TBR News April 17, 2019
The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. April 17, 2019: “Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
His latest business is to re-institute a universal draft in America.
He wants to do this to remove tens of thousands of unemployed young Americans from the streets so they won’t come together and fight him.
Commentary for April 17:”Trump has said via his staff people that anyone working in the White House who passes information to the lying media will be prosecuted by the FBI. He rants so much, threatening everyone, including the cooks at MacDonalds for “bad-tasting cheeseburgers” (done deliberately no doubt as part of a sinister plot against him.) that if a competent psychologist took the time to listen to him, he would end up in the back of an ambulance wrapped in a tight jacket. Crazy? Yes and very nasty and vindictive. It is felt by the lesser staff that if the IRS lets go of his tax returns, he will end up in prison somewhere eating cold beans off a tin tray.”
Table of Contents
- U.S. planes, tractors on EU tariff list over Boeing
- Nuts, ketchup & bicycle pedals: EU targets US goods with retaliatory sanctions
- Trump Dances to Israel’s Tune
- Hizballah and Iranian Missiles
- Trump’s veto over Yemen is a scandalous abuse of presidential power
- Looking Back at 1919
- Encyclopedia of American Loons
- The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
U.S. planes, tractors on EU tariff list over Boeing
April 17, 2019
by Philip Blenkinsop
Reuters
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Planes, tractors, food and handbags featured on a list of U.S. imports worth $20 billion that the European Union said on Wednesday it could hit with tariffs in a transatlantic aircraft subsidy dispute.
The 28-nation bloc said this week it was ready to open negotiations with the United States to cut industrial duties, but has now detailed plans that could lead to a new tit-for-tat trade conflict between the two global powers.
Transatlantic tensions were enflamed again on Wednesday when Washington said it would end a ban against U.S. citizens filing lawsuits against foreign companies operating in Cuba, with EU firms seen among the targets.
The two sides have been battling for almost 15 years at the World Trade Organization over subsidies given to U.S. planemaker Boeing and its European rival Airbus.
Washington last week issued a seven-page list of EU products to target for tariffs, from large aircraft to dairy products and wine, to counteract $11 billion of harm it says EU subsidies for Airbus have caused.
Brussels has responded with its own list of some $20 billion worth of U.S. imports, also including planes and wine.
The 11-page list also features a diverse range of agricultural produce from dried fruit to ketchup, as well as frozen fish, tobacco, handbags, suitcases, tractors, helicopters and video game consoles.
It is now open to a public consultation until May 31 and could then be revised.
Both sides have said they would prefer a settlement that did not lead to the imposition of tariffs.
“We must continue to defend a level-playing field for our industry. But let me be clear, we do not want a tit-for-tat,” EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said in a statement
WTO arbitrators have yet to set amounts of damages or countermeasures in each case, but the U.S. case against Airbus is more advanced, with a ruling expected in June or July. Damages for the EU’s Boeing complaint could come early in 2020.
UNEASY DETENTE
Washington and Brussels are already in conflict after U.S. President Donald Trump subjected EU steel and aluminum imports to punitive tariffs. The EU responded with duties on 2.8 billion euros ($3.2 billion) of U.S. imports.
Brussels then chose politically sensitive products, such as whisky from Kentucky and Harley Davidsons from Wisconsin.
An EU official said the new list was drawn up with the aim of having minimal impact on EU businesses, but also to serve as a deterrent and to cause discomfort to the other side.
It includes some 7 billion euros worth of aircraft; steam coal is in, but coking coal, used by steelmakers, is not; U.S. soybeans, which the EU has pledged to promote, have also been left out.
The two sides had appeared to reach a detente last July when Trump agreed not to impose tariffs on EU-produced cars and parts as long as the two sides negotiated on trade, including the removal of tariffs on “non-auto industrial goods.”
The European Union declared itself ready on Monday to start formal talks to do just that.
The Commission is proposing two sets of negotiations – one to cut tariffs on industrial goods, the other to make it easier for companies to show that products meet EU or U.S. standards.
However, it has insisted that agriculture not be included, putting it at odds with Washington, which wants farm products to be part of the talks.
Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop; Editing by Alissa de Carbonnel and Gareth Jones
Nuts, ketchup & bicycle pedals: EU targets US goods with retaliatory sanctions
April 17, 2019
RT
The EU has unveiled a wide-ranging list of US imports worth $20 billion which it could target in retaliation for a subsidy battle between rival European and American planemakers, Airbus and Boeing.
The European Commission launched consultations on Wednesday as it issued the 11-page document listing US goods being considered for additional import duties.
The long list covers a considerable amount of agricultural products, including fruits, coffee and tobacco, and extends to other spheres such as aviation. The possible levies may hit various items ranging from ketchup, vodka, chocolate and lobsters to video-game consoles, bicycle pedals, tractors, shovels and handbags.
A discussion on the proposed list is open until May 31 and the commission said it is up to the World Trade Organization (WTO) arbitrator to determine the exact level of countermeasures.
“European companies must be able to compete on fair and equal terms,” EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said in a statement. “We must continue to defend a level-playing field for our industry.”
The official added that the retaliatory measures are on the agenda so that the EU is ready “in case there is no other way out,” but stressed that the bloc still does not want to be embroiled in “tit-for-tat” measures and hopes that dialogue will prevail.
“The EU remains open for discussions with the US, provided these are without preconditions and aim at a fair outcome,” she noted.
Washington and Brussels have been locked in a bilateral dispute at the WTO, with each claiming that Airbus and Boeing benefitted from illegal subsidies given to them. The two sides have been battling for almost 15 years over the matter, before it escalated, last week, when the US vowed to impose import tariffs on $11 billion worth of European goods.
In late March, the WTO appellate body confirmed that the US failed to comply with the organization’s rules on subsidies and “continued unabatedly its illegal support of its aircraft manufacturer Boeing to the detriment of Airbus,” according to the European Commission.
Trump Dances to Israel’s Tune
More wag-the-dog means war for America
April 16, 2019
by Philip Giraldi
So newly reelected Israeli monster-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu has boasted, with a grin, that America’s President Donald J. Trump followed through on his proposal to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist group. Bibi was smiling because the timing of the move, one day before the Israeli election, strongly suggests it was done to assist him against what had become a very strong opposition challenge. That Trump likely colluded with Netanyahu to blatantly interfere in the election has apparently bothered no one in Israel or in the tame American media.
The gift from Washington came on top of recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, threatening members of the International Criminal Court if they try to prosecute Israel for war crimes, moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, removing the word “occupation” from the State Department’s assessments of human rights infringements on the West Bank, eliminating relief funding for Palestinian refugees, leaving the U.N. Human Rights Council because it was too critical of Israel, and looking the other way as Israel declared itself a state only for Jews. Washington also ignored the bombing of hospitals, schools and water treatment infrastructure in Gaza while Israeli army snipers were shooting unarmed demonstrators demanding their freedom.
The labeling of the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group is particularly disturbing as it means that the United States military by virtue of the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) now has a mandate to attack the IRGC wherever it appears, including in Syria or even in the waterway the Straits of Hormuz, where the guard has regular patrols in small boats. It is a de facto declaration of war and it comes on top of a number of deliberate provocations directed against Iran starting with the withdrawal from the nuclear agreement Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA) one year ago, which led to the unilateral imposition of harsh sanctions directed against the Iranian economy to bring about a popular uprising as well as regularly repeated false claims that Iran is the leading “state sponsor of terrorism.” Next month, the U.S. will begin enforcing a unilaterally declared worldwide sanction on any and all Iranian oil sales.
Netanyahu pledged to annex Israeli settlements on the largely Palestinian West Bank if elected, which is undoubtedly a move cleared in advance with the Trump team of foreign policy sociopaths as it de facto puts an end to any delusional speculation over a possible two-state negotiated solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict. It will also lead to a massive upsurge in violence as the Palestinians object, which is neither a concern for the White House or Netanyahu, as they are assuming that it can be suppressed by overwhelming force directed against an almost completely unarmed civilian population.
And Trump will no doubt expect Bibi to return the favor when he is running for reelection in 2020 by encouraging American Jews who care about Israel to support the Republicans. Trump is focused on his own electability and is absolutely shameless about his betrayal of actual American interests in the Middle East, possibly because he has no inkling of the actual damage that he is doing. His speech last week before the casino multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson-hosted Jewish Republican Coalition Annual Leadership Meeting in Las Vegas was a disgusting pander to a group that includes many key players who have little or no concern for what happens to the United States as long as Israel flourishes. The only good news that came out of the meeting was that Adelson himself appears to be “gravely ill.”
Trump at times appeared to be speaking to what he thought was a group of Israelis, referring to “your prime minister” when mentioning Benjamin Netanyahu and several times describing Israel as “yours,” suggesting that deep down he understands that many American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States. At another point, Trump declared that “The Democrats have even allowed the terrible scourge of anti-Semitism to take root in their party and their country,” apparently part of a White House plan to keep playing that card to turn American Jews and their political donations in a Republican direction before elections in 2020.
Trump also told the Republican Coalition audience how he came to a decision on recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He described how “he’d been speaking to his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, as well as U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman and his Israel adviser, Jason Greenblatt, over the phone about an unrelated issue when he suddenly brought up the Golan Heights.” Trump shared how “I said, ‘Fellows, do me a favor. Give me a little history, quick. Want to go fast. I got a lot of things I’m working on: China, North Korea. Give me a quickie.’ After the advisers filled him in, Trump said he asked Friedman: ‘David, what do you think about me recognizing Israel and the Golan Heights?’ Friedman, apparently surprised by the suggestion, reacted like a ‘wonderful, beautiful baby,’ Trump said, and asked if he would ‘really … do that.’ ‘Yeah, I think I’m doing it right now. Let’s write something up,’ Trump said he responded, prompting applause and cheers from his audience in Las Vegas. ‘We make fast decisions and we make good decisions.’”
Putting the Trump story about the Golan Heights in some kind of context is not really that difficult. He wanted an answer to please Netanyahu and he went to three Orthodox Jews who support the illegal Israeli settlements and have also individually contributed financially to their growth so he was expecting the response that he got. That he was establishing a precedent by his moves on Jerusalem and the Golan apparently did not occur to him as his administration prides itself on having a foreign policy vision that extends no longer than the beginning of next week, which is why he hired Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams. And then there is always the doleful Stephen Miller lurking in the background as well as the three musketeers of Kushner, Greenblatt and Friedman for really serious questions relating to why acceding to the wishes of parasite state Israel should continue to be the apparent number one priority of the government of the United States.
Donald Trump neither poses nor answers the question why he feels compelled to fulfill all of the campaign pledges he made to the Jewish community, which by and large did not vote for him, while failing to carry out the promises made to those who actually did support him. The absurd Jewish Republican Coalition narrative about how Trump gave Israel the Golan Heights should have resulted in a flood of opprobrium in the U.S. media about his profound ignorance and fundamental hypocrisy, but there was largely silence.
The nonsense going on in Las Vegas in front of a lot of fat cats who regard the United States as little more than a cash cow that they control as well as in the White House itself unfortunately has real world consequences. America is being led by the nose by a well-entrenched and powerful group of Israeli loyalists and this will not end well. The U.S. doesn’t even have a Middle Eastern foreign policy anymore – it has a “to do” list handed by Netanyahu to whomever is president. The fact that the current man in charge in Washington is either so ignorant or so deluded as to allow the process to escalate until the U.S. is drawn into yet more catastrophic wars is beyond regrettable. U.S. foreign policy should not depend on the perceptions of Kushner and company. It should be based on real, tangible American interests, not those of Israel. Someone should explain that to the president.
Hizballah and Iranian Missiles
Hizballah is an Islamic movement founded after the Israeli military seizure of Lebanon in 1982, which resulted in the formation of Islamic resistance units committed to the liberation of the occupied territories and the ejection of Israeli forces. Hizbollah was established in 1982 during the Lebanon War when a group of Lebanese Shi’ite Muslims declared themselves to be the “Party of God” (Hizb Allah, which is clear in Hizbollah but progressively less so in Hizbollah / Hizbullah / Hezbollah). Upon the realization that the IDF was entrenching itself in south Lebanon, and influenced and assisted by 1,500 Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon, Hizballah cells began developing with the immediate desire to resist the Israeli invasion. Hizbollah began establishing its base in Lebanon in 1982 and has expanded and strengthened ever since, primarily due to its wave of suicide bombings and foreign support by Iran and Syria.
Over the past few years, the American media has been breathlessly informing the public about “probable attacks” on Iran because, it is stated, that country is developing atomic weapons to use on Israel. Of course whatever happens to Israel is of vital importance to the United States and is mostly non-Israeli citizens.
The U.S. has been placing economic sanctions on Iran and this is damaging their economy. Their response? They have threatened to close the international waterway, the Straits of Hormuz! Since almost all Iranian oil, on which they depend for a significant part of their national income, comes from selling, and shipping, oil, this is mere sound and fury, signifying nothing. This false bravado is also designed to build public morale in Iran with national elections looming.
This threat, and the subsequent threat to attack an American Navy aircraft carrier carry with them the danger that a rigged Gulf of Tonkin incident can be arraigned to supply a legitimate motive for the U.S. Navy to take “retaliatory measures” against Iran. In the mountains on Iran’s western border on the Gulf are numerous missile bases, constructed with aid of the Russians. Recently, Russia made a deal with the United States, In return for allowing Russian naval units to berth in and protect Syrian gulf ports, they gave the Americans all the coordinates of their missile sites! In the event of a “hostile act” on the part of Iran (Perhaps a small military type MTB wearing an Iranian flag, would lunch relatively small surface-to-surface at some large American ship. There would be explosions and, out of necessity, American deaths. Shocked headlines in the CIA-controlled New York Times and Washington Post and a stunned Congress would demand revenge. Then our Naval units would attack the missile bases and turn them into large, rubble-filled holes and our next target would be far to the north in Tehran. Our military is stretched too thin to become involved in yet another political war but the Navy and Air Force have been unscathed and would do the attacking. Naturally, the Israeli units would be unable to assist this effort to save them from possible attack because they were too busy protecting the Sacred Motherland to get killed elsewhere and, even worse, to lose expensive aircraft to air defense missiles.
What is causing a deliberate escalation of this project is multifaceted in nature. China does a good deal of oil business with Iran. China has reached a trade volume of 53 billion dollars with Iran and also has a treaty to manage an aslect of the South Pars oil fields. China has been threatening our allies lately, hacking into sensitive governmental computers sites and threatening us with dire fiscal problems because they own so much of our Treasury notes and intercepted messaging indicates China is trying to forge more important ties with Tehran, just short of an open military or other alliance that would upset the balance of power. Tehran and North Korea have also had other missile-oriented dealings such as, 4000 km ranged Musudan missiles which are similar to Taepodong – 1 and Taepodong – 2 missiles. Iran now has the ability to mass produce aversive balllistic missile systems with the technical aid of both North Korea, China and Russia. The North Koreans, and their Pakistani friends, are now lower down the list of supporters but China is coming to the fore Using technical assistance as noted at this time Iran has build and can build intercontinental ballistic missiles that now have a range of more than 5500 km.
IRSL-X-2 and Shahab-6. missiles have the capacity to strike into the eastern end of the Mediterranean and shorter range missiles have been developed to attack American naval units in the Gulf area. Threat and counterthreats have driven the Iranian programs deep underground where American missile or bunker-buster bombing attacks could not destroy them and there are a number of hidden underground missile sites which have been carefully concealed from American aerial surveillance efforts and Israeli as well. The Chinese, in furtherance of both financial gain and merely fishing in troubled waters, have supplied the Iranians with surveillance paths and times of both American and Israeli drones which they obtained by gaining clandestine admittance to secret American and Israeli military defense computer sites.
Much more serious, from Israeli’s point of view is that the Chinese have given a GPS missile control system to the Iraninans which will permit them pinpoint accuracy in directing their present long range missiles to exact targets, be they important Israeli sites like Dimona or U.S. Naval facilities in Muscat or elsewhere.
Tensions build on a daily basis but sometimes the gamblers do not realize the chances they might be taking with something erratic and uinplanned for happening and then the whole Middle East would erupt in bloody warfare. The thesis of the “Arab Spring” is sreading outside its intended and the Iranians are aware that both the American CIA and its Israeli counterpart, the Mossad, have penetrated into Iran and are not only spying but engaging in acts of murder and potential sabotage. In a society as paranoid as Iran’s it might take very little for someone to push a button and once lanuched, a missile, or flight of missiles, cannot be called. We all know how wars start but none of know how they will end
Comment:
Hezballah is an Islamic movement founded after the Israeli military seizure of Lebanon in 1982, which resulted in the formation of Islamic resistance units committed to the liberation of the occupied territories and the ejection of Israeli forces. Hizbollah was established in 1982 during the Lebanon War when a group of Lebanese Shi’ite Muslims declared themselves to be the “Party of God” (Hizb Allah, which is clear in Hizbollah but progressively less so in Hizbollah / Hizbullah / Hezbollah). Upon the realization that the IDF was entrenching itself in south Lebanon, and influenced and assisted by 1,500 Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon, Hizballah cells began developing with the immediate desire to resist the Israeli invasion. Hizbollah began establishing its base in Lebanon in 1982 and has expanded and strengthened ever since, primarily due to its wave of suicide bombings and foreign support by Iran and Syria.
Over the past few years, the American media has been breathlessly informing the public about “probable attacks” on Iran because, it is stated, that country is developing atomic weapons to use on Israel. Of course whatever happens to Israel is of vital importance to the United States and is mostly non-Israeli citizens.
The U.S. has been placing economic sanctions on Iran and this is damaging their economy. Their response? They have threatened to close the international waterway, the Straits of Hormuz! Since almost all Iranian oil, on which they depend for a significant part of their national income, comes from selling, and shipping, oil, this is mere sound and fury, signifying nothing. This false bravado is also designed to build public morale in Iran with national elections looming.
This threat, and the subsequent threat to attack an American Navy aircraft carrier carry with them the danger that a rigged Gulf of Tonkin incident can be arraigned to supply a legitimate motive for the U.S. Navy to take “retaliatory measures” against Iran. In the mountains on Iran’s western border on the Gulf are numerous missile bases, constructed with aid of the Russians. Recently, Russia made a deal with the United States, In return for allowing Russian naval units to berth in and protect Syrian gulf ports, they gave the Americans all the coordinates of their missile sites! In the event of a “hostile act” on the part of Iran (Perhaps a small military type MTB wearing an Iranian flag, would lunch relatively small surface-to-surface at some large American ship. There would be explosions and, out of necessity, American deaths. Shocked headlines in the CIA-controlled New York Times and Washington Post and a stunned Congress would demand revenge. Then our Naval units would attack the missile bases and turn them into large, rubble-filled holes and our next target would be far to the north in Tehran. Our military is stretched too thin to become involved in yet another political war but the Navy and Air Force have been unscathed and would do the attacking. Naturally, the Israeli units would be unable to assist this effort to save them from possible attack because they were too busy protecting the Sacred Motherland to get killed elsewhere and, even worse, to lose expensive aircraft to air defense missiles.
What is causing a deliberate escalation of this project is multifaceted in nature. China does a good deal of oil business with Iran. China has reached a trade volume of 53 billion dollars with Iran and also has a treaty to manage an aslect of the South Pars oil fields. China has been threatening our allies lately, hacking into sensitive governmental computers sites and threatening us with dire fiscal problems because they own so much of our Treasury notes and intercepted messaging indicates China is trying to forge more important ties with Tehran, just short of an open military or other alliance that would upset the balance of power. Tehran and North Korea have also had other missile-oriented dealings such as, 4000 km ranged Musudan missiles which are similar to Taepodong – 1 and Taepodong – 2 missiles. Iran now has the ability to mass produce aversive balllistic missile systems with the technical aid of both North Korea, China and Russia. The North Koreans, and their Pakistani friends, are now lower down the list of supporters but China is coming to the fore Using technical assistance as noted at this time Iran has build and can build intercontinental ballistic missiles that now have a range of more than 5500 km.
IRSL-X-2 and Shahab-6. missiles have the capacity to strike into the eastern end of the Mediterranean and shorter range missiles have been developed to attack American naval units in the Gulf area. Threat and counterthreats have driven the Iranian programs deep underground where American missile or bunker-buster bombing attacks could not destroy them and there are a number of hidden underground missile sites which have been carefully concealed from American aerial surveillance efforts and Israeli as well. The Chinese, in furtherance of both financial gain and merely fishing in troubled waters, have supplied the Iranians with surveillance paths and times of both American and Israeli drones which they obtained by gaining clandestine admittance to secret American and Israeli military defense computer sites.
Much more serious, from Israeli’s point of view is that the Chinese have given a GPS missile control system to the Iraninans which will permit them pinpoint accuracy in directing their present long range missiles to exact targets, be they important Israeli sites like Dimona or U.S. Naval facilities in Muscat or elsewhere.
Tensions build on a daily basis but sometimes the gamblers do not realize the chances they might be taking with something erratic and uinplanned for happening and then the whole Middle East would erupt in bloody warfare. The thesis of the “Arab Spring” is sreading outside its intended and the Iranians are aware that both the American CIA and its Israeli counterpart, the Mossad, have penetrated into Iran and are not only spying but engaging in acts of murder and potential sabotage. In a society as paranoid as Iran’s it might take very little for someone to push a button and once lanuched, a missile, or flight of missiles, cannot be called. We all know how wars start but none of know how they will end!
While fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Hezbollah has effectively used ATMs to counter suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive devises (SVBIED) launched by the extremist group.
RPG-29 Vampir+
RPG-29
9M14 Malyutka (NATO: AT-3 Sagger) +
AT-3
9K111 Fagot (NATO: AT-4 Spigot)+
AT-4
M113 Konkurs (NATO: AT-5 Spandrel)+
AT-5
9K115-2 Metis-M (NATO: AT-13 Saxhorn-2)+
AT-12
9M133 Kornet-E (NATO: AT-14 Spriggan)+
at-14
Antiair Missiles (AAMs)
Most of Hezbollah’s antiair missile systems offer only a relatively small area of protection. They nevertheless force Israeli aircraft to fly at higher altitudes, reducing Israel’s ability to accurately strike ground-based targets. Israeli policymakers and military officers have consistently reiterated their concerns about Hezbollah acquiring more sophisticated air defenses from Bashar al-Assad’s Syria.
Misagh-1/2 +
Misagh-1
ZU-23 +
ZU-23
9K32 Strela-2 (NATO: SA-7 Grail)+
sa-7
9K33 Osa (NATO: SA-8 Gecko)+
sa-8
9K34 Strela-3 (NATO: SA-14 Gremlin)+
9K310 Igla-1 (NATO: SA-16 Gimlet) and 9K38 Igla (NATO: SA-18 Grouse)+
9K40 Buk-M2 (NATO: SA-17 Grizzly)+
Pantsyr-S1 (NATO: SA-22 Greyhound
220 tonnes
Length
36.3 m
Diameter
3.0 m
Warhead
10–24 MIRVs (various type and yield, including HGVs; At the maximum reported throw-weight of up 10,000 kg, the missile could deliver a 50 Mt charge (the maximum theoretical yield-to-weight ratio is about 6 megatons of TNT per metric ton, and the maximum achieved ratio was apparently 5.2 megatons of TNT per metric ton in B/Mk-41).
Further, should the United States prepare to assist Israel, it is believed that Russian intelligence will quickly detect such actions and Hezbollah would be forwarned in sufficient time to launch pre-emptive strikes, to include silo-based heavy missiles.
Mashinostroyeniya, KBKhA
Specifications:
Weight: 220 tonnes
Length: 36.3 m
Diameter: 3.0 m
Warhead:10–24 MIRVs (various type and yield, including HGVs); At the maximum reported throw-weight of up 10,000 kg, the missile could deliver a 50 Mt charge (the maximum theoretical yield-to-weight ratio is about 6 megatons of TNT per metric ton, and the maximum achieved ratio was apparently 5.2 megatons of TNT per metric ton in B/Mk-41).
Engine: First stage: PDU-99 (RD-274 derived)
Propellant: Liquid
Operational range: approx. 10,900 kilometres (6,800 mi)
Speed: over Mach 20.7; 25,000 km/h (16,000 mph)
Guidance system: Inertial guidance, GLONASS, Astro-inertial
Accuracy: 10 m
Launch platform: Silo
These missiles could easily reach American and Saudi military targets in Europe and the Middle East, hence the reluctance of the Pentagon officials to support Israeli demands for preemptive strikes.
Trump’s veto over Yemen is a scandalous abuse of presidential power
The US could have distanced itself from a murderous war. Instead, Trump’s unholy alliance with the Saudis continues
April 17, 2019
by Simon Tisdall
The Guardian
Expected or not, Donald Trump’s veto of a bipartisan Congressional resolution to end US military involvement in Saudi Arabia’s murderous war in Yemen is an outrage. It will prolong the unspeakable suffering of millions of Yemeni civilians, the blameless victims of Riyadh’s vicious proxy war with Iran and its Houthi allies.
Yet Trump’s uncaring arrogance also threatens the US itself. It is further proof that the constitution’s famous checks and balances are just not working, and that, post-Mueller, this unworthy president is raging dangerously out of control.
Trump ’s stated reasons for the veto ranged from specious to risible. He claimed to be protecting American citizens – even as he denied directly assisting the Saudis and said there were no US regular troops in Yemen. So which is it? The Americans Trump referred to, mostly resident in Gulf states that back the Saudi-led coalition, were at risk from Houthi “explosive boats”, he said. They may also face danger when transiting Riyadh airport. In reality, no US citizen is obliged to brave such shocking perils, and very few have.
Yet Yemen’s civilians have no choice.They need not leave their houses to be killed or maimed by Saudi air force bombers, assisted by US advisers. “Yemen is at breaking point, with 10 million people on the brink of famine. There are as many as 100 civilian casualties per week, and Yemenis are more likely to be killed at home than in any other structure,” said David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee. Trump’s veto is a “green light” for further atrocities, he warned.
Trump also rejected the resolution as “an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities”. Yet on the contrary, his action amounts to flagrant defiance of the 1973 War Powers Act that checks a president’s ability to engage in armed conflict without express consent of Congress. Although interpretations differ, this is not a partisan point. I,t is a matter of constitutional law. And it’s a precedent. This was the first time in history that a War Powers resolution had passed from House and Senate to the president’s desk.
Far from protecting presidential rights and prerogatives, Trump is abusing them. He tried it on again earlier this year, when he declared a fatuous, anti-migrant “national emergency” at the Mexican border – and Congress could not stop him. This week, Trump had a chance to do the right thing, said Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who sponsored the original Yemen resolution. Instead, he had “failed to uphold the principles of the constitution”.
Why is the US Congress, which counts itself an exemplary global democratic paragon, apparently so impotent in the face of such abuses? There are echoes of Westminster here. What do these many hundreds of elected politicians, regardless of party affiliation, think they are doing to earn their pay? How did the US arrive at a situation in which an ignorant, irresponsible, arguably corrupt chief executive exercises such arbitrary power? Trump rides roughshod over the people’s tribunes. And they, with valiant exceptions, let him. King George was a pushover by comparison.
Congress should now move heaven and earth, in the name of Yemen’s starving children and the majority of Americans who oppose the Saudis’ war, to override Trump’s veto. The firm expectation that it will fail to do so reflects a broader failure to properly police the corrosive Trump-Saudi relationship. The oleaginous friendship between Trump and the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, encompasses far more than an irrational desire for continued carnage in Yemen.
It started in 2016-17, when Saudi and other Middle East nationals were first suspected of funnelling illegal donations to Trump’s campaign and inaugural committee. A Trump-owned hotel in Washington profited from Saudi business. The relationship flourished as greenhorn Trump bought into the Saudi-Israeli narrative that Iran, not Russia, was the number one international threat. Riyadh, not coincidentally, hosted Trump’s first trip abroad as president.
Trump and the Saudis have since found common cause not just over Iran, and by association Yemen and Syria, but also over Palestine. The long-delayed, much-hyped “peace plan” by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, reportedly pivots on the injection of massive financial investments by the Saudis and other wealthy Arab states. The cash would be used to “buy” Palestinian acquiescence in the permanent loss of large parts of the West Bank and their dream of a viable, fully independent separate state.
Trump’s Saudi-Israeli axis also extends to apparently quid pro quo talks to furnish Riyadh with technological capabilities that could, in theory, enable it to produce nuclear weapons – supposedly to counter Iran. In February an interim report by Democrats on the House oversight committee revealed that Trump relatives, senior officials and business cronies had secretively pursued a potentially multibillion-dollar deal – without reference, at that point, to Congress or the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Trump’s self-serving obeisance to like-minded Saudi autocrats led him to become apologist-in-chief for the brutal murder of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. It has emboldened him to ignore other egregious human rights abuses, such as the torture of Saudi women’s rights campaigners currently held in jail.
All this is rendered ever more alarming by Trump’s now systemic, vandalistic contempt for international law. Last week his administration revoked the US visa of the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court, who had been inquiring into alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan. More significantly, his recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights – a blatant pre-election gift to his fellow “strongman” Benjamin Netanyahu – blew apart international legal norms embodied in UN resolutions.
It’s all of a piece – and Trump’s grubby Yemen veto is but the latest proof. Let’s face it. This worst-ever American president, led by the nose by the Saudis, bedevilled by greed and hubris, is a threat to the world and his own country. He has gone rogue. So when will Americans bring him to heel?
Looking Back at 1919
Immigration, Race, and Women’s Rights, Then and Now
by Arnold R. Isaacs
Tom Dispatch
Reading about immigration policy, religious and racial bigotry, and terrorism fears in America in 1919 offers an eerie sense of decades melting away and past and present blurring together.
The blend isn’t exact. Bigotry was expressed much more explicitly a century ago, not in code as it usually is now. Jim Crow laws in the South and other forms of racial segregation in the rest of the country were seen by most white Americans as the normal state of affairs. In the national debate on immigration, the most inflammatory rhetoric was largely aimed at immigrants from Asia, not Latin America or the Middle East; Slavs, southern Europeans, and Jews from Eastern Europe also faced widespread hostility. Religious prejudice was typically directed at Jews and Catholics, not Muslims. Yet despite those differences, many of the underlying attitudes and the tone of the immigration argument 100 years ago were strikingly similar to those that roil our society today.
I haven’t read of anyone in 1919 saying “make America great again” or referring to unwanted immigrants’ homelands as “shithole countries.” But those exact ideas, if not precisely the same words, were commonly expressed a century ago. And some key words and phrases appeared then as now — referring to immigration as an “invasion,” for example, or disparaging immigrants as dirty, poor, and criminally inclined.
A pair of quotes illustrates the common thread, a widespread feeling in both eras that, after several decades of large-scale immigration, American identity itself was under threat.
In an article published in March 1919, the Immigration Restriction League, an influential anti-immigrant group, put it this way: “A preponderance of foreign elements destroys the most precious thing [a country] possesses — its own soul.” Fox News’s Laura Ingraham delivered exactly the same warning when she claimed in an August 2018 broadcast that immigration had contributed to “massive demographic changes” in the U.S. population, and that “in some parts of the country, it does seem like the America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore.”
Facing a wave of criticism, Ingraham unconvincingly denied that she was referring to racial or ethnic groups, but it’s impossible to find any other meaning in her words. The author of the Immigration Restriction League article was more straightforward, writing sentences like: “Races follow Gresham’s law as to money; the poorer of two kinds in the same place tends to supplant the better” and “Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat.”
The 2019 calendar is full of dates that evoke similar echoes. May 19th, for example, will mark 100 years since the 66th Congress convened in Washington with Republicans newly in control of both houses, a shift that set the course for a drastic revision of immigration laws in the 1920s.
Under the new majority, the chairmanship of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization passed to Albert Johnson of Washington, a newspaper owner and fervent supporter of the anti-immigrant movement. In his new post, Johnson, who wrote in one editorial that “the greatest menace to the Republic today is the open door it affords to the ignorant hordes from Eastern and Southern Europe,” set about creating a completely new immigration system. Under his plan, immigrants would be admitted on the basis of country-by-country quotas that heavily favored northern Europeans, while drastically reducing immigration from less favored European countries. (Asians were already banned under previous legislation.)
In spirit, Johnson’s effort reflected exactly the same view conveyed in President Trump’s recent declaration that “our country is full” and his shakeup of the Homeland Security department leadership in pursuit of new and potentially extreme immigration and border control policies.
Johnson’s initial quota bill was enacted in 1921. Three years later, Congress replaced that law with an even harsher version that he co-sponsored with Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania. The 1924 statute remained in effect for more than four decades until Congress abolished the quota system in 1965.
After the 1924 law was enacted, Reed made no bones about its motive. “The racial composition of America at the time,” he declared, “is thus made permanent.”
That story, too, reverberates in the present era. More than 90 years after the Johnson-Reed Act became law, Jeff Sessions, the Alabama senator who went on to serve as President Trump’s first attorney general, cited it as a specific and appropriate model for new reforms. “It slowed down immigration significantly,” he said in a 2015 interview. “We then assimilated through 1965 and created really the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants, and it was good for America.”
Sessions, a fervent advocate of more restrictive immigration laws, said nothing in the interview about the 1924 act’s intentionally discriminatory nature. Whether he didn’t know that part of the story or just didn’t think it mattered enough to be worth mentioning is an open question — but a telling one.
In 2019, lawmakers and Trump administration officials who are advocates for ever more restrictive immigration policies would not say out loud, and possibly not even to themselves, that their aim is to preserve “the racial composition of America.” But there can be no doubt that, consciously or not, that is exactly what they want to achieve.
Linking Immigrants and Terror — A Song We’ve Heard Before
Another similarity between 1919 and now is a phobic fear of “foreign-born terrorists.” That fear was not invented in post-9/11 America. It was alive and well 100 years ago, along with the related fear that immigrants were potential carriers of a menacing foreign ideology that rejected American principles and endangered the country’s security.
Today’s rhetoric is about the threat of violent Islamist extremism. In 1919, the scare stories were about Bolshevism and anarchism. In our era we hear ideas like candidate Trump’s 2016 proposal to ban all foreign Muslims from the country. A hundred years ago, the cry was that protecting the country required keeping out European immigrants, especially those from revolutionary Russia and other countries where radical movements were strong (or thought to be strong). If you blank out the names, though, you would be hard-pressed to tell which era you were reading about.
Russian immigrants in 1919 were suspect as possible followers of the Bolsheviks who had come to power in that country just two years before. Immigrants from Italy were associated with another kind of terrorist violence fueled by followers of an anarchist named Luigi Galleani who had emigrated to the United States in 1901.
In April and again in June 1919, a group of Galleanisti, as they were called, carried out attempted bomb attacks against prominent Americans, including John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and several dozen others. No one on the target list was killed, but one blast in the second wave of attacks did damage the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.
Afterwards, on Palmer’s orders, federal agents carried out widespread raids, rounding up not just suspected anarchists in the Italian immigrant community but leftist radicals of many stripes, as well as other activists who had opposed American participation in World War I. Immigrants from Russia, particularly Jews, were prominently targeted, reflecting fears sparked by the Bolshevik revolution. Large numbers of detainees were deported, while others were tried and imprisoned, often on transparently fabricated charges.
The Red Scare, or Palmer raids, as they came to be known, were executed more crudely but still were remarkably similar to the security sweeps, groundless prosecutions, and deportations in American Muslim communities after the September 11th attacks.
That chapter of 1919 history, incidentally, deserves to be more widely remembered than it is, because it played a decisive role in the history of two institutions that remain important today, the FBI and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The Justice Department official whom Palmer designated to oversee those 1919 raids was a 24-year-old lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover who would become the FBI’s first director some years later. The Red Scare experience clearly reverberated in his leadership of the bureau during his long tenure. Meanwhile, the ACLU was founded in 1920 in direct response to the Palmer raids, which — as the FBI’s own online historical account acknowledges — trampled heavily on civil liberties and constitutional rights.
Racial Justice — A Century Apart, Promises Unkept
On the domestic racial landscape, the parallels between 1919 and now may seem less obvious, but are nonetheless real.
In 1919, entrenched racial injustices were far cruder and crueler than they are today. Rigid segregation was unchallenged in the southern states, including laws that barred virtually all blacks from voting. Other forms of discrimination — racially restrictive property deeds and strict racial barriers in employment, for example — were standard practices in the rest of the country. Lynching was common. By one count, an African American was lynched roughly every five days in 1919, a figure that doesn’t include several hundred more deaths that year in a series of race riots that largely, though not exclusively, involved white-on-black mob violence.
The differences between that era and now are profound, but there are also some striking similarities. The historical timelines, for example, are almost poetically symmetric. In 1919, 54 years after the Civil War ended slavery, racial oppression was still pervasive and the promise of true freedom for black Americans remained a distant dream. In 2019, essentially the same amount of time has passed since the civil rights movement, the 1963 March on Washington, and the federal civil rights and voting rights laws of 1964 and 1965. But the hopes of that era, like those after the Civil War, have hardly been fully realized and racial injustices in the criminal justice system and elsewhere continue to cast a shadow over American life.
To cite one symbolic example: 1919 was the year Confederate General Stonewall Jackson’s statue was erected on a main thoroughfare in Richmond, Virginia. It still stands, despite a campaign — supported by two of Jackson’s great-great-grandsons — seeking to have it removed, along with other Confederate monuments expressly built to symbolize and celebrate the segregationist ideology and institutions of that past era.
A May 1919 essay by W.E.B. Du Bois, the famed civil rights activist, is a reminder that words from that time can still ring powerfully today. Writing about the return of several hundred thousand black soldiers who had served in the strictly segregated armed forces of World War I, DuBois saluted their service, but also delivered a lacerating indictment of the country those soldiers came home to:
“For America and her highest ideals, we fought in far-off hope; for the dominant southern oligarchy entrenched in Washington, we fought in bitter resignation. For the America that represents and gloats in lynching, disfranchisement, caste, brutality and devilish insult — for this, in the hateful upturning and mixing of things, we were forced by vindictive fate to fight also.”
Some of the particulars may sound dated, but others are entirely relevant today, even if the details differ. Blacks may no longer be systematically prohibited from voting, as they were across the south in DuBois’s time, but the more subtle present-day attacks on voting rights still give a sharp sting to his verdict: “The land that disfranchises its citizens and calls itself a democracy lies and knows it lies.”
In his closing, returning to the theme of the homecoming of black soldiers, DuBois wrote that they were right to fight for their country with all its faults, but that their fight at home was not over:
“Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that that war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.”
A hundred years after those words were written, they remain urgent: that battle has not been won and still needs to be fought.
An Earlier “Year of the Woman”
June 4, 1919, marked another milestone event of profound importance, then and now, to the nature and meaning of American democracy. On that day, Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the Constitution declaring, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
The vote came exactly 41 years, four months, and 25 days after the amendment, identically worded, was first introduced in Congress. It was ratified the following August, in time for the 1920 elections.
Approaching the centennial of that suffrage amendment, American women are in the midst of another dramatic and rapid transformation of their political role. In last year’s midterm elections, a record-setting number of women won seats in both houses of Congress, while women scored significant gains in elections for state-level offices as well. Reflecting the same trend, by mid-March of this year, no fewer than six women had announced their 2020 presidential candidacies, a lineup that no one could have imagined in any past presidential campaign.
It’s hard to guess what the women of 1919 might think today, whether they would be surprised at how far women have come in politics or disappointed that, a century later, they had not come further. But they would certainly recognize themselves and their struggles and achievements in the women of 2019 and see that the fight for equality did not end a century ago, but — like the broader struggle for a better, more just democracy — lives on.
It would take a much longer essay than this to describe all the unexpected connections and continuities between 1919 and today. The start of Prohibition, for example, a cause that fueled an intense politicization of religion (as abortion does in our time); or that, in 1919, income inequality was on the threshold of a dizzying rise over the next decade in a rich-get-richer trend very similar to the one that has reached new peaks since the turn of the twenty-first century; or the U.S. Army’s first motorized convoy across the North American continent in the summer of 1919, an early harbinger of the automobile age that would transform American life.
That expedition, organized jointly by the Army’s Motor Transport Corps and a group of private-sector interests including automobile manufacturers, was explicitly staged to get publicity and promote political support for improving a road system then so primitive that it took the convoy 62 days to travel from Washington to San Francisco at an average speed of six miles an hour. One of the soldiers who made that drive in 1919 was a 29-year-old lieutenant colonel named Dwight Eisenhower, who as president nearly 40 years later initiated the interstate highway program that is the deteriorating backbone of our national transportation system today.
History may not repeat itself but, as the proverb goes, it often rhymes. The events of 1919 are particularly rich in examples of that metaphor — a history full of moments that rhyme, in illuminating and often very surprising ways, with our own time.
Encyclopedia of American Loons
Arthur Krigsman,
Arthur Krigsman, MD, is a pediatrician and gastroenterologist best known for his controversial and widely-criticized research in which he attempts to prove that the MMR vaccine is the cause of diseases, especially autism. In fact, Krigsman may not be among the flashiest, but he is certainly among the most influential member of the antivaxx movement.
He has, in particular, written in support of the existence of autistic enterocolitis, which is, to put it mildly, not particularly widely accepted – Andrew Wakefield’s original study that tied the MMR vaccine to autism has of course been found to be fraudulent, and it was on the basis of this “research” that Wakefield coined the notion of “autistic enterocolitis”. In other words, Krigsman is fringe; but he still, to an extent, knows what he is talking about, which makes his contributions all the more insidious. In 2003, Krigsman reported similar findings as those of Wakefield, saying he found the intestines of 40 autistic children showed signs of inflammation, thus lending support to Wakefield’s ideas that MMR was related to autism and also to gastrointestinal disease. This information was, predictably enough, not formally published until 2010, and then in the pseudo-journal Autism Insights. The results were also obtained through failing to follow standard protocols and through questionable (or even scandalous) ethical behavior. Indeed, in 2004 Krigsman had to leave Lenox Hill hospital under “questionable circumstances,” and in 2005, he was fined by the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners for multiple violations, including failing to report previous regulatory sanctions by the Florida medical board, and for the disciplinary action by the Lenox Hill Hospital.
Krigsman later joined Wakefield at the antivaxx organization Thoughtful House (though left when Wakefield was forced to leave after his original study was shown to be fraudulent). He is currently a perennial expert witness in vaccine-related court cases. His participiation in these cases seem to regularly raise discussions regarding his CV and how he represents his publication list. In one case, the judge noted that he thinks Krigsman failed to be a “credible witness” and that the parents who brought the case were “misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross medical misjudgment.” In another case, the judge noted of Krigsman’s qualification for identifying a new disease like “autistic enterocolitis”, being “unrecognized by other authorities in the field, were, even when inflated, sadly lacking” and that his testimony about its existence was “speculative and unsupported by the weight of the evidence.”
Diagnosis: Though his cause has taken some fairly serious damage Krigsman is still in the running, and must still be considered dangerous.
Gene Koonce
Gene Koonce is the President of VIBE Technologies, LLC in Greeley, CO. They sell stuff, and as you might expect, the stuff Koonce is out to sell you has to do (at least according to the marketing) with healing, and with vibration, and hence we are up for some truly serious woo: “We at VIBE Technologies are committed to raising the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual vibrations of each living individual on the planet,” says the VIBE people.
One of the great inventions manufactured by VIBE technologies is the V.I.B.E. machine. How does it work? It is an “electronic device that brings the vibrational level of your body back to its natural state of being. VIBE stands for Vibrational Integrated Bio-photonic Energizer” (which I think means that it is a lamp). It is worth quoting the product description in some detail:
“Human DNA conformational changes have been previously used to measure energetic influences of subtle energy generated by healers. This new bio-assay measures direct resonances with the physical DNA as well as underlying quantum process associated with hydrogen bond formation. Experiments reported here were designed to measure possible correlations between psychotronic and biochemical measurement of DNA in real time as physical DNA rewound following thermal denaturation. Physical measurements of DNA were made in NY using a spectrophotometer and radionic measurements were made in Ohio using the Harmonic Translator. An active phone line created a connection between the two locations and allowed exact timing for simultaneous measurements using both devices.”
Oh boy. They used real phone lines. Clearly this must be taken seriously, though we were, admittedly, not aware that DNA worked the way the authors claim it works. There is also a lot of talk about energy and intent:
“Have you ever wondered why one person walking down a dark alley at night will get mugged while the previous person goes by untouched? Bad things may happen to apparently ‘good’ people and good things may happen to seemingly ‘bad’ people. This phenomena is all based upon the level of positive or negative energy that they are sending out into the Universe. You are like a radio tower that is constantly sending out a certain frequency of energy. Your thoughts and feelings together create an ‘energetic blueprint’ that is constantly being emitted out into the world. The interesting thing is that this vibration is always being reflected back to you, showing up as physical results in your life. What you send out is EXACTLY what you get back!”
I don’t think the universe works that way
What about the experiments they are talking about ? The study in question is called “Clinical study on Direct Correlations between Psychotronic and Biochemical Measures of Human DNA”, and the authors are:
– Glen Rein, who does Quantum Biology Research for The Society for Scientific Exploration, where he has also contributed “Homeopathy: Energetic Mechanism For Information Storage”; and
– Peter Moscow, who is a holistic philosophy consultant.
In other words, they are precisely the kind of “researchers” whom you’d suspect would be able to find the contraption to be effective.
In any case it seems that the V.I.B.E. machine is unavailable at present: “Currently the V.I.B.E. Machine is going through FDA clearance …,” says the company’s website, which should be translated into saying that the FDA sent Koonce a rather angry warning letter. Fortunately, “[i]n the meantime, learn how to heal your mind-body with ancient techniques in our Manifesting Manual,” which is probably just as effective and much cheaper.
Diagnosis: Since this is, by assumption, not fraud, we have to conclude that there is some serious crazy going on here. It is doubtful that the efforts of VIBE Technologies will have very much impact, however.
The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
April 17, 2019
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 publication.
Conversation No. 116
Date: Wednesday , December 10, 1997
Commenced: 3:05 PM CST
Concluded: 3:30 PM CST
RTC: How are you today, Gregory? Getting ready for Christmas?
GD: Just another day, Robert. A bit quieter. I’m sure the business people regret that they have to shut up on Christmas because they might make a few more dollars. Just a commercial venture these days. Did you ever hear ‘Green Christmas’ ? The song?
RTC: I can’t say that I have.
GD: A pointed satire in the manifest and bald-faced greed of the season, Robert. Thanksgiving is nothing but the Massacre of the Turkeys but Christmas is highlighted by the figurative ringing of the cash register bells and the crisp crackle of greenbacks. And many lovely and totally innocent trees are sacrificed for what was always a Roman pagan holiday.
RTC: Indeed?
GD: The Saturnalia. End of the year celebration to take up the extra days. Evergreens in abundance. Presents given and received.
RTC: No star in the sky?
GD: None that I have read about. And no three wise men from some unspecified place bearing gifts. The whole scene was lifted from the Romans and the Ascension of Christ taken directly from the cult of Isis which was very popular in Rome at the time.
RTC: Then you reject the historical accuracy of the New Testament?
GD: Entirely. After the fact fiction almost entirely and historically totally inaccurate. The Gospels came from a source document written about 45-50 AD and were constantly being cleaned up to reflect the changes of the day. None of them written closer to the events chronicled than about a hundred years. And the Revelations book was written by a lunatic confined on the island of Patmos which was a Roman nut house colony and about 96 AD. John was supposed to be living there with the Virgin Mary so you figure it out.
RTC: Aren’t there historical references to Jesus?
GD: None. The writings of Flavius Josephus, a renegade Jew of the time, had an inserted reference to Jesus but it has long been known as a gross ex post facto insertion by pious Christians in the second century. All fake, Robert, like the so-called Shroud of Turin. That dates to 1300.
RTC: How did the image get on it?
GD: Painted a naked model with egg tempera paint and pushed the cloth down over the body. That simple. Of course, the Vatican knows it’s a fake but they don’t discuss it because it is a big drawer for the pious of soul and incredulous of belief. In Vienna, in the cathedral of St. Stephan, we find the skull of that saint but at St. Polten, the skull of St. Stephan as a fifteen year old boy.
RTC: You’re putting me on.
GD: (Laughter) No, I’m not. And the sacred bones of St. Agnes turned out to be part of the spine of a goat. I wonder how Michelangelo would have depicted that one? With lots of muscle and a small penis. A wonderful artist but gay as a goose. And that brings me to yet another interesting aspect of the whole business. If you really look into the Gospels and try to discern the teachings of Jesus, you will realize that Jesus was an Essene. Now our modern theologians can discuss Jesus in detail and the Essenes in equal detail but never, ever at the same time. That’s would not be correct.
RTC: And why is that, pray tell?
GD: Well, because the Essenes were an all-male organization. They were communistic in their community activities with shared purses and so on and hated women. They bred with them and if the babies were male, all well and good but if female, both mother and child were expelled. They boys they kept.
RTC: There seem to be sinister overtones here, Gregory. Are you saying….?
GD: Yes, I am saying. Like the Spartans and Zulus, the Essenes were homosexuals.
RTC: Now, Jesus H. Christ, Gregory, by implication, by what you are saying and assuming you are accurate, was Jesus a fairy?
GD: It’s ‘gay’ now, but yes, that’s the way it appears. Don’t forget James the Beloved of Christ.
RTC: Are you certain about the facts…never mind your warped conclusions…the facts?
GD: Always. Yes, look it all up. None of it is connected but study the Essene cult. They were eventually shut down but it’s all there for you to find. But there never has been made a connection between Jesus and that group. Yet study the preachings of Jesus, or at least what the Gospels claim are the preachings, and then study the Essene dogmas and you at once see very clear and unmistakable parallels.
RTC: I could look all of this up but you seem to know your history. Of course you can’t say such things because you can never get it public. You do like to get involved in useless quests.
GD: No, but I like facts, not fictions. And I find it very, very entertaining that our evangelical Christians loathe and want to kill off any homosexual they can find. I doubt if any of them would even bother to do the research on the subject because a closed mind is a wonderful thing to behold. And as another interesting fact, the so-called ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ are Essene writings. Consider that the scholars have been pouring over these for years and yet only a few garbled passages have been released to the public. Why? Because the writings bear out what I just told you and our Jewish chums have agreed to shut up about it. I suppose they get more cluster bombs and nerve gas from Washington with which to civilize the Palestinians in return for said silence. I’m not joking about this, Robert.
RTC: Sadly, probably not. Jim was so determined to serve Tel Aviv’s interests that I’m afraid he has set this country up for future decades of Muslim hatred. Well, I doubt if I’ll see the results of this pandering in my lifetime.
GD: Yes, you’re no doubt right but the wheel always turns, Robert. And the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon their children.
RTC: More biblical exhortations, Gregory?
GD: The Devil can cite scripture, Robert, and your chums down in the Gerbil Palace consider me to be, at the least, a minor devil. Know the truth, Robert, and the truth shall set you free. More likely get you ten to twenty for having a kilo of smack in your glove compartment. Of course you never put it there but the alternative would be a dead baby suddenly being found in your suitcase at the airport. Societies or their control groups have a way with such things. The prisons are full of dissenters and more than a few have been gassed, electrocuted or hanged. Justice is depicted with a blindfold but I think she would be more appropriate wearing a gas mask to avoid the stench of the rotting bodies of the innocent dead sacrificed in her name.
(Concluded at 3:30 P.M. CST)