The Slaughterhouse Informer

A Compendiium of Various Official Lies, Business Scandals, Small Murders, Frauds, and Other Gross Defects of Our Current Political, Business and Religious Moral Lepers.

Presenting a new magazine that contains material that is not found elsewhere and is very difficult to post on the Internet. The ‘Voice of the White House’ will appear in each issue containing material not found on TBR News for very obvious reasons.This publication will appear once a week, on Wednesday, every week, will be ten pages in length and is available by subscription only. The price is $5.00 a month and can be paid via PayPal or by check, sent to ‘Morris Productions, 3015 E. New York St. Ste A2-190, Aurora, Il 60504.’ If you don’t like it, and Bush supporters can read the Drudge Report for free, you can cancel at any time.

Civil insurrection in America and government countermeasures: The official papers

By Bradley Moscrip

An in-depth study of official American plans to construct FEMA detention centers in America and specific recent U.S. Army domestic counterinsurgency plans. Here is a sampling of the ebook contents:

Gun Control by Confiscation

As the American general population is known to be the most heavily armed in the world, immediately upon the declaration of Martial Law and the execution by the military of counterinsurgency programs, it has been determined that the BATF, will begin the process of rounding up all rifles, pistols and so-called assault weaponry from the civil population. Lists of gun collectors obtained from firearms dealers, gun magazine subscription lists and other sources will be the basis for these mass confiscations. Gun owners will be supplied documentation by the BATF showing which pieces have been confiscated so that in the future, they will be told, they can recover their weapons when the state of emergency has passed. In actuality, weapons that do not have a high value or are not suitable for arming loyalist police forces, will be destroyed by order

This study is available from tbrnews at $5.00 by PayPal  

The Voice of the White House

                Washington, D.C., May 10, 2009: “As much as I dislike coping with the incredible glut of conspiracy theories I have to review on a daily basis, I saw a report early this morning that I felt I had to pass on to the public, such as it is. I cannot just scan it in because it is classified with a very limited COSMIC readership but I can, and have, copied out salient parts of it and, after suitable rewriting, I am sending it out.

                There is now an on-going mini-epidemic of a form of swine flu sweeping the world but I can see almost nothing about how, or where, it really started.

                 Of course, it started in Mexico, probably Mexico City, and was deliberately sat on by the Mexican government because it coincided with the American spring break and the Mexicans did not want to warn off the enormous army of American teenagers who pour into that benighted country every year, flush with nice money.

                By delaying official notice of the disease, they allowed it to spread all over the world but that is not the issue. After all, what can you expect from a country whose national bird is the fly?

                It seems that an Israeli pharmaceutical company, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd,  one of the world’s largest with 28,000 employees located in 50 countries, bought out one Ivax Corporation that had labs in Mexico City. Teva has been working on finding vaccines and medicines for a host of different human ailments and took over the work of Ivax which also produced medicines and vaccines for human consumption but also did extensive experimental work in the veterinarian field.

                 It seems that sometime in late March of this year, one of the human test subjects for Teva developed a form of swine/bird flu that was not responsive to medical treatment but company officials in charge of the program (the development of a vaccine for several different forms of swine/bird flu) were unaware of this and allowed the test subject to leave their facilities and go into the public. When the test subject died, it took two weeks for the company to find out about this and as the infection was now spreading, instead of speaking out, they quickly burn reams of test documents and destroyed the records of their test subject. 

                The CDC has learned that the type of swine/bird flu involved here “has the potential of causing a pandemic” that could “easily have the same global effect as the 1918 influenza” epidemic that killed 30-50 millions of people world wide and did terrible damage to the global economy.

                 It is obvious that this was a deplorable accident but by trying to cover it up, the potential damage could be beyond our belief. Neither the Mexican authorities or the pharmaceutical company will admit to any of this and, like the missing billions of Bernie Madoff, no one in authority in the United States, Mexico or Israel will address it, hoping that the flu now creeping across the planet will not prove to be pandemic or deadly.

                 What can be done about this tragedy of errors? Nothing at all. However, unlike a major earthquake, this is not an act of God but an act of man.”

Teva Mexico

Pharmaceutical, Biogeneric and API development
manufacture and marketing
Pasaje Interlomas No. 16 - 5to. piso
Col. San Fernando La Herradura
CP 52784 Huixquilucan
Edo. de Mexico

Phone: +(52)-55-5950-0200

Fax: +(52)-55-5950-0201

Is company cost-cutting company throat-slitting?

May 6, 2009

by James B. Kelleher and Jennifer Ablan

Reuters

CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - In recent weeks, a number of investors and economists have declared the recession all but over based on a handful of seemingly positive signs, including a flurry of better-than-expected earnings from U.S. companies.

They may be getting ahead of themselves.

Aggressive cost-cutting through layoffs and capital expenditure reductions has, it's true, helped many companies report profits that surpassed analysts' estimates.

But beneath what can be perceived as "green shoots" of recovery, experts say, lie the germinating seeds of what could be a much deeper, more prolonged recession.

"I think the clear and present danger is the negative feedback loop for the economy," said Greg Peters, head of global-fixed income and economic research at Morgan Stanley in New York.

"If people are getting laid off and if capital expenditures are being pulled back, then that has a cascading effect that is much more long-lasting on the economy."

Analysts and investors argue that while job, capex and R&D cuts may shore up individual profits temporarily, they are bad news in the aggregate. They swell the ranks of the unemployed, reduce the wages of those who keep their jobs, and hurt an already struggling economy by further crimping consumer and corporate spending.

And that will only ricochet back on the companies themselves, reducing demand for their products and services and putting additional pressure on their sales and margins.

"As corporations cut payrolls and deleverage they are acting perfectly rationally," said Robert Reich, the former U.S. Labor Secretary under President Bill Clinton who now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

"But if that's what every corporation does, we're going to end up with far more job losses and in a deeper economic hole. Who's going to be left to buy all the goods and services these companies produce?"

THE BEAT GOES ON ... JOB LOSSES TOO

The list of U.S. companies able to report better-than-expected results for the most recent quarter because aggressive cost cuts offset falling sales is a long one.

It includes appliance maker Whirlpool Corp, advertising powerhouse Omnicom Group Inc, specialty glass maker Corning Inc, wireless telephone service provider Sprint Nextel Corp, drug maker Pfizer Inc tool maker Black & Decker Corp, and Kraft Foods Inc.

Based on the number of earnings that beat forecasts, one would never guess the United States is in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. According to Thomson Reuters Director's Report of the 365 S&P 500 companies that have reported earnings so far this quarter, 65 percent delivered better-than-expected results.

"In the aggregate, companies are reporting earnings that are 10.4 percent above the estimates, which is above the 1.6 percent long-term average" based on figures since 1994, John Butters, director of U.S. earnings at Thomson Reuters, wrote in his "This Week in Earnings" report last Friday.

But the cuts behind those beats add up, too. U.S. data due out this week is expected to show that employers cut another 620,000 jobs in April, according to a Reuters poll of economists, lifting the unemployment rate to 8.9 percent. That is up from 8.5 percent in March -- double what it was just two years ago and the highest level since 1983.

Over time, those cuts -- and the distress they cause -- become part of a self-reinforcing cycle, hurting consumer spending, which is responsible for the lion's share of U.S. economic activity -- and further pinching corporate results, experts said.

WHO WILL BUY WHEN NO ONE'S BUYING?

In fact, it is already happening. Although this past quarter was marked by a number of earnings surprises, it was also noteworthy for the number of companies that cut their forecasts, citing a deteriorating sales environment.

"We are still seeing forward earnings estimates being adjusted down," said Keith Wirtz, president and chief investment officer of Fifth Third Asset Management, which manages $22 billion.

To be sure, some pretty powerful voices are sounding a more upbeat note about the economy.

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Tuesday that the recession should end this year, as long as there is no relapse of the credit squeeze that has strangled the economy. And the Business Council, a private group of top U.S. CEOs, said its members see light at the end of the tunnel and are expecting a rebound, at least in the United States and China, next year.

Still, perhaps too many executives are talking like Harold "Terry" McGraw, the CEO of publisher McGraw-Hill Cos Inc, who stressed last week that "cost containment will be a priority for us all year."

As a result, Wirtz said he expects companies to remain "lean and mean ... slow to add expense early into the recovery phase."

And in a system where one man's expense is another man's paycheck, that kind of discipline is bad for the economy.

This conundrum, identified early in the 20th century by economist John Maynard Keynes as "the paradox of thrift" or the "paradox of savings" is, of course, one of the major headwinds facing the economy as it struggles to pull out of the downturn.

Simply put, consumers are now saving when the economy really needs them to spend and businesses are now relentlessly firing and cutting costs when the economy really needs them to be hiring.

The result, according to Keynes: declining incomes across the board.

Which is why Reich believes President Barack Obama's stimulus plan, which injects $787 billion into the economy over two years through tax cuts and spending, does not go far enough and may need to be expanded.

"In this environment, the government has to step in as the spender of last resort," he said.

(Reporting by James B. Kelleher and Jennifer Ablan, Editing by Martin Howell and Matthew Lewis)

Increasing Flight of Israrlis; Terrorism Cited

May 10, 2009

dnb

Tel Aviv - In Israel, the number of emigrants far  exceeded the number of immigrants for the first time in 20 years, the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on May 3..

Many emigrants were recent arrivals who wanted to leave Israel again, the report said. In 2009 9,600 immigrants have been expected in Israel while 60,000 people are expected to leave the country, according to the report based on figures for the first months of 2009.

                The last time emigration exceeded immigration was in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and in 1983 and 1984 when inflation was high.

                Meanwhile the Maariv newspaper reported that approximately a quarter of the Israeli population was strongly considering emigration.

                Almost half of the country's young people were thinking of leaving the country, the report said. Their reasons included dissatisfaction with the government, the education system, a lack of confidence in the political ruling class and an acute concern over the security situation because of numerous random rocket attacks.

The MV DEYANAT Coverup

Russia: Captured Iranian Ship 'Deyanat' Huge Floating Dirty Bomb

October, 2009

MilitaryPhotos.net

                “On August 21st, 2008, the MV Iran Deyant, 44,458 dead weight bulk carrier was heading towards the Suez Canal. As it was passing the Horn of Africa, about 80 miles southeast of al-Makalla in Yemen, the ship was surrounded by speedboats filled with members of a gang of Somalia pirates who grab suitable commercial ships and hold them,, and their cargos and crews for ransom. The captain was defenseless against the 40 pirates armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades blocking his passage. He had little choice other than to turn his ship over to them. What the pirates were not banking on, however, was that this was no ordinary ship.

                The MV Iran Deyanat is owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) - a state-owned company run by the Iranian military that was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury on September 10, shortly after the ship's hijacking. According to the U.S. Government, the company regularly falsifies shipping documents in order to hide the identity of end users, uses generic terms to describe shipments to avoid the attention of shipping authorities, and employs the use of cover entities to circumvent United Nations sanctions to facilitate weapons proliferation for the Iranian Ministry of Defense.

                Subsequently, it was disclosed that the U.S. government had offered to pay $7 million to the pirates to "receive entry permission and search the vessel." Officials in the Pentagon and the Department of State have consistently refused to comment on the situation.

                The exact nature of the cargo remains officially a mystery but officials in Puntland and Baidoa are convinced the ship was carrying weapons to Eritrea for Islamist insurgents. "We cannot inspect the cargo yet," Osman said, "but we are sure that it is weapons."

                The US Navy (and the French and the Russians) have been hove to off the coast of Eyl, going anywhere once released, it will be seized once it gets to sea. The specific clauses that have been approved in both the UN and in Congress would allow the US Navy to seize the ship under the suspicion clause. The claims that there are weapons onboard, and the possibility there might be chemical weapons, has insured there is at the very minimum, an inspection of the ship by outside authority will be mandated. At this writing, the MV Iran Deyanat is at anchor, watched closely by American, French and Russian naval units.

                Although American intelligence and government sources are maintaining a strictly observed silence, the same does not apply to the Russians and so it is that we learn the real story of the MV Iran Deyanat.She was an enormous floating dirty bomb, intended to detonate after exiting the Suez Canal at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in proximity to the coastal cities of Israel. The entire cargo of radioactive sand, obtained by Iran from China (the latter buys desperately needed oil from the former) and sealed in containers which, when the charges on the ship are set off after the crew took to the boats, will be blasted high into the air where prevailing winds will push the highly dangerous and radioactive cloud ashore.”

                This story received wide circulation at the time but since, like so many other important stories, it has faded slowly away. One notes that the implication that the Iranians were planning some kind of an attack on the state of Israel received absolutely no attention in either the American or Israeli press. A number of stories about this ship and its cargo were carried extensively in other countries but not as noted above. The reason for this? The Isreali government has been coping with extensive loss of its citizens due to growing fears of  military attacks from Arabs and they begged the United States officialdom, and the media, not to cover the story. If it got out on a wide basis, it could, Israel reasoned, cause a panic-stricken flight out of their country.

                But now we learn from reading Wikipedia that the whole thing must have been an error. We can always count on this source to post the latest official lines of both the United States and Israel. Here, are some of their dismissive statements:

“Though the ship carried industrial contents such as iron ore, other potentially illegal cargo has been surmised by the blog Long War Journal. According to Long War Journal (which as sources for its reports includes "Somali officials," "independent sources," and chiefly a man named Hassan Allore Osman, listed as Puntland's Minister of Minerals and Oil), some of the pirates who boarded the ship suffered a strange illness, which includes loss of hair and skin burns, and some pirates having died. The pirates tried to access the cargo on the ship, but the containers were locked and the captain and Iranian engineer from the ship's crew gave changing accounts of the cargo's contents. "That ship is unusual," the Long War Journal reports Osman as saying. "It is not carrying a normal shipment."

                In addition, Mwangura told South Africa's Sunday Times: “We don’t know exactly how many, but the information that I am getting is that some of them had died. There is something very wrong about that ship." Mwangura, however, did not name the source of his information, so it is not known whether he was referring to the Long War Journal reports.

                Experts have said that the accounts of the illness sound more like radiation poisoning than chemical poisoning. "It's baffling," Jonathan Tucker, from the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said to Fox News. "I'm not aware of any chemical agent that produces loss of hair within a few days. That's more suggestive of high levels of radioactive waste.

                In all, 16 pirates died from the ship's contents. Differing analyses have claimed that the ship's contents were planned to be delivered to Hezbollah or to al-Qaida groups in the Horn of Africa; ultimately, however, the ship berthed at the destination listed on its manifest, Rotterdam, unloading food and minerals.

Docking

                The MV Iran Deyanat arrived at Rotterdam on 11 November 2008. A "multi-disciplinary team comprising inspectors from the port authority, customs and habour police boarded and searched the ship" and found no hazardous substances on board. The paperwork was in order and the ship was unloaded. Lloyd's List reported that the ship’s charterer—German-based Hinrichs—denied any evidence of pirates falling ill during the hijacking. This contradicts the claims, however, that local officials made to sources such as The Times of South Africa and Reuters ……”

                It is instructive to note that Wikipedia does not carry any article that is critical of either Israel or any of the nasty activities of the CIA and should any reader be injudicious enough to post such material, Wikipedia will rapidly take it down and notice the poster with stern warnings about daring to repeat their negative activities.  One can get more accurate information from the Weekly Reader.

Conversations with the Crow: Part 72

Editor’s note: When this series was prepared, a number of conversations were deliberately redacted because they were either very personal in nature or, more important, contained specific material which we felt might have considerable impact and present potential danger in publication. Now that all of the conversations are being readied for publication, along with illustrative specific notes, we are publishing many of the hitherto off-limits examples. Enjoy  them!

                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 a well-known Washington fix-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.

                The  small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento's house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

                When published material concerning the CIA's actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA's horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA's activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious 'Regional Interrogation Centers' in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

                A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid "historians" and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

                The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley's survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of  highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by  DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton  conspired to  secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files our of the agency. Crowley did the same thing  right before his own retirement , secretly removing thousands of pages  of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

                Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in military intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

                One of Crowley’s first major assignments within the agency was to assist in the recruitment and management of prominent World War II Nazis, especially those with advanced intelligence experience. One of the CIA’s major recruitment coups was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler’s Gestapo who had fled to Switzerland after the collapse of the Third Reich and worked as an anti-Communist expert for Masson of Swiss counterintelligence. Mueller was initially hired by Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA,  who was running the Gehlen Organization out of Pullach in southern Germany. Crowley eventually came to despise Critchfield but the colonel was totally unaware of this, to his later dismay.

                Crowley’s real expertise within the agency was the Soviet KGB. One of his main jobs throughout his career was acting as the agency liaison with corporations like ITT, which the CIA often used as fronts for moving large amounts of cash off their books. He was deeply involved in the efforts by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, which eventually got him into legal problems with regard to investigations of the U.S. government’s grand jury where he has perjured himself in an agency cover-up

After his retirement, Crowley began to search for someone who might be able to write a competent history of his career. His first choice fell on British author John Costello (author of Ten Days to Destiny, The Pacific War and other works) but, discovering that Costello was a very aggressive homosexual, he dropped him and tentatively turned to Joseph Trento who had assisted Crowley and William Corson in writing a book on the KGB. When Crowley discovered that Trento had an ambiguous and probably cooperative relationship with the CIA, he began to distrust him and continued his search for an author.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas  in 1993  when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. . In 1996, Crowley , Crowley told Douglas  that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

In 1998, when Crowley was slated to go into the hospital for exploratory surgery,  he had his son, Greg, ship two large foot lockers of documents to Douglas with the caveat that they were not to be opened until after Crowley’s death. These documents, totaled  an astonishing 15,000 pages of CIA classified files involving many covert operations, both foreign and domestic, during the Cold War.

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.

                All of this furor eventually came to the attention of Dr. Peter Janney, a Massachusetts clinical psychologist and son of Wistar Janney, another career senior CIA official, colleague of not only Bob Crowley but Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Jim Angleton and others. Janney was working on a book concerning the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official, and later the mistress of President John F. Kennedy.  Douglas had authored a book, ‘Regicide’ which dealt with Crowley’s part in the Kennedy assassination and he obviously had access to at least some of Crowley’s papers. Janney was very well connected inside the CIA’s higher levels and when he discovered that Douglas had indeed known, and had often spoken with, Crowley and that after Crowley’s death, the FBI had descended on Crowley’s widow and son, warning them to never speak with Douglas about anything, he contacted Douglas and finally obtained from him a number of original documents, including the originals of the transcribed conversations with Robert Crowley.

                In spite of the burn bags, the top secret safes and the vigilance of the CIA to keep its own secrets, the truth has an embarrassing and often very fatal habit of emerging, albeit decades later.

                While CIA drug running , money-launderings and brutal assassinations are very often strongly rumored and suspected, it has so far not been possible to actually pin them down but it is more than possible that the publication of the transcribed and detailed Crowley-Douglas conversations will do a great deal towards accomplishing this.

                These many transcribed conversations are relatively short because Crowley was a man who tired easily but they make excellent reading. There is an interesting admixture of shocking revelations on the part of the retired CIA official and often rampant anti-social (and very entertaining) activities on the part of Douglas but readers of this new and on-going series are gently reminded to always look for the truth in the jest!

Conversation 72

Date:  Monday, March 31, 1997

Commenced: 9:12 AM CST

Concluded: 9:46 AM CST

GD: I have been trying to work up an article on the BCCI and thought, Robert, you might have some knowledge of it, seeing as Corson told me you knew about them.

RTC: Bill has a motor mouth but yes, I know about them. What are you looking for?

GD: There has been quite a bit of comment on and off in the press about this and, as I said, Bill commented on this.

RTC: Well, BCCI was, is, a Paki bank, set up by a high-rolling con man and fraud expert named Abedi. We had connections with him and some of his people and he was willing to help us fund the anti-Russian rebels in Afghanistan but off the books. Critchfield had a hand in all of this gun business as you know. These people were a farce, setting up all kinds of off shore banks and basicially, it was nothing but a Ponzi scheme but one that we got into and were able to shut up a number of trouble makers along the way. And the Abedi people had connections with the Paki ISI…

GD: Pardon?

RTC: Called the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. A Limey set it up at the time the Pakis broke off from India in the late ‘40s,. They basicially were the power behind the throne in Pakistan…ran everything, took huge bribes from us on one hand and the Russians on the other. Typical bunch of worthless raghead scum. Never turn you back on any of them,, ever, Gregory, or you get a knife in it. My, what a game that turned out to be. We had such a stake in all of that mess that we had to make sure it was kept quiet, at least until we managed to get Ivan out of Afghanistan. Oh yes, there were complaints because the BCCI people were not only outright frauds but very obvious to the legitimate bankers here. Oh, a nice conversation there and someone falling off a cliff there but these greedy crooks just got too much hubris and finally it began to unravel. You must have read about this. F. Lee Bailey was a front for them and God knows how many throughly rotten Congressmen, regulatory people and so on were on the take. I mean there was so much bribe money flowing out of those people you couldn’t wonder how high it went. They dragged old Clark Clifford into it and others. Of course Clark has a great opinion of himself and had no problem taking money for his services.

GD: And your people?

RTC: I have pounds of filched files on this. Poor Trento thinks he’s going to get them and write a Pulitizer Prise winner out of it. I ought to send them to you. Would you like that?

GD: And have Paki assassins lurking on my front porch, cunningly disguised as piles of dog droppings? Probably not…although…

RTC: Well, Trento is far too stupid to know what to do with them so if I don’t send them to you, I might burn them. Emily shouldn’t have to deal with it when I’m gone and Greg…my son, not you…wouldn’t have a clue. Yes, I can send them to you and you can do what you want with them. My God, Gregory, billions of dollars in taxpayers funds lining pockets from here to Karachi.

GD: Critchfield?

RTC: Among others…but not me. Jim made so much money from the rag heads that I’m surprised he didn’t buy the Capitol as a barn for his stupid horses.

GD: And Atwood…

RTC: Small potatoes. The roster of the anointed reads like the Washington social calendar. Senator this and Director that.

GD: Kimmel?
RTC: Oh, God, no, not Dudley Doright. And don’t mention any of this to him. He wouldn’t have the fantest idea what to do with it and if he tried, he would join brother Colby in the boneyard. I tell you, Gregory, when we started the Company in ’48, believe it or not, we were a bunch of idealists. Of course the Cold War was a fake but we were really interested in fucking up old Joe Stalin and also thwarting the liberal kikes inside the Beltway. Still, idealists at heart. The thievery started later. Gregory, put a poorish man in a room full of gold coins and a few will stick to his feet. Sometimes more than a few. I ran the CIA’s business section and believe me, it was a wonderful rerlationship with the latter-day robber barons. The slide rule Shylocks. I rather like you, Gregory and if I gave you come of the papers I collected, you would either die or become very, very rich. I think they call it blackmail.

GD: One has to be careful what that, Robert. For instance, you tell me Angleton was in with the mob…

RTC: And the kikes too, don’t forget that. I really liked and admired Jim but…

GD: Yes. That’s like having a best friend from college who pimps autistic children to fat old men,

RTC: Yes, more or less but Jim had terrible friends. They got more out of him than he ever got out of them, let me advise you.

GD: I got the better of a Jew once and I thought the bugger would explode. On the other hand, I would never try to get the better of a Mafioso. I’ve known a few and I get on fine with them but try to screw them? I think not. Well, most of them have a really well developed sense of honor and the Jews do not. And they hate the Jews.

RTC: But Lansky…

GD: An exception. There is always an exception. Well, I might take some of your background material on the BCCI people if you have it to hand and it isn’t too much trouble. I always thought Clark Clifford was a triple plated phony anyway. Him and Alan Cranston.

RTC: Agreed but why stop there?

GD: I’d be on this call for three days straight, just reading off the names. Isn’t America blessed to have to many thieves that get away with it?

RTC: Well, if you steal a dollar, you are a thief but if you steal ten million, you are a financier.

RTC: Or a Republican.

(Concluded at 9:46 AM CST)

Editorial comment: The Douglas book on the Kennedy assassination was not received by official Washington and the FBI cut a deal with Mr. Germar Rudolf, the publisher. In return for securing the copyright from author Douglas, they would guarantee he could stay in the United States although the German government was seeking to extradite him to serve a prison sentence. The plan fell through but during its death struggles, it became very evident that ‘Regicide’ was not on the CIA’s Book-of-the-Month Club list. For this reason, we are going to publish the entire book, a chapter at a time. ‘Regicide’ sold very well until the government rounded up all the copies still unsold and locked them up in storage. We hope you all enjoy it!

Regicide — The Official Assassination Of John F. Kennedy by Gregory Douglas

by Frank Turberville, Jr., Milton, NC phoney

Military Magazine

REGICIDE — THE OFFICIAL ASSASSINATION OF JOHN F. KENNEDY,
by Gregory Douglas (Monte Sano Media, 2002; 224 pgs.; $19.95 — ISBN 1591482976).

                Your first reaction may be the same as mine — an addition to the several dozen books already written, struggling with the obvious fiction of the Warren Report! This is not the case, however. You should notice the word “Official” in the sub-title. While working on his book “Gestapo Chief,” the biography of Heinrich Muller, Gregory Douglas became acquainted, and then good friends, with Robert T. Crowley, former Assistant Deputy Director of Clandestine Operations of the CIA. Crowley, or “Crow” as he was known within the CIA, had been a close associate and supervisor of Muller when he was brought into the CIA following WWII.

                After his retirement and increasing age with an approaching chest operation where cancer was suspected, Crowley turned over his files to the author, Gregory Douglas, with the understanding that they were not to be opened, or used until after his death. On Tuesday, 10 October 2000, on page 6, the Washington Post reported the death of “Robert Trumbull Crowley, 76, a senior CIA official…”

                Douglas was now free to use the Crowley papers. This astounding book is the result: “The Official Assassination of John F. Kennedy”! To a major extent it is the reproduction of much of Robert T. Crowley’s files in the typewritten print of those files, with Crowley’s underscoring and emphasis on them, along with the explanations by Gregory Douglas. The book is so astounding that many may find themselves questioning the authenticity of even this original file material as I did. Therefore I refer you to two other sources:

                1) The New York Times of 3 October 1963 editorial page (50 days previous to the assassination of JFK) carried a column by the well-known journalist Arthur Krock, “The Intra-Administration War in Vietnam” in which he described the CIA in Viet-Nam refusing to carry out orders from the President delivered to them by Ambassador Lodge. In closing this column Krock says, “If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the Government it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon.”

                2) In 1973 Col L. Fletcher Prouty, USAF (Ret), after retirement from nine years as the liaison officer for the Pentagon with the CIA, wrote a book, “The Secret Team — The CIA and its Allies in control of the United States and the World.” Date:  Monday, March 31, 1997

                These two items by independent authors overlap and support what you will find in this book. It was the compatibility of what Arthur Krock and Fletcher Prouty, independent authors, had written that gave me assurance that I was reading authentic documents.

                In the review of CIA “Operation Zipper” in this book you will see CIA agents James J. Angleton and Robert T. Crowley planning the assassination of the president, beginning in early March of 1963. Before the end of March, according to the documents, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, Lyndon B. Johnson, Vice President, and General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been brought into the plan along with the Chicago Mafia and Israeli Mossad. The Chicago Mafia’s recruitment of the Corsican Mafia assassins in Marseille, France, alerted French Intelligence that a political assassination was planned in the U.S. and they alerted the U.S. Embassy, who apparently alerted no one. LBJ was concerned that he was also targeted and had to be assured by J. Edgar Hoover that he was not a target. It seems clear Lee Harvey Oswald was strictly the “patsy” he claimed to be.

                Why and how did the CIA persuade so many high government officials to join them in a coup to overthrow the elected U.S. government? It is all here! Crowley was convinced the “Zipper” project was in the best interest of the country! You will find it helpful to review your history of the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile crisis, which brought about a fatal fracture of trust between the President and his intelligence agency! Also the CIA had discovered that via his brother, Robert Kennedy, and the senior KGB agent in the Washington USSR Embassy, the President had established a private line of communication with Nikita Khrushchev which the CIA considered treasonous.

                Where JFK had planned to reduce our commitments and involvement in Viet-Nam, LBJ engineered the Gulf of Tonkin incident and expanded them. JFK was strongly opposing the Israeli development of nuclear weapons — LBJ was complacent and ignored these developments.

                http://milmag.com/2009/02/regicide-%e2%80%94-the-official-assassination-of-john-f-kennedy-by-gregory-douglas/

Regicide

The Official Assassination

of John F. Kennedy

by

Gregory Douglas

Foreword

The assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, continues to generate an enormous amount of popular controversy, more so than any other historical happening in recorded memory. The killing took place in a major American city in full view of hundreds of people and in broad daylight, yet years after the event, a dispassionate overview of the incident is impossible to achieve. The act and its consequences are as cluttered as the dense Indian jungle that so thoroughly hides the gaudy tiger from the sight of its prey.

The initial stunned confusion in Dallas has continued, with much official connivance, into succeeding decades, with an immense proliferation of books, magazine articles, motion picture productions, and television dramas, which are equally divided between assaults on previous productions and the presentation of even more confusion, theory, and supposition.

One camp consists entirely of what can best be termed the “official version” and in the other camp are the “revisionist versions.” There is only one of the former and a multitude of the others There is no question in the minds of anyone that John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, Texas, in November of 1963. The real issue is who shot him and why.

Is the report of the official Warren Commission correct?[1] Was the President killed by a disaffected man who acted entirely alone? Was his subsequent murder perpetrated by another disaffected man who also acted entirely alone?

Are the legions of revisionists correct? Was the Kennedy assassination the result of a plot? And if there was a plot, who were the plotters and what were their motives?

The overwhelming majority of the public, who are the final arbiters of whatever may pass for historical truth, has, in the intervening years, come to believe less in the determined certainty of officialdom and more in the questions raised by those who cannot accept official dictums.

In a very strong sense, the Kennedy assassination marked an important watershed in the relationship between the American public and its elected and appointed officials. Before that event, what the government said was almost universally accepted as the truth. There was unquestioning and simplistic belief, and more, there was trust in the pronouncements from the Beltway and its numerous and often very slavish servants in academia and the American media. It is true, people would say, because it is printed in my newspaper and supported by important and knowledgeable savants.

That the media and academia might be influenced by, if not actually commanded by, the government rarely occurred to anyone outside of a small handful of chronic malcontents.

The questions that were raised by the Warren Commission’s lengthy and thoroughly disorganized report were certainly in many cases very important. That there were many errors in this hasty attempt to allay national anxieties is clearly evident, but in retrospect, and in view of recently disclosed evidence, these are more errors of commission than omission.

The Warren Report was prepared and released to the public not to encourage questioning but to silence it as quickly as possible. There are many cogent reasons for this desire for silence and acceptance, not the least of which was the urgent desire for self-preservation and the maintenance of the integrity of the governmental system.

In actuality, the American currency is not backed by gold or silver holdings but by the blind faith of the public. If the concept of unquestioning belief in governmental  currency stability is questioned, economic chaos can be the result and this applies equally to government probity.

To quote from the title of the first and very important revisionist work on the Kennedy assassination, there was a great “rush to judgment” and a frantic desire on the part of the official establishment to completely bury not only the murdered President, but also any questions his killing might have engendered with him.

Was the primary reason for this desire for closure merely a desire to placate public opinion or were there other, and far more sinister, reasons for this rush to judgment?

Those who question the official chronicle have been severely hampered by the fact that all the records, documents, interviews, and other evidentiary material are securely under governmental custody and control. It is beyond the belief of any reasonable person to think that an official agency would release to the public any material that would bring the official judgment into question. This is not only institutional maintenance but also, all things in evidence now considered, a frantic effort at self-preservation.

Not all documents, however, lie under government control, and there exist reports that do not only question the Warren Report’s findings but are also of such a nature as to both thoroughly discredit it and, in the final analysis, bring it to ruin.

Such a historical land mine lay for years in the personal files of Robert Trumbull Crowley , once Deputy Director for Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency. Crowley, who had authored books on Soviet intelligence, died in October of 2000 after a long illness.

When Crowley  retired from the CIA in the 1980s, he took a significant quantity of important historical documents with him and, prior to his death, gave a number of these to various historians with whom he occasionally cooperated.

Among these documents was a lengthy paper prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 1978 as a commentary on Soviet intelligence evaluations of the Kennedy assassination.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, a branch of the Department of Defense, specializes in the analysis of foreign military technical intelligence.

This document was considered highly sensitive, for reasons that shall shortly become very evident, and its distribution was limited to a handful of copies with severely restricted circulation.

Crowley  had a copy of this explosive document because he had personal knowledge of the factors and personalities behind the assassination and had, in fact, prior professional knowledge of the information contained in the DIA secret paper.

The second and certainly even more important document is a 98 pages long paper entitled “OPERATION ZIPPER Conference Record.” This document is a long list of decisions and activities of various U.S. authorities in a project with the code name “Operation ZIPPER.”

The distribution of this document was restricted to five persons, one of them being R. T. Crowley , in whose papers a copy of it was found.

This book uses the official DIA Report and the “Operation ZIPPER” document as its framework. In addition to that, the author uses the notes he made during endless hours of conversation he had with R. T. Crowley  in the years between 1993 and 1996, and has dug deeply into the great body of literature on the assassination of J. F. Kennedy to flesh out what has proven to be a very ugly skeleton. In sum, it puts sinews and flesh on the bones of a monster.

                The loss of faith is a terrible matter and one can say after reading these papers and with bitter truth: “Who then will guard the guardians?”

Acknowledgments

              It is generally the custom for beginning writers to thank anyone and everyone even remotely connected with his book. Book editors, typists, library personnel, former teachers, family members, and pets are all given their five seconds of fame (or far less depending upon the sales of the book).

However, that having been said, the author would like to offer the most sincere and grateful, albeit posthumous, thanks to the late Colonel Robert T. Crowley  of Washington, D.C., and his co-worker, Colonel William Corson , USMC (United States Marine Corps), of Potomac, Maryland, for all of the very important advice and assistance they have rendered to the grateful author. Also their friend and co-worker, Joe Trento  of Front Royal, Virginia, for his valuable commentary and excellent advice, especially concerning the activities of James Jesus Angleton .

As opposed to acknowledging others who aided in the actual preparation of this study, recognition ought to be given on the author’s part for research into American intelligence matters.

David Lifton ’s work, Best Evidence,[2] is a brilliant analysis of the Kennedy autopsy; Thomas  C. Reeves , A 

Question of Character[3] is one of the best revisionist views of the life and political career of John F. Kennedy; Thomas Dale Scott ’s work, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK[4] is a sensible and studied work on the backgrounds of Kennedy adversaries; and Seymour Hersh ’s work The Dark Side of Camelot[5] gives a far more detailed revisionist look into JFK and provides considerable background on his Soviet connection. Almost every book on the subject, regardless of how bizarre it might appear to the average reader, contains small nuggets of value to be mined by the thorough researcher.

Former CBS news director and documentary producer, Los Angeles-based Ted Landreth  has done prodigies investigating certain highly sensitive CIA operations inside the United States.

Also, an important work is Gerald Posner ’s Case Closed.[6] This work is an excellent overview and defense of the official establishment point of view. That the American media lavishly praised it when it appeared in 1993 is a commentary on the objectivity of the media

To be continued…..

     David S. Lifton, Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, New York: Carroll & Graf, 1980.

[1]   Thomas C. Reeves, A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy, New York: Macmillan, 1991.

[1]   Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

[1]   Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, New York: Brown, 1998 (pb. edition).

[1]   Gerald Posner, Case Closed, New York: Doubleday, 1993.

REBRANDING THE LONG WAR,
Obama does his Bush impression
by Pepe Escobar

                The "lasting commitment" Washington war-time summit/photo-op between United States President Barack Obama and the AfPak twins, "Af" President Hamid Karzai  and "Pak" President Asif Ali Zardari was far from being an urgent meeting to discuss ways to prevent the end of civilization as we know it. It has been all about the meticulous rebranding of the Pentagon's "Long War”.

                In Obama's own words, the "lasting commitment" is above all to "defeat al-Qaeda". As an afterthought, the president added, "But also to support the democratically elected, sovereign governments of both Pakistan and Afghanistan." To have George W Bush's man in Kabul and former premier Benazir Bhutto's widow definedas "sovereign", one would be excused for believing Bush is still in the White House.

                In yet another deployment of his impeccable democratic credentials, Karzai has just picked as one of his vice presidential running mates none other than former Jamiat-e-Islami top commander and former first vice president Mohammad Fahim, a suspected drug warlord and armed militia-friendly veteran whom Human Rights Watch deplores as a systematic human-rights abuser. Faheem is Tajik; Karzai is Pashtun (from a minor tribe). Karzai badly needs the Tajiks to win a second presidential term in August.

                Possibly moved by the obligatory "deep regret" expressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Karzai refrained from throwing a tantrum in Washington concerning the latest "precise" US air strike in ultra-remote Farah province in western Afghanistan which, according to local sources, may have incinerated over 100 Afghans, 70% of them women and children. Context is key: it was the inept, corrupt, dysfunctional Karzai administration - monopolized by warlords and bandits - which made so much easier the return of the Taliban in full force.

Obama's opium war

                By now it's clear that the upcoming, Pentagon-enabled, summer surge in the "Af" section of Obama's war in AfPak will be deployed essentially as Obama's new opium war. In a spicy historic reversal, the British Empire (which practically annexed Afghanistan) wanted the Chinese to be hooked on its opium, while now the American empire wants Afghans to stop cultivating it.

                The strategy boils down to devastating the Pashtun-cultivated poppy fields in southern Helmand province - the opium capital of the world. In practice, this will be yet another indiscriminate war against Pashtun peasants, who have been cultivating poppies for centuries. Needless to say, thousands will migrate to the anti-occupation rainbow coalition/motley crew branded as "Taliban".

                Destroying the only source of income for scores of poor Afghans means, in Pentagon spin, "to cut off the Taliban's main source of money", which also happens to be the "main source of money" for a collection of wily, US-friendly warlords who will not resign themselves to being left blowing in the wind.

                The strategy is also oblivious to the fact that the Taliban themselves receive scores of funding from pious Gulf petro-monarchy millionaires as well as from sections in Saudi Arabia - the same Saudi Arabia that Pentagon supremo Robert Gates is now actively courting to ... abandon the Taliban. Since the Obama inauguration in January, Washington's heavy pressure over Islamabad has been relentless: forget about your enemy India, we want you to fight "our" war against the Taliban and "al-Qaeda".

                Thus, expect any Pashtun opium farmer or peasant who brandishes his ax, dagger, matchlock or rusty Lee-Enfield rifle at the ultra-high tech incoming US troops to be branded a "terrorist". Welcome to yet one more chapter of the indeed long Pentagon war against the world's poorest.

You're finished because I said so

                As for the "Pak" component of AfPak, it is pure counter-insurgency (COIN). As such, His Master's Voice has got to be Central Command commander and surging General David "I'm always positioning myself for 2012" Petraeus.

                Enter the Pentagon's relentless PR campaign. Last week, Gates warned the US Senate Appropriations Committee that without the approval of a US$400 million-worth Pakistan Counter-insurgency Capability Fund (itself part of a humongous, extra $83.5 billion Obama wants to continue prosecuting his wars), and under the "unique authority" of Petraeus, the Pakistani government itself could collapse. The State Department was in tune: Clinton said Pakistan might collapse within six months.

                Anyone is excused for believing this tactic - just gimme the money and shut up - is still Bush "war on terror" territory; that's because it is (the same extraordinary powers, with the State Department duly bypassed, just as with the Bush administration). The final song, of course, remains the same: the Pentagon running the show, very tight with the Pakistani army.

                For US domestic consumption purposes, Pentagon tactics are a mix of obfuscation and paranoia. For instance, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell says, about Pakistan, "This is not a war zone for the US military." But then Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - who's been to Pakistan twice in the past three weeks - says the Taliban in AfPak overall "threaten our national interests in the region and our safety here at home".

                He was echoing both Clinton and Gates, who had said that the Taliban are an "existential threat" to Pakistan. Finally, Petraeus closes the scare tactics circle - stressing in a letter to the House Armed Services Committee that if the Pakistani Army does not prevail over the Taliban in two weeks, the Pakistani government may collapse.

                That unveils the core of Pentagon's and David "COIN" Petraeus' thinking: they know that for long-term US designs what's best is yet another military dictatorship. Zardari's government is - rightfully - considered a sham (as Washington starts courting another dubious quantity, former premier Nawaz Sharif). Petraeus' "superior" man (his own word) couldn't be anyone but Army Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kiani.

                And that's exactly how Obama put it in his 100-day press conference last week, stressing the "strong military-to-military consultation and cooperation" and reducing Zardari to smithereens ("very fragile" government, lacking "the capacity to deliver basic services" and without "the support and the loyalty of their people"). Judging by his body language, Obama must have repeated the same litany to Zardari yesterday, live in Washington.

                The money quote still is Obama's appraisal of Pakistan: "We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don't end up having a nuclear-armed militant state."

                Pakistani "sovereignty" is a joke; Pakistan is now openly being run from Washington. "We want to respect their sovereignty" does not mean "we" actually will. Obama and the Pentagon - which for all practical purposes treat Pakistan as a pitiful colony - would only be (relatively) comfortable with a new Pakistani military dictatorship. The fact that Pakistani public opinion overwhelmingly abhors the Taliban as much as it abhors yet another military dictatorship (see the recent, massive street demonstrations in favor of the Supreme Court justices) is dismissed as irrelevant.

 The Swat class struggle

 In this complex neo-colonial scenario Pakistan's "Talibanization" - the current craze in Washington - looks and feels more like a diversionary scare tactic. (Please see The Myth of Talibanistan, Asia Times Online, May 1, 2009. ) On the same topic, a report on the Pakistani daily Dawn about the specter of Talibanization of Karachi shows it has more to do with ethnic turbulence between Pashtuns and the Urdu-speaking, Indian-origin majority than about Karachi Pashtuns embracing the Taliban way.

                The original Obama administration AfPak strategy, as everyone remembers, was essentially a drone war in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) coupled with a surge in Afghanistan. But the best and the brightest in Washington did not factor in an opportunist Taliban counter-surge.

                The wily Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM - Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law), led by Sufi Muhammad, managed to regiment Swat valley landless peasants to fight for their rights and "economic redistribution" against the usual wealthy, greedy, feudal landlords who happened to double as local politicians and government officials.

                It's as if the very parochial Taliban had been paying attention to what goes on across South America ... Essentially, it was the appropriation of good old class struggle that led to the Taliban getting the upper hand. Islamabad was finally forced to agree on establishing Nizam-e-Adl (Islamic jurisprudence) in the Swat valley. So what happened in Swat is that it moved beyond a - corrupt - state, and neo-colonial control. Washington's enemy suddenly swelled to part of the 1.3 million people in the area whose only means of protection are armed militias - what the West bundles up as "Taliban".

                It's always crucial to remember that the "Taliban" have all sorts of agendas, from armed resistance to US occupation in Afghanistan to armed resistance to Pakistani army incursions. What they all want is basically the end of Washington's drone war, the end of Pakistan's support for the "war on terror" in AfPak, or at least forthe inept, corrupt Pakistani state to leave them alone.

It's true that over the past few weeks Pakistani public opinion as a whole shot up to around 95% against the Taliban because Sufi Muhammad said democracy is an infidel thing; and because videos of Taliban floggings for the fist time were all over Pakistani media.

                But the solution is obviously not a war in Swat. It would be, for instance, a concerted, long-term government policy to defuse the network of at least 45,000 madrassas (seminaries) with nearly 2 million students all over the country. And to defuse anti-democratic, sectarian outfits like Lashkar-e Toiba and Sipah-e Sahaba.

                It won't happen. And Washington does not care. What matters for the Pentagon is that the minute any sectarian outfit or bandit gang decides to collude with the Pentagon, it's not "Taliban" anymore; it magically morphs into a "Concerned Local Citizens" outfit. By the same token any form of resistance to foreign interference or Predator hell from above bombing is inevitably branded "Taliban".

                Left to its own devices, the Pentagon solution for Swat would probably be some form of ethnic cleansing. Predictably, what Obama and the Pentagon are in fact doing - part of their cozying up with the Pakistani army - is to side with the feudal landlords and force a return to the classic Pakistani status quo of immense social inequality. Thus virtually every local who has not become a refugee (as many as 5000,000 already did, leading to a huge humanitarian crisis) has been duly branded a "terrorist". Locals are caught between a rock (the Taliban) and a hard place (the US-supported Pakistani military).

                The Pentagon does not do "collateral damage". The only consideration is the US Army becoming partially exposed in neighboring Afghanistan. After all, the key AfPak equation for the Pentagon is how to re-supply US troops involved in OCO ("overseas contingency operations").

                The Swat tragedy is bound to get bloodier. As Steve Clemons from The Washington Note blog has learned in a conference in Doha, Obama and Petraeus are forcing the Pakistani army to crush Swat. Once again the imperial "fire on your own people" logic. Predictably, Zardari and the Pakistani army are still against it. But if they accept - that would be a tangible result from the Washington photo-op on Wednesday - the prize will be a lot of money and loads of precious helicopter gun ships.

Madmen on the loose

The Obama administration not only has rebranded the Bush "global war on terror" (GWOT) as the subtly Orwellian "overseas contingency operations" (OCO). The key component of OCO - the AfPak front - is now being actively rebranded, and sold, not as an American war but a Pakistani war.

                Zardari plays his pitiful bit part; alongside Obama, the Pentagon and the State Department, he has been convincing Pakistani public opinion to fight Washington's OCO, defending the Predator bombing of Pashtun civilians in Pakistani land. It ain't easy: at least 20% of Pakistani army soldiers are Pashtun - now forced to fight their own Pashtun cousins.

                As for the "Af" element of AfPak, the war against occupation in Afghanistan has "disappeared" from the narrative to the benefit of this Pakistani "holy war" against Talibanization. What has not disappeared, of course, is US bombing of Afghan peasants (with attached Hillary "regrets") plus the Predator war in FATA.

                The question is: How far will the Obama, the Pentagon and Zardari collusion go in terms of wiping out any form of resistance to the US occupation of Afghanistan and the drone war against Pashtun peasants in FATA?

                The relentless warnings on the collapse of Pakistan may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Were it to happen, the balkanization of Pakistan would do wonders for the Pentagon's long-term strategy in the "arc of instability".

                From a Pentagon dream scenario point of view, the balkanization of Pakistan would mean dismantling a "Terrorist Central" capable of contaminating other parts of the Muslim world, from Indian Kashmir to the Central Asian "stans". It would "free" India from its enemy Pakistan so India can work very closely with Washington as an effective counter power to the relentless rise of China.

                And most of all, this still has to do with the greatest prize - Balochistan, as we'll see in part 2 of this report on Friday. Desert Balochistan, in southwest Pakistan, is where Washington and Islamabad clash head on. From a Washington perspective, Balochistan has to be thrown into chaos. That's about the only way to stop the construction of the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline, also known as the "peace pipeline", which would traverses Balochistan.

                In a dream Washington scenario of balkanization of Pakistan, the US could swiftly take over Balochistan's immense natural wealth, and promote the strategic port of Gwadar in Balochistan not to the benefit of the IPI pipeline, but the perennially troubled Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline - Caspian gas wealth flowing under US, and not Russian or Iranian, control.

                As for the Taliban, whether in FATA or Swat or anywhere else, they are no threat to the US. Usman Khalid, secretary general of the Rifah party in Pakistan, has nailed it, "The population dread the Taliban-style rule but they dread being split into four countries and to go under Indian suzerainty even more. The Taliban appear to be the lesser evil just as they were in Afghanistan."

                History once again does repeat itself as farce: in fact the only sticking point between the Taliban and Washington is still the same as in August 2001 - pipeline transit fees. Washington wouldn't give a damn about sharia law as long as the US could control pipelines crossing Afghanistan and Balochistan.

                Yes, Pipelineistan rules. What's a few ragged Pashtun or Balochis in Washington's way when the New Great Game in Eurasia can offer so many opportunities?

 

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Cheney backs Limbaugh over Powell on GOP future

May 10, 2009

by Michael J. Sniffen

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Dick Cheney made clear Sunday he'd rather follow firebrand broadcaster Rush Limbaugh than former Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell into political battle over the future of the Republican Party.

Even as Cheney embraced efforts by ex-Govs. Jeb Bush of Florida and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and the House's No. 2 Republican, Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, the former vice president appeared to write his one-time colleague Powell out of the GOP.

Asked about recent verbal broadsides between Limbaugh and Powell, Cheney said, "If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh. My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn't know he was still a Republican."

Powell, who was secretary of state under President George W. Bush and held the nation's top military post under President George H.W. Bush, endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for president last year. Nonetheless, he has described himself as a right-of-center conservative, though "not as right as others would like."

Cheney, citing Powell's backing of Obama over Republican nominee John McCain, said, "I assumed that that is some indication of his loyalty and his interests."

Cheney's remarks on CBS' "Face the Nation" were the latest step in his slow-motion estrangement from Powell since the two worked closely together to manage the Persian Gulf war in 1991 - Powell as the Army general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Cheney as defense secretary for the elder Bush.

Under the younger Bush, Powell initially backed action against Iraq's Saddam Hussein and delivered a famous U.N. speech laying out the U.S. case. But Powell and Cheney increasingly parted ways over the Bush administration's policies on the war and terrorism, with Cheney usually prevailing. Powell left the administration after Bush's first term.

Wading into the debate over the GOP's future, Cheney called efforts by George W. Bush's brother Jeb, along with Cantor and Romney, as "a good thing to do," but set a limit on how far the party should go.

"The suggestion our Democratic friends always make is somehow if you Republicans were just more like Democrats, you'd win elections," Cheney said. "Well, I don't buy that. We win elections when we have good solid conservative principles to run upon."

Powell has argued the Republican Party needs to move toward the center and reach out to growing black, Hispanic and Asian communities, but instead has been shrinking because it hasn't changed as the country changed in the face of economic distress. "Americans are looking for more government in their life, not less," Powell said last week.

For months, Powell has urged the party to turn away from the acid-tongued Limbaugh. "I think what Rush does as an entertainer diminishes the party and intrudes or inserts into our public life a kind of nastiness that we would be better to do without," Powell said.

"Colin Powell is just another liberal," Limbaugh retorted. "What Colin Powell needs to do is close the loop and become a Democrat." Limbaugh said Powell is "just mad at me because I'm the one person in the country that had the guts to explain his endorsement of Obama. It was purely and solely based on race." Both Powell and Obama are black.

On other topics on the CBS interview, Cheney:

-said transferring suspected terrorists from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United States would be a bad idea that would enlarge their legal rights. Obama's national security adviser, retired Marine Gen. James Jones, told ABC's "This Week" the White House isn't going to do that if it would make Americans less safe.

-reiterated his belief the U.S. has become more vulnerable to a potential terrorist attack since the Obama administration renounced harsh interrogation tactics such as waterboarding, which simulates drowning, that Cheney said provided good intelligence. Jones said he didn't believe the nation was at greater risk and that even some in the Bush administration disagreed with Cheney on that score.

-renewed his call for the administration to release two CIA memos he said list successes derived from those interrogations, including "attack planning that was under way and how it was stopped." The Obama administration is reviewing Cheney's request. Obama has said the memos are not so clear-cut and do not address whether the information could have been obtained without such methods.