Tag Archives: cia

The Long US Government War Against Americans

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The Cointelpro Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States

by Ward Churchill* and Jim Vander Wall

South End Press (1990)

Free PDF: Cointelpro Papers

Book Review

As the authors describe, the FBI Cointelpro program first came to light in letters and memos seized when antiwar activists broke into an FBI field office in 1971 looking for draft cards. Using these and other documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the authors make it clear that the FBI has infiltrated and sabotaged every major citizens group since 1945.

The Cointelpro papers should be required reading for high school graduation. It’s essential to realize that government wire tapping, stalking, covert break-ins and infiltration of community groups didn’t start in 2002 when these activities first became “legal” under the Patriot Act. In fact, it’s extremely well documented (by University of Wisconsin professor Alfred McCoy – see Spying on Americans: the Ugly History) that it first began during the US occupation of the Philippines in 1898-1901.

This book had great personal importance in my life. There are a number of parallels between Jean Seberg’s case (see below) and the FBI harassment I began experiencing in 1987 related to my work with two former Black Panthers.** Along with four other African American activists, they had occupied an abandoned Seattle school in 1985 to transform it into a community-controlled African American Heritage Building and Cultural Center.

The section of Cointelpro Papers I found most illuminating describes the death squad activity that occurred on the Pine Ridge Sioux reservations during the 1970s – fifty-plus murders were never even investigated, much less prosecuted. Most Americans assume forced disappearances and extrajudicial assassinations only occur in Third World countries (thanks to the excellent CIA training their military officers receive at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning Georgia). Learning of scores of documented instances on US soil is extremely troubling.

The book also reproduces chilling FBI memos related to the coordinated FBI/police attack and murder of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and the attempted murder of Los Angeles Black Panther leader Geronimo Pratt (who was subsequently imprisoned for 27 years on fictitious charges). The book goes on to recount to the brave refusal of Seattle mayor Wes Uhlman to consent to a similar FBI/police raid on the Black Panthers in Seattle (see The Mayor Who Said No to the Feds).

The saddest chapter describes the sadistic campaign of personal harassment Hoover undertook against actress Jean Seberg, a white actress who provided the Black Panthers with financial support. As a result of rumor campaigns and vicious gossip columns planted by the FBI, Seberg and her partner ultimately committed suicide.

*Ward Churchill is a well-known American Indian Movement (AIM) activist and former professor of ethnic studies at University of Colorado.

**Which I describe in my memoir The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee

The State Department/CIA Psy-Op Against North Korea

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The Haircut – A North Korean Adventure

Hokusai Films (2017)

Film Review

The Haircut is a 20-minute classic Aussie satire exposing the blatant western propaganda aimed at demonizing North Korean leader Kim Jung Un. Prior to seeing this film, it never occurred to me that constant propaganda churned out about Kim Jung Un is virtually identical to the psy-ops painting Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega and Bashar al-Assad as insane monsters – and used to justify US invasion of their countries.

The video begins by reviewing jathe US-directed split of Korea in 1945 (similar to the US-British directed split of India-Pakistan and of Vietnam) to thwart the establishment of a unified nationalist socialist government unfriendly to western interests. Following the Korean War (1950-53), land reforms (ie returning land to landless peasants) continued under North Korean leader Kim Jung Il. Meanwhile South Korea was placed under the control of a US puppet dictator. South Korean troops remained under the control of the US military until 1994, a year after the South Korean people overthrew the last US-installed dictator (see The Long US War Against the Third World).

The filmmakers proceed to expose a number of specific lies the CIA, State Department and corporate media aggressively propagate to portray North Korea as a dangerous rogue state, starting with the myth that all North Korean men are required to wear their hair like Kim Jung Un. They trace this particular psy-op back to the CIA’s own Radio Free Asia – which credits the claim to “unnamed sources.”

They go on to examine the oft repeated slur about North Korean prison camps, pointing out that no country in the world comes close to the US record for imprisoning its population.

The film finishes with an actual visit to various North Korean tourist sites.

The 1972 US Coup Against Australia

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Hot Money and the Politics of Debt

RT Naylor

McGill-Queens University Press (2004)

Book Review

Hot Money is about the trillions of dollars of global financial activity that is never recorded in official economic statistics. Corporate money laundering of illegal narcotics profits is the form of “hot money” that gets the most publicity. However according to Naylor, it accounts for a relatively small proportion of “hot money” percolating through offshore banks and dummy corporations.

Most “hot money” starts out as funds generated via “legitimate” business which rich elites sebd offshore to avoid taxes or in anticipation of economic calamity or regime change. All the world’s most ruthless dictators stashed funds in Swiss banks or similar financial havens prior to being deposed.

A sizeable chunk of hot money is generated from other illegal enterprises, such as gun running, illegal arms deals, prostitution, phony charities and religious groups (eg Reverend Moon’s Unification Church and L Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology) and government agencies (eg CIA) who use “hot money” to finance coups and insurgencies.

For me, the high point of Hot Money  is the excellent history Naylor provides of the CIA role in the world heroin and cocaine trade, especially their move to make Afghanistan the major global supplier of heroin.

Nalylor also provides a detailed history about the role of the Vatican Bank as a “hot money” center, the rise and fall of Propaganda Due (P2), a secret collaboration between the CIA, Mafia and right wing Masonic lodges that infiltrated all aspects of Italian public life in the 1970s; the role of Nazi war criminals Klaus Barbie and Josef Mengele in setting up Latin American death squads and cocaine networks; the rise and fall of the two biggest CIA banks, Australia’s Nugan Hand Bank and the Bank of Commerce and Credit International;  and the importance of “hot money” in the Iran Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration illegally sold weapons to Iran to finance the Contra war against Nicaragua.

The most shocking chapter describes the role of the Nugan Hand Bank in funding a bloodless coup US Naval Intelligence carried out against Australia in 1972 – to remove a prime minister whose political views were inconsistent with US interests. Most Americans are totally unaware of this heinous attack against a close US ally. I’ve only learned of it since moving to New Zealand (Australia is New Zealand’s closest neighbor).

The Robert Kennedy Assassination: Why the Official Story is a Fake

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The Assassination of Robert Kennedy

Christopher Plumley (1992)

Film Review

This classic documentary from 1992 neatly summarizes a reasonably ironclad case that a second gunman, not Sirhan Sirhan, shot and killed Robert Kennedy in June 1968. It also reveals how the Los Angeles police (LAPD) systematically destroyed and suppressed evidence pointing to the true killer.

Filmmaker Christopher Plumley begins with the forensic and autopsy evidence. The latter shows clearly that the bullet killing Kennedy came from immediately (2-3 inches) behind, whereas Sirhan was in front of him. According to 76 eyewitnesses he was never closer than three feet to Kennedy. At the time if Sirhan’s, trial there were approximately 1,000 photos of the shooting, which the LAPD subsequently destroyed in a hospital incinerator.

Too Many Bullets

The “official” LAPD crime scene reconstruction shows eight bullets (Sirhan’s gun only held eight) hitting Kennedy three times and wounding five other victims. Both the FBI and the LAPD crime scene officer disputed the official reconstruction, based on eyewitness testimony, the autopsy report and bullet holes in the woodwork of the Ambassador Hotel pantry showing there had to be at least 12 bullets.

The autopsy alone proves Sirhan couldn’t have been the assassin. Instead of challenging the autopsy evidence at trial, his defense attorney (who seems to have been party to the conspiracy) advised him to plead diminished responsibility. To this day, Sirhan maintains he has no recollection whatsoever of the shooting.Neither the defense nor the prosecution presented any eyewitness testimony, which clearly would have exonerated the supposed deranged lone gunman.

Witness Coercion

LAPD browbeat and threatened several eyewitnesses who saw Sirhan together with another man and a woman in a polka dot dress. According to at least one witness, the woman claimed responsibility for the shooting as the couple fled the crime scene. Plumley plays a choice selection of a recorded polygraph examination of an ex-CIA polygraph specialist emotionally abusing her – as he tries to coerce her into change her story.

The CIA’s Project Artichoke

The most damaging evidence against Sirhan was a notebook in which he repeatedly scribbled nonsensical threats about killing Kennedy. The last ten minutes of the film looks at declassified evidence about the CIA’s Project Artichoke, a top secret program in which robot assassins were hypno-programed to commit murder and have no subsequent recollection of their actions.

This section features a 1974 audiotape made by Dr William Bryan Jr, who reportedly bragged about being the hypnotist who hypno-programed Sirhan. The psychologist who examined Sirhan in prison confirmed he had been hypno-programed. The latter was fired after seeking permission to deprogram him.

 

Who Really Controls America?

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The Hidden History of the United States

John Judge (1994)

 

What I find most remarkable about this 23 year old presentation by late assassination researcher John Judge is its amazing grasp of facts and concepts that have only become public knowledge with wide popular access to the World Wide Web and social media.

John begins his presentation with the assertion that secret assassinations and other conspiracies aren’t the handiwork of secret societies and cabals, but of America’s wealthy elite. He maintains the US elite is split into two factions that frequently go to war with each other via the intelligence agencies they control. The CIA is run by the old Eastern banking families, whereas military intelligence is run by the new money Southern rim economy, consisting mainly of oil, aerospace, munitions and real estate.*

Among other topics John covers in this marathon three hour presentation are

  • The CIA-run international drug trade, which he describes as the most profitable industry in the world.
  • UFOs, which he maintains are secret spy satellites operated by Air Force intelligence.
  • George Orwell’s book 1984, originally titled 1948 (as it describes government monitoring of civilian populations that was already occurring). His American (CIA-controlled) publisher forced him to change the title to 1984 when the book came out in the US (1949).
  • MK-Ultra and other CIA mind control operations – John begins by describes by describing his childhood (both his parents worked for the Pentagon) growing up in a CIA bedroom community in Virginia and the heavy use of lobotomy and ECT on many CIA wives, including the World War II intelligence operative who cracked the Eastwood Code (the encoded message forewarning the US government of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor. John also talks about CIA director Allen Dulles’s purchase of 150 million tabs of LSD in 1956 – a massive quantity that was clearly intended for mass consumption rather than research (see How the CIA Used LSD to Destroy the New Left).
  • The role of Richard Nixon and CD Jackson** (as naval intelligence operatives) in smuggling thousands of Nazi war criminals and scientists into the US to form the CIA and the US aerospace program”
  • Evidence (eg missing nuclear code books from all Strategic Air Command bombers) indicating that JFK’s murder was a coup authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the failed assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981 was an attempted coup.
  • Evidence linking notorious cult figures linking notorious cult figures – Charles Manson, Jim Jones (Jonestown), David Koresh (Waco) and others to US intelligence.

In Part 2, which launches automatically at the end of Part 1, John discusses his research into Jonestown, which he describes as a secret US intelligence concentration camp and slave colony, (which was 90% African American), and his work with his mentor, the late Mae Brussell (see Mae Brussell: Forgotten Superhero). Brussell, who subscribed regularly to 150 publications, had identified key figures in the shadow government and followed their movements closely. Based information she garnered, she gave Ethel Kennedy (in 1968) five days about her husband Robert’s imminent assassination and Mary Jane Kopechne’s mother (in 1969) three days warning of her daughter’s murder.

*Although he hails from New York, Donald Trump is most closely linked with “Southern rim” real estate interests, which would explain the current war the CIA and the CIA-controlled media are waging against him.

**CD Jackson was a psychological warfare specialist who played a major role in creating Radio Free America and Radio Free Europe and Operation Mockingbird (the operation enabling CIA control of America’s major publishing and media outlets). In 1960 he became publisher of Life magazine.

***Kopechne allegedly drowned while a passenger in Senator Ted Kennedy’s car, this Chappaquiddick incident purportedly used by his enemies to destroy his presidential ambitions.

Ukrainian Soldiers Caught Planting Car Bombs in Donbass – Guess Who Trained Them?

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The “mystery” behind the long list of assassinated rebel leaders in Donbass might now be solved.

Two Ukrainian soldiers have been captured with weapons and bomb-making materials by Lugansk authorities.

The two soldiers, both allegedly part of Ukraine’s Special Forces, confessed to assassinating the rebel commander Oleg Anashchenko last month.

Partial list of prominent rebel leaders who have been assassinated:

  • May 23, 2015: Luhansk rebel leader Aleksey Mozgovoy is assassinated in East Ukraine (his car was ambushed).
  • October 16, 2016: Donetsk rebel leader Arsen Pavlov, aka “Motorola”, is assassinated by a bomb.
  • February 8, 2017: Donetsk rebel leader Mikhail Tolstykh, aka “Givi”, is assassinated by some sort of explosive projectile or bomb.

 

 

Putin: A Russian Primetime TV Documentary

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Exclusive: Fantastic Russian Prime Time 2 HR Putin documentary

Masterskaya (2016)

English subtitles

Film Review

This film, despite being an obvious pro-Putin propaganda piece, provides interesting historical background on his role in thwarting western efforts to turn Russia into a third world sweatshop.

The beginning of the documentary, describing the plans laid by Putin’s cabinet to remove the oligarchs from power (see How Putin Outwitted the Russian Oligarchs ), confirm what I have always suspected: that his rise to global prominence relies heavily on his ability to choose skilled advisors.

This documentary also clearly conveys that he’s as much a populist as Donald Trump – though a far more skilled one. An amazingly effective speaker, his ability to influence and manage large groups is unparalleled among world leaders.

Although he tends to be extremely guarded about disclosing personal feelings, the film contains a few revealing clips from TV interviews. In one, he admits to his mistaken belief as a KGB agent that political conflict with the West would dissolve once Russians abandoned their Communist ideology. He now realizes that Russia will always have tension with the West based on competing geopolitical interests (ie competing demands for resources, markets, labor etc).

I was also intrigued to hear him discuss his enormous debt to teacher and mentor Anatoly Sobchak. Sobchak was a legal scholar and politician who co-wrote the constitution of the Russian Federation and was the first democratically elected mayor of St Petersburg. He died under suspicious circumstances in 2000.

The film’s main weakness is its total dismissal of Russia’s opposition movement as being too chaotic and disorganized for Putin to take seriously. While there is good reason to suspect CIA involvement in various anti-Putin street protests, it seems to be there would also be legitimate protest against the enormous obstacles to registering new political parties in Russia, as well as major censorship by the mainly state-controlled media.

I was also irritated by the repeated emphasis on Putin being a self-sacrificing leader with no interest whatsoever in personal wealth or power. According to various former insiders, Putin has immense personal wealth and may be one of the richest men in the world. See Putin Corruption: Five Things We Learned About the President’s Secret Wealth

 

How Putin Outwitted the Russian Oligarchs

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The Rise and Fall of the Russian Oligarchs

Directed by Alexander Gentelev (2006)

Film Review

The Rise and Fall of the Russian Oligarchs focuses on the scandalous period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which 100 opportunist oligarchs destroyed the economy of a relatively wealthy country (with the help of the CIA, USAID, the IMF and the World Bank) by seizing $20 billion of assets for roughly a billion dollars. The admitted goal of these Russian oligarchs (and their CIA supporters) was to privatize as many industries as possible behind the scenes before the Communist majority in the Russian parliament could consolidate power and stop them. The documentary’s overarching theme concerns Putin’s rise to power in 1999, which is credited for saving the Russian economy via his shrewd confrontation and defeat of these oligarchs.

This Russian-made documentary focuses on three specific oligarchs: Mikhail Chernoy, who now lives in exile in Israel; Theodore Gusinski, who now lives in exile in Spain, and Boris Beresovksy, who now lives in exile in London. It’s divided into two parts.

Part 1

Part 1 describes how these men used privatization schemes introduce by the last Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev (under Perestroika – 1985-1991) to acquire a variety of Russian assets for pennies on the dollar. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many state-owned factories were threatened with closure, the Russian government initially privatized them through an ill-conceived voucher scheme. Ownership in the factories was broken up into millions of shares in the form of vouchers distributed to all Russian citizens. Because they had no other source of income, many were forced to sell their vouchers cheaply for food. Others were tricked into “investing” them in phoney investment schemes as their owners sold on their hoard of vouchers and pocketed the proceeds.

Chernoy wound up with hundreds of thousands of these vouchers, which he used to buy up Russia’s aluminum industry.

Using western financing, Gusinski would form Russia’s first commercial TV network in 1993. In 1994 Berezovsky (again with the help of western financing) would buy Russian state TV for a few million dollars. Joining with other oligarchs, they skillfully used their media monopoly to promote their privatization agenda.

Part 1 also covers the 1991 attempted coup against Gorbachev (a desperate attempt by the Communists to reverse rapid privatization); Yeltsin’s successful (CIA-backed) coup in 1993, in which he used the military to attack the Russian parliament, effectively dissolving parliament and the constitutional court; and the vast human misery caused by the “shock therapy” Wall Street imposed Russia as they looted their economy. This, in turn, would lead to escalating mass protests demanding a return of the Communists to power.

Part 2

Part 2 focuses on the oligarch (and CIA) financed and controlled election of Boris Yeltsin in 1996 – as well as the direct role the oligarchs assumed in government following Yeltsin’s victory against his more popular Communist opponent.

The Russian economy reached breaking point in 1998. By then, the Russian government had lost so main state-owned industries (75%) that it could no longer pay its debts and Russian banks froze depositors assets.

This, along with Yeltsin’s failing health, would lead to a political crisis, resulting in Vladimir Putin’s appointment as acting president initially supported by the oligarchs – in 1999. Following Putin’s election in 2000, he quickly turned on oligarch supporters, who expected to control his government as they had Yeltsin’s.

Then, as now, he excelled at media manipulation, capitalizing on popular fear of Chechen terrorism to heighten his popularity. He also shrewdly confronted individual oligarchs for tax evasion and other financial crimes during televised cabinet meetings.

This was followed up by security raids and harassment, arrest – and in some cases imprisonment – to encourage numerous oligarchs to relinquish their ill-gotten shares to state control.

In this way, Putin essentially ended Wall Street’s wholesale exploitation of the Russian economy and the Russian people – and Wall Street and the US military-intelligence complex have never forgiven him for it.

The documentary’s main weakness is its failure to explore the major role Wall Street and US intelligence played in the destruction of the Russian economy between 1991-2000. Good background on this at the following links:

The Harvard Boys do Russia

US Meddling in 1996 Russian Elections in Support of Boris Yeltsin

USA Russia

The Plunder of Russia in the 1990s

Reflections on the Overthrow of Communism – Michael Parenti

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Reflections on the Overthrow of Communism

Michael Parenti (2009)

Michael Parenti maintains that the Soviet Union didn’t collapse of its own accord in 1991 – that it was overthrown by the US and their allies.  He details the US-backed coup undertaken by Boris Yeltsin’s in 1993 when the Russian parliament refused to approve his extreme market-based reforms. Parenti also discusses the extreme misery Wall Street elites and the State Department inflicted on the Russian people in the effort (prior to Putin’s rise to power) to transform their country into a third world sweatshop. He highlights the massive increase in gang inequality and crime, and the increase in gender inequality (as the right to maternity leave, day care, divorce and abortion were stripped from the Russian constitution), sexual harassment, domestic violence and murder of women by their husbands.

The US Left’s Virulent Anticommunism

Parenti freely acknowledges that Soviet citizens sacrificed civil liberties for economic democracy, ie a society in which all citizens are  lifted out of poverty and enjoy free health care and education, subsidized housing and public transport and an absolute guarantee against brutal exploitation. He contrasts this with life in the US, where working people enjoy neither economic democracy nor civil liberties. He’s also scathingly critical of the American left (he mentions Noam Chomsky by name), which is much more virulently anti-communist than their right wing counterparts.

He goes on to detail serious weaknesses of the Soviet system, which he believes contributed to its demise. Overall he feels the Soviet economic system suffered from an absence of independent analysis. While Karl Marx offers a thorough critique of capitalism, he has no counterpart to critique the socialist/communist model.

The Human Nature Debate

Where Parenti and I part company is is contention that “pure socialism” (ie total abolition of the state) is impossible. He makes the argument that if workers run everything, it’s impossible to accumulate enough surplus value to finance an army to 1) to break the stranglehold of the capitalist class and 2) to defend against counter-revolution. He also maintains a state is necessary to protect against the greedy, acquisitive nature of human beings.

These views are also contradicted by decades of sociological research that human beings (like all primates) are hard wired to be social animals and naturally inclined towards cooperation and interdependence (see Human Nature: Cultural or Genetic). There is also strong evidence that much of the greed and antisocial behavior that characterizes the capitalist system stems from traumatic child rearing styles.

Trump: Expanding the Parameters of Permissible Debate

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Lies Wars and Empire

By Michael Parenti (2007)

In this presentation, Michael Parenti focuses on the science of media manipulation and mass indoctrination. He makes his most important point at the end: mass indoctrination never works perfectly. Spontaneous skepticism tends to be a natural outcome of a steady diet of media propaganda. I suspect this healthy skepticism is a major reason why Trump’s attacks on the corporate media have been so popular – and why counterattacks by US intelligence and the mainstream media have been so savage.

Trump is the highest profile politician to ever publicly challenge the official version of 9-11, the job-killing effects of free trade treaties such as TPP and NAFTA, the threats to democratic process posed by investing power in a private central bank (the Federal Reserve) and the long term safety of America’s multiple vaccination regime in children.

Parenti begins with an explanation why, in most cases, peoples’ beliefs are totally impervious to facts. He reminds us that our perceptions are shaped by a number of factors beyond our control, particularly income, status, background assumptions and disinformation.

He maintains that what passes for objectivity in the mainstream media is really conformity of bias – nearly always in favor of corporate capitalism and the status quo. Owing to this emphasis on conformity, expressing a dissenting viewpoint viewed as a radical activity, mainly because it helps expose and expands the boundaries of permissible debate. Because the corporate media only allows an extremely narrow range of debate, you will never see a open discussion of evidence implicating the government in 9-11 or  the JFK, Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King assassinations.

This lecture examines numerous world events deliberately censored or distorted by the corporate media:

  • The war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic (who died under suspicious circumstances in prison in 2006).
  • The stolen 2004 election (in which election fraud in Ohio, New Mexico, Florida and Arizona wrongly awarded the electoral vote to Bush).*
  • The repeated claim that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 – the Afghan government requested assistance from the Soviets to restore order in the face of a major CIA destablization campaign.
  • Saddam Hussein’s 40-year role as a CIA asset in the coup overthrowing Iraqi prime minister Abd al-Karim Qasim and declaring war on Iran.

*See Stolen Elections