Kid Berwyn
Kid Berwyn's Journal3 Generations of Bushes, Nixon, NAZIs and the CIA
Certain quarters objected when President Jimmy Carter instituted "Human Rights" over economic and business interests as the main objective of U.S. foreign policy. The President understood reliance on Saudi Arabia and oil was a danger to national security. So, he began to move the nation toward "Energy Independence" and renewable, clean sources over dependence on Big Oil for energy. The people who own the oil companies and the governments of oil-rich nations objected.
Three unidentified US hostages speak to the press while their Iranian captors (L and R) watch closely, at the besieged US embassy in Tehran, November 1979. [IRNA-FILES/AFP via Getty Images] Source: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231104-on-this-day-the-iran-hostage-crisis/
How a Deep State Plot Sank Jimmy Carter
PETER DALE SCOTT
WhoWhatWhy.Org, 11/02/14
The Safari Club was an alliance between national intelligence agencies that wished to compensate for the CIA’s retrenchment in the wake of President Carter’s election and Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms. As former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal once told Georgetown University alumni,
In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran. (1)
After Carter was elected, the Safari Club allied itself with Richard Helms and Theodore Shackley against the more restrained intelligence policies of Jimmy Carter, according to Joseph Trento. In Trento’s account, the dismissal by William Colby in 1974 of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton,
combined with Watergate, is what prompted the Safari Club to start working with [former DCI Richard] Helms [then U.S. Ambassador to Iran] and his most trusted operatives outside of Congressional and even Agency purview. James Angleton said before his death that “Shackley and Helms … began working with outsiders like Adham and Saudi Arabia. The traditional CIA answering to the president was an empty vessel having little more than technical capability.”(2)
Trento adds that “The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations. With the official blessing of George Bush as the head of the CIA, Adham transformed . . . the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a worldwide money-laundering machine.”(3) Trento claims also that the Safari Club then was able to work with some of the controversial CIA operators who had been forced out of the CIA by Turner, and that this was coordinated by Theodore Shackley:
Shackley, who still had ambitions to become DCI, believed that without his many sources and operatives like [Edwin] Wilson, the Safari Club—operating with [former DCI Richard] Helms in charge in Tehran—would be ineffective. . . . Unless Shackley took direct action to complete the privatization of intelligence operations soon, the Safari Club would not have a conduit to [CIA] resources. The solution: create a totally private intelligence network using CIA assets until President Carter could be replaced. (4)
Continues…
https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/government-integrity/the-deep-state-plots-the-1980-defeat-of-jimmy-carter/
In addition to turning down the thermostat and wearing a sweater to stay warm, President Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House and ordered the federal highway speed limit of 55, which saved about 150,000 barrels of oil per day and about 4,000 lives per year. President Reagan took the solar panels down and Big Oil really hasn't worried much about getting replaced ever since.
Bottom Line: Big Oil, the Saudi Roils and the global Petrogarchs HATE democracy. They can't live as large as they want if they have to share the loot with other people, including the people who live on top of the "black gold." And they want to get every last penny from every last drop this extracted mineral can yield, even if it kills us all in the process. So, they hire or buy politicians like Prescott Bush, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush. The Gehlen NAZI spy operation was absorbed by OSS into the new CIA in the late 40s and early 50s. And they want to make the rest history, especially Democracy.
Obvious, yet covered up.
Media covered up 1980 Iran hostage deal, the ‘October surprise,’ author tells Clubby Vincent Morris
National Press Club, October 24, 2024
Excerpt…
Unger, whose book “Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason that Stole the White House,” published Oct. 1, says that the issues around the case are larger than questions about our national security apparatus and the role of international politics in a domestic election; it’s about the media.
“One of the great disgraces of our national media in covering this up,” said (author Craig) Unger, who has worked as deputy editor of the New York Observer and editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine. “It was a great scandal and they twisted it and turned it on its ass.”
Although some of the history is still contested, the facts are not. President Jimmy Carter was unable to get American hostages released from Iran. In November 1980, he lost the election to Reagan. In January 1981, just minutes after Reagan was sworn in, the hostages were released.
In his remarks, Unger described how he first came upon the story many years later and turned it into a 10,000 word explosive piece for Esquire magazine. Not long after the piece hit, Unger says he was hired by Newsweek magazine and turned loose to do more investigative work; but “that’s when things went south,” he says.
Unger claims that soon after settling in at Newsweek, his stories about this topic were spiked by editors there. Worse, they printed stories that essentially washed over the explosive charges about the hostage deal, he said.
Unger reserved his most intense criticism for the Washington Post, which owned Newsweek at the time and, he says, had an outsize role in quietly killing the story. He’s also equally critical of Congressional Democrats, who he claims never pursued the dramatic charges as earnestly as they should have.
Continues…
Source: https://www.press.org/newsroom/media-covered-1980-iran-hostage-deal-october-surprise-author-tells-club
Russia: It's up to Trump team to make first move to improve ties
Like in the Old Days.
Russia: It's up to Trump team to make first move to improve ties
By Guy Faulconbridge and Vladimir Soldatkin
Reuters, December 26, 2024
Summary
* Foreign Minister Lavrov: If Trump is serious, so are we
* Lavrov says any Ukraine peace deal must be legally watertight
* Washington should make first move, Lavrov says
MOSCOW, Dec 26 (Reuters) - Russia is willing to work with Donald Trump's incoming administration to improve relations if the U.S. has serious intentions to do so but it is up to Washington to make the first move, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday.
Trump, who will return as U.S. president on Jan. 20, styles himself as a master dealmaker and has vowed to swiftly end the war in Ukraine but not set out how he might achieve that beyond getting President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian counterpart President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to agree to end the fighting.
But the Americans broke (off) the dialogue, so they should make the first move," Lavrov, Putin's foreign minister for over 20 years, told reporters in Moscow.
Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine has left tens of thousands of dead, displaced millions of people and triggered the biggest rupture in relations between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
U.S. officials cast Russia as a corrupt autocracy that is the biggest nation-state threat to the United States and has meddled in U.S. elections, jailed U.S. citizens on false charges and perpetrated sabotage campaigns against U.S. allies.
Continues…
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-security-must-be-guaranteed-by-any-ukraine-peace-deal-lavrov-says-2024-12-26/
No Long-Term Memory is how bastards get the US Taxpayer on the Hook
First off: Absolutely agree about the importance of memory and history to democracy. As a former newspaperman, I don't completely blame the media -- more its ownership -- but include a number of educators both public and private and too many parents for breeding and then raising idiots.
Like Crime, Ignorance Pays. Two cases:
Neil "Silverado" Bush should still be busting rocks in Leavenworth. The S&L Crisis was a disaster for the whole country...
Know your BFEE: They Looted Your Nation’s S&Ls for Power and Profit
But it was a practice run for the Banking Crisis...
Know your BFEE: Phil Gramm, the Meyer Lansky of the War Party, Set-Up the Biggest Bank Heist Ever.
"Control Fraud" is the term Edwin Black coined to describe what happens when the crooks buy the bank they plan to rob. Of course, no one who stole the money had to put it back. That privilege was given to the US Taxpayer.
Know your BFEE: Goldmine Sacked or The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One
Uniting both the worlds of business and government are the professional criminal class known as the GOP. How they got that way, paperwork and making sure it never does anything but mark them as anything but the owners:
George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of ‘Counter-Terrorism’
By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58
A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.
During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.
Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.
The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.
SNIP...
Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.
SNIP...
NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985
The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.
The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.
The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.
Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified. The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.
CONTINUED...
CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.
So, not only is ignorance strength, it makes crime (and treason -- Hi, Donald!) pay handsomely.
ETA The Most Important Part: Happy Holidays to You, PCIntern and to ALL DU!!!!
Designer of Toilet Big Enough for MAGA Assholes Tapped as NATO Ambassador
Matt Whittaker, designer of the Masculine Toilet, has been nominated to serve as the United States Ambassador to NATO. I kid you not.“The other remarkable thing is how stunningly unqualified everyone is. I don’t see anyone there who I think, ‘Now there’s a highly qualified person.’” -- Dennis Jett, an international relations professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of a book on the history of US ambassadors
Trump’s ‘stunningly unqualified’ diplomatic team shapes up at breakneck speed
Trump is hardly the first US president to introduce miscast nominees, but he has nominated ambassadors at a rate not recalled in recent memory
by Robert Tait
The Guardian, December 21, 2024
Excerpt...
Their lack of credentials has prompted one experienced foreign policy analyst to label them a “diplomatic clown car” – and a deliberate affront to the countries hosting them.
Snip...
Thomas Countryman, a former assistant secretary of state during Barack Obama’s presidency, said the nominations raised fears about the quality of US foreign policy in vital areas, as well as conflicts of interest.
“An unqualified person like Herschel Walker can only do so much damage in the Bahamas,” he said.
“But at a place like the permanent mission to Nato, having a person with zero diplomatic experience and almost no managerial experience negotiating some of the most difficult issues that Europe and the United States must face together is a recipe not just for misunderstanding, but for failure to reach the kind of consensus and compromise that obviously requires.”
On Barrack (Tom Barrack, named to serve as US Ambassador to Turkey), he added: “I think that disentangling the private profit interests of Mr Trump and Mr Barrack from the professional work that Barrack would need to do in Ankara will be difficult, not least because of its non-transparency.”
Continues...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/trump-team-cabinet
If not the biggest shits themselves, MAGA are among the biggest assholes in the world.
Half Way 2 Trillionaire beats your own Roy Cohn any day.
You don't need a law degree when you can buy the courts.
How can people possibly say that they 'know' that extra-terrestrial craft do not exist?
That's how the great DUer PCIntern put it in 2010:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8751853
As always with this subject, the responses are interesting, too.
Wanna turn your neighbors over to the Gezpacho?
There's an app for that!
The chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever. Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories — even the most wildly speculative ones — produced by the human mind; they occur in the field of the ever-changing affairs of men, in whose flux there is nothing more permanent than the admittedly relative permanence of the human mind’s structure. Once they are lost, no rational effort will ever bring them back.
Source: https://www.historynet.com/from-blurring-imperfections-to-falsifying-reality-how-stalin-made-the-truth-disappear-through-photoshop/
Drones shut down Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
Drone sightings lead to airspace shutdown at Ohio military baseBy Dave Collins and Bianca Vázquez Toness
The Associated Press, December 16, 2024
BOSTON — More suspected drone sightings in the eastern U.S. led to a temporary airspace shutdown at an Air Force base in Ohio and arrests near Boston’s Logan International Airport, as elected officials increased their push for action to identify and stop the mysterious unmanned flights.
Drones flying around Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, forced base officials to close the airspace for about four hours late Friday into early Saturday, said Robert Purtiman, a base spokesperson.
It is the first time drones have been spotted at the base, one of the largest in the world, and no sightings have been reported since early Saturday, Purtiman said Monday. He would not say how many drones were flying in the area, adding that they ranged in size and that they did not impact any base facilities.
Snip…
National security officials have said the drones recently spotted in the eastern part of the country don’t appear to be signs of foreign interference or a public safety threat. But because they can’t say with certainty who is responsible for the sudden swarms of drones — or how they can be stopped — leaders of both political parties are demanding better technology and powers to deal with the drones.
“There’s a lot of us who are pretty frustrated right now,” Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday,” as drone sightings were being reported in his state. "'We don’t know’ is not a good enough answer.”
Continues…
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2024/12/16/drone-sightings-lead-to-airspace-shutdown-at-ohio-military-base/
Gee. For being a non-story, drones sure can foul things up.
"Instead of education, Musk believes in making money."
Lots of money in mineral extraction, where a white owner, say of an emerald mine, gets filthy rich off black miners working at subsistence-level wages. It isn’t a racket. It’s a lifestyle, the “Natural Order of Things.”
Profile Information
Member since: Mon May 6, 2019, 07:01 PMNumber of posts: 18,404