TBR News October 7, 2018

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8 

Washington, D.C. October 7, 2018: “The Internet has proven to be the greatest source of information since lunatic Christians burnt down the library of Alexandria. Anything being sought, be it an address or an in-depth analysis of Dead Sea scrolls, is there and is the main reason that the famous Encyclopedia Britannica has gone out of business.

At the same time, because it is open to one and all, the Internet is also a breeding ground for a legion of strange persons with a frantic desire to air their pet theses, themselves and their friends.

We see earnest discussions about the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, the Sinister Truth about Hurricane Katrina, Tesla Death Rays used to bring down the buildings of the WTC, balanced with other information proving beyone a shadow of a doubt that Russian bombers were used. We also discover the evil plottings of the Illuminiati, a group that has been long gone, or that the Rothschild banking house had taken over the whole world. And from one source, now long  vanished, we discover that Houston was destroyed by a nuclear bomb set off by Jewish radicals or that the Fukishima disaster was really caused by an Israeli submarine, using German-made nuclear torpedos!

Yes, the Internet can entertain as well as inform.

But the fact that the Internet has many independent news sites means the diminution of the print media and the television news stations. Since these are the propaganda control for the oligarchy, there is great distress in board rooms and from them to the halls of Congress. They would like to shut off the Internet so that the stupid, and tax-paying public can only see what they are supposed to and not what might be the truth.

Obama and Cass Sunstein tried to shut down anyone who dared to interfere with the propaganda machinery but they were not successful. Even a furious and highly delusional eccentric, Trump and his decaying machinery, can’t do it and if they continue to try, there will be very serious public reactions indeed.”

The Table of Contents

• Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 43
• Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation isn’t democracy. It’s a judicial coup
• Banks back Democrats in bid to rebuild bipartisan support
• Prince’s Plan For Afghanistan Isn’t Happening: Votel
• Who Cares What Erik Prince Thinks?
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
• Churchill unmasked

 

Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 43

August 8, 2018

by Daniel Dale, Washington Bureau Chief

The Toronto Star, Canada

The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not teling the truth.

Last updated: Aug 8, 2018

• Dec 12, 2017

“Despite thousands of hours wasted and many millions of dollars spent, the Democrats have been unable to show any collusion with Russia – so now they are moving on to the false accusations and fabricated stories of women who I don’t know and/or have never met. FAKE NEWS!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: There is proof that Trump met several of the women who have accused him of sexual assault. They include Summer Zervos, who was a contestant on Trump’s reality show, The Apprentice; Natasha Stoynoff, a journalist who interviewed him for a story in People magazine; Jill Harth, with whom he posed for a photo; and Jessica Drake, an adult film star with whom he posed for a photo.

• Dec 13, 2017

“Finally, the plan is going to bring trillions of dollars back into the United States, money that’s offshore. And you’ve been hearing me say $2.5 trillion for years. Well, 2.5 has grown, and it’s going to be a lot more than that — probably $4 trillion. It could be even higher than that. We don’t even know. It’s so much money, we don’t even know how much it is.”

Source: Remarks at lunch with legislators involved in tax bill

in fact: Trump’s “$4 trillion” estimate is unsupported by any experts. The U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation released an estimate of $2.6 trillion in August 2016, and experts said they were not aware of a massive jump in the following 12 months. An October 2017 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) also pegged the number at $2.6 trillion, while Goldman Sachs pegged it at $3.1 trillion the same month. “There’s no world in which it’s $4 trillion,” ITEP senior policy analyst Richard Phillips said in November. “I do not know of anyone who increased the estimate so much recently,” Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, said in August. “Like many things, I assume he made this up on the fly,” said another expert on the subject, who requested anonymity, when Trump made an estimate of $5 trillion in August.

Trump has repeated this claim 32 times

“The reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange (and his numbers went up mightily), is that I said Roy Moore will not be able to win the General Election.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Both parts of this claim are inaccurate. First, Strange’s numbers did not rise mightily after Trump’s endorsement. This did not happen. Trump endorsed Strange on Aug. 8, during the first round of Alabama’s Republican Senate primary, which involved about five candidates of note. A poll conducted two days prior had Strange trailing leader Roy Moore by eight percentage points. In the final runoff, Moore ended up defeating Strange by 9.2 percentage points. Second, Trump did not say Moore “will not be able to win.” His statement was more cautious: he said Moore had a “very good chance of not winning.”

Trump has repeated this claim 9 times

• Dec 14, 2017

“Economic growth has topped 3 per cent. Two quarters in a row now we’ve had that. And except for the hurricanes, we would have almost hit 4 per cent. And you remember how bad we were doing when I first took over — there was a big difference, and we were going down. This country was going economically down.”

Source: Speech on deregulation

in fact: Trump is entitled to say that the economy was not performing well under Obama, since that is a matter of opinion, but it is false to say the country was “going down” economically. The U.S. economy had grown every year since 2009. In Obama’s final two full quarters, growth was 2.8 per cent and 1.8 per cent. Monthly job growth under Obama last year was slightly higher than monthly job growth this year under Trump, and the unemployment rate continued to fall. Wages rose 2.9 per cent, the fastest rate since the economic crisis of 2008.

• Dec 15, 2017

“They have a (diversity visa) lottery. You pick people. Do you think the country is giving us their best people? No. What kind of a system is that? They come in by lottery. They give us their worst people, they put them in a bin, but in his hand, when he’s picking them is, really, the worst of the worst. Congratulations, you’re going to the United States.’ Okay. What a system.”

Source: Speech to FBI National Academy graduation ceremony

in fact: People who enter the U.S. visa-lottery program are not “given” to the U.S. by the governments of their home countries: would-be immigrants sign up on their own, as individuals, of their own free will. Trump has consistently misrepresented the program by suggesting that foreign governments enter the worst of their citizens into it in order to dump them on the United States.

Trump has repeated this claim 21 times

“So now even the Democrats admit there’s no collusion.”

Source: Comments to media before Marine One departure

in fact: The Democrats do not concede that there was no collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Some Democrats have said that they have not currently seen any evidence of collusion, but they have then said that the investigations are ongoing.

Trump has repeated this claim 18 time

 

“Let’s put it this way: there is absolutely no collusion. That has been proven.”

Source: Comments to media before Marine One departure

in fact: It has not been proven that there was no collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia; special counsel Robert Mueller continues to investigate, as do congressional committees.

Trump has repeated this claim 18 times

“You know, I ran a campaign, and it was a very successful campaign — you might have heard about it — and we won very easily. We won by — we had 306 Electoral College votes to 223, or something like that.”

Source: Speech to Marine Helicopter Squadron One

in fact: Hillary Clinton earned 232 electoral votes, not 223. This was not a one-time slip-up but the fourth time Trump said “223.”

Trump has repeated this claim 12 times

• Dec 16, 2017

“Well this is going to bring money in. As an example, we think $4 trillion will come flowing back into the country. That’s money that’s overseas, that’s stuck there for years and years. It was $2.5 trillion, then it was $3.5 (trillion), it’s probably over $4 trillion.”

Source: Comments to media before Marine One departure

in fact: Trump’s “$4 trillion” estimate is unsupported by any experts. The U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation released an estimate of $2.6 trillion in August 2016, and experts said they were not aware of a massive jump in the following 12 months. An October 2017 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) also pegged the number at $2.6 trillion, while Goldman Sachs pegged it at $3.1 trillion the same month. “There’s no world in which it’s $4 trillion,” ITEP senior policy analyst Richard Phillips said in November. “I do not know of anyone who increased the estimate so much recently,” Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, said in August. “Like many things, I assume he made this up on the fly,” said another expert on the subject, who requested anonymity, when Trump made an estimate of $5 trillion in August.

Trump has repeated this claim 32 times

• Dec 18, 2017

“The train accident that just occurred in DuPont, WA shows more than ever why our soon to be submitted infrastructure plan must be approved quickly. Seven trillion dollars spent in the Middle East while our roads, bridges, tunnels, railways (and more) crumble! Not for long!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: There is no basis for the “$7 trillion” figure. During the 2016 campaign, Trump cited a $6 trillion estimate that appeared to be taken from a 2013 report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. (That report estimated $2 trillion in costs up to that point but said the total could rise an additional $4 trillion by 2053.) Trump, however, used the $6 trillion as if it was a current 2016 figure. He later explained that since additional time has elapsed since the campaign, he believes the total is now $7 trillion. That is incorrect. The latest Brown report, issued in late 2017, put the current total at $4.3 trillion, and the total including estimated future costs at $5.6 trillion.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“The train accident that just occurred in DuPont, WA shows more than ever why our soon to be submitted infrastructure plan must be approved quickly. Seven trillion dollars spent in the Middle East while our roads, bridges, tunnels, railways (and more) crumble! Not for long!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: There was no apparent connection between the train accident and the quality of U.S. infrastructure. The train was going 80 miles per hour in a 30 miles per hour zone, U.S. news reports said, and the track was new. As the Associated Press reported: “The accident did not happen on a crumbling railway but rather on a section of track that had just been upgraded as part of a $181 million project for a new, faster route. The high-speed train was making its first run on newly constructed tracks when it derailed. The new route was designed to speed up service by drawing passengers away from the sort of aging system that Trump speaks about: a route with curves, single-track tunnels and freight traffic.”

“Remember, Republicans are 5-0 in Congressional Races this year. The media refuses to mention this.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Republicans have lost two congressional races this year: the high-profile Alabama Senate race, in which Democrat Doug Jones beat Republican Roy Moore, and a little-noticed race in California’s 34th House district, in which Democrat Jimmy Gomez beat a field largely consisting of other Democrats. Republicans lost that race so badly that none of them came close to qualifying for the runoff.

Trump has repeated this claim 9 times  

“I said Gillespie and Moore would lose (for very different reasons), and they did.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Trump never publicly said that either Virginia governor candidate Ed Gillespie or Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore would lose. He said nothing of the sort about Gillespie. About Moore, he said, “Roy has a very good chance of not winning.” That statement falls far short of a prediction of defeat.

Trump has repeated this claim 3 times

“We are once again investing in our defense — almost $700 billion, a record, this coming year.”

Source: Speech on National Security Strategy

in fact: Trump’s $700 billion defence budget is not a record. As the New York Times noted, Obama signed a $725 billion version of the same bill in 2011.

Trump has repeated this claim 11 times

 

Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation isn’t democracy. It’s a judicial coup

Mitch McConnell and his ilk must be delighted: they’ve waged a decades-long campaign to stack the courts with conservative ideologues

October 6, 2018

by Richard Wolffe

The Guardian

Brett Kavanaugh is the symptom, not the cause, of our sickness. He is the nasal congestion snorted out by the politics that have plagued us for the best part of three decades. If we’re ever going to recover our health and sanity, we need to start with the correct diagnosis.

For all the justified outrage about sexual assault, involving allegations that Kavanaugh denied, the new supreme court justice represents an even bigger lie than his mindless fabrications about “ralphing” and “boofing”. He can blame his weak stomach if he likes; the rest of us are heaving at the sight of a generation-long confidence trick suckering an entire democracy.

You could hear it as Kavanaugh’s loyal supporters stood up on the Senate floor and proclaimed their sincere belief in, nay their earnest yearning for, judicial impartiality.

“Judges make decisions based on law, not on policy, not based on political pressure, not based on the identity of the parties,” said Deb Fischer, the Nebraska Republican who quoted liberally from Kavanaugh himself.

This may come as a surprise to anyone who has been awake and conscious for the last several decades of a campaign to stack the courts with conservative ideologues.

It’s hard to believe that Mitch McConnell, the wily Republican leader of the Senate, has fought so hard and so long for his legacy to be such wonderfully impartial and apolitical judges.

But don’t take my word for it; take his.

“This project … is the most important thing that the Senate and an administration of like mind – which we ended up having – could do for the country,” he told Politico. “Putting strict constructionists, relatively young, on the courts for lifetime appointments is the best way to have a long-term positive impact on America. And today is a seminal moment in that effort.”

Ah yes, “strict constructionists.” Them’s fancy words for conservative ideologues who get jobs as judges. They emerged in opposition to the clearly crazy supreme court that voted unanimously against segregation in Brown v Board of Education.

There’s no meaningful definition of this jurisprudence, but there is a political understanding that it is opposed to “activist judges” who are entirely – and astonishingly – all liberals.

In the words of George W Bush, Kavanaugh’s former boss and protector, it’s pretty clear who fits the bill. When asked what kind of supreme court justices he’d nominate, back when he was running for president in 2000, Bush said simply: “I don’t believe in liberal activist judges. I believe in strict constructionists.”

That was something of a sick joke when the conservative activists on the supreme court decided to end the recount of votes cast for Bush and Gore just two months later, thus handing Bush the presidency.

This is the polar opposite of an impartial, apolitical judiciary. And it’s why McConnell has no shame in talking about a project of like-minded political hacks, re-tooling the judiciary for political purposes far beyond their elected terms. Whatever this is, it isn’t democracy.

To justify this judicial coup over the last several weeks and decades, the entire Republican party needed to engage in extensive doublespeak.

It was the Democrats who were playing politics with the supreme court, trying to delay the Kavanaugh nomination until the elections. It wasn’t the Republicans, who delayed president Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for the best part of a year until, um, the 2016 election.

Brett Kavanaugh was the victim of a political assault, while the victim of the sexual assault – Dr Christine Blasey Ford – was part of a conspiracy of aggressors.

It was Kavanaugh who put this best when he shed his judicial robes before the Senate judiciary committee last week. “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit,” he raged, “fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside leftwing opposition groups.”

In one sniffling, water-gulping outburst, Kavanaugh revealed his judicial nomination for the political operation it always was. The lieutenant to Ken Starr – who liberally leaked sexual assault details as a form of political attack on Bill Clinton – was railing against the leaking of sexual assault details which Kavanaugh considered a political attack.

In this world, where victims are aggressors and attackers are victims, it is hard to know which way is up. Not least because the whole political world is heading down the sewer.

Political hacks turn into supposedly apolitical judges who suddenly revert back into political hacks, as part of a political campaign to remake the judiciary in non-political ways that happen to be conservative.

“Boy, you all want power. God, I hope you never get it,” yelled Lindsey Graham, the lickspittle Republican senator, as he turned on his Democratic opponents in front of the poor, helpless Judge Kavanaugh. Graham was so hot and bothered about stopping power-hungry politicians that he needed to be super power-hungry himself. “I hope the American people can see through this sham,” he said.

A sham it certainly was. The FBI background check into Kavanaugh was so heavily curtailed by the Trump White House that it served as a cover-up: a fig leaf to protect vulnerable senators from embarrassment.

One of those was the Maine Republican, Susan Collins, a self-styled moderate, who pretzeled herself trying to make sense of her own vote to confirm Kavanaugh. The judge, she said, was endorsed by the American Bar Association, preferring to ignore the fact that the ABA said it was re-evaluating that whole endorsement thing because Kavanaugh had acted so plain bonkers in the hearing last week.

Collins, like so many other seemingly sympathetic Republicans, said she believed Dr Ford’s testimony. She just didn’t actually believe her. “I believe that she is a survivor of a sexual assault and that this trauma has upended her life,” Collins said earnestly. “Nevertheless, the four witnesses she named could not corroborate any of the events of that evening gathering where she says the assault occurred.”

This makes about as much sense as all those medieval trials of French pigs.

Of course, the curious case of Brett Kavanaugh is the perfect emblem for the politics of Trump, where the real victims of racism and sexism are old white men with a predilection for sexual harassment, assault and infidelity. It has been literally awesome to hear all about the presumption of innocence from the party that still chants “lock her up” at presidential rallies.

But why don’t we leave it to the newly-minted supreme court justice to give voice to this bare-faced doublespeak: the one whose name emerged from a list of nominees prepared by rightwing ideological groups like the Federalist Society, writing in the rightwing editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.

“The supreme court must never be viewed as a partisan institution,” wrote the man who claimed he was the victim of a vast leftwing conspiracy. “The justices do not sit on opposite sides of an aisle. They do not caucus in separate rooms. I would be part of a team of nine, committed to deciding cases according to the constitution and laws of the United States. I would always strive to be a team player.”

Yes, we know, Justice Kavanaugh. You told Democrats last week “what goes around comes around”. You’re the best team player the conservative movement could wish for, and that’s exactly why they fought so hard to get you on the court for the rest of your living days.

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Banks back Democrats in bid to rebuild bipartisan support

October 6, 2018

by Michelle Price

Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Banks are going to bat for Democrats in the U.S. November midterm congressional elections as part of an ambitious strategy to rebuild the bipartisan support they enjoyed before the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

Commercial banks have so far donated a total of $2.5 million to U.S. Senate Democrats in the 2018 election cycle, the largest sum since 2008, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

The backing of Democrats marks a shift for banks, which have kept a low profile in Washington since the crisis. Democrats had all but abandoned the financial industry in the aftermath, wary of appearing to do favors for Wall Street.

But some moderate Senate Democrats in May backed the first easing of financial rules since the crisis and now are seeing a boost to their campaign coffers as the sector seeks to broaden its support on Capitol Hill.

Of the 20 Senate candidates receiving the most money from banks during the 2018 cycle, 15 are Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics data which tracks donations made by political action committees and individuals. When those seats were last up for election in 2012, only seven Democrats were in the top 20.

Senators Heidi Heitkamp, Jon Tester and Joe Donnelly, moderates who helped pushed through the May legislation easing rules on community banks introduced by the 2010 Dodd Frank law, are the top three recipients, the data shows.

Representatives for Senators Tester, Heitkamp and Donnelly did not respond to requests for comment.

All three senators are locked in tight contests on Nov. 6. Analysts predict Democrats are likely to gain control of the House of Representatives but have a more narrow path to taking back the Senate.

The other 12 Senate Democrats, some of whom also voted for the bank rule-easing bill, are also moderates. The exception is Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, whose position as ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee makes him an important stakeholder for the industry.

The sector hopes boosting moderates will constrain the big bank-bashing wing of the Democratic Party, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, a likely presidential candidate in 2020, and Representative Maxine Waters, who is poised to chair the committee overseeing banks if Democrats win the House.

Rebuilding broad bipartisan support will be challenging, consumer advocates say. Big banks continue to be a sensitive issue within the Democratic Party, which was bitterly divided over the May legislation, and among voters.

STRATEGIC MOVE

The midterm elections mark the first time since 2012 that the banking industry has given more money to Senate Democrats than Republicans, according to center’s data, which is based on federal records released on Sept. 24.

The sector has dished out $2.5 million to Senate Democrats and $1.8 million to Republicans this election cycle. By contrast, the industry gave $1.6 million to Senate Democrats and $5.2 million to Senate Republicans during the 2016 elections.

The American Bankers Association, the top Washington bank lobby group, has contributed $83,000 to Senate Democratic candidates this cycle and is leading the industry’s push to regain bipartisan support, said its CEO Rob Nichols.

Nichols, whose association has for the first time bought advertisements for 12 midterm candidates, including four Democrats, called enhancing the industry’s political capability “strategically important.”

“This is rigorously bipartisan: if you support us, we want to support you,” he said. “This is not about playing party favorites. For decades, banking policy was bipartisan up until Dodd Frank, and we’re excited to see a return to this bipartisanship.”

Industry officials hope the senators they support will back further legislation easing capital markets rules drawn up in a package that passed the House in July but has yet to pass the Senate.

“Democrats being supported by the banks are generally viewed as moderate elements in a Senate that is being steadily stretched to its extreme ideologically,” said Isaac Boltansky, director of policy research at Washington-based Compass Point Research & Trading.

He added that the industry is also anxious to ensure these senators are around to oversee a swift implementation of May’s new laws by the banking regulators.

Two-thirds of registered voters are more likely to vote for a candidate who supports regulating Wall Street and big banks when they talk about the economy, according to a September survey by The Harris Poll on behalf of Better Markets, which lobbies for tighter industry regulation.

Ken Bentsen, the chief executive of bank lobby group the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) and a former Texas congressman, said it was unfortunate that the industry continued, in his view, to be seen “as a political piñata.”

But he said Democratic views on the banking industry were not monolithic, and he saw opportunities to work with members of the party.

“We’ll address it, however it turns out,” he said of next month’s election.

Reporting by Michelle Price; additional reporting by Pete Schroeder; Editing by Colleen Jenkins

 

Prince’s Plan For Afghanistan Isn’t Happening: Votel

US Army Gen. Joseph Votel says it would not be a good strategy to turn over US national interest to contractors.

October 5, 2018

Tolo News

Neither the Afghan government nor the US military believes in Erik Prince’s plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan, the commander of US Central Command Gen. Joseph Votel said on Thursday, as quoted in a report by Task & Purpose.

Erik Prince, founder and former CEO of Blackwater security company, has held numerous interviews with the media over the past few weeks and just late last month he spoke to TOLOnews about his plans to privatize the war.

He said his forces could change the situation in the country within six months.

Defending his plan, he said: “Well, I would say six months after the program is fully ramped up, you have a very different situation on the ground, I will commit to that,” said Prince.

But Gen. Votel told reporters on Thursday that he does not buy Prince’s sales pitch. Citing US Defense Secretary Mattis’ previous comments on the subject, Votel said it would not be a good strategy to turn over US national interest to contractors.

“We have vital interests here and we are pursuing them with legitimate forces that can do that,” Votel said during a Pentagon news briefing. “Even broader than that: The bilateral security agreement that I think is in place with Afghanistan does not allow this. The Afghans don’t want this. They would have to approve this as well, and I think as you’ve seen from some of their comments, they do not support this either.”

The Afghan Office of the National Security Council (NSC) on Thursday stated government would consider all legal options against anyone who tries to privatize the war in Afghanistan.

In their statement on Thursday, the NSC rejected outright the notion and said “in no manner does the government of Afghanistan condone this destructive and divisive debate.”

The NSC said the debate around privatizing the Afghan war would “add new foreign and unaccountable elements to our fight.

Blackwater gained notoriety during the Iraq war. The company’s contractors killed 14 Iraqi civilians and wounded 20 more in a September 2007 incident in Baghdad. Soon afterward, US Congress made contractors subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but it is an open question as to whether that is constitutional.

Nicholas Slatten, one of the contractors involved, was initially sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder, but a US appeals court overturned his conviction in 2017, Task & Purpose wrote in the report. The court also reduced the sentences of three other contractors because it found their lengthy prison sentences violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Slatten was prosecuted for murder a second time, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict and the case ended in a mistrial in September.

In August, Mattis said he did not see any advantages to having a private army take over the war in Afghanistan from the US military.

“When Americans put their nation’s credibility on the line privatizing it is probably not a wise idea,” Mattis told reporters during a news conference at the Pentagon.

The Task & Purpose quotes a spokesman for Prince’s latest private security from Frontier Services Group told Task & Purpose, as saying that “anyone who says that the current effort in Afghanistan is working is deluded”.

“The US taxpayer is spending $62bn per year, our soldiers are dying and the Afghan army is losing 3% of its man-power every month due to death, injury or desertion. Something needs to change,” the spokesperson said as quoted by Task & Purpose.

WHO IS PRINCE?

Prince is an American businessman and former US Navy SEAL best known for founding the government services and security company Blackwater USA, now known as Academi.

He founded Blackwater Worldwide in 1997 after buying 6,000 acres of the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and set up a school for special operations.

Between the years 1997 to 2010, Blackwater was awarded $2 billion in US government security contracts, more than $1.6 billion of which were unclassified federal contracts and an unknown amount of classified work.

For nine years – between 2001 and 2010, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) allegedly awarded his company up to $600 million in classified contracts and it became the largest of the US State Department’s three private security companies.

Blackwater however came under increasing criticism after the Nisour Square massacre in September 2007, in which Blackwater employees opened fire in a crowded square in Baghdad, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and seriously wounding 20 more.

Three Blackwater guards were convicted in October 2014 of 14 manslaughter charges, and another of murder, in a US court.

The criticism continued unabated after former president Barack Obama took office in 2009 – criticism that Prince said stems from politics.

Prince has since been hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi where he was task to assemble an 800-member force of foreign troops for the UAE. He has also trained 2,000 Somalis or anti-piracy oprations in the Gulf of Aden.

The list of Prince’s accomplishments and involvement in foreign governments is lengthy and questions have often been raised over his business dealings.

However Prince has been a Donald Trump supporter and although it is believed he had no formal role in Trump’s transition, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating a January 11, 2017, meeting in the Seychelles at which Prince presented himself as Trump’s unofficial representative.

 

Who Cares What Erik Prince Thinks?

I don’t know how to fix Afghanistan, but at least I’ve never owned a murderous firm of mercenaries

August 31, 2017

by Jesse Berney

Rolling Stone

I’ve never served in the military. I’ve never worked for the Foreign Service. I’ve never studied foreign policy or done advocacy work focused on it. I’m just a political hack, and I’ve been one for the last 16 years, working with Democratic campaigns and progressive nonprofits.

That makes my opinion near useless when it comes to finding a solution to the violent Afghanistan quagmire we can’t seem to escape. The truth is I don’t know what to do about Afghanistan. I’d like to see the United States pull out of the country, but I don’t want to leave it in the hands of an unstable government that could easily fall to the extremist Taliban. I also don’t want to see a huge new investment of American money and lives, and the resulting deaths of Afghan civilians. No doubt it’s a difficult problem to solve, and I don’t have the answers.

And while I may not be the person to turn to, I can think of someone even worse: the former owner of a for-profit military contractor who stands to make millions of dollars if we send a team of his unaccountable mercenaries into the war-torn country. I may be uncertain of the right thing to do to bring peace to Afghanistan, but at least I’m not arguing to send private contractors there, put the war effort in their hands and extract whatever profit I can out of the violence and chaos.

A person like that would be even worse than I am to ask about our policy toward Afghanistan. If he were to suggest sending more contractors like those who work for him to Afghanistan to win the war, he’d simply be a bad person.

But that’s exactly what Erik Prince suggested in a New York Times op-ed this week.

Prince was born into wealth. Unlike me, he decided to serve his country in the military and fulfilled the almost superhuman requirements to become a Navy SEAL. That’s admirable.

But then he parlayed his experience with his wealth and contacts to form a private military contracting firm with the ominous name Blackwater. In Iraq, his contractors were responsible for a veritable reign of terror, culminating in the Nisour Square massacre in September 2007. Escorting a U.S. embassy convoy through Baghdad, Blackwater contractors got into a firefight, killing 17 people and injuring 20 more. Blackwater was kicked out of Iraq, and four contractors were convicted on charges ranging from manslaughter to murder. (The murder conviction has been overturned and the contractor may be retried; the sentences for manslaughter have also been overturned on appeal.)

That massacre highlighted the fundamental problem with putting contractors in a war zone: Their actions aren’t subject to the same standards of review and accountability members of the military face. They don’t have a strict chain of command that’s held responsible when things go wrong. That freedom breeds a cowboy culture, and the results can be deadly.

While there may be a role for military contractors in war zones – security for non-military personnel seemed like a good fit, although Blackwater sure screwed that up – actual engagement with enemies should be left to our military services, with all the layers of legal and structural restrictions in place.

Prince may not still own Academi – what Blackwater is now called after two PR-driven name changes – but he is still deeply involved in the security contracting world. Combined with his close ties to the Trump administration, including a sister in the Cabinet, it’s clear he stands to benefit from sending contractors to fight the war in Afghanistan on America’s behalf.

Whose opinion on matters of war matters less than a war profiteer’s? I may have no military or foreign policy experience, but at least you can be assured my opinion won’t be based on how much money I stand to make off violence and death. Erik Prince’s opinion on American policy in Afghanistan is worse than meaningless: It is actively harmful.

 

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

October 5, 2018

by Dr. Peter Janney

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, on 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 the 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 out 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 its 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.

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 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.

Conversation No. 29

Date: Tuesday July 30, 1996

Commenced: 8:30 AM CST

Concluded: 8:55 AM CST

 

GD: Good morning, Robert.

RTC: And the same to you, Gregory.

GD: Robert, I know you were not in the CIA’s technical branch but I often wonder when I am on the phone, am I being listened to?
RTC: You don’t have to be from the technical people to know the answer to that one. It’s not so much that you are being snooped on but that you can be observed by almost anyone at any time. We listened in on people and opened mail. That’s the reason why Jim was sacked but that was only an excuse. He was getting crazy. But as far as the telephone is concerned, yes, you could be listened to at any time. It’s not a bug on your phone so much as full and complete cooperation by the telephone people with various agencies. We did it, the FBI and the NSA do it and probably others as well. Your mail can be opened, addresses copied and so on. For instance, if you have a private Swiss bank account, we have the postal people copy down and forward to us the cover of any letter sent by a Swiss bank to an American addressee. We don’t have to open the letter to know it’s a monthly bank statement. And then we know where your account is. And the NSA listened in on each and every phone call overseas. You see, they tap into the communications satellites. Of course there are huge numbers of calls every day so their computers are set to pick out certain words. Like Abu Nidal for instance. Once a key word comes up, the conversation is taped and listened to later.

GD: And the television sets can be used as a monitoring device but only if they’re connected to the cable TV system.

RTC: I’ve heard that but then I rarely watch the garbage on television.

GD: You can circumvent that simply by disconnecting your set from the cable system. Just take out the plug. Put it back later. Or, what I would do, would be to hold a really sizzling but totally fake disinformation conversation right in front of the set. You know…’the Russians really pay well for that information…’ and also ‘ yes the entire building has been mined. One push of a button and we can make the front pages of every newspaper in the world.’ Can you imagine the uproar on the other end? Of course you never are specific and just enough to drive them into a frenzy. I’ve done this a number of times but only twice did I ever find out what a huge stink I caused. Loved it then and I love it now.  Oh yes, Bill told me the other day that he saved Bobby Inman ^[1] from exposure once. When I asked him from what, he shut down. Can you comment on this?

RTC: Probably the homosexual issue. They are very sensitive to that one.

GD: Why? And is Inman a faggot?

RTC: Now, now, I’ll let Bill discuss this with you. My information would only be second hand. And it has been long felt that if an agent were a fairy, he could be gotten at by the Russians and blackmailed or set up and turned.

GD: Well, that makes sense but there are so many people like that in DC that it would be difficult not to find a few in various agencies. I think it must be the military bases with their legions of muscled hustlers that draws these people. And the, of course, one gets into an agency and of course has to have company.

RTC: Yes. The Jews are the same way. You let one in and pretty soon, the office looks like a synagogue. And it’s always us against them. The same way with the fairies. That’s the main reason why I object to having them on board.

GD: But the problem with Inman….

RTC: Back in 1980 there was a fairy scare over at NSA. Real McCarthy purges, finger pointing, anonymous letters and so on. A number of the top brass there were scared shitless lest they, too, got exposed. Bill knows some of this and he has known Inman for a long time. There was an ugly incident when he was in law school. I was told that Bill was able to shut the matter down. That is one of the reasons Bill has such good rapport in certain circles.

GD: He’s blackmailing them?

RTC: In a sense. During the Carter days, Bill could pretty well get what he wanted from certain highly placed intelligence people. I think I should leave it at that, Gregory. Talk to Bill about this if you like but I doubt he’ll tell you anything and, yes, you are right. Washington is indeed full of those people. A lot in Congress, the military, especially the Air Force and various agencies. The FBI is rather picky but we and NSA have quite a few queers on board. The NSG has more than its share. And if you go into some of the faggot bars here, you might see a number of the prominent dancing around in mesh stockings and wearing really bad wigs.

GD: Oh, I’ve seen these in San Francisco. The wigs look like dead cats. They don’t look any more like women than my dog but who argues with self-delusion? Five kids and a wife at home and into the lavatories with the holes in the partitions after work. During the week, his name is George but on Saturdays, his name is Phyllis.

RTC: (Laughter) Yes, we are overrun here.

GD: Well, at least you can’t dump that one on Clinton although God knows that the weird Christian freaks might try. My God, they hate him and as far as I am concerned, these bone headed twits are far worse than the queens. They believe in the strangest things and are really obnoxious swine. They believe the world is only six thousand years old, that Noah’s ark came to ground at 5,000 feet on a mountain side and God only knows what other myths. I mean, Robert, if another religious cult arose that worshipped the Easter Bunny, it wouldn’t any more unbelievable than the Evangelicals. By the way, did you know that Crisco’s main production plant in New Jersey burned down last night? Yes. Millions now living will never fry.

RTC: (Laughter) Ah, Gregory, I can see why so many hate you so much.

GD: Well, one day, it will come out that Heini Mueller, head of the Gestapo and number two man on the wanted Nazi escapee list was living right near you and visiting the White House.

RTC: We may have to wait a while before that gets to be public knowledge. My God, the Hebes would scream so loud we would have to stuff hundred dollar bills into their mouths like a mama bird shoving worms into her babies. They are such arrogant and demanding people.

GD: Yes, God’s chosen people, Robert. I wonder what God chose them for? Probably to wait in line for the showers somewhere in Poland.

RTC: If that’s true, Gregory, God should have finished the job.

(Concluded at 8:55 AM CST)

 

Churchill unmasked

October 7, 2018

by Christian Jürs

The personality of Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill could very well be a subject of interest to an alienist who, by definition, is a physician who treats mental disorders. There is a saying that the world is governed with very little sense and there are times when one could add to this statement that it often has been governed by lunatics.

Churchill was born in 1874 and died in 1965. His father was Randolph Spencer-Churchill, a son of the Duke of Marlborough. The first Duke was John Churchill, one of England’s most capable military commanders, who died without male issue in 1722 and the title was given to one of his nephews, a Spencer. As a courtesy, the Spencer family was allowed to add Churchill to its name, separated by a hyphen. Winston always wanted to believe that he was a gifted military leader in the mold of the first Duke but his efforts at generalship were always unqualified disasters that he generally blamed on other people. This chronic refusal to accept responsibility for his own incompetent actions is one of Churchill’s less endearing qualities.

Randolph Churchill died early as the result of rampant syphilis that turned him from an interesting minor politician to a pathetic madman who had to be kept away from the public, in the final years of his life. His mother was the former Jennie Jerome, an American. The Jerome family had seen better days when Jennie met Randolph. Her father, Leonard, was a stock-market manipulator who had lost his money and the marriage was more one of convenience than of affection.

The Jeromes were by background very typically American. On her father’s side, Jennie was mostly Irish and on her mother’s American Indian and Jewish. The union produced two children, Winston and Jack. The parents lived separate lives, both seeking the company of other men. Winston’s psyche suffered accordingly and throughout his life, his frantic desire for attention obviously had its roots in his abandonment as a child.

As a member of the 4th (Queen’s Own) Hussars, in 1896 Churchill became embroiled in a lawsuit wherein he was publicly accused of having engaged in the commission of “acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type.” This case was duly settled out of court for a payment of money and the charges were withdrawn. Also a determinant factor was the interference by the Prince of Wales with whom his mother was having an affair.

In 1905, Churchill hired a young man, Edward Marsh (later Sir Edward) as his private secretary. His mother, always concerned about her son’s political career, was concerned because Marsh was a very well known homosexual who later became one of Winston’s most intimate lifelong friends. Personal correspondence of March, now in private hands, attests to the nature and duration of their friendship.

Churchill, as Asquith once said, was consumed with vanity and his belief that he was a brilliant military leader led him from the terrible disaster of Gallipoli through the campaigns of the Second World War. He meddled constantly in military matters to the despair and eventual fury of his professional military advisors but his political excursions were even more disastrous.

Churchill was a man who was incapable of love but could certainly hate. He was viciously vindictive towards anyone who thwarted him and a number of these perceived enemies died sudden deaths during the war when such activities were much easier to order and conceal.

One of Churchill’s less attractive personality traits, aside from his refusal to accept the responsibility for the failure of his actions, was his ability to change his opinions at a moment’s notice.

Once anti-American, he did a complete about-face when confronted with a war he escalated and could not fight, and from a supporter of Hitler’s rebuilding of Germany, he turned into a bitter enemy after a Jewish political action association composed of wealthy businessmen hired him to be their spokesman.

Churchill lavishly praised Roosevelt to his face and defamed him with the ugliest of accusations behind his back. The American President was a far more astute politician than Churchill and certainly far saner.

In order to support his war of vengeance, Churchill had to buy weapons from the United States and Roosevelt stripped England of all of her assets to pay for these. Only when England was bankrupt did Roosevelt consent to the Lend-Lease project, and in a moment of malicious humor, titled the bill “1776” when it was sent to Congress.

Hitler’s bombing of England was not a prelude to invasion, but a retaliation for Churchill’s instigation of the bombing of German cities and Churchill used the threat of a German invasion to whip up pro-British feelings in the United States.

Threats of invasion by the Germans, in this case of the United States, have been cited by such writers as Weinberg as the reason why Roosevelt had to get into the war. Neither the Germans nor the Japanese had even the slightest intention to invade the continental United States and exhaustive research in the military and political archives of both countries has been unable to locate a shred of evidence to support these theories.

 

 

 

[1]  Admiral Bobby Ray Inman (April 4, 1931 in Rhonesboro, Texas) is a retired United States admiral who held several influential positions in the U.S. Intelligence community. He served as Director of Naval Intelligence from September 1974 to July 1976, then moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency where he served as Vice Director until 1977. He next became the Director of the National Security Agency. Inman held this post until 1981. His last major position was as the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a post he held from February 12, 1981 to June 10, 1982.