan]

Kennedy was a Catholic but some how I can't see him being in Opus Dei. In any case he abhorred secret societies.

[Jan Klimkowski]

There are several DPF threads which discuss various incarnations of The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta (Italian: Sovrano Militare Ordine Ospedaliero di San Giovanni di Gerusalemme di Rodi e di Malta) (known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta [SMOM], Order of Malta or Knights of Malta for short).

The entire Covert Action feature on SMOM is also archived on DPF.

I view SMOM with profound suspicion.

However, I also view Hersh with some suspicion, so I am intrigued by his raising this, ahem, SPECTRE.....

Here's the longer, complementary, "Foreign Policy" piece about Hersh's comments which appear to have been part of a speech:

Seymour Hersh unleashed

Posted By Blake Hounshell Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - 1:34 AM


In a speech billed as a discussion of the Bush and Obama eras, New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh delivered a rambling, conspiracy-laden diatribe here Monday expressing his disappointment with President Barack Obama and his dissatisfaction with the direction of U.S. foreign policy.

"Just when we needed an angry black man," he began, his arm perched jauntily on the podium, "we didn't get one."

It quickly went downhill from there.

Hersh, whose exposés of gross abuses by members of the U.S. military in Vietnam and Iraq have earned him worldwide fame and high journalistic honors, said he was writing a book on what he called the "Cheney-Bush years" and saw little difference between that period and the Obama administration.

He said that he was keeping a "checklist" of aggressive U.S. policies that remained in place, including torture and "rendition" of terrorist suspects to allied countries, which he alleged was ongoing.

He also charged that U.S. foreign policy had been hijacked by a cabal of neoconservative "crusaders" in the former vice president's office and now in the special operations community.

"What I'm really talking about is how eight or nine neoconservative, radicals if you will, overthrew the American government. Took it over," he said of his forthcoming book. "It's not only that the neocons took it over but how easily they did it -- how Congress disappeared, how the press became part of it, how the public acquiesced."

Hersh then brought up the widespread looting that took place in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. "In the Cheney shop, the attitude was, What's this? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they're all worried about some looting? ... Don't they get it? We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get all the oil, nobody's gonna give a damn.'"

"That's the attitude," he continued. "We're gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command."

He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta."

Hersh may have been referring to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a Roman Catholic organization commited to "defence of the Faith and assistance to the poor and the suffering," according to its website.

"Many of them are members of Opus Dei," Hersh continued. "They do see what they're doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function."

"They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins," he continued. "They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there's a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.""

Hersh relayed that he had recently spoken with "a man in the intelligence community... somebody in the joint special operations business" about the downfall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia. "He said, Oh my God, he was such a good ally.'"

"Tunisia's going to change the game," Hersh added later. "It's going to scare the hell out of a lot of people."

Moving to Pakistan, where Hersh noted he had been friendly with Benazir Bhutto, the journalist told of a dinner meeting with Asif Ali Zardari, the late prime minister's husband, in which Hersh said the Pakistani president was brutally disdainful of his own people.

Hersh described a trip he made to Swat, where the Pakistani military had just dislodged Taliban insurgents who had taken over the scenic valley, a traditional vacation area for the urban middle class. Hersh said he asked Zardari about the tent cities he saw along the road, where people were living in harsh, unsanitary conditions.

"Well, those people there in Swat, that's what they deserve," the Pakistani president replied, according to Hersh. Asked why, Hersh said Zardari responded, "Because they supported the Taliban." (Note: Hersh's conversation is not recounted in his 2009 New Yorker article on Pakistan's nuclear weapons, presumably because it coudn't be verified.)


The veteran journalist also alleged that the CIA station chief in Islamabad, who was recently recalled after his name surfaced in Pakistani court documents and in the lively Pakistani press, had actually been fired for disputing the plans of Gen. David Petraeus, who took over the Afghan war last summer after General McChrystal was summarily dismissed.

"When Petraeus issued a very optimistic report about the war in December that he gave to the president," Hersh said, the station chief "just declared it was bankrupt... internally. He just said This is completely wrongheaded. The policy's wrongheaded.' Off he goes. Out he goes."


"I've given up being disillusioned about the CIA," Hersh said. "They're trained to lie, period. They will lie to their president, they will lie certainly to the Congress, and they will lie to the American people. That's all there is to it."

Hersh was speaking on the invitation of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, which operates a branch campus in Qatar.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011..._unleashed

[Keith Millea]

"I've given up being disillusioned about the CIA," Hersh said. "They're trained to lie, period. They will lie to their president, they will lie certainly to the Congress, and they will lie to the American people. That's all there is to it."

I wonder, when Hersh goes to his CIA contacts for stories if he thinks they lie to him?

:hitball:

[Ed Jewett]

Maybe Seymour read the DPF threads? :angeldevil:

[Jeffrey Orling]

Sy Hersh is not listened to so he is given all sorts of leaks. Actually no one with any sense is listened to by the lamestream press of the elected and appointed officials. They're all making money with the status quo to listen or to change.

[David Guyatt]

I believe I've mentioned elsewhere on the DPF previously, that Opus Dei is regarded as the nexus of the far right in Europe - and this from a person who was a member of that far right.

But I rather think "extreme right" is more fitting.

It has also been noted by Joel van der Reijden in his "Beyond Dutroux" essays (see the ISGP Archive on this forum), that witnesses have detailed that Opus Dei was complicit in some of the most vile paedophile activities, including, if I recall accurately (?), satanic ritual abuse. And we also know that officers at NATO HQ in Dutroux's Belgium also were fingered in these foul practices.

In my view SMOM is an inherently dangerous anti-democratic elite group that wields tremendous military and intelligence power behind the scenes.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Mention of the extreme and ruthless methodology of Opus Dei and SMOM reminds me of one of their field operators, Eduardo Rozsa-Flores, who was killed by President Morales' secret service as he plotted false flag atrocities in Bolivia.

Here is the chronicle of a false flag Gladio warrior exposed:

Born in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to spanish catholic mother and Hungarian Jewish father, Flores spent his formative years in Budapest, where in his teens he was an active member of the communist youth movement.

In fact, he is not without military experience, having done his military service in the Hungarian army as a border guard at Budapest airport, where he reportedly met the notorious international terrorist "Carlos".

In 1988-89 Flores' career took a new direction when he started to work with the Barcelona paper La Vanguardia as an assistent to Ricardo Estarriol, the paper's East European correspondant and an active member of the secretive rightist Catholic organisation Opus Dei.

Both men made regular trips to Vienna to visit the Opus Dei offices there and Flores mantained close contact with this historically pro-fascist Catholic organisation.

Before being assigned by La vangaurdia to Croatia, where he was to jettison his laptop computer in favor of a rifle, Flores was covering events in Hungary, Albania and Slovenia, the province in which German government insired seperatists had already begun to drive the first stakes into the hearts of Yugoslavia. Arriving in Croatia in late August 1991, Flores immediately announced that he had enlisted in the so-called Croatian National Guard and was posted to the village of Lazlovo, close to the Serbian border and populated by ethnic Hungarians.

From post #210 here:
https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...#post13239

Rozsa Flores' activities from 1990 onwards clearly identify him as an assassin and mercenary willing to commit atrocities in the name of racist, far right, causes and blame them on his opponents. Tudjman, the Croatian butcher, made him an honourary Croatian for his dirty tricks and war crimes during the Balkan Wars.

Here's some detail on Rozsa Flores' notorious Croatian International Brigade:

a brigade of 380 foreigners, the First International Platoon, known by its Croatian initials, PIV.

"He was an action-chaser," a Croatian journalist with years investigating connections between foreign mercenaries and Croatian secret services tells TIME. "PIV was a notorious group: 95% of them had criminal histories, many were part of Nazi and fascist groups, from Germany to Ireland." Rozsa rose to the status of Major and gained a reputation for brashness - before scandal hit in December of 1991. That's when a PIV enlistee named Christian Wurtemburg, a Swiss national, turned up dead - tortured and garroted. British journalist Paul Jenks began investigating Wurtemburg's death and was shot dead as well. (British journalist John Sweeney made a movie about the deaths in 1994 for Channel 4 called Dying for the Truth.)

More recently, Rozsa Flores was linked with Jobbik, the far right Hungarian movement which is very close to openly espousing ethnic cleansing of the Roma (Gypsy) people. Some of his mercenary band were members of the Szekely Legion, which is a Hungarian neo-fascist paramilitary group.

Rozsa Flores was a self-proclaimed National Anarchist, which is a mystical, often Black-Sun worshipping, neo-Nazi cult. Several leading National Anarchists have been outed as intelligence agency assets.

Rozsa Flores was also a spokesperson for Opus Dei, and other members of his Bolivian mercenary band - dead and alive - have received financial and legal aid from SMOM groups. With SMOM and Opus Dei, and the Croatian background, we are bang in the middle of deep political covert operations run utlimately by the same gang who brought us Gladio.

Before it disappeared, Rozsa Flores' web pages further identified him as a supporter of Camba Nation, a Bolivian secessionist group. For more on Camba Nation and its funding by the secessionist European elite of Santa Cruz, see post eg #54 here:
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...stcount=54

There are well-grounded allegations that the "US Ambassador for Ethnic Cleansing", Goldberg, was sent to Bolivia to help stoke ethnic tension prior to a break-up of Bolivia in the fashion of the deliberate destruction and fracturing of Yugoslavia. See eg posts #68 & #57 here:
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...stcount=68
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...stcount=57

Fortunately, President Morales had the courage and intelligence to throw Goldberg out of Bolivia.

Oh yeah, Rozsa Flores also gave an interview in Europe about his intentions:

Croatia: Morales murder plot suspect 'wanted to form separatist army'

Zagreb, 22 April (AKI) - A Croat allegedly involved in a plot to kill leftwing Bolivian president Evo Morales said in an interview that he travelled to Bolivia to form a secessionist army in the country's mineral-rich Santa Cruz region.

"They called me from Bolivia, from Santa Cruz, they told me to come home, because the motherland calls," Eduardo Rosza Flores said in a Hungarian media interview.

The interview was recorded last September and excerpts from it were published on Wednesday by Croatian daily Jutarnji.

Flores, who had dual Bolivian-Croatian nationality, was killed last week in Bolivia in a gunfight with police.

"M task is to form an army in Santa Cruz as soon as possible and to be its leader," Flores said. "I'm not a mercenary, nor will I ever be, but if motherland needs me I'm going," said Bolivian-born Flores.

In the interview, recorded just before he travelled to Bolivia, Flores said the Santa Cruz region opposed Morales' rule and was fighting for autonomy.

"Only if autonomy doesn't succeed by peaceful means, will we proclaim independence," he concluded in the interview.

Flores, 49, a Bolivian of Croatian origins, said that his trip to Bolivia was well organised, including his air tickets and illegal crossing of the border from Brazil.

Flores, nicknamed Chico, went to Croatia in 1991, to fight in the secessionist war against the former Yugoslavia.

After the war ended with Croatia's independence in 1995, he retired from the army with the rank of major and lived in the Hungarian capital, Budapest.

Apart from Flores, an Irishman, Dwyer Michael Martin, and a Romanian, Arpad Magyarosi were killed in a shootout with police in the eastern city of Santa Cruz.

Two other suspected plotters, Elot Toaso, a Hungarian, and another Bolivian of Croat descent, Mario Francisco Tadic, were arrested during the gunfight.

Morales said they were members of a gang planning to kill him and several other officials. The Bolivian press linked the plotters to an opposition leader in Santa Cruz, Branko Marinkovic, who is also of Croatian descent.

The discovery of the alleged plot raised concern in Croatia about the fate of a sizeable Croat community in Bolivia after Croats were described in the media as separatists and fascists.

Some Bolivian newspapers have made a link with the World War II fake or quisling state in Croatia that was formed by the leader of the separatist Ustashe movement, Ante Pavelic, under the auspices of Hitler and Mussolini.

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Pol...3239993223

http://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/show...uot/page22

[Magda Hassan]

May be Sy has his reasons and is coming out on some things. The Foreign Policy blog author just seems like one of those MSM journos waving the 'conspiracy theory' slur to dismiss his speech. Let's wait and see how Sy's speech is treated by the establishment and this will tell us something of it's veracity. And perhaps of his motives. :angeldevil:

[Magda Hassan]

New Yorker's Hersh sparks anger, puzzlement with remarks on military 'crusaders'


Journalist Seymour Hersh has broken dozens of major stories about the U.S. military, foreign policy and covert operations. (Associated Press)


By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 21, 2011; 12:00 AM

Legendary journalist Seymour Hersh has uncovered some sinister conspiracies during his long career, but his latest revelation is drawing some puzzled reactions and angry denunciations.
In a speech this week in Doha, Qatar, Hersh advanced the notion that U.S. military forces are directed and dominated by Christian fundamentalist "crusaders" bent on changing "mosques into cathedrals."
According to an account of the speech in Foreign Policy magazine, Hersh alleged that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the retired head of the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command and briefly the top commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, was among several senior officers who are members or supporters of exclusive Roman Catholic organizations such as Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta.
Neoconservative advisers to President George W. Bush took the attitude that " 'we're gonna change mosques into cathedrals,' " Hersh, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, said in the speech. "That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command." The command is the part of the military focused on targeted missions to kill enemy leaders, primarily in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its operations are almost always secret.
He added: "This is not an atypical attitude among some military - it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function."
As for President Obama, Hersh said he has been blind to the drift in America's foreign policy. "Just when we need an angry black man," he said, "we didn't get one."
There seem to be a few problems with Hersh's assertions.
One is his allegation involving McChrystal. A spokesman for McChrystal said the general "is not and never has been" a member of the Knights of Malta, an ancient order that protected Christians from Muslim encroachment during the Middle Ages and has since evolved into a charitable organization. These days, the Knights, based in Rome, sponsor medical missions in dozens of countries. McChrystal's spokesman, David Bolger, said Hersh's statement linking McChrystal to the group was "completely false and without basis in fact."
Hersh's attempts to link the religious groups to the Pentagon, meanwhile, brought a denunciation from Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who said Hersh's "long-running feud with every American administration - he now condemns President Obama for failing to be 'an angry black man' - has disoriented his perspective so badly that what he said about the Knights of Malta is not shocking to those familiar with his penchant for demagoguery."
Further, Pentagon sources say there is little evidence of a broad fundamentalist conspiracy within the military. Although there have been incidents in which officers have proselytized subordinates, the military discourages partisan religious advocacy.
Hersh said Thursday that he couldn't remember every detail of his speech because it was "a rumination" rather than a scripted talk. But, he said, "no one said the whole war was waged as a crusade. My point is that some leaders of the Special Forces have an affinity for that notion, the notion that they're in a crusade.
"I'm comfortable with the idea that there is a great deal of fundamentalism in JSOC. It's growing and it's empirical. . . . There is an incredible strain of Christian fundamentalism, not just Catholic, that's part of the military."



He called his "angry black man" comment about Obama a "figure of speech, a cliche" that his audience, consisting primarily of American expatriates, laughed at. The speech was sponsored by Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, which has a campus in Qatar.
Over a long and distinguished career, Hersh, 73, has broken dozens of major stories about the U.S. military, foreign policy and covert operations. In 1969, he exposed an Army massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai and subsequent coverup, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. His account of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses in Iraq for the New Yorker in 2004 spurred reform and prosecutions and brought Hersh new acclaim.
Hersh declined to comment on some of the specific statements he made in the speech, such as the notion that American military officers pass "crusader" coins among themselves. "I said what I said," he responded. "I can't get into it because I'm writing a book" about the small group of neoconservatives who directed U.S. foreign policy in the Bush administration.
Hersh has sometimes made intemperate statements in his speeches, and his defenders point to his written work, which is typically more solid and well-sourced than his spoken comments.
Hersh's editor at the New Yorker, David Remnick, declined to comment on Hersh's speech. But Remnick said, "Sy is one of the greatest reporters the country has ever known, and that is all I need to know about him."
In a reply to Hersh's allegations about the U.S. military, journalist Tom Ricks, a former Washington Post defense reporter, wrote in Foreign Policy this week: "[I'm] looking forward to the New Yorker article that will lay this all out. Good luck to those celebrated fact-checkers."
Staff writer Greg Jaffe contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...06090.html