Where do we even start with this mess? How did America get to this point – where we are in danger of being over-run by the allies of a rogue intelligence agency that we are powerless against? How did the USA go from being the champion of the free world to being the greatest threat to the peace and security of its own citizens, and instant death from remote-control-in-the-skies for everyone else on earth?

It’s tempting to start out with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but the story starts with the creation of the CIA and the National Security State, founded in 1947 by President Harry Truman to address the fact that, with the war against fascism over, it was time for the US government to rid itself of communists and other socialists who had poured into President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. The fear being that communists loyal to Russia’s revolutionary leader and communist party chairman Joseph Stalin would help him gradually transform the US into a communist state.

Government and business leaders wanted to ensure that there were “trusted people” in charge of things here, behind the scenes. These unaccountable, largely unknown people would be free to pursue their own agenda, without interference from government oversight and regulation. They set up fake businesses and NGOs. They hired CIA operatives to help facilitate business overseas and converted media mouthpieces to their cause.

They justified this by making sure the world knew of the dangers of “creeping socialism.” For years, the world was able to watch the Congress of the United States, along with their partners in business, destroy people’s lives by accusing them of being communists. Sometimes the accusations were merely petty acts of malice against people who had rejected the committee chairman’s homosexual advances  – this happening in an era much more judgemental and less accepting of ANY expression of sexuality, much less one which many people could not comprehend.

Despite the fact that several courageous individuals succeeded in exposing the gross abuse of power of the anti-communists (even today, one of the more vocal anti-communists’  name is used to describe persecution for political gain – “McCarthyism.”), several of them retained power, and even increased this power in the decades afterwards – both Richard Nixon (HUAC) and Ronald Reagan (anti-communist president of the Screen Actors Guild) eventually took over the White House (in possession of the CIA since the intelligence/industry coup that had JFK assassinated), largely on the political clout earned in the 1940′s and 50′s anti-communist witch-hunts.

The longterm consequences of the 1963 coup has been a nation in a state of perpetual warfare. At first, the war was against the Communist Menace, anywhere on the globe (Greece, Iran, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, the list goes on…). After the Soviet Union collapsed – as it was always intended to – the old Cold Warriors needed a new boogeyman to seek out and destroy anywhere an oil field or other valuable natural resources were in danger of being stolen from American corporations by foreigners.

However, in the 1970s a glitch in the system developed. The American people had become unwilling to finance and die for wars abroad, being fought for very unclear purposes. Two strategies were developed to compensate for this. First, blue-blood businessmen helped the CIA set up their own drug-running operations. This would give them international contacts, with people who would do just about anything for money. It would also give the CIA a ways of building a “black budget” of money from drug-running operations, with the good people of the United States and their elected representatives none the wiser.

Also, this allowed industries to develop their own private military and intelligence businesses. Both to set up their own smuggling networks, and to deal with those pesky foreigners who kept trying to utilize their nation’s natural resources for the benefit of the local population. How dare they!

This privatization and outsourcing of warfare for the benefit of multinational corporations picked up steam under the guidance of President James Earl Carter, who came up with the brilliant idea of recruiting and arming the most intolerant and violent people to be found on Earth and sending them to fight against the Soviet army in Afghanistan, rather than risk an outright war if the US were involved in some kind of official capacity. These mujahadeen eventually became the current crop of Afghan warlords and Opium barons. We are allegedly at war with this group, forever. We are currently arming this group. Not the exact same people, of course – but the ideology (or “theology” if you want to legitimize their insane version of Islam) remains the same. They exist to cause violence and chaos in countries not under the direct control of one of “their” Imans. There are no nations that fit this description, and the Holy Terror Army (a name i just made up and will now use to refer to any fundamentalist religion that resorts to extreme violence to impose it’s version of “god’s” law on nonbelievers) is spreading nightmarish violence around the world.

Prior to this current age of holy terror, acting President Ronald Reagan expanded the proxy wars to Angola, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Cambodia, and Grenada. His successor invaded Panama and Kuwait. And dirty old man Bill Clinton gave al Qaeda it’s biggest test, installing the CIA’s Holy Terror Army into the former Yugoslavia.

After that, the CIA/al Qaeda alliance was ready for the big time, and despite having trained, funded, and armed the Holy Terror Army, President Slick Willy justified military actions abroad by claiming they were targeting the workings of Holy Terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. This was the reason given for striking a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan being built to provide cheap prescription drugs to a continent being decimated by AIDS. Millions of Africans have died over the years due to this, and not just of AIDS - they’ve died of numerous maladies that could have been treated with pharmaceuticals, but the patent-holders demand prices that few people in Africa can afford.

Which brings us to 9/11/2001, the invasion of a country for fun and profit, and the start of a second perpetual war, the first one being the war on drugs, which the U.S. intentionally escalates by selling arms to drug cartels.

So, the CIA has assassinated an American President, set up an international drug-running operation which employs the most insanely violent people imaginable, and conducts wars with proxy armies which it cannot control, only finance. And the Government continues to use the war on drugs as a pretext to wage war on its own citizens, despite a proven will by the American public to legalize Ganja. But, this isn’t enough.

The war on terror has to be continually justified, despite a proven inability to militarily defeat a state of mind. Otherwise, it could lose its precious funding. Money is hard to come by, with the Government printing it as fast as it can in order to give it to European Banking cartels. There’s nothing left for the rest of us. I guess we are supposed to take solace in the roles left to us – fodder for their highly profitable, never-ending wars – and learn to love Big Brother.

Here in the spring of 2013, it looks as if the cycle has run its course, and the extreme violence of the late 20th century is finally coming back to its spawning grounds in North America. In the past two years, there have been numerous instances of mass shootings that were so obviously orchestrated by someone other than the “fall guy,” who usually ends up dead, that the Government is losing credibility. Washington has lost the Hearts and Minds campaign in the homeland, to the bloggers.

In addition to being nothing more than future collateral damage to our government, Americans are also guinea pigs in Monsanto’s GMO playground. They have been given immunity from prosecution for the damage their poisons are causing.

Our government is unaccountable to us. It is out of control, and the people in the positions of political power can only find solutions to the problems the banks, corporations, Holy War Terrorists, and drug cartel violence create by spreading more of the same.

If the US government continues to escalate the war of attrition it is waging against Americans, there may come a day when we welcome intervention by some foreign power. In the meanwhile, some countries may not wait for an invitation to intervene here. Just as they are saying about Syria, and like they said about Bosnia, the world cannot sit idly by and watch a violent regime continue to slaughter its own people.

It seems like our nation is doomed, and if we don’t want to go down with it, we had damn well better starting envisioning our lives in the ruins of the former United States, and living our lives to accommodate the changing world around us – one that an out-of-control CIA completely fucked over. I doubt the people of Yugoslavia had much of an idea how things would go after Tito died. Their society imploded. NATO intervened. Everything fell apart. Fortunes were lost in the destruction. New fortunes were made in the reconstruction – mostly for foreign corporations. And I don’t see things turning out much differently for us.

rob los ricos

The National Security State

The apparatus of the National Security State, largely established in the National Security Act of 1947, laid the foundations for the extension of American hegemony around the globe. In short, the Act laid the foundations for the apparatus of the American Empire. The National Security Act created the National Security Council (NSC) and position of National Security Adviser, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JSC) as the Pentagon high command of military leaders, and of course, the CIA.

The first major foreign operation carried out by the National Security State, or rather, the “secret government,” was the overthrowing of a democratically elected government in Iran. In 1952, the British were concerned at the efforts of Iran’s new Prime Minister Mohommad Mossadeq, in nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, taking the monopoly away from British Petroleum. So the British intelligence, the SIS, proposed to the Americans a joint operation, and the CIA obliged.

On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address to the nation in which he warned America and indeed the world about the growing influence of the National Security State in what he referred to as the “military-industrial complex”:

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Eisenhower was speaking from the point of view of having first-hand knowledge of this “influence” in the corridors of power, himself as President being unable to challenge it, and unable to do so simply in the first decade of the American Empire. He was warning against the influence of the interconnected relationship and organized power of the military, government, and industry, in that the growing influence of this “complex” was so vast that it threatened to take over the government and subvert democracy itself. It was the functions of this complex that saw profit created through war and empire, and thus, there was a constant drive and impetus towards pursuing empire and resorting to war. If you build a massive military structure, you are going to use it; if it is profitable to go to war, you will go to war.

Prescott Bush, the father of GHW Bush, later wrote Clover Dulles, the widow of Allen Dulles, in 1969, about his meeting with Allen Dulles after JFK had canned him in fall, 1961. “He [Allen] tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick of heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco [Bay of Pigs]. And here they were making Allen to be the goat, which he wasn’t and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them.”

Note the last sentence of Prescott Bush. His son George Herbert Walker Bush says he can’t remember where he was on the day of the JFK assassination, despite his being a US Senate candidate staying in the Dallas, TX Sheraton the night of 11/21/63 and being in Dallas on 11/22/63. GHW Bush helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion and I think he was involved in the JFK assassination. – from The LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it wasn’t the Joint Chiefs alone who were trying to push for war, as the “CIA also played a dangerous game during the crisis,” as Kennedy had ordered the CIA to halt all raids against Cuba during the crisis, “to make sure that no flying sparks from the agency’s secret operations set off a nuclear conflagration.” However, Bill Harvey, the CIA agent in charge of “Operation Mongoose,” the CIA plan which employed the Mafia to attempt to kill Castro, in brazen defiance of Kennedy’s orders, mobilized “every single team and asset that we could scrape together” and then dropped them into Cuba, “in anticipation of the U.S. invasion that the CIA hoped was soon to follow.”`

Robert Kennedy became the conduit through which the back-channel negotiations took place with the Soviets that ultimately ended the crisis without catastrophe. Nikita Khrushchev recounted the situation in his memoirs, in which he explained that Robert Kennedy “stressed how fragile his brother’s rule was becoming as the crisis dragged on,” which struck Khrushchev as “especially urgent.” Robert Kennedy warned the Soviets that, “If the situation continues much longer, the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.” Khrushchev even later wrote that, “for some time we had felt there was a danger that the president would lose control of his military,” and that, “now he was admitting this to us himself.” Thus:

“Moscow’s fear that Kennedy might be toppled in a coup, Khrushchev suggested in his memoirs, led the Soviets to reach a settlement of the missile crisis with the president. “We could sense from the tone of the message that tension in the United States was indeed reaching a critical point.”

Thirteen days after the crisis began, the Soviets announced that they would remove the missiles from Cuba, with the US agreeing to remove missiles from US bases in Turkey and “pledging not to invade Cuba,” which Kennedy and future presidents would honour. At the announcement of the end to the crisis, General LeMay roared at Kennedy, “It’s the greatest defeat in our history,” and that, “We should invade today!” A defense analyst at the Pentagon, Daniel Ellsberg, who was consulting with Air Force generals and colonels on nuclear strategy at the end of the crisis, remarked that after the settlement was reached, “there was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles,” explaining, “not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup – I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous.” - from lew rockwell, The National Security State and the Assassination of JFK

How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

Brzezinski: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

The above has been translated from the French by Bill Blum author of the indispensible, “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II” and “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower” Portions of the books can be read at: <http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm>

Mujahideen trained and funded by the US are among its deadliest foes

American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.

Since the fall of the Soviet puppet government in 1992, another 2,500 are believed to have passed through the camps. They are now run by an assortment of Islamic extremists, including Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist.- from the gaurdian, Frankenstein the CIA created

CONTROLLING THE ILLEGAL DRUG TRADE

The more one studies the dark history of the US national security state, the more transparent the CIA – Wall Street connections become. The links to the international drug trade are less obvious, but have existed from the beginning, that is, from the days of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Time and again, the same pattern has played out: US military interventions in Southeast Asia, Central America and, since 2001, Afghanistan and Iraq, have been accompanied by a sharp increase in narco-trafficking, with all of the attendant evils. These include the plague of drug addiction, drug-related crime, the devastation of the family and as I hope to show, the corrupting of democratic institutions at home and abroad.

The morally bankrupt policies that are responsible for all of the above have had another deleterious effect: They have crippled our nation’s capacity to play a positive role on the world stage. It is no wonder that foreigners no longer view the United States with admiration and respect, but increasingly with fear and loathing. But US elites are oblivious to such concerns. They do not care, and are quite candid about what they view as the CIA’s pragmatic “need” to associate with unsavory individuals and criminals in the interest of furthering US foreign policy goals. Their realpolitik can be read between the lines of the policy papers. Take, for instance, the 1996 intelligence report, already noted, prepared by Maurice “Hank” Greenberg for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and for which Greenberg was nominated to replace John Deutch as director of the CIA. In the paper Greenberg affirms that “the capability to undertake [covert operations]….constitutes an important national security tool.” Later, in the section titled “Intelligence and Law Enforcement” he insists that

foreign policy ought to take precedence over law enforcement when it comes to overseas operations. The bulk of U.S. intelligence efforts overseas is devoted to traditional national security concerns; as a result, law enforcement must ordinarily be a secondary concern. FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents operating abroad should not be allowed to act independently of either the ambassador or the CIA lest pursuit of evidence or individuals for prosecution cause major foreign policy problems or complicate ongoing intelligence and diplomatic activities.

This means, over and above diplomacy, that when criminals are judged to be intelligence assets, they are granted protection from prosecution for narco-trafficking, money laundering, extortion, rape, even terrorism and murder. In 1982, the CIA and the US Department of Justice actually worked out a secret agreement to this effect. The deal exempted the CIA from having to report drug trafficking by CIA assets, which, notice, made a mockery of then presidential wife Nancy Reagan’s much ballyhooed “just say no” anti-drug campaign. At the time, most Americans trusted Ronald Reagan and believed that his administration was serious about the so-called war on drugs. But hindsight shows that the Reagan White House badly abused the public’s good faith.

The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, with which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high — more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it. According to an Amnesty International report in 2001, violations committed by the army and associated groups included ‘‘extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, ‘disappearances’ and torture. . . . Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred.’’ As part of President Reagan’s policy of supporting anti-Communist forces, hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of  Special Forces advisers, led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses. The United States lost more than 700 soldiers in the war.

The foreign policy advocated by Maurice Greenberg, above, is in large part responsible for the drug-related violence on the streets of our cities, and for the epidemic of narcotic addiction among our children, who have been sacrificed to the false god of national security. But the social carnage is not limited to the United States. Drug addiction in Muslim Iraq was almost unknown prior to the US invasion in 2003; but has since become a major problem. A similar recent explosion of heroin use has occurred in Iran, which, notice, is right next door to Afghanistan, where the poppies are grown with the blessing of the CIA. Such foreign policies are evil, a scourge upon the planet, yet, are intimately associated with US empire building. Quite simply, the US power elite has followed in the footsteps of the British and French who, in their day, also exploited the immensely profitable opium and heroin trade. The writer Chalmers Johnson has termed this descent into darkness the sorrow of empire.

The CIA’s secret collusion with the Department of Justice gave the CIA veto over law enforcement, effectively blunting the capacity of US drug enforcement agencies to interdict the flow of illegal drugs into the US. The timing was no accident. The deal coincided with the start of the CIA’s Contra war in Central America. This explains why, the next year, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), under pressure from the Pentagon, closed its office in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The flow of drugs through Honduras had not diminished; in fact, just the opposite. For years, the country had been a transfer point for illegal drug smuggling into the US, a reality that Contra leaders readily exploited to finance their war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas; and they did so with the full knowledge and approval of the CIA. For many years after, Langley’s veto blocked legitimate efforts by US law enforcement to curb the drug trade.

I must emphasize that, meanwhile, the American people were kept in the dark about the policy and its effects, at every point in the chain: from the formulation of the policy to its implementation to the phony packaging of the policy for mass consumption. In fact, we only know about it, today, thanks to a courageous journalist named Gary Webb, who published a groundbreaking series of articles in 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News, exposing Contra links and CIA complicity in the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged the black communities of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The series, appropriately titled “Dark Alliance”, was one of the first big stories to be carried on the Internet; and later, Webb expanded it into an important book by the same name, in which he lays out the voluminous evidence in stark detail. But it was Webb’s series of articles in 1996 that initially focused media attention on the drug issue; and which compelled CIA director John Deutch to announce an internal investigation. Meanwhile, the agency simultaneously launched a disinformation campaign to discredit Webb, whom it viewed as a serious threat.

The campaign against Gary Webb has been called “one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist’s competence in living memory.” The fawning mainstream press, always eager to do the CIA’s bidding, appeared to take pleasure in savaging the messenger, even while tacitly conceding that his facts were basically correct. One of the low points occurred on live TV, on November 15, 1996, when NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, wife of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, referred to Webb’s exhaustively documented expose as “a conspiracy theory,” the kiss of death for any serious journalist.  At this same time, as we know, Greenspan was busily engineering the deregulation of Wall Street, setting the stage for the 2008 financial meltdown of the global economy. – from foreign policy journal, Black 9/11: A Walk on the Dark Side Part 3: AIG and the Linkage to the Drug Trade 

when assets go bad

Phillip (alternately, “Philip”) Marshall, 54, a career airline pilot who claimed to have once served as a contract pilot for the CIA and DEA during the Iran-Contra affair, shot and killed his two teenage children, and the family dog, then killed himself.

The apparent murder-suicide was discovered at the family home in an upscale gated golfing community in Murphys, California.

Phillip Marshall has been identified as a former pilot for Eastern and United airlines. He self-published a number of books, including at least two about his 9/11 conspiracy theories: “The Big Bamboozle” (February 9, 2012) and “False Flag 911: How Bush, Cheney and the Saudis Created the Post-911 World” (July 29, 2008).

A previous novel published in 2003, “Lakefront Airport, New Orleans,” detailed his claimed experience as a pilot for the US during Iran/Contra. – from boing boing, Former pilot and 9/11 conspiracy theorist shoots and kills 2 teen children, then himself

L.A. Cop Busts CIA Cocaine Ring

Michael Ruppert. Mike is a former LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) narcotics officer who in the late 1970′s, trained in narcotics by the U.S. Justice Department. The CIA tried to recruit Mike to traffic drugs with them. When Mike tried to expose the corruption that he saw (the moral thing to do), he was fired without cause. As Governor Jesse Ventura says, “Don’t just go along to get along.”

Mike Ruppert has spent the last 25 years fighting the system, trying to expose the lies and tyranny of the CIA (and many other offices of our government). This is no conspiracy theory, Mike Ruppert has presented over 6,000 documents indicting the U.S. government’s involvement in decades of heroin and cocaine drug-trafficking into the cities and towns of the United States. You can subscribe to Mike’s newsletter at www.copvcia.com or go to www.fromthewilderness.com

• Drugs and The Economy

• CIA, Drugs and Wall Street

• The Bush-Cheney Drug Empire

• Bush and Barry Seal

• Drugs and Dollars

• Drug Trade in Asia (Golden Triangle)

• Banks, the Mafia, and Drugs

Sleeping With the Devil: How U.S. and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 9/11

Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official, Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987. (source RAWA)

The CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan … found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to “read” than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the “reliable” partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.

To this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.

“Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he said.

The Washington Post reported in 2002:

The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings ….

The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books ….

- from global research

Cheney’s Shadow Government

John Adams once called the vice presidency, “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.” FDR’s VP, John Nance Garner, said the job wasn’t “worth a pitcher of warm piss.”

It’s quotes like these that make Dick Cheney—who pretty much ran his own separate government from the VP’s office—all the more impressive, not to mention terrifying. For not only was Cheney out of control, he was out of control in a job that had no controls attached to it. No one had ever thought them necessary before.

Give the man credit for creativity. Cheney found even more ways to overturn the Constitution, undermine the separation of powers, and possibly make the U.S. government an accessory to murder many times over.

The New York Times broke half the story in Sunday’s paper as Scott Shane explained that “the Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney.” Congress finally found out eight years after Cheney gave the order, when CIA Director Leon E. Panetta informed the House and Senate intelligence committees upon learning of the program himself.

According to current law, when a U.S. intelligence agency is involved in a covert action, at least eight members of Congress—the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of their intelligence committees—must be informed in order for the program to be legal.

CIA defenders insist compliance with the law is actually a gray area because “this program never went fully operational” as one official put it. And Panetta terminated the program as soon as he learned of it. But given the history of both Cheney and many in the CIA’s contempt for both Congress and the Constitution, it’s entirely possible that we still don’t know the full story. - from the daily beast

9/11 Conspiracy Solved: Names, Connections, & Details Exposed!

there are some flaws to this video, but it’s a treasury of good information.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the use of contractors reached a level unprecedented in U.S. military operations. As of March 31, 2010, the United States deployed 175,000 troops and 207,000 contractors in the war zones. Contractors represented 50 percent of the Department of Defense (DOD) workforce in Iraq and 59 percent in Afghanistan.

This increase is the logical outcome of a series of decisions going back decades. Force structure reductions ranging from the post-Vietnam decisions that moved most Army logistics support elements to the Army Reserve and Guard⁴ to the post–Cold War reduction that cut the Army from 18 to 10 divisions with corresponding cuts in support forces greatly reduced the Services’ ability to support long-term operations. Next, a series of decisions in the 1990s led to the employment of contractors in the Balkans for tasks from traditional camp-building to the new concept of “force development” that saw MPRI training the Croatian army. Finally, the decision to invade Iraq with minimum forces left the United States with too few troops in-theater to deal with the disorder that resulted from the removal of Saddam. Thus, it is understandable that the immediate, unanticipated need for large numbers of logistics and security personnel, the shortage of such troops on Active duty, and the precedent for using contractors in the Balkans caused the Pentagon to turn to contractors to fill the immediate operational needs. However, the subsequent failure to conduct a careful analysis of the wisdom of using contractors is less understandable. The executive branch has conducted numerous investigations into fraud, waste, and corruption in the contracting process. Congress has held hearings and established the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the U.S. Government has not systematically explored the essential question: Does using contractors in a conflict zone make strategic sense?

By the end of 2009, contractors reported almost 1,800 dead and 40,000 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the fighting in Afghanistan gets worse, contractors are now suffering more deaths than U.S. forces: “In the first two quarters of 2010 alone, contractor deaths represented more than half—53 percent—of all fatalities. This point bears emphasis: since January 2010, more contractors have died in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. military soldiers.” For practical purposes, these casualties were “off the books” in that they had no real impact on the political discussions about the war. As Peter Singer noted:

there was no outcry whenever contractors were called up and deployed, or even killed. If the gradual death toll among American troops threatened to slowly wear down public support, contractor casualties were not counted in official death tolls and had no impact on these ratings. . . . These figures mean that the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined. The losses are also far more than any single U.S. Army division has experienced.

Contractor casualties are not reported via the Pentagon, but only through the U.S. Department of Labor. Labor’s Web site notes that these are not comprehensive statistics but only represent those injuries and deaths that resulted in insurance claims. Thus, it is difficult if not impossible to determine how many additional casualties were suffered by other nations’ contractors in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

In reality, it is virtually impossible to determine the actual effectiveness of any contractors—armed or unarmed—until they begin to operate in theater (and only then if a member of the U.S. Government can observe the contractors as they operate).

Compounding the problems created by lack of quality control, the government does not control the contractor’s daily contact with abuse, intimidation, and even killing of local civilians such as the DynCorp employee who ran a child sex ring in the Balkans or the September 2007 Blackwater shootings in Nisour Square, Baghdad.

This lack of quality and tactical control greatly increases the impact of the third major problem: the United States is held responsible for everything the contractors do or fail to do. Despite the fact the United States has no effective quality or operational control over the contractors, the local population rightly holds it responsible for all contractor failures.

In addition to undercutting government legitimacy, the use of contractors may actually undercut local government power. In Afghanistan, security and reconstruction contracts have resulted in significant shifts in relative power between competing Afghan qawmsas well as allegations of corruption. Dexter Filkins, writing in the New York Times, notes that the power structure in Orugzan Province, Afghanistan, has changed completely due to the U.S. Government’s selecting Matiullah Khan to provide security for convoys from Kandahar to Tirin Kot:

With his NATO millions, and the American backing, Mr. Matiullah has grown into the strongest political and economic force in the region. He estimates that his salaries support 15,000 people in this impoverished prov ince. . . . This has irritated some local leaders, who say that the line between Mr. Matiullah’s business interest and the government has disappeared. . . . Both General [Nick] Carter [commander of ISAF South] and Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister, said they hoped to disband Mr. Matiullah’s militia soon—or at least to bring it under formal government control. . . . General Carter said that while he had no direct proof in Mr. Matiullah’s case, he harbored more general worries that the legions of unregulated Afghan security companies had a financial interest in prolonging chaos.

Thus, an unacknowledged but serious strategic impact of using contractors is to directly undercut both the legitimacy and the authority of the host nation government. - this article was originally published as Institute for National Strategic Studies Strategic Forum 260 (NDU Press, November 2010)

Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that QinetiQ, a high tech defense contractor specializing in secret satellites drones and software used by U.S. special forces, was the victim of a sustained cybersecurity breach for several years starting in 2007.

According to Bloomberg, documents released in the Anonymous Stratfor hack reveal QinetiQ was compromised as part of a cyber-espionage attack originating in China — and notes the breach was part of a much broader campaign targetting U.S. contractors:

“QinetiQ’s espionage expertise didn’t keep Chinese cyber- spies from outwitting the company. In a three-year operation, hackers linked to China’s military infiltrated QinetiQ’s computers and compromised most if not all of the company’s research. At one point, they logged into the company’s network by taking advantage of a security flaw identified months earlier and never fixed [...]

QinetiQ was only one target in a broader cyberpillage. Beginning at least as early as 2007, Chinese computer spies raided the databanks of almost every major U.S. defense contractor and made off with some of the country’s most closely guarded technological secrets, according to two former Pentagon officials who asked not to be named because damage assessments of the incidents remain classified.“

U.S. intelligence reports ranked cyber threats as the top danger facing the country for the first time in April, but tensions have been running high about the government’s ability to protect digital assets and intelligence for years. A 2011 Department of Justice report noted that only 64 percent of FBI agents assigned to national security-related cyber investigations had the appropriate skills and expertise to handle those types of cases.

Government cybersecurity contracting exploded during the Bush Administration, with many roles traditionally filled by government employees or resources outsourced to external companies over whom the government has less oversight. The Obama Administration has made efforts to curb that trend, but that expansion, combined with a lack of cybersecurity expertise in the military and federal agencies, resulted in many cybersecurity defense operations being outsourced or completed under the heavy supervision of outside contractors. – from think progress, The U.S. Outsources Cybersecurity & Defense To Contractors That Keep Getting Hacked

The Syrian government has called on the United Nations to classify a leading rebel group as a terrorist organisation after its leader pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda.

Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani heads the radical Nusra Front rebel group.

In a message posted online on Wednesday he pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and supported calls for an Islamic state to be created in Syria.

The Syrian regime is demanding the UN “fulfil its role and preserve global security” by classing Nursa Front as an Al Qaeda linked entity. – from ABC Australia, Syrian rebel pledges allegiance to Al Qaeda

Shadow Government in Control:

It is now beyond reasonable doubt that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by his own National Security State in what was a violent coup d’état that is, an overthrowing of the legitimate elected government of the United States by force through the use of the clandestine black-ops services of the CIA, elements of the Secret Service, the US military, the FBI and organized crime.

Unless and until the United States publicly discloses to the citizenry that its duly elected government was overthrown in 1963 and that since then the replacement/imposter government has been at least technically/legally speaking illegitimate[12] it will likely be impossible to reverse the increasingly rapid disintegration of America. The reality is that since the murder of President John F. Kennedy, there has been an extra-constitutional imposter “government” in place which prior to that time existed only in the shadows. It has been given many different names including the “war party” the MIMIC (media, intelligence, military, industrial complex) the secret government, the shadow government etc. That entity or “Regime” as a result of the JFK assassination appears to have profoundly altered the trajectory of the United States by placing the country on a constant war footing and building and sustaining an enormous foreign military base presence throughout the world which serves to project American power and enlarge the “empire.” – from jericho rendezvous, After the JFK Assassination–a True Coup d’état: Is the Current US Government Legitimate?

A handful of polls conducted in the days after the Boston Marathon bombings show that US citizens are responding much differently than in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that killed roughly 3,000 people. Not only are Americans more opposed now to giving up personal freedoms for the sake of security than they were after 9/11, but other statistics show that distrust against the federal government continues to climb.

Just one day after the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing, pollsters with Fox News asked a sample of Americans, “Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce the threat of terrorism?” Forty-three percent of the respondents said they would, while 45 percent said no. Comparatively, 71 percent of Americans asked a similar question in October 2001 said they’d be willing to give up personal freedoms, while only 20 percent opposed at the time.

A separate poll conducted by the Washington Post just three days after the Boston Marathon bombing reveals that nearly half of those surveyed say that the government will go too far in trying to prevent future acts of terrorism. The Post asked a random national sample of 588 adults, “Which worries you more: that the government (will not go far enough to investigate terrorism because of concerns about constitutional rights), or that it (will go too far in compromising constitutional rights in order to investigate terrorism)?” Days after the Boston bombing, 41 percent of respondents said the government will not go far enough, compared to 48 percent saying they’ll go too far. When similar questions were asked in 2006 and 2010, 44 percent and 27 percent said the government will go too far, respectively, signaling that for the first time in years Americans are overly concerned about a misuse of power on the part of Washington.

That isn’t to say that the Boston attack is necessarily inspiring Americans to question authority, though. Two months before Tsarnaev brothers allegedly detonated a pair of explosives near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, 53 percent of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center said the federal government is threatening their personal rights and freedoms. In November 2011, that statistic was only 30 percent. - from russia today,  Americans troubled more by governmental abuse than terrorism

Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)

The Syrian government has called on the United Nations to classify a leading rebel group as a terrorist organisation after its leader pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda.

The call came as the opposition accused forces loyal to president Bashar al-Assad of “savage” killings in the country’s south.

Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani heads the radical Nusra Front rebel group.

In a message posted online on Wednesday he pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and supported calls for an Islamic state to be created in Syria.

The Syrian regime is demanding the UN “fulfil its role and preserve global security” by classing Nursa Front as an Al Qaeda linked entity.