TBR News March 11, 2016
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C., March 11, 2016: “A Chinese philosopher once said to spare him from living in interesting times. We are now living in interesting times. Overpopulation is upon us, natural resources are being exhausted, the cilimate changes are wreaking havoc in some area and threaten to do so on a wider scale. And a warloving mankind is glaring at his neighbors with growing fury. The American economy, once one of the most powerful on the globe, is shrinking quiietly and since nature abhors a vacuum, others aspire to the Imperial mantle. China has towering economic and ecololgical problems that will suddenly crash down on her teeming masses and as unemployment grows in America, so also will social unrest. And this will be countered, and inflamed, by more and more surveillance of a potentially dangerous electorate. The First World War, that crippled European civilization, was not the work of evil men but of stupid ones. And history does repeat itself.”
Conversations with the Crow
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. After Corson’s death, Trento and his Washington lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever
After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.
Douglas had been in close contact with Crowley and had long phone conversatins with him. He found this so interesting and informative that he taped and later transcribed them.
These conversations have been published in a book: ‘Conversations with the Crow” and this is an excerpt.
Conversation No. 82
Date: Friday, May 2, 1997
Commenced: 9;45 AM CST
Concluded: 10:11 AM CST
RTC: Gregory, I was going to ask you if you could recommend a good coin dealer. I want to buy a few small gold coins for the younger relatives.
GD: In your area? I don’t…but let me look around. American gold?
RTC: Preferably,
GD: How about some small two and a half dollar Indian heads? You could get a few of these that are not a numismatic item and have the mounted in a bezel and worn around the neck. Any good jeweler could do this.
RTC: Numismatic?
GD: Yes. American coins are sold by date, condition and mint mark. You could have two identical coins of the same date but one would be selling for hundreds more because it was a Denver mark instead of a Philadelphia. I can check for you. Attractive coins but I can shop around for you.
RTC: Many thanks, Gregory. Are you into coins?
GD: No, but I had many friends who were and I understand the market.
RTC: I remember ten or so years ago, maybe more when gold was going up and up.
GD: Yes, and it came down and down. That was a rigged market, Robert. An artificial one pushed up by some for their own profit and then allowed to fall after they took the profit out. I remember getting some of my rich friends to buy Krugerrands oh around $300 or so. A bunch of them got together and I bought quite a few and even dipped into my own savings to get some for myself. Kept them in a dresser drawer until the weight collapsed it. What a mess. Anyway, gold kept going up and it got to be a South Seas Bubble type of rise. Feeding on itself and aided by the manipulators of course. Oh, it went to $500 and my buying friends were wetting themselves. And it went to $600 and all the real experts, who are dumb as posts, said it would go to a grand at least. More frantic buyers and up went the prices every day. It got to $700 but I began to feel very badly about the whole thing. My Grandfather was a banker who felt that the frenzied stock market was out of control in ’29 and sold out in September just a month before the huge crash. He said it was an unrealistic frenzy, like the tulip craze in Holland and such over-capitalization could not last. He was right and when the bottom fell out, Grandfather was holding all his profits in cash. The banks crashed too so he was better off than almost everyone else. During the war, he bought up commercial property at ten cents on the dollar and the war boom sent his holdings up into the stratosphere. But he taught me a good deal and you have to use common sense in dealing with these bubbles and get in early and get out the same way. Remember, catch a rising market and sell out before it peaks but just before the peak.
RTC: And the gold?
GD: Oh, yes. When it got to $810 I decided to sell but my dealer told me I was a damned fool and to hang on until it reached a thousand. I went home and thought about it and the next day, I hauled a big suitcase of coins, got a neighbor to help me because it was so heavy, and went to the coin store. It was noontime and it was packed with all kinds of professional types buying. Let me tell you that when I sold the contents of the case at $811, before I left the place, every coin was sold. And did they laugh at me. But a few days later, when gold plunged to $200 or so, I was the one who was laughing. And my investing friends, who were not aware of my sell out, told me that at least on paper they did very well. I informed them that I had sold out before the break and to come over and pick up their cash. I took out a modest commission plus the cost of repairing of the broken drawer bottom and we all did quite well.
RTC: Of course you might have not told them.
GD: Never happen. Never fuck your friends, Robert but keep that list small.
RTC: This South Sea thing…
GD: I was just reading about this in Mackay’s book on the madness of crowds. It was a stock scam and ruined a huge number of people. Early eighteenth century England. Supposedly the King of Spain granted a London company the trading rights in the Pacific and since the possibilities were enormous, the subscribers to the stock program were enthusiastic and many. Stock prices soared and many very influential Brits got involved. Of course it was a fraud. The King of Spain allowed one ship a year to call at his South American ports but the public was not informed of this. The whole thing got to be a frenzy like the tulip craze but like all of these things, it collapsed and took a lot of people and money with it. The gullible front men, mostly members of the nobility and the clergy, got the law onto them but the real crooks escaped across the Channel with their loot.
RTC: The book available?
GD: Yes, it was originally printed in England in the eighteen forties and reprinted again and again. Do you want the full title? RTC: Why not? Always interested in new stories.
GD: Let me get the book
(Pause)
GD: Here it is. ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’ by Charles Mackay. My reprint is from ’63 so you should be able to find a copy.
RTC: I’ll ask Bill to dig me up a copy.
GD: They call these bubbles. Start out as con jobs with a grain of truth and sometimes, the public gets frantic and the rigged stock, or the gold coins, soar in value. That happened with the gold recently and it happened in ’29 with the market.
RTC: But the Roosevelt people put on so many controls over the market that I doubt if it could happen that way again.
GD: Yes. As long as the controls remain. But if some evil person or gang of persons managed to remove them, the thing will surely happen again. That’s the true nature of the capitalist system. Boom or bust, or rather boom and bust. Just look at the cycles at the end of the nineteenth century right here. If the market wasn’t under tight control, we would have it again. A few would get very rich and a lot, mostly middle class hopefuls would buy into the dream and get poor quickly.
RTC: Attacking our beloved system, are you?
GD: Marx was right once in awhile but his basic premise was flawed. Like Christianity, Communism won’t work. Why? What do they say about this? From each according to his ability to each according to his need? Wonderful thinking but flawed. People are greedy and rapacious and others bleat like sheep. Let him take who is able and let him keep who can. Christianity is the same way. Much talk about brotherhood. Noble words and thoughts in church on Sundays and fuck them all the rest of the week. Well, our stock market is safe for now but surely the speculators will strike again whenever and wherever they can. God help the country if these types ever get into power.
RTC: Well, the Democrats are in now so we are not likely to have high rolling stock swindlers running things.
GD: Yes, but the pendulum swings and it always makes a full swing, Robert. Always. It’s like a wheel in that what is at the bottom today will be at the top today. And remember, shit always floats to the top of the septic tank.
RTC: So disrespectful, Gregory. No wonder Kimmel views you as the Antichrist.
GD: In older times, if you told the truth about sacred matters the Church would barbecue you but now they just ignore you and laugh.
(Concluded at 10:11 AM CST)
San Francisco mulls state of emergency over homelessness. But will it help
California city weighs following similar moves by Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle as west coast copes with crisis much worse than the national average
March 10, 2016
by Julia Carrie Wong
The Guardian
When Jacob Riis published his photographs of late 19th-century urban poverty, he invoked French author François Rabelais’s words: “One half the world does not know how the other half lives.” That ignorance may have been understandable in the age when the poor were sequestered in tenements and slums, but in today’s gentrified cities, the two halves share the frame.
A viral photograph of a young woman in Los Angeles posing for a photograph while a homeless man sleeps on the street at her feet exemplifies the 21st-century urban reality. We see how the other half lives, but we don’t let it distract us from taking our selfies.
According to the 2015 annual homeless assessment performed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, homelessness in the United States has been declining steadily since 2007. But conditions on the west coast are different.
In 2015, California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii were four of the five states to see the greatest increase in their homeless populations (the fifth was New York). California alone accounts for 21% of the nation’s homeless population. And while nationwide, 31% of homeless people have some kind of shelter at night, California, Oregon and Hawaii all have unsheltered rates above 50%. In California, 63.7% of the homeless population lacks shelter.Homelessness on the west coast is increasingly perceived by residents as an unacceptable crisis. In response, policymakers have begun declaring “states of emergency” over the manmade disaster unfolding on their streets.
On Tuesday, San Francisco supervisor David Campos introduced legislation to declare a “shelter emergency” in the city of San Francisco. The move came one week after city officials had cleared out a sprawling homeless encampment under a highway overpass where as many as 300 homeless people had been living in tents and makeshift shelters.
Campos’s legislation seeks to activate a California state law that allows cities to declare a “shelter crisis” when “a significant number of persons are without the ability to obtain shelter, resulting in a threat to their health and safety”. Such a declaration suspends certain liabilities and regulations that would “prevent, hinder, or delay” government action to address the crisis.
“This is usually reserved for natural disasters like floods and earthquakes,” Campos said. “This is not a natural disaster. It’s a manmade disaster, but it’s a disaster nonetheless.”
On the same day, another San Francisco supervisor, Jane Kim, introduced a resolution urging Governor Jerry Brown of California to declare a statewide “state of emergency on homelessness”.
“Homelessness knows no city or county boundaries but is a regional and state-wide issue and only a coordinated response will alleviate this crisis,” the resolution reads.
“We would not ask or expect southern California to deal with the aftermath of a major earthquake alone. We wouldn’t ask the Sierra foothills to address the devastation of a fire alone,” Kim said. “We should not expect any single district or city to solve the homelessness crisis by themselves.”
San Francisco’s push for an emergency declaration follows on similar moves in late 2015 by Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, Seattle and King County, Washington, and the state of Hawaii. (According to the Los Angeles Times, Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles ultimately did not officially declare a local state of emergency, choosing instead to appeal to the state for a proclamation from the governor’s office of emergency services, which was denied.)
The cities of San Jose, Oakland, and Eugene, Oregon, have also all declared some kind of shelter crisis related to homelessness in recent months. In December, the mayors of Portland, Seattle, Eugene, San Francisco and Los Angeles convened a new alliance specifically designed to elicit more federal support for the homelessness crisis.
In declaring states of emergency on homelessness, civic leaders have generally noted the incongruity of using a government power that citizens are accustomed to applying to natural disasters.
“Emergency declarations are associated with natural disasters, but the persistent and growing phenomenon of homelessness – here and nationwide – is a human-made crisis just as devastating to thousands as a flood or fire,” said King County executive Dow Constantine.
But according to Jacob Remes, a professor of history specializing in disaster studies, the very concept of a disaster is inherently political, and was never limited to “acts of God” or natural calamities like earthquakes and fires.
“When we do disaster aid, we see people who are made homeless and jobless by a hurricane, and we decide that those people are worthy of a special type of aid. But there are homeless and jobless and poor people all the time who we decide are not worthy of that kind of aid,” Remes argues. “What the category of disaster does is sort people into worthy poor and unworthy poor.”
By declaring states of emergency then, Remes argues that west coast politicians could “create a new population of worthy poor”.
One historical example of this political strategy succeeding is the Great Depression, a manmade disaster during which Remes says politicians deliberately “adopted the language of disaster” by casting the economic catastrophe as “an act of God”.
Declaring an emergency allows people to focus on the conditions in which people are living – universally recognized as deplorable – rather than assigning blame to the people experiencing them, since disasters are generally accepted to be blameless.
“The current situation is the product of slower social and political disasters rather than rapid geological forces,” says Gary Blasi, a UCLA professor of law and expert on homelessness, “but the result is experienced in the same way by homeless people, whatever the cause.”
California has declared emergencies over particularly human catastrophes before, according to Kelly Huston of the governor’s office of emergency services, including urban riots and the San Bernardino shootings. But Huston does not believe that such a declaration has ever been made over homelessness.
The governor’s office declined to comment on the San Francisco resolution, which has not yet been passed by its board of supervisors.
For San Francisco’s Campos, it’s at least worth making the effort. As he introduced his resolution on Tuesday, Campos related the tale of meeting an older homeless woman on the steps of the Navigation Center, a shelter in San Francisco’s trendy and increasingly expensive Mission district.
The woman’s best friend had died on the streets a few days earlier.
“She was camping out on the steps of the Navigation Center because she didn’t want to be next. She was pleading with me to get her in,” Campos said. “We have to do better. What we are doing is simply not enough.”
Rare blood infection made 48 people ill, maybe killed 18 in Wisconsin
March 10, 2016
RT
A rare bloodstream infection is mystifying Wisconsin officials as they try to determine whether it’s behind the deaths of 18 people in the state. The illness has already affected 48 people since late last year.
According to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS), the cases have been logged since November 1, 2015, though the Division of Public Health was first notified about six possible cases between December 29 of last year and January 4, 2016. Since then, the number of cases has continued to rise, mostly affecting people over 65 years old.
The illness in question is called Elizabethkingia, a bacteria that infects the bloodstream and usually affects people with weakened immune systems and underlying health issues such as cancer or diabetes. So far, 18 people who tested positive for the disease have died, but officials haven’t been able to confirm if Elizabethkingia was responsible.
Now, Wisconsin officials have called in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to help with their investigation.
“Determining the source of the bacteria affecting patients in Wisconsin is a complex process,” State Health Officer Karen McKeown said in a statement. “While we recognize there will be many questions we cannot yet answer, we feel it is important to share the limited information we have about the presence of the bacteria, as we continue our work to determine the source.”
At this point, officials aren’t quite sure where to look. What’s notable about this outbreak is that even though Elizabethkingia is seen in many types of environments around the world, including dirt and water, the cases in Wisconsin all involve a bacteria with the same genetic fingerprint, the Washington Post reported. This has officials wondering if there’s a single source for the spate of illnesses.
“Our main priority here is to try and find out where this is coming from so that we can prevent additional cases,” Dr. Michael Bell of the CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion said to Fox6.
“It could be getting into either a food supply or medication system or you name it, any number of ways.”
Typically, health labs only see a case or two of Elizabethkingia every year. And while it can usually be treated with antibiotics, the Wisconsin DHS noted it is multi-drug resistant.
“It’s safe to say that the outbreak is still ongoing and no source has been identified, but we’re leaving no stone upturned with what is causing the outbreak,” CDC spokesman Tom Skinner told WKOW.
All told, 12 counties have recorded cases of the disease, according to DHS: Columbia, Dane, Dodge, Fond du Lac, Jefferson, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Racine, Sauk, Sheboygan, Washington and Waukesha.
Iran ordered to pay $10.5 billion for 9/11 by US judge
March 10, 2016
RT
A US judge ordered Iran to pay over $10 billion in damages to families of victims who died on September 11, 2001 – even though there is no evidence of Tehran’s direct connection to the attack. The same judge earlier cleared Saudi Arabia from culpability.
The default judgement was issued by US District Judge George Daniels in New York on Wednesday. Under the ruling, Tehran was ordered to pay $7.5 billion to 9/11 victims’ families, including $2 million to each victim’s estate for pain and suffering, and another $6.88 million in punitive damages. Insurers who paid for property damage and claimed their businesses were interrupted were awarded an additional $3 billion in the ruling.
The ruling is noteworthy particularly since none of the 19 hijackers on September 11 were Iranian citizens. Fifteen were citizens of Saudi Arabia, while two were from the United Arab Emirates, and one each from Egypt and Lebanon.
Saudi Arabia was legally cleared from paying billions in damages to families of 9/11 victims last year, after Judge Daniels dismissed claims that the country provided material support to the terrorists and ruled that Riyadh had sovereign immunity. Saudi attorneys argued in court that there was no evidence directly linking the country to 9/11.
In response to the latest ruling, Hossein Sheikholeslam, a senior aide to Iran’s parliamentary speaker, called the decision “absurd and ridiculous.”
“I never heard about this ruling and I’m very much surprised because the judge had no reason whatsoever to issue such a ruling… Iran never took part in any court hearings related to the events of September 11, 2001,” he told Sputnik. “Even if such an absurd and ridiculous decision has been made, the charges simply hold no water because Iran has never been mentioned at any stage of the investigation and the trials that followed.”
While Sheikholeslam argued that Iran didn’t take part in related hearings, that lack of participation may have contributed to the decision. A default judgment is typically issued when one of the parties involved in a case does not respond to court summons or appear in court to make their case.
Judge Daniels found that Iran failed to defend itself against claims that it played a role in 9/11. Iran believes the lawsuit is unnecessary because it says it did not participate in in the attack.
In the US, Tehran’s role in 9/11 has been debated heavily over the years. The 9/11 Commission Report stated that some hijackers moved through Iran and did not have their passports stamped. It also stated that Hezbollah, which the US designates as a terrorist organization supported by Iran, provided “advice and training” to Al-Qaeda members.
In a court document filed in 2011 regarding the latest case, plaintiffs claimed Hezbollah “provided material support” to Al-Qaeda, such as facilitating travel, plus “direct support” for the 9/11 attacks. As a result, the plaintiffs argued Iran was liable.
However, the commission report itself found no evidence to suggest Iran was aware of the 9/11 plot, and suggested the possibility that if Hezbollah was tracking the movements of Al-Qaeda members, it may not have been eyeing those who became hijackers on 9/11.
While the report suggested further investigation into the issue, President George W. Bush has said, “There was no direct connection between Iran and the attacks of September 11.”
Iran, inhabited mostly by Shia Muslims, has also denied any connection to Al-Qaeda – a militant Sunni group – and cooperation between the two has been questioned due to religious differences. Al-Qaeda views the Shia as heretics, for example.
“The people who committed those terrorist attacks were neither friends nor allies of Iran,” Iran Press Editor-in-Chief Emad Abshenas told Sputnik. “They were our sworn enemies, members of Al-Qaeda, which considers Iran as their enemy. Fifteen out of the 19 terrorists were Saudi citizens, which happens to be America’s best friend. The remaining four terrorists lived in Saudi Arabia and enjoyed Saudi support. Therefore the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks had nothing to do with Iran.”
How the case moves forward after Daniels’ ruling is unclear. According to Bloomberg, it can be very hard to obtain damages from another country, but plaintiffs might try to do so by targeting Iranian funds frozen by the US.
Oil and Blood
by Harry von Johnston, PhD
From 1991 through 1997, major U.S. oil companies including Exxon-Mobil, Texaco, Unocal, BP Amoco and Shell directly invested nearly $3 billion in cash to bribe various state officials in the oil-rich former Soviet Union area of Kazakhstan. This was done in order to guarantee Western rights to the immense oil reserves in this country.
The oil companies further committed to make an immense direct investment in Kazakhstan of $35 billion. The underlying reason for the establishment of this policy was that the oil companies were no longer willing to expend high and increasing prices charged by the Russian Republic for the use of their pipeline system. [Source: Testimony before the House International Relations Committee 2/12/98]The former Soviet Kazakhstan is the most potentially important area for American oil interests. It has reserves of approximately 17.6 billion barrels of oil, close to the U.S. total oil reserves of 22 billion barrels.The majority of the $3 billions paid by U.S. oil interests to secure Kazakhstan oil was promptly banked in Swiss accounts by the President of the country, Nursultan Nazarbayev.
This money was not well spent because in 2001, the bulk of Kazakhstan’s oil, some 250 million barrels, was shipped to market via Russian, not American, pipelines.
On December 4, 1997 Taliban representatives were guests at the Texas headquarters of Unocal to negotiate their organization’s support for the pipeline to Pakistan and the sea.. Subsequent reports indicated that these negotiations failed, purportedly because the Taliban was extortionate in their monetary demands. [Source: The BBC, Dec. 4 1997]
In a Feb. 12, 1998, report to the House Committee on International Relations, Unocal Corp. VP for International Relations John J. Maresca, subsequently a Special Ambassador to Afghanistan, testified that the Taliban government in Afghanistan was an obstacle to Unocal’s installing the projected oil pipeline from the Caspian region. He also made it clear that “construction of the pipeline cannot begin until a recognized government is in place in Kabul that has the confidence of governments, lenders, and our company.”
U.S. oil firms then contemplated the construction of another pipeline that would go west through Russia instead of south through Afghanistan. Enron- the biggest contributor to the Bush/Cheney 2000 campaign and later a spectacular bankrupt, conducted the feasibility study for the proposed $2.5 billion Trans-Caspian gas pipeline, but this project failed to materialize due to Russian cash demands.
However, if the United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan in order to put in place the desired “internationally recognized government,” the region could certainly be considered sufficiently acceptable and pacified for the Unocal pipeline project to proceed.
If Unocal were to complete the pipeline, their projected annual revenues would approach $2 billion- sufficient to recover the cost of the project in five years [Source: Testimony before the House International Relations Committee. 2/12/98]
The August 10, 2000, the Chicago Tribune reported that Vice-President Richard Cheney “was once CEO of Dallas-based Halliburton Co., the biggest oil-services company in the world. Because of the instability in the Persian Gulf, Cheney and his fellow oilmen concentrated on the world’s other major source of oil–the Caspian Sea area whose oil and gas resources are estimated at $4 trillion by U.S. News and World Report.”
The Caspian Sea region that Cheney and the “fellow oilmen”- such as Enron, Amoco, British Petroleum, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil and Unocal-were so anxious to exploit is located immediately to the north of Afghanistan.
“The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States…But, we go where the business is… ” Cheney said in a speech given on June 23, 1988 at the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank.
‘Burned to death, beheaded’: Cizre Kurds accuse Erdogan’s forces of civilian massacre (RT EXCLUSIVE)
March 11, 2016
RT
Harrowing accounts of an alleged massacre of dozens of Kurdish civilians in the southeastern Turkish town of Cizre have been collected by RT’s William Whiteman, who traveled to the area following reports of a brutal military crackdown on the population.
Reports of Turkish troops slaughtering hundreds of civilians trapped in the basements of Cizre, which is located in Turkey’s Sirnak province, first surfaced in February. Some 150 people were allegedly burned to death in one of them.
That particular claim was made by Turkish MP Feleknas Uca from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, who spoke to Sputnik agency. These and other trapped people were reportedly denied access to food and medical supplies. However, until now, the alleged atrocities committed by the Turkish forces could not be substantiated on the ground.
Whiteman found witnesses who survived the offensive and were able to show the exact place of the mass killing, while providing terrifying details on what had happened.
“I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. Erdogan has destroyed our world. He has burned us,” said a female witness, while showing blood stains on the debris of the deadly building.
“Three, four – maybe five hundred people. There were old people, women and children – some as young as 10 years old. They killed a heavily pregnant woman,” added the woman, blaming Erdogan for indiscriminately killing innocent people during the so-called counter-terrorism operation against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) separatists.
“Women and children lived here. Erdogan killed all of them with heavy artillery, he destroyed this home,” added the woman
“They claim they are fighting ‘terrorists’ – but where are the terrorists?” she said, arguing that all of the victims had been civilians.
While inspecting the town, Whiteman reported a strong scent of decomposing bodies. This led him to another chilling discovery – a building whose basement has served as a mass grave.
Between 45 and 50 people were burned alive in one of the buildings, according to a local woman speaking to Whiteman. What is worse, many of the victims appear to have been cold-bloodedly beheaded by the Turkish troops, she said.
The Turkish military operation against PKK militants in the southeastern part of the country was launched in July 2015, breaking a ceasefire agreement that had held for two years. At the time of the alleged mass murder in Cizre, Turkish state television announced that 60 “terrorists” were killed in a building basement. The operation in Cizre, which, according to Turkish Interior Minister Efkan Ala, was completed “in a very successful fashion,” officially ended early February.
The alleged atrocities have brought little reaction from Western governments, as Turkey is a NATO member state and crucial to stemming the refugee and migrant crisis gripping Europe.
Most criticism has come from international human rights groups. Amnesty International reported in January that at least 150 civilians, women and children among them, had been killed in the Turkish military operation, saying that some 200,000 people had been put at risk and were being denied access to services due to strict curfews.
“Cuts to water and electricity supplies combined with the dangers of accessing food and medical care while under fire are having a devastating effect on residents, and the situation is likely to get worse, fast, if this isn’t addressed,” said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International’s Director for Europe and Central Asia, as cited in the report.
Pointing out the lax reaction to the human rights violations committed en mass by Turkish authorities against the Kurdish population, he urged the international community not to turn a blind on the conflict.
“While the Turkish authorities appear determined to silence internal criticism, they have faced very little from the international community. Strategic considerations relating to the conflict in Syria and determined efforts to enlist Turkey’s help in stemming the flow of refugees to Europe must not overshadow allegations of gross human rights violations,” he added.
The American Way of War as a Do-Over
March 11, 2016
by Tom Engelhardt,
TomDispatch
With General John Campbell’s tour of duty in Afghanistan finished, a new commander has taken over. Admittedly, things did not go well during Campbell’s year and a half heading up the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) there, but that’s par for the course. In late 2015, while he was in the saddle, the Taliban took the provincial capital of Kunduz, the first city to be (briefly) theirs since the American invasion of 2001. In response, U.S. forces devastated a Doctors Without Borders hospital. The Taliban is also now in control of more territory than at any time since the invasion and gaining an ever-firmer grip on contested Helmand Province in the heart of the country’s poppy-growing region (and so the staggering drug funds that go with it). In that same province, only about half of the “on duty” Afghan security forces the United States trained, equipped, and largely funded (to the tune of more than $65 billion over the years) were reportedly even present.
On his way into retirement, General Campbell has been vigorously urging the Obama administration to expand its operations in that country. (“I’m not going to leave,” he said, “without making sure my leadership understands that there are things we need to do.”) In this, he’s been in good company. Behind the scenes, “top U.S. military commanders” have reportedly been talking up a renewed, decades-long commitment to Afghanistan and its security forces, what one general has termed a “generational approach” to the war there.
And yes, as Campbell headed off stage, General John Nicholson, Jr., beginning his fourth tour of duty in Afghanistan, has officially taken command of ISAF. Though it wasn’t a major news item, he happens to be its 17th commander in the 14-plus years of Washington’s Afghan War. If this pattern holds, by 2030 that international force, dominated by the U.S., will have had 34 commanders and have fought, by at least a multiple of two, the longest war in our history. Talk about all-American records! (USA! USA!)
If such a scenario isn’t the essence of déjà vu all over again, what is? Imagine, for a minute, each of those 17 ISAF commanders (recently, but not always, Americans, including still resonant names like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal as well as those like Dan McNeill and David McKiernan already lost in the fog of time) arriving at yearly intervals, each scrambling to catch-up, get the big picture, and run the show. Imagine that process time after time, and you have the definition of what, in kid culture, might be called a do-over – a chance to get something right after doing it wrong the first time. Of course, yearly do-overs are a hell of a way to run a war, but they’re a great mechanism for ensuring that no one will need to take responsibility for a disaster of 14 years and counting.
How to Play Do-Over
For journalists, when it comes to twenty-first-century American war, do-overs are a boon. From collapsing U.S.-trained, funded, and equipped local militaries to that revolving door for commanders in Afghanistan to terror groups whose leaderships are eternally being eviscerated yet are never wiped out, do-overs ensure that your daily copy is essentially pre-written for you. In fact, when it comes to American-style war across the Greater Middle East and increasingly much of Africa, do-over is the name of the game.
In movie terms, you could think of Washington’s war policies in the post-9/11 era as pure “play it again, Sam.” If this weren’t the grimmest “game” around, involving death, destruction, failed states, spreading terror movements, and a region flooded with the uprooted – refugees, internal exiles, transient terrorists, and god knows who else – it could instantly be transmuted into a popular parlor game. We could call it “Do-Over.” The rules would be easy to grasp, though – fair warning – given the recent record of American war making, it could be a very long game.
Modest preparation would be involved, since you’d be using actual headlines from the previous weeks. Given the nature of the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror (now the Obama administration’s no-name war on terror), however, this shouldn’t be a daunting proposition. Any cursory reader of the news, aged 12 to 75, will find it easy to take part. Let me give you just a handful of examples of how Do-Over would work from a plethora of recent news stories:
Here, for instance, is a typical, can’t-miss, Do-Over headline: “Back to Iraq: U.S. Military Contractors Return In Droves.” For Washington’s third Iraq War, with a military that now heads into any battle zone hand-in-hand with a set of warrior corporations, the private contractors are returning to Iraq in significant numbers. In the good old days, after the invasion of 2003, for every American soldier in Iraq, there was at least one private contractor. As RAND’s Molly Dunnigan wrote back in 2013, “By 2008, the U.S. Department of Defense employed 155,826 private contractors in Iraq – and 152,275 troops. This degree of privatization is unprecedented in modern warfare.” (Afghan War figures were remarkably similar: in 2010, there were 94,413 contractors and 91,600 American troops in that country.) Now, in the ongoing war against the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq, contractors, 70% American, hired by the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies outnumber the 3,700 U.S. military personnel on the ground by two to one or more and the names of the companies putting them there should ring a distinctly Do-Over bell from the previous round of war: KBR, DynCorp, and Fluor Corporation, among others. Of course, since it’s a Do-Over and we know just what happened the last time around, what could possibly go wrong?
Here’s another kind of headline for the game. Think of it as a “new” Do-Over (a story that looks like a first-timer, but couldn’t be more repetitive): “U.S. Plans to Put Advisers on Front Lines of Nigeria’s War Against Boko Haram.” As the New York Times reports, a plan developed by Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, U.S. Special Operations commander for Africa, to “send dozens of Special Operations advisers to the front lines of Nigeria’s fight against the West African militant group Boko Haram” is expected to be approved by the Pentagon and the White House. Those special ops forces, “dozens” of them, are slated to advise Nigerian troops for the first time in the embattled northern part of their country. Though theirs will not officially be a combat role, they will be stationed in an area where anything might happen. At first glance, this may seem like something new under the sun in Washington’s expanding “war against the Islamic State” (to which Boko Haram has pledged its fealty), but only until you consider a remarkably similar October 2015 headline about a neighboring country: “The U.S. Is Sending 300 Military Personnel to Cameroon to Help Fight Boko Haram.” Those special ops troops were to conduct “airborne intelligence and reconnaissance operations” against that grim Nigerian terror group. Or to leap back another year, consider this headline from May 2014: “U.S. Deploys 80 Troops to Chad to Help Find Kidnapped Nigerian Schoolgirls.” (They weren’t found.) And of course, similar headlines could be multiplied across the Greater Middle East over the last decade against groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State from Yemen to, most recently, Iraq and Syria, with similarly dismal results.
For your success in finding such a headline, you get a bonus question: Fourteen-plus years later, after U.S. special ops forces have repeatedly been sent to scads of countries, and the terror situation has only worsened, what exactly do they have to teach Nigerians or anyone else for that matter? What is it that Washington’s guys know about the world of terror and how to fight it that locals don’t? Given the global record over these years, call that a mystery of our moment.
Now, here’s an even rarer form of Do-Over, a headline that calls up not one, but – count ‘em! – two repetitive themes in the American war on terror: “U.S. Captures ISIS Operative, Ushering in Tricky Phase.” The story itself is fairly straightforward. A secretive elite Special Operations team in Iraq has captured “a significant Islamic State operative,” with more such prisoners expected in the near future. The captive is presently being held and questioned “at a temporary detention facility in the city of Erbil in northern Iraq.” What no one in Washington has yet sorted out is: Where are such detainees to be kept in the future? It’s a question that, as you might imagine (and the accompanying New York Times story makes clear), instantly brings to mind Guantanamo and, in Iraq, Abu Ghraib (with its nightmarish photos), and that’s just to begin a longer list of grim places, including a string of “black sites,” and military and CIA prisons begged, borrowed, or appropriated across the planet in the Bush years. In all of them, American intelligence and military personnel (and private contractors) grossly abused, mistreated, tortured and in some cases actually killed prisoners. So in the conundrum of what to do with that single Islamic State captive lies an almost endless set of Do-Over possibilities. Lurking in that same headline, however, is another kind of Do-Over of these last years reflecting another set of repetitive war on terror practices: “U.S. drone strike kills a senior Islamic State militant in Syria,” “U.S. drone strike kills Yemen al-Qaida leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi,” “U.S. Commandos Raid Terrorist Hideouts in Libya, Somalia, Capture Senior Al-Qaeda Official.” In these and so many other headlines like them lies evidence of a deeply held Washington conviction that terror outfits can be successfully disabled and in the end dismantled, as can repressive states like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, by taking out key leadership figures. This heavily militarized top-down approach, labeled “the kingpin strategy,” has been brought to bear time and again in America’s post-9/11 conflicts. That there is no evidence at all of its effectiveness (and significant evidence that it actually succeeds in making such groups more brutal and efficient and such states into failed ones) seems not to matter. So in any headline about a terror leader or lieutenant captured in a U.S. special ops raid, there is automatically a second classic Do-Over theme.
Now, what about a Do-Over round for events that haven’t even happened and yet are already in reruns? Take this recent headline: “After Gains Against ISIS, Pentagon Focuses on Mosul.” We’re talking about a much-predicted U.S.-backed Iraqi (and Kurdish) offensive against Mosul. Small numbers of Islamic State militants took Iraq’s second largest city in June 2014 after the American-trained Iraqi army collapsed and fled, shedding quantities of American-provided equipment and their uniforms. The offensive to retake it was being touted in a somewhat similar manner a year ago by U.S. Central Command. At that time, 20,000 to 25,000 Iraqi troops were supposedly being prepared to recapture the city in a spring 2015 offensive that somehow never came to be (perhaps because those 20,000 or more troops essentially didn’t then exist). That “pivotal battle” to come was at the time being promoted by American military officials. As Reuters wrote, it was “highly unusual for the U.S. military to openly telegraph the timing of an upcoming offensive, especially to a large group of reporters.” As it turned out, they tipped those reporters off to nothing.
At the moment, Pentagon officials are touting such an offensive all over again for spring 2016, or if not quite now, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford put it recently, at least not in “the deep, deep future.” (Iraqi military officials, however, already beg to differ, predicting that such an offensive will be at least many months away “or longer.” Welcome to the Mosul offensive of 2017!) Of course, we already have a remarkably clear idea of what Mosul will look like in the wake of such an offensive, should it ever happen. After all, we know just how the smaller Iraqi city of Ramadi ended up after a six-month campaign by U.S.-trained and backed Iraqi troops to retake it from Islamic State militants: largely depopulated, 80% destroyed, and a landscape of rubble thanks to hundreds of U.S. air strikes, street-by-street fighting, and IS booby traps (with no rebuilding funds available). In other words, we already have a Do-Over vision of a future Mosul, should 2016 finally be the year when those Iraqi troops (and American advisers and planes) arrive in the IS-occupied city. (Perhaps the only non-Do-Over possibility is the grimmest of all – that, as the American Embassy in Baghdad has suddenly taken to warning, Mosul’s massive, compromised dam could collapse as the winter snows melt, essentially sweeping the city away and possibly killing hundreds of thousands of downstream Iraqis.)
On the positive side, since the American war on terror shows no sign of abating or succeeding, and as no one in Washington seems ready to consider anything strategically or tactically but more (or slightly less) of the same, Do-Over has a potentially glowing future as a war game. After all, based on almost 15 years of experience from Afghanistan to Nigeria, further destruction, chaos, the growth of failed states, the spread of terror groups, and monumental flows of refugees seem guaranteed, which means that there should never be a dearth of Do-Over-style headlines to draw on.
Pointing out the lax reaction to the human rights violations committed en mass by Turkish authorities against the Kurdish population, he urged the international community
One warning, though: in the annals of such games, this one is unique. Because of the nature of the American way of war in our time, Do-Over may be the only game ever invented in which there can be no ultimate winner and, unfortunately, the tag line “Everyone’s a loser!” doesn’t seem like a selling way to go. Though the game is still in its planning stages, perhaps the ending has to be something realistic and yet thrilling like: “You’ve been Done-In!”
Can You Keep a Secret?
The former C.I.A. chief Michael Hayden on torture and transparency.
March 7, 2016 Issue
by George Packer
The New Yorker
Spymasters are supposed to be good at keeping their mouths shut, so it’s striking how many heads of the Central Intelligence Agency have published memoirs. Just in the years since September 11th, three former directors—George Tenet, Leon Panetta, and now Michael V. Hayden—have felt compelled to tell tales. (A fourth, David Petraeus, coöperated with his biographer so fully that he provided her with classified information.) They are no doubt driven by the same motives that lead other public figures to write autobiographies—money, narcissism, score-settling, concern for their place in history. Spooks in general have had a lot to answer for in the past decade and a half: the 9/11 attacks themselves, Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, secret prisons, torture, warrantless eavesdropping, the bulk collection of Americans’ data, and targeted killings. On the inside, they hold their breath for years; once outside, they won’t shut up. Within the limits set by the C.I.A.’s Publications Review Board, silence is an easy code to break.
Hayden was an Air Force officer who retired as a four-star general. He spent just about his whole career as an intelligence officer—providing intelligence to B-52 pilots in Vietnam, serving as chief of intelligence for U.S. forces in Europe during the Bosnian war, and then running the Air Intelligence Agency. In 1999, Hayden was appointed to lead the National Security Agency. He had the right résumé—all N.S.A. directors are senior military officers—as well as the luck of timing and circumstance that so often determines who gets the coveted jobs in government. But the director of the C.I.A.—a position Hayden held from 2006 to the start of the Obama Administration, after a brief stopover as deputy director of national intelligence—is rarely a career intelligence officer. And before Hayden nobody had ever led both the N.S.A. and the C.I.A. Hayden had clearly impressed the politicians, made few powerful enemies among his colleagues, and avoided scandal. In short, he was an excellent bureaucrat, and he spent his entire professional life guarding the country’s secrets, among them some of the deepest and darkest.
“Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror” (Penguin Press) suffers from the usual problems of the official memoir. All autobiographies are self-serving, but those of public figures tend to be unapologetically so. Hayden includes liberal excerpts from a graduation speech he delivered at his alma mater, Duquesne University, and reports on the standing ovation that greeted him. “Playing to the Edge” is also badly written, with no trace of a ghostwriter or editor. Hayden is a devout Steelers fan, and his style is jock-bureaucratic—tough talk clotted with insider terminology. At one point, he writes, “I have spent my adult life working in American intelligence. It has been quite an honor. Generally well resourced. A global mission. No want of issues. And it was a hell of a ride.” At another: “The head of operations wanted to try the Thin Thread approach, retain US metadata that we were collecting in our foreign intelligence activities, encrypt it, limit access to it through a kind of ‘two key’ protocol, and then (when indicated) chain through the metadata to other contacts.”
This matter of language is important. Professional jargon—on Wall Street, in humanities departments, in government offices—can be a fence raised to keep out the uninitiated and permit those within it to persist in the belief that what they do is too hard, too complex, to be questioned. Jargon acts not only to euphemize but to license, setting insiders against outsiders and giving the flimsiest notions a scientific aura. Repeat the phrase “chain through the metadata” enough times and it sounds like a law of nature rather than a contentious policy. In the case of the intelligence world, where a high degree of insularity is essential, the cloak of language renders spooks and their civilian critics mutually alien. The tendency on each side is to deny that the other has any real right to exist.
Hayden was running the N.S.A. when, following September 11th, President Bush told the agency to intercept the content of certain calls between American and foreign telephones without a court order, and to store all the metadata on calls made to, from, and within the United States. Hayden asked an agency lawyer for an overnight legal opinion and got an answer (“a more-than-plausible theory about its lawfulness”) that a more skeptical mind could have shredded. But Hayden also knew exactly what his superiors at the White House wanted. He had the tools and was eager to use them. You don’t rise to the top of the intelligence community by asking whether “can” and “should” are always the same.
This proved the case with torture, too. Hayden wasn’t yet at the C.I.A. when the agency, with the backing of the Bush White House and the Justice Department, tried waterboarding and other physical efforts to break Al Qaeda suspects in secret overseas prisons. By the time Hayden took over, many, though not all, of the practices had ended. Contemplating an order to subject a detainee named Muhammad Rahim al-Afghani to sleep deprivation and a liquid diet, Hayden writes, “I remember staring down at the page, pen in hand, hesitating to take that step.” Needless to say, he signed. Afghani’s interrogators got nothing useful from their prisoner; Hayden suggests that this was because the harshest techniques had by then been taken off the table.
Hayden insists that vital information about Al Qaeda came from these techniques. He’s contradicted by a thick Senate Intelligence Committee report, numerous journalistic investigations, and the accounts of certain intelligence officers. When it comes to detainee deaths, innocent men wrongfully held in brutal conditions, and other abuses, Hayden barely glances over his shoulder: “There were occasional mistakes.” On the usefulness of the N.S.A.’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, which some insiders have dismissed as producing little valuable information, Hayden is similarly confident: “We were able to brief real connections between overseas terrorists and people in the United States. . . . It is clear that Stellarwind”—the code name for the information collected under the program—“covered a quadrant where we had no other tools. What could be wrong with that?” The public may never be able to assess where the truth lies.
In his last days in government, at the start of the Obama Administration, Hayden fought bitterly against the release of the Bush Justice Department’s torture memos, insisting that the revelations constituted a betrayal and would damage C.I.A. officers’ morale beyond repair. In 2014, when the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report, which singled out Hayden for misleading the committee in many instances, he lashed out even more furiously. The report is a damning document on the brutality of the C.I.A.’s practices, the shoddiness of its management, and the mendacity of its leaders. Hayden’s case against the report comes down to the fact that it was written by the committee’s “Democrat” members and staff. Hayden seems more ambivalent about eavesdropping than about torture. He admits that Stellarwind “did indeed raise important questions about the right balance between security and liberty, and Snowden’s disclosures no doubt accelerated and intensified that discussion.” And last week he sided with Apple in its privacy dispute with the F.B.I. But techniques like waterboarding and rectal hydration raise no questions for Hayden.
He has a number of glowing things to say about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, none about Barack Obama. Bush is a good listener, avid for details, ready to hear hard truths from his intel people and make policy accordingly. Obama, on the other hand, is indecisive, hypocritical, and—on issues like torture and negotiating with Iran—wrong. Hayden devotes far more energy to answering critical coverage in the Times and the Washington Post than to analyzing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In general, he doesn’t care for investigative journalists or congressional Democrats. First-rate intelligence reporters like the Times’ James Risen, the Post’s Dana Priest, and this magazine’s Jane Mayer aren’t just a pain in the ass, in his view—they have low motives and unfair agendas. He can’t fathom why the legitimate role of the press might be to ferret out secrets that officials like him are sworn to guard, or why the C.I.A.’s destruction of its own interrogation tapes looked like a coverup of a crime. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Senator Ron Wyden aren’t good-faith critics of the agency—they’re partisan hypocrites. At one point, Hayden quotes a line from Bob Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie”: “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” Hayden adds, “Especially with yourself. All the time.” In other words, if the intelligence agencies are going to push the limits of law, policy, and technology, with minimal oversight—if they’re going to use the sidelines, in the football metaphor of the book’s title—they need to hold themselves accountable. But Hayden’s unwillingness to give an inch to any challenge shows why Congress, the press, and the public are the only ones who can keep the agencies honest.
What’s strange is that Hayden knows this. He knows that the intelligence world is isolated from the public, and that, like so many other institutions, it has lost Americans’ trust. He seems to understand that keeping the senior Republicans and Democrats on the intelligence committees informed while imposing a gag order on them is no longer enough to win citizens’ confidence. He goes so far as to call this realization “Snowden’s ‘gift,’ ” referring to him as the “visible effect” of a “broad cultural shift that is redefining legitimate secrecy, necessary transparency, and what constitutes the consent of the governed.”
This is ultimately why Hayden has come out of the shadows to write this still heavily shadowed book. He wants more openness, not out of any principled belief in government transparency but because it’s essential if his profession is going to survive. “If we are going to conduct espionage in the future,” he writes, “we are going to have to make some changes in the relationship between the intelligence community and the public it serves.” And, he adds, “we also need to explain to those with whom we intend to be more open that with that will come some increased risk. It can be no other way.” He isn’t wrong to say so, or to point out the bad faith of the agencies’ detractors who want to have it both ways. After quoting passages from a congressional report critical of the N.S.A.’s failure to do more to prevent 9/11, he adds, “I mention them here only to point out that what then followed, NSA’s Stellarwind program, was a logical response to an agreed issue and not the product of demented cryptologic minds, as some would later suggest.” You don’t have to be an admirer of warrantless wiretapping to acknowledge that it might have originated in an understandable panic about the intelligence failures that permitted the attacks to happen. “Far easier to criticize intelligence agencies for not doing enough when [political élites] feel in danger,” Hayden writes, “while reserving the right to criticize those agencies for doing too much when they feel safe.” The truth in this observation isn’t weakened by the fact that Hayden repeats it elsewhere at least twice, nearly word for word.
Hayden isn’t the mindless drone or sinister spy boss that his harshest detractors might believe. He’s a very imperfect bearer of a legitimate insight: that, if the American people and the intelligence world need each other, they can’t afford to speak mutually unintelligible languages. Imperfect because he failed his own standard of openness, first while in government—he battled any serious oversight of the intelligence agencies’ most controversial programs—and then again in this cheerful, overconfident account of his years there. George Tenet, in his more readable memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” spends a lot of time on his mistakes, especially on Iraq’s missing weapons of mass destruction. Hayden, by contrast, looks back and says, “I could be accused of grading my own work, but I believe that despite our flaws, we’re actually pretty good at this spy stuff.”
Hayden thinks that the answer to the intelligence community’s isolation and disarray is for leaders like him to come forth and explain their work—which is what he’s been doing since his retirement, in speeches and articles and debates (including one with Glenn Greenwald), and, now, in this memoir. He wants transparency, sort of (another official called it “translucence”), but on his own terms. That won’t be enough, and perhaps nothing will be enough. In a sense, the more the spies say, the less the public will trust them, because it’s secrecy that gives them the mystique of knowledge. The relationship is a little like that between teen-agers and their parents. We expect the intelligence people to keep us safe, we resent them for their intrusions and their failures, and we need to believe that they know better than we do in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.
The Sea Island Conspiracy
March 11, 2016
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Over the long weekend before the Mississippi and Michigan primaries, the sky above Sea Island was black with corporate jets.
Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Napster’s Sean Parker, Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, and other members of the super-rich were jetting in to the exclusive Georgia resort, ostensibly to participate in the annual World Forum of the American Enterprise Institute.
Among the advertised topics of discussion: “Millennials: How Much Do They Matter and What Do They Want?”
That was the cover story.
As revealed by the Huffington Post, Sea Island last weekend was host to a secret conclave at the Cloisters where oligarchs colluded with Beltway elites to reverse the democratic decisions of millions of voters and abort the candidacy of Donald Trump.
Among the journalists at Sea Island were Rich Lowry of National Review, which just devoted an entire issue to the topic: “Against Trump,” and Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the Trumphobic New York Times.
Bush guru Karl Rove of FOX News was on hand, as were Speaker Paul Ryan, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham, dispatched by Trump in New Hampshire and a berserker on the subject of the Donald.
So, too, was William Kristol, editor of the rabidly anti-Trump Weekly Standard, who reported back to comrades: “The key task now, to … paraphrase Karl Marx, is less to understand Trump than to stop him.”
Kristol earlier tweeted that the Sea Island conclave is “off the record, so please do consider my tweets from there off the record.”
Redeeming itself for relegating Trump to its entertainment pages, the Huffington Post did the nation a service in lifting the rug on “something rotten in the state.”
What we see at Sea Island is that, despite all their babble about bringing the blessings of “democracy” to the world’s benighted, AEI, Neocon Central, believes less in democracy than in perpetual control of the American nation by the ruling Beltway elites.
If an outsider like Trump imperils that control, democracy be damned. The elites will come together to bring him down, because, behind party ties, they are soul brothers in the pursuit of power.
Something else was revealed by the Huffington Post – a deeply embedded corruption that permeates this capital city.
The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research is a 501(c)(3) under IRS rules, an organization exempt from U.S. taxation.
Million-dollar corporate contributions to AEI are tax-deductible.
This special privilege, this freedom from taxation, is accorded to organizations established for purposes such as “religious, educational, charitable, scientific, literary … or the prevention of cruelty to children or animals.”
What the co-conspirators of Sea Island were up at the Cloisters was about as religious as what the Bolsheviks at that girls school known as the Smolny Institute were up to in Petrograd in 1917.
From what has been reported, it would not be extreme to say this was a conspiracy of oligarchs, War Party neocons, and face-card Republicans to reverse the results of the primaries and impose upon the party, against its expressed will, a nominee responsive to the elites’ agenda.
And this taxpayer-subsidized “Dump Trump” camarilla raises even larger issues.
Now America is not Russia or Egypt or China.
But all those countries are now moving purposefully to expose U.S. ties to nongovernmental organizations set up and operating in their capital cities.
Many of those NGOs have had funds funneled to them from U.S. agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy, which has backed “color-coded revolutions” credited with dumping over regimes in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia.
In the early 1950s, in Iran and Guatemala, the CIA of the Dulles brothers did this work.
Whatever ones thinks of Vladimir Putin, can anyone blame him for not wanting U.S. agencies backing NGOs in Moscow, whose unstated goal is to see him and his regime overthrown?
And whatever one thinks of NED and its subsidiaries, it is time Americans took a hard look at the tax-exempt foundations, think tanks and public policy institutes operating in our capital city.
How many are like AEI, scheming to predetermine the outcome of presidential elections while enjoying tax exemptions and posturing as benign assemblages of disinterested scholars and seekers of truth?
How many of these tax-exempt think tanks are fronts and propaganda organs of transnational corporations that are sustained with tax-deductible dollars, until their “resident scholars” can move into government offices and do the work for which they have been paid handsomely in advance?
How many of these think tanks take foreign money to advance the interests of foreign regimes in America’s capital?
We talk about the “deep state” in Turkey and Egypt, the unseen regimes that exist beneath the public regime and rule the nation no matter the president or prime minister.
What about the “deep state” that rules us, of which we caught a glimpse at Sea Island?
A diligent legislature of a democratic republic would have long since dragged America’s deep state out into the sunlight.
45 Years After COINTELPRO, FBI Still Thinks ‘Dissent is the Enemy’
More than 60 groups sign letter calling for full investigation into government spying on protest groups
March 8, 2016
by Lauren McCauley, staff writer
Common Dreams
Forty-five years ago on Tuesday, peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania and unearthed documents exposing the government’s expansive COINTELPRO operations, which aimed to surveil, disrupt, and “neutralize” lawful activist groups, including war protesters, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the American Indian Movement, and the National Lawyers Guild.
Though the COINTELPRO revelations stirred widespread outrage and led to the eventual passage of reform legislation, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, such abuse of activists’ First Amendment rights continues to this day.
More than 60 national and local groups on Tuesday sent a letter (pdf) to the leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees expressing concern over the FBI’s and Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s “abuse of counterterrorism resources to monitor Americans’ First Amendment protected activity.”
The groups, which include Center for Constitutional Rights, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Government Accountability Project, Greenpeace USA, National Lawyers Guild, School of the Americas Watch (SOAW), and Veterans for Peace, among others, are urging the Committees to conduct a full investigation, not unlike the Church Committee, “to determine the extent of FBI and DHS spying in the past decade.”
“The FBI in particular has a well-documented history of abuse of First Amendment rights,” the letter states—referring specifically to the COINTELPRO operations—and such activities have continued, including “sending undercover agents and informants to infiltrate peaceful social justice groups, as well as surveillance of, documenting, and reporting on lawful political activity.”
Groups recently targeted by the FBI include SOAW, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and anti-Keystone XL Pipeline activists. Meanwhile DHS and local fusion centers, which operate as local sources of “counter-terrorism” intelligence gathering and sharing, monitored the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements as well.
What’s more, the groups note, “documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that the FBI continuously invokes counterterrorism authorities to monitor groups it admits are peaceful and nonviolent.”
“Labeling activism as terrorism criminalizes political dissent,” the letter states. “Given the current political climate and draconian laws concerning terrorism, individuals may be deterred from participating in completely lawful speech, such as a protest march, by this stigma.”
“That the FBI cannot discern between activism and terrorism shows us that they think dissent is still the enemy,” said Chip Gibbons, legal fellow with Bill of Rights Defense Committee and Defending Dissent Foundation, which organized the letter. “There have been multiple attempts at reform but after each and every one we see the same thing happening again. The FBI claims to no longer investigate groups for their political beliefs, but look at who the FBI investigates under its counterterrorism authority—peace groups, racial justice groups, economic justice groups—the very same types of organizations that were targeted during the heyday of J. Edgar Hoover.”