Category Archives: Hidden history

Meet Allen Dulles: Fascist Spymaster

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Meet Allen Dulles: Fascist Spymaster

James Corbett (2015)

Film Review

A comprehensive biography of infamous CIA director Allen Dulles, this film is a treasure trove of hidden history. Dulles ran the CIA from 1953 until Kennedy fired him (in 1961) over the disastrous CIA invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs.

Prior to watching this documentary, I was unaware of Dulles’ long time collaboration with fascists of all stripes. For example, Dulles

  • (with his brother John Foster Dulles) was a founding member of the corporate elite round table group the Council on Foreign Relations (1921).
  • collaborated with George W’s grandfather Prescott Bush and W Averell Harriman to use Union Bank Company to launder Wall Street monies that financed Hitler’s military arsenal.
  • as a member of the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA’s precursor), served as the primary architect of the program to secretly bring Nazi war criminals to the US – where they became CIA spies, military analysts and space and mind control scientists.
  • with John Foster, represented the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the United Fruit Company as partners in the powerful Wall Street law firm Cromwell and Sullivan.
  • instigated coups against Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) as a personal vendetta when their democratically elected leaders acted contrary to the financial interests of corporate clients.
  • as a Warren Commission member following the JFK assassination, demanded records destroyed relating to Oswald’s CIA employment.*

*The order was foiled by a Warren Commission staffer who secretly retained a copy.

 

The Lust for Libya: How a Nation Was Torn Apart

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The Lust for Libya: How a Nation Was Torn Apart

Al Jazeera (2018)

Film Review

This is a two part documentary about the 2011 US/UN invasion of Libya, which triggered its descent into civil war.

Part 1 is about pre-independence Libya and Muamar Gaddafi’s rise to power during the 1969 revolution. Prior to Gaddafi’s 2011 overthrow, Libya had no history as an independent state. It was continuously occupied from ancient times, by Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Italians and eventually a French/British and a British/US consortium.

Inspired by the pan-Arab movement started by Egyptian president Gamal Nasser, in 1969 Gaddafi led a successful revolution to oust the pro-US government. He went on to close the US/UK military bases and nationalize their oil companies and the Italian banks that controlled Libya’s economy.

With the 1973 oil embargo, the value of Libya’s oil doubled overnight. Gaddafi used the country’s new found wealth to rapidly build up Libya’s decaying infrastructure, as well as to provide free health care, housing and education (through university) for all residents.

Following Nasser’s death in 1970, Gaddafi sought to enshrine himself as the “man of the masses” who would unite the Arab world. In this role, he supported numerous international liberation struggle, including the Irish Republican Army, the African National Congress and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He also developed a bizarre and grandiose habit of claiming responsibility for terrorist bombings (including CIA/NATO Operation Gladio false flag bombings*).

In 1973 he revoked the Libyan constitution and ruled independent decree. Although he established thousands of Jamahiriya (people’s committees), they had no real power independent of the Libyan  military. The analysts interviewed here view Gaddafi as a benevolent dictator who was genuinely concerned about the Libyan people but lacked any education or training in setting up democratic institutions of power.

Worried a prolonged Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) would hinder US access to Middle East Oil, the US would launch its first covert regime change operations against Gaddaffi in 1981. These included a 1981 assassination attempt (by bombing his palace) in 1981, as well as an effort to frame Libya for the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am passenger jet over Lockerbie Scotland.

The incident would lead to UN sanctions against Libya from 1992 until 2003, when Gaddafi signed an agreement he would end his nuclear program, assume financial responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and assist the CIA in fighting global terrorism.

*Operation Gladio is the code name for a CIA/NATO backed paramilitary network that carried out thousands of false flag terrorist operations in Cold War Europe. The goal of these operations was to justify repressive government legislation against grassroots anti-capitalist organizers. It was exposed in a 1992 BBC documentary. See 1965-75: The Decade that Nearly Dismantled Capitalism

 

The Failed 2011 Arab Spring: Extreme Poverty and Repression in Egypt

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Zabbaleen: Trash Town

RT (2014)

Film Review

This film offers a rare glimpse into how little life has changed for Egypt’s poor following the 2011 Arab Spring “revolutions.”

It specifically concerns the Cairo dump and the tens of thousands of people who live and work there collecting and sorting garbage for Egypt’s capitol. Most of the residents are Coptic Christians, but there are also Muslim families.

Men with trucks work in teams of 12 to collect trash from their assigned neighborhoods. Sorting and recycling metal plastic is also considered men’s. The plastic is cleaned and ground into powder to be sold to factories that remold it into plastic utensils and containers. Women mainly sort food waste and distribute it to chicken and pig farmers.* Children begin working at age 10-12, unless the family is destitute and needs the income of younger siblings.

Zabbaleen is largely self-governing and self-supporting. Ten percent of the community are managers and fairly well off. The managers refer disputes and criminal acts to a group of elders to resolve. Zabbaleen residents despise the police and army.

Many residents are descendants of Zabbaleen families engaged in this work for 40 or more years. The community has their own butchers, grocery stores and schools – though most children are too busy working to attend.

The average life expectancy in Zabbaleen is 55. This contrasts with an overall Egyptian life expectancy of 70.9.

*Raising pigs was banned for the two years the Muslim Brotherhood ran the Egyptian government.

Hidden History: How Bush Sr and Clinton Sabotaged the Reagan-Gorbachev Nuclear Disarmament Treaty

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Gorbachev and the Opportunity for Peace Wasted

DW (2018)

Film Review

This is a fascinating documentary featuring a rare appearance by former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. It begins by examining a mutual disarmament treaty Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan negotiated in 1987. Reagan was clearly acting in opposition to the reigning military-industrial-complex, just as Trump is in his negotiations with North Korean president Kim Jong-un. This seems to be why Reagan waited to launch disarmament talks until he safely won re-election in 1984.

The arms reduction treaty had scarcely come into effect when Gorbachev’s Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring),, in concert with CIA meddling, triggered the rapid break-up of the Soviet block. By 1990, thanks to Gorbachev’s commitment to non-intervention in Soviet allies’ internal affairs, the Berlin wall had fallen and Communist governments had been overthrown in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania.

An August 1991 coup, led by (CIA-backed) hard line Communists, failed but significantly weakened the Soviet Union by strengthening the hand of CIA-backed (see US Agents Helped Yeltsin Break Coup) Russian president Boris Yeltsin.

Within months, Yeltsin conspired with the presidents of Kazakstan, Belarus and Ukraine to declare independence simultaneously with the Russian Federation. The move would lead to Gorbachev’s resignation in December 1991.

The EU, concerned about preserving the Reagan-Gorbachev arms reduction treaty, proposed a number of countermeasures to improve Russian economic stability. Among them were a proposal to integrate Russia into western Europe by admitting them to the G7 and the NATO missile defense strategy and granting them $30 billion in aid. All were vetoed by the Bush senior and his successor Bill Clinton in favor of NATO expansion.

*In his book Manifest Destiny, F William Engdahl talks about the Enterprise, a private intelligence/security network created by George H W Bush and run by Oliver North and Richard Secord. In addition to organizing illegal weapons sales to Iran (see Iran-Contra Affair), the Enterprise recruited corrupt KGB generals to help  bring down Gorbachev’s government. According to Engdahl, these generals and their young proteges would become Russia’s corrupt billionaire oligarchs. The Enterprise financed the KGB generals’ coup against Korbachev in 1991 and installed Boris Yeltsin as president. The latter allowed the oligarchs, with the help of George Soros, Jeffrey Sachs and other Harvard economists to loot Russia exactly as they had looted Poland. See Russia’s Criminal Oligarchy: The Role of Bush Senior and the CIA).

 

How Offshore Tax Havens Enslave the World

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The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire

Directed by Michael Oswald (2017)

Film Review

The Spider’s Web is about the network of secret offshore tax havens that has allowed Britain to financially enslave much of the Third World. The film begins by describing the special status of the City of London corporation, a special enclave within greater London that services as Britain’s financial district.

The City of London has a private police force and private courts, Unable to conquer this area of London during the 1066 invasion, William the Conqueror negotiated a treaty making it virtually self-governing.

After an attack on the British pound during and after the 1956 Suez Crisis (see Suez: Britain’s Illegal War Against Egypt), the British government implemented two important measures to stem the hemorrhage of pounds overseas: 1) it temporarily restricted foreign investment and 2) it created a City of London eurodollar market to accept foreign investments in US dollars.

Keen to escape US regulation, US banks flocked to set up international operations in London. At the same time, City of London bankers augmented their eurodollar market by drafting secret and illegal regulations to make the Cayman Islands (still a British colony) a secret haven for tax evasion and money launderers.

Eagerly creating similar offshore havens in Bermuda, Virgin Islands, Jersey and other colonies, by 1997 City of London banks controlled 90% of all international loans via their eurodollar market. The filmmakers blame the creation of this vast offshore banking network for the “financialization” of both the US and UK economies (ie the decision by US/UK banks in the mid-seventies by major US/UK banks  to invest in financial instruments rather than manufacturing).

Africa is the region most heavily exploited by this illegal financial network. Between 1970 and 2008, African elites in cahoots with multinational corporations moved $944 billion in oil, gold, diamond and rare earth revenues into offshore tax havens. This was five times the amount of global debt ($177 billion) Africa owed in 2008.

The most interesting part of the film is an interview with former Chase Manhattan economist Michael Hudson about the State Department approaching him in 1967 for his help setting up a US offshore tax haven to stem the flow of US dollars overseas for Vietnam-related military expenditures.

1968 Global Revolts: Derailed by US Intelligence?

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1968 Global Revolt – Part 4 World Wars

DW (2018)

Film Review

The final episode of this series has a dual focus: the 1968-71 uprisings that occurred in Japan, Chile, Brazil and France and the birth of the women’s, gay liberation and environmental movements in the US.

Like the earlier three episodes, there’s no real unifying thread in Part 4. It begins by focusing on the birth of the Japanese Red Army, from the perspective of ex-Japanese Red Army member filmmaker Tamotu Adachi. The first global “terrorist” network, the ideologically confused Japanese Red Army eerily foreshadows the birth of Al Qaeda and ISIS thirty years later.

Although the Red Army’s links to US intelligence are less well-established than those of Al Qaeda, ISIS (and Italy’s Red Brigades and Germany’s Baader-Meinhoff Gang – see 1968 Global Revolt and the Brutal 1969 Crackdown), one time US intelligence asset Lyndon Larouche called attention to their CIA links as early as September 1974 (see Japan’s Red Army Reactivated).

After becoming a filmmaker, Adachi traveled with the Japanese Red Army to Palestine where they engaged in military exercises with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. There, along with German radicals and volunteers from the Irish Republican Army, they smeared themselves with blood-red berry juice and acted out a number of fake battles for the benefit of journalists and filmmakers.

Part 4 also examines the popular overthrow of Chile’s dictator, Brazil’s failed uprising, and successful uprisings by French and Japanese farmers to prevent US military base expansion.

The film concludes with a brief history of US activists who parted company with the antiwar movement to form the women’s liberation, gay liberation and environmental movement. As historian Tariq Ali points out near the end, the 1968 uprisings in the US and the UK were primarily libertarian and focused on individual freedoms. This possibly explains why they took a much different direction in other countries.*

*The influence of US intelligence in guiding this direction can’t be ruled out, see How the CIA Used LSD to Destroy the New Left , Did the CIA Use Gloria Steinem to Subvert the Feminist Movement ,  A C-SPAN Talk About Gloria Steinem and Other CIA Anomalies

Hidden History: The UN Mediator Assassinated by Jewish Terrorists in 1948

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Killing the Count – Part 2 Mediation and Assassination

Al Jazeera (2014)

Film Review

Part 2 begins by tracing the development of Palestine’s Jewish terrorist organizations opposed to British occupation. The first, the Haganah, was created in the late 1930s when Britain severely restricted immigration of European Jews to Palestine. The Irgun and Stern Gang (aka Lehi) were more militant splinter groups of Haganah. Although all three committed bombings, assassinations and other terrorist atrocities against British troops and Arab civilians, the Stern Gang was by far the most violent. Itzak Shamir, a prominent member, would become prime minister of Israel in 1977.

In November 1947, ongoing Jewish terrorism led the newly formed UN General Assembly to recommend the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish regions. Jewish extremists rejected this proposal – their goal was to capture all of Palestine (aka “Greater Israel” as defined in Biblical terms). Haganah responded to partition by commencing military operations against the UN-assigned Arab areas.

Continued Jewish terrorism ultimate forced British troops to withdraw from Palestine on May 14, 1948. Although technically Palestine was now ruled by UN mandate, Jewish militants proclaimed territories under their control as the State of Israel. Within hours, the Egyptian air force bombed the Jewish-controlled regions, and troops from Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Iraq crossed into Palestine.

Based on his skillful negotiation with the Nazis to free concentration camp prisoners (see Jewish Terrorism and the Creation of the State of Israel/), the UN Security Council appointed Swedish diplomat Folke Bernodote to negotiate a truce and eventual peace in Palestine. It was Bernodotte who invented the “shuttle diplomacy” that would make Nixon security advisor Henry Kissinger so famous.

Bernodotte visited Israel and all the Arab capitols multiple time to draw up peace terms. The initial conditions he set called for Palestine’s Jewish and Arab territories to be contiguous (unlike the General Assembly partition, which created isolated Jewish and Arab regions across Palestine), the right of Arab refugees to return to land Jews had confiscated and for Jerusalem to be in the Arab-controlled state.

The latter was a fatal error* that Bernadotte subsequently rectified by calling for Jerusalem to be a UN-administered zone.

It was too late. The Stern Gang brutally assassinated him within hours after his final arrival in Israel.

Although members of Ben-Gurion’s government could personally identify the killers, they were never brought to justice.

*Obviously Bernodotte never attended a Seder (Passover celebration), in which the pronouncement “next year in Jerusalem” concludes the ritual.

 

Hidden History: Jewish Terrorism and the Creation of the State of Israel

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Killing the Count – Part 1 The White Buses

Al Jazeera (2014)

Film Review

Killing the Count is a two-part documentary about the 1949 assassination of UN mediator Foulke Bernodotte. Part 1 covers Swedish baron Bernodotte’s daring rescue of 30,000 concentration camp victims during the final year of World War II. Of the 30,000, 10,000 were Jews and 20,000 were Scandinavian resistance fighters arrested following the Nazi occupation of Norway and Denmark.

On learning of Hitler’s order to exterminate all concentration camp prisoners when it became clear Germany would lose the war, Bernadotte used his friendship with Himler’s personal physician to arrange a meeting with the SS leader responsible for running the camps.

Bernadotte, an exceedingly shrewd negotiator, persuaded Himler to allow the Swedish Red Cross to move Scandinavian prisoners from Germany’s interior to Neuengame, a concentration camp close to the Danish Border.

The Swedish Red Cross had a detailed list of all the Scandinavian prisoners detained in German camps. In part owing to Sweden’s strong Nazi leanings,* their Red Cross had been  to deliver food parcels provided they were personally addressed to individual prisoners.

By the time Bernadotte successfully organized a convoy of buses to transport 10,000 Scandinavian prisoners to Neungame, Allied troops had crossed the German border and most SS members had deserted. Because there were no Nazis to stop him, Bernadotte now used his buses to evacuate the Scandinavian prisoners and as many Jewish prisoners as he could rescue from Neungame and the women’s and children’s concentration camp Ravensbrook. He was subsequently honored by a number of Jewish organizations for his effort.

In 1948 the UN Security Council would him to negotiate a settlement in the Jewish-Palestinian war in Palestine.

*Although technically a “neutral” country, the Swedish monarch provided the Third Reich with iron exports critical for their armaments industry, as well as allowing Hitler’s Navy to cross their territorial waters and his bombers to cross their air space.

 

 

https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2014/06/killing-count-20146282143931887.html

 

 

 

Hidden History: Israel’s Persecution of Jordan Valley Bedouins

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The Last Shepherds of the Jordan Valley

Al Jazeera (2012)

Film Review

This documentary depicts the systematic persecution of Bedouin shepherds in the Jordan Valley by the Israeli government. Although their ancestors have farmed the occupied West Bank for thousands of years, Israel is determined to drive these Palestinians from their homeland because the Jordan River is the main source of much of Israel’s water. Since 1997, the Israel Defense Force has routinely demolished their homes, shot their sheep and/or arrested them without charge.

The majority of Palestinians fled the Jordan Valley during the 1967 war. Israel prohibits those who left from returning. Ten thousand remained. Although many of their descendants have been driven out, at present the Jordan Valley is home to 60,000 Palestinians.

The Israeli government has illegally confiscated most of the shepherds’ lands for a military firing range. They have also allowed Israeli settlers to build illegal settlements.

Local families are forbidden to draw water from their own well, which is now deemed the property of the Israeli military.

Instead they must travel 27 km and pay $7 per cubic meter to buy water from Israel.

Since the documentary was first released in 2012, Israel has arrested one of the women for participating in its filming.

Hidden History: Life Inside a Palestinian Refugee Camp

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Seven Days in Beirut

Al Jazeera (2018)

Film Review

Al Jazeera has been running an excellent series of documentaries about the daily lives of ordinary Palestinians. Seven Days in Beirut is about a British-Italian journalist who spends a week in the Burj Barajneh refugee camp in southern Lebanon. Many Palestinians who were evicted from their homes by Zionist paramilitary forces in 1948 are in permanent limbo in crowded Lebanese refugee camps.

The family the journalist stays with have lived in the camp, which has the appearance of a overcrowded favela or slum, ever since they were forced to flee Palestine in 1948.

Because Lebanon refuses to grant citizenship to the 18,000 Palestinian refugees who live in the camp, they can’t own land outside the refugee camp, work in the professions they have trained for (medicine, nursing, education, etc) or receive free health care and education guaranteed Lebanese citizens.

Electricity is delivered to their tenements via low hanging tangles of power cables that pose a constant danger of electrocution. Finding work is extremely difficult, and residents support themselves by working in shops and cafes, working as cleaners and singing at weddings.

There is one medical clinic (funded by the UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees)*  serving 25,000 Palestinian and Syrian refugees. However residents must make advance cash payment ($US 7,000) if they require hospitalization.

The UNRWA also funds a school inside the camp for children.

All the refugees interviewed for the film believe they will eventually return to their homes in Palestine. They place great store in education to prepare their children for this day.

*The future of UNRWA, which relied heavily on US funding, is very uncertain since Trump discontinued it a few weeks ago.