“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief” – Frantz Fanon
The preceding paragraph illuminates a social phenomena played by corporate owned mainstream media, taking advantage of people everyday. ‘Alternative media’ is meant to circumvent this but in fact often is a wolf dressed in the proverbial sheep’s clothing. Here is why:
All of the ‘alternative’ news outlets (all of those with any degree of independence and significant readership in any case) will be targets of the several competing intelligence agencies wishing to shape discourse. The ability of the agencies to do this will depend on the environment, awareness, personality, sympathies and approach of the producers. Zerohedge is (my perhaps imperfect assessment) far less manipulative than, example given, TomDispatch (a blatant case) but no matter the outlet there is always some degree of risk the consumer will absorb deliberate disinformation. Additionally, ideological alignment will play in the alternative outlets, no matter how clean. Information is shaped both by conscious effort and unconscious influences.
I would place zerohedge in that category where anti-corporate, libertarian ideology (yes, there is such a thing, as opposed to corporate controlled or manipulated ‘libertarian’ tea party, e.g. Koch brothers) shapes its discourse on the right, over on the left there are also examples, for instance Global Research, Voltaire Net and more recently The Intercept are all to some extent shaped by ideology or personal prejudices. Of course intelligence agencies will look at every opportunity to exploit these outlets. The Intercept appears to have been co-opted rather quickly by western intelligence via its bank-roller Pierre Omidyar; particularly on the Ukraine discourse (Glenn Greenwald’s disclaimers notwithstanding.)
In cases of more insidious perversion of information, a common modus operandi is to associate events that cannot be concealed with the wrong party (false flag is pervasive method of disinformation) and embed facts together with inventions in the discourse. Consortium News is a past master at this, for instance Robert Parry consistently shaping the discourse to point to incompetent or maverick Ukrainian military downing MH 17 with a Buk surface to air missile, as opposed to the Ukrainian SU 25 combat jet which he steadfastly refuses to so much as mention much less consider. The point of method like this can be to create a face saving or less damaging escape for the western aligned parties in the event the initial propaganda efforts blaming Russia fall apart. Better some drunk or incompetent Ukrainian military performed the shoot down in the public eye (in the western intelligence view) than a Ukrainian air force jet on orders from Kiev. A secondary possible effect (the CIA would hope) is when, more likely than if, considering the incompetence involved, the west’s MH 17 story falls apart, the Russians will allow for the alternative line put forward by someone like Parry in return for concessions in the ‘spirit’ of so-called ‘Realpolitik’ where cynical geopolitical deals will necessarily determine truth must be the first casualty.
Another method is to play on peoples’ sense of helplessness while steering them away from the essential reality and attending motivations by keeping them preoccupied with outrage. That’s Tom Engelhardt’s method. A short research pulls up CIA associated funding underlying TomDispatch, originating with Ford Foundation grants, laundered via The Nation Institute (The Nation is another long time intelligence penetrated organization, host of disinformation puppet Bob Dreyfuss.)
Just a few short but critical examples. The best one can do with all of this is to keep track of the metadata threads (facts within events than cannot be denied) while being careful not to be sucked into the attending spin. Assembling a focus this way, you seldom will get a perfect picture but done competently, one should certainly get a far clearer understanding of what’s actually going on.
A footnote would be, the Russians recognize the western press is so corrupt, they don’t need to much engage in overt deceits but more or less stick to the facts surrounding events (as much as possible) to gain credibility, and when this is not an option, their preferred fallback technique is ‘lies by omission.’ The western consumer taking in RT gets a much better deal than the eastern consumer lapping up the Helsinki based, western mainstream media clone misnamed ‘The Moscow Times.’
As I bail out of the game, here is the gift of all (or nearly all) of the ronaldthomaswest.com articles in a single page of links; beginning with stories of travels through India, then, my personal life adventures largely centered in Native America, if only because I believe this is my most under-appreciated work and deserves greater exposure. Following these accounts are things I personally find interesting, next are external links to books authored by myself and then my satire. Lastly, scroll down to find that work I most detest, the work which had inspired the satire (a sort of therapy) – to discover the real evils of geopolitics.
My blog had begun attracting readers in mid 2014, when I’d been giving it real attention for several months. This upcoming week of 21 March 2016, coinciding with withdrawing from giving ronaldthomaswest.com sustained attention, it will pass the 100,000 hits mark (it stands at 99,685 as I write this.)
Hardly some mega-phenomena but not bad either. Now, it’s just another internet archive –
*
All original material copyright Ⓒ 2015 by Ronald Thomas West: For profit & mass paper media redistribution prohibited
This information has been forwarded on (via email) to the leadership of the German parliament, as well the German federal prosecutor’s office, the German constitutional court, and the International Criminal Court. One can only wonder how long the criminally complicit politicians will sit on their hands and do nothing. German politicians have known for quite sometime that BND (German CIA) head Gerhard Schindler lied to them when he stated Assad ordered the sarin gas attack at Ghouta, Syria in August 2013. As well, Germany has a provision of law under the principle of universal jurisdiction which could be used to prosecute these crimes and a constitutional loophole bigger than the Brandenberg Gate that allows passing on prosecutions when in ‘the best interest of the state.’
When the Turkish government seized Today’s Zaman newspaper on 5 March 2016, it was only a matter of time before the Zaman English website was taken down. Today I checked and discovered the site has indeed been taken offline (and had been replaced with a Turkish language site featuring Erdogan’s government line.) Anticipating something like this, I’d saved a few stories together with screenshots; here is the most damning story and a prime motivation behind the criminal Erdogan administration’s act of taking over the most popular news outlet in Turkey. As the several NATO states shed what are clearly crocodile tears over Turkey’s suppression of a free press, none will point to stories such as this following; in fact there will be only relief that evidence NATO is doing business with & propping up war criminals will have been swept under the rug. Verbatim text of the screen shots (full story) pasted in, below:
21 October 2015
Two deputies from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) have claimed that the government is against investigating Turkey’s role in sending toxic sarin gas which was used in an attack on civilians in Syria in 2013 and in which over 1,300 Syrians were killed.
CHP deputies Eren Erdem and Ali Şeker held a press conference in İstanbul on Wednesday in which they claimed the investigation into allegations regarding Turkey’s involvement in the procurement of sarin gas which was used in the chemical attack on a civil population and delivered to the terrorist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to enable the attack was derailed.
Taking the floor first, Erdem stated that the Adana Chief Prosecutor’s Office launched an investigation into allegations that sarin was sent to Syria from Turkey via several businessmen. An indictment followed regarding the accusations targeting the government.
“The MKE [Turkish Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation] is also an actor that is mentioned in the investigation file. Here is the indictment. All the details about how sarin was procured in Turkey and delivered to the terrorists, along with audio recordings, are inside the file,” Erdem said while waving the file.
Erdem also noted that the prosecutor’s office conducted detailed technical surveillance and found that an al-Qaeda militant, Hayyam Kasap, acquired sarin, adding: “Wiretapped phone conversations reveal the process of procuring the gas at specific addresses as well as the process of procuring the rockets that would fire the capsules containing the toxic gas. However, despite such solid evidence there has been no arrest in the case. Thirteen individuals were arrested during the first stage of the investigation but were later released, refuting government claims that it is fighting terrorism,” Erdem noted.
Over 1,300 people were killed in the sarin gas attack in Ghouta and several other neighborhoods near the Syrian capital of Damascus, with the West quickly blaming the regime of Bashar al-Assad and Russia claiming it was a “false flag” operation aimed at making US military intervention in Syria possible.
Suburbs near Damascus were struck by rockets containing the toxic sarin gas in August 2013.
The purpose of the attack was allegedly to provoke a US military operation in Syria which would topple the Assad regime in line with the political agenda of then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his government.
CHP deputy Şeker spoke after Erdem, pointing out that the government misled the public on the issue by asserting that sarin was provided by Russia. The purpose was to create the perception that, according to Şeker, “Assad killed his people with sarin and that requires a US military intervention in Syria.”
He also underlined that all of the files and evidence from the investigation show a war crime was committed within the borders of the Turkish Republic.
“The investigation clearly indicates that those people who smuggled the chemicals required to procure sarin faced no difficulties, proving that Turkish intelligence was aware of their activities. While these people had to be in prison for their illegal acts, not a single person is in jail. Former prime ministers and the interior minister should be held accountable for their negligence in the incident,” Şeker further commented.
Erdem also added that he will launch a criminal complaint against those responsible, including those who issued a verdict of non-prosecution in the case, those who did not prevent the transfer of chemicals and those who first ordered the arrest of the suspects who were later released.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced in late August that an inquiry had been launched into the gas attacks allegedly perpetuated by both Assad’s Syrian regime and rebel groups fighting in Syria since the civil war erupted in 2011.
However, Erdem is not the only figure who has accused Turkey of possible involvement in the gas attack. Pulitzer Prize winner and journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, argued in an article published in 2014 that MİT was involved with extremist Syrian groups fighting against the Assad regime.
In his article, Hersh said Assad was not behind the attack, as claimed by the US and Europe, but that Turkish-Syrian opposition collaboration was trying to provoke a US intervention in Syria in order to bring down the Assad regime.
Keywords: Eren Erdem , Ali Şeker , Syria , Turkey , chemical attack
4 April 2017 update: With the new accusations of Assad (and by extension, the Russians) having used chemical weapons in Syria, it does well to recall what the NATO states have never come clean about; independent sources having arrived at the conclusion it was NOT Assad’s people had attacked with chemicals at Ghouta, Syria, in August 2013. This was a NATO nation’s intelligence agency perpetrated the chemical attack resulting in well over 1,000 dead.
8 April 2018 update: Another chemical attack accusation with blame on Assad and Russia, at Douma, Syria. This is nothing less than a war-footing preparatory propaganda and a criminal act of NATO sponsored ‘moderate rebels.’ The information in this article is the Achilles Heel that should put this nonsense to rest. This suppressed information points squarely to the actual perpetrators, NATO and the NATO proxies in Syria.
I noticed an attack on this letter (below) in the comments at third party media basically smearing Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) by association with Bernard Kouchner, a man that departed the organization more than 35 years ago over philosophical differences. I had supported Doctors Without Borders because they had been apolitical, and largely neutral in conflicts. This neutrality had begun a process of erosion in Syria. Unlike the attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, where there was no question of which belligerent controlled the air power responsible (NATO’s USA), and where the organization called for an independent, third party investigation, those actors responsible for the attacks concerning the MSF aligned clinics in Syria are not as convincing and clear, arguably creating even more pressing demand for impartial, third party investigation.
Following these most recent attacks on clinics aligned with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in Syria, Mego Terzian, President of MSF France, immediately blamed Russia and Assad. MSF International President has gone on record also blaming Russian aligned forces, stating “It was probably carried out by the Syrian-government-led coalition that is predominantly active in the region.” This statement of Dr Liu is disingenuous. Turkey is a major player in its support for jihadi militia in that very area and has a vested interest in information operations intended to undermine the coalition supporting the Assad regime. This is the purpose of false flag attacks. Recent history demands if the finger of superficial appearance had pointed to the NATO aligned nations, there would be calls for impartial investigation rather than immediate trial and conviction by propaganda operations perpetrated in western media.
Relevant to this preceding, it is a fairly safe presumption all high profile international non-governmental organizations will be targets of intelligence agencies for diverse purpose. However there is a large qualitative difference between that organization and the organization which, on the whole, has been tipped by intelligence to a point of co-option; where the organization itself has become the intelligence agency operations asset. Médecins Sans Frontières would appear to be pointed towards this co-option. Here is my response:
Dear MSF
A monthly donor of many years, I feel an explanation is in order for my cancellation and further refusal to participate as a MSF “Field Partner.” I am a former military special operations intelligence professional and anti-corruption investigator of many years. Based on my expertise in open source intelligence analysis and closely following several of the ongoing conflicts, including Ukraine and SYRIA, it has become clear MSF is becoming a tool for geopolitical ends. Either you’ve been penetrated by intelligence agencies for this purpose of promoting false flag information operations or your organization is being manipulated to same effect. I cannot, with clear conscious, be a party to this with further contributions.
The several NATO intelligence agencies are in full force pursuing anti-Russian propaganda operations, which likely include the recent attacks on MSF aligned Syrian clinics; purposeful and professional operations intended to smear Russia and President Putin for purposes of generating political capital for pursuit of geopolitical manipulations. Your organization immediately pointing the finger at Assad and/or the Russians, without time taken to properly investigate, is unethical.
NATO aligned intelligence agency false flag examples provided:
NATO’s Turkey suppressing investigation into their intelligence agency, MIT, providing sarin gas to al Nusra (al Qaida) that killed 1,400 Syrians at Ghouta, blamed on the Assad regime, in August, 2013. Turkish parliamentarians complain of the suppressed facts:
The Maidan snipers in Kiev trained by the CIA according to Member of European Parliament, backed by a leaked phone call between the EU foreign policy chief and the Estonian Foreign minister revealing the snipers were aligned with the new regime in Kiev. This crime had been blamed on the Russian aligned preceding government.
&
The crimes in Syria against MSF aligned facilities serve the same propaganda purposes and the Erdogan government cannot be ruled out as committing them, whereas it is NOT in the Russian interest to perpetrate these attacks. Here is a list of Turkish support for bad actors in Syria compiled by Jihad Watch:
It is sad to see MSF go the route of some other organizations and become a pawn of dirty players in geopolitics. I suggest your organization pursue a professional investigation to determine how, and by who, you’ve become manipulated to both a stooge and minion of evil.
“The history of the great events of this world are scarcely more than a history of crime” -Voltaire
note: since I’d written this piece, the Erdogan administration (Turkish government) seized Today’s Zaman newspaper and killed the linked story on the gas attack at Ghouta, Syria, forwarded to MSF in the letter. Anticipating some possibility like this, I had preserved screen shots and the story’s complete text which now may be found by clicking HERE
A slightly differing version of this article has been picked up and run at the online magazine ‘Russia Insider.’ This edition reflects subsequent updates
Anyone who believes VICE isn’t mainstream news should be aware Rupert Murdoch pushed $70 million of his money into buying a piece of the VICE action (buying his kid a seat on the VICE board of directors.) In a piece worthy of Murdoch’s British tabloid ‘The Sun on Sunday’ the public is treated to a rank psy-ops piece:
The 328-page report said there was a “strong probability” the Russian intelligence agency (FSB) directed two men to poison Litvinenko in London, and that this operation was “probably” sanctioned by then FSB head Nikolai Patrushev and Russian President Vladimir Putin
Yep, trust VICE to roll over for the MI6 murder novel at the snap of a neocon finger, with no critical exam of the wider facts surrounding Alexander Litvinenko’s death. The most remarkable words in the British report blaming the Kremlin and Putin are “probability” and “probably.” Probability and probably are NOT evidence but rather spinning an inescapable admission there is no hard evidence backing the accusations. So it is, the west ups the ante in its demonizing Vladimir Putin with sham report per rank propaganda purposes (recalling the Dutch investigation of MH 17.)
This case has always smelled to high heaven. Former FSB officer Litvinenko had all the wrong friends/trusted all the wrong people. As sloppy as the hit on him was, people the British have an ax to grind with (Russians) are purportedly to blame, but Litvinenko’s MI6 employer should be every bit as suspect as anyone.
“Professional standards require intelligence professionals to lie, hide information, or use covert tactics to protect their “cover,” access, sources, and responsibilities. The Central Intelligence Agency [as well, MI6] expects, teaches, encourages, and controls these tactics so that the lies are consistent and supported (“backstopped”). The CIA [as well, MI6] expects intelligence officers to teach others to lie, deceive, steal, launder money, and perform a variety of other activities [such as ‘psy-ops’ or information operations] that would certainly be illegal if practiced in the United States [or Britain]. They call these tactics “tradecraft,” and intelligence officers practice them in all the world’s intelligence services”
A case can be made the preponderance of circumstantial evidence points to the opposite direction of the (heavily influenced by MI6) British report’s conclusion.
More likely Litvinenko’s *truly fatal* mistake was to begin working with Spanish authorities on breaking down the illicit heroin trade at a time when a British ambassador who had been recently fired subsequently penned an essay ‘Britain protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time’ coinciding with revelations both CIA & MI6 had been paying millions in off-record cash to the Karzai government in Kabul (noting Hamid Karzai’s brother, Wali, was both; renting a large compound to the CIA and concurrently playing kingpin in Afghanistan’s heroin trade) .. even as Russia’s anti-heroin efforts are undermined by NATO:
Meanwhile, the British ambassador would appear to have been sent packing for investigating the problem from neighboring Uzbekistan. It is interesting to note his linking the murdered former Russian anti-corruption investigator Alexander Letvinenko to uncovering the Afghan heroin pipeline to St Petersburg… a murder blamed in popular media on Russia with no critical exam whatsoever of Litvinenko’s subsequent MI6 connections in this regard.
A CIA/MI6 joint venture? After, (video, above) the Russians’ high visibility whistle-blowing, there is grudging (and minimal) actions by NATO, busting just a few labs out of hundreds and ONLY those labs it would seem are not under the CIA’s protection. The southwest of Afghanistan is the poppy region where the USA and British military had taken a ‘hands off’ attitude and done little to nothing to address the problem. Any drug interdiction program efforts had been initiated against only THOSE OPUIM FARMERS WHO DO BUSINESS WITH THE TALIBAN, or 15% of the labs and traffickers. As the USA wound down the American military involvement, it is clear the problem had never been honestly addressed.
Again, Litvinenko’s fatal mistake likely had been to concurrently cooperate with Spanish intelligence on Russian mafia, bringing him too close to his expertise on the Afghan heroin pipeline. That MI6 may have been the actual perpetrator of Litvenenko’s murder is almost a certainty, with MI6 having been identified as piling ‘off the record’ cash to the government of Karzai and its known close connections to heroin trafficking. The product can’t be moved to Russia (ultimately via Russian mafia on the St Petersburg end) by the Americans and British without cooperation bought from the Afghans at the source, again recalling Hamid Karzai’s brother, Wali, was both; renting a large compound to the CIA and concurrently playing kingpin in Afghanistan’s heroin trade. So Litvinenko easily could have been killed by his MI6 employer with Putin blamed as a matter of frosting on the intelligence agency hit. May as well get some gain when embarrassing circumstance requires the killing of your own agent. In the close alternative scenario, MI6 had debriefed Litvinenko with an eye to murdering him in the initial plan; when they’d hired the former FSB anti-corruption expert with entirely too much knowledge of the Russian end of the so-called ‘St Petersburg pipeline.’ At the end of the day, it come down to western intelligence complicity in the Afghan heroin trade is old news
“I don’t believe for a second that the Russian authorities were involved. The sentence [report’s findings] is a set-up to provide more bad publicity against the Russian government. The Russians had no reason to want Alexander dead. My brother was not a spy, he was more like a policeman. He was in the FSB but he worked against organised crime, murders, arms trafficking, stuff like that.
“He did not know any state secrets or go on any special missions. It is the Western media that have called him a spy. He [Alexander Litvinenko] had already started to get in touch with old friends and would have gone back [to Russia] in due course. My father and I are sure that the Russian authorities are not involved. It’s all a set-up to put pressure on the Russian government.
“Why else would the court be called to hold this inquiry only after 10 years?” –Maxim Litvinenko
This article, reprinted with the consent of the author, has been banned from a wide variety of ‘progressive’ news outlets. It is, in my opinion, one of the most important pieces of information people should have absorbed. Dr Bramhall’s reporting on this subject is independently consistent with my own research on ‘color revolutions’ (my appended observations follow Dr Bramhall’s article.)
The CIA and Nonviolent Resistance
One important aspect of the “diversity of tactics” debate (i.e. the debate whether to be exclusively nonviolent) in the Occupy movement relates to mounting evidence of the role CIA and Pentagon-funded foundations and think tanks play in funding and promoting nonviolent resistance training.
The two major US foundations promoting nonviolence, both overseas and domestically, are the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) and the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). Both receive major corporate and/or government funding. The latter comes mainly through CIA “pass-through” foundations. While the ICNC is funded mainly by the private fortune of hedge fund multimillionaire (junk bond king Michael Milken’s second in command) Peter Ackerman, the AEI has received funding from the Rand Corporation and the Department of Defense, as well as various CIA-linked foundations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the US Institute of Peace and the Ford Foundation (read here on The Ford Foundation and the CIA), which all have a long history of collaborating with the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA in destabilizing governments unfriendly to US interests.
This is a strategy Frances Stonor Saunders outlines in her pivotal Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. According to Sanders, right wing corporate-backed foundations and the CIA have been funding the non-communist left since the late sixties, in the hope of drowning out and marginalizing the voice of more militant leftists.
Gene Sharp, the Fervent Anticommunist
Much of this debate focuses around the American godfather of nonviolent resistance, Gene Sharp, the founder and director of the Albert Einstein Institution. Sharp’s handbooks on nonviolent protest were widely disseminated in the Eastern Europe color revolutions, in the Arab spring revolutions and in the Occupy movement in the US (see Nonviolence in the Service of Imperialism). Unfortunately Sharp has become a decoy in this debate, deflecting attention from the larger question of whether the US government is actively financing and promoting the work of the AEI, the ICIC and other groups that promote nonviolent resistance, to the exclusion of other militant tactics. The question is extremely important, in my view, because it possibly explains the rigid and dogmatic attitude in the US progressive movement regarding nonviolence.
Is Military-Intelligence Funding Compatible with Progressive Politics?
The institutional nonviolence clique has cleverly refocused the debate on whether Sharp, who is eighty-three, is a CIA agent and whether he actively participated in US-funded destabilization efforts in Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iran and elsewhere that resulted in so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions. The obvious answer to both questions is no. The more important question is why the alternative media and “official” progressive movement embrace Sharp unconditionally as a fellow progressive without a careful look at his past or his ideological beliefs. Sharp has never made any secret of his fervent anticommunist views. He also makes no secret of the funding he has received from the Defense Department; the Rand Corporation; CIA-linked foundations, such as NED, the IRI and the US Institute of Peace; and George Soros’s Open Society Institute. All this information is readily available from the AEI website.
Thierry Meyssan’s 2005 Expose
The current brouhaha over Gene Sharp was first triggered by an article, The Albert Einstein Institution: Nonviolence According to the CIA, Thierry Meyssan published on Voltaire Net in October 2005. Meyssan, a French intellectual and political activist, first gained international prominence in 2002 by publishing a French best seller entitled L’effroyable imposteur (English title: The Big Lie). The book claimed that the 9-11 attacks were directed by right-wingers in the U.S. government and the military industrial complex, who were seeking justification for military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. Meyssan’s 2005 article on the Albert Einstein Institutes enumerates a long list of collaborations between Sharp and opposition groups receiving covert US support in campaigns to bring down Asian and Eastern European governments unfriendly to US interests.
Iran and Venezuela’s Denunciation of Sharp
The article was widely reposted on leftist and libertarian websites. In 2008, it resulted in a formal denunciation of Sharp by the Iranian government and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, both targets of AEI destabilization activities. In June 2008, Stephen Zunes, chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Peter Ackerman’s International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) issued a rebuttal, Sharp Attack Unwarranted, in Foreign Policy in Focus. The latter is an on-line magazine of the Institute for Policy Studies, where Zunes serves as Middle East Editor. The article was simultaneously reprinted in the Huffington Post.
Zunes subsequently persuaded Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Code Pink and other high profile progressives to help launch an on-line petition defending Sharp’s progressive credentials. However, as numerous critics point out, he never addressed Meyssan’s most important concerns: the military/intelligence backgrounds of many of the Albert Einstein Institution’s (AEI’s) directors and advisory board members; their documented collaboration, together with Sharp, with opposition groups responsible for the “color” revolutions in Eastern Europe; and their work with Venezuelan opposition groups in an effort to topple president Hugo Chavez.
AEI ties to Department of State and Military-Intelligence Complex
Australian researcher Michael Barker, Canadian activist Stephen Gowans and CIA watchers wrote detailed critiques defending Meyssan’s 2005 expose. Barker’s rebuttal is entitled Sharp Reflection Warranted. Barker’s main argument is that the problem of elite manipulation of ostensibly progressive groups isn’t at all new. He also points readers to excellent links regarding collaboration between the CIA and the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and others.
Gowans argues that Zunes, a paid adviser to the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), is hardly a neutral or objective party, given his involvement with Peter Ackerman and the ICNC. Ackerman, hardly the progressive peace activist, is a Wall Street investment banker, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and head of Freedom House. The latter, according to Noam Chomsky (in Manufacturing Consent), is “interlocked” with the CIA and a “virtual propaganda arm of the (US) government and international right wing.” According to Louis Proyect, Ackerman is also on the advisory board of the ultraconservative Cato Institute’s Project on Social Security Choice. Not surprisingly, this group strongly advocates for privatizing Social Security.
A Close Look At Sharp’s Past
There is no question that Thierry Meyssan’s 2005 article on Gene Sharp’s extensive links to the US military-intelligence complex is one of the most important exposes of the 21st century. Its only weaknesses is Meyssan’s failure to cite many of his references. What follows is the best publicly verifiable chronology of Sharp’s life I could come up with (most comes from Meyssan’s 2005 article with sources added):
1953 – conscientious objector during Korean War, imprisoned for nine months for refusing to report for alternative duty. Imprisoned for refusing to fight in Korean War (People and The Progressive).
1973 – publishes The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973) with an introduction by Thomas C. Shelling. Shelling was a well known economist and professor of foreign affairs, national security, nuclear strategy, and arms control. After working with US ambassador Averel Harriman in Paris in 1948 to implement the Marshall Plan, Shelling had a fifty year affiliation with the Rand Corporation (US military think tank) and is widely credited as the theoretician behind military escalation in Vietnam.
1983 – founds the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) in Boston, with the assistance of Major General Edward B Atkeson, who was on the first AEI advisory board. The AEI website identifies Atkeson as Senior Fellow at the Institute of Land Warfare Association of the US Army. According to the CIA website, during the 1980s Atkeson was also a National Intelligence Officer for General Purpose Forces.
1985 – publishes a book entitled Making Europe Unconquerable: the Potential of Civilian-base Deterrence and Defense. The second edition includes a preface by George Kennan, historian and State Department senior diplomat whose writings influenced Truman in the creation of the Truman Doctrine. Kennan is viewed as the father of the US foreign policy of “containment” (by force) of Soviet expansion.
1986, 1988 and 1989 – travels to Israel/Palestine to bolster support for the Palestinian Center for the History of Non-Violence, founded in 1983 by one of Sharp’s disciple. It’s a matter of public record that Sharp met with Colonel Reuvan Gal, who directed the Israel Defense Force (IDF) Psychological Action Division. Meyssan claims the two conspired to create a split in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) by creating a dissident “nonviolent” group. Gal and Sharp claim the purpose of their meetings were to devise ways to dissuade IDF commanders from using tanks and excessive military force against Palestinian settlers (see The Jeruselem Fund, Mubarak Awad, and Nonviolence).
1987 – receives funding from the US Institute of Peace to host seminars instructing US allies on defense based on civil disobedience. By law, the US Institute of Peace integrates elements of US intelligence.
1989 – assists Colonel Robert Helvey in training anticommunist Burmese opposition groups concerned about the growing strength of the Burmese Communist Party. The AEI website refers to Helvey as a retired US military officer and ex-military attaché in Burma. He was actually a thirty year veteran of the Defense Intelligence Agency with extensive experience in overseeing clandestine and subversive operations in Southeast Asia (see Guerrillas Without Guns Col Helvey Weaponizing Nonviolence and Peace Magazine Archive). Following his retirement from the Defense Intelligence Agency, Helvey has been board member and president of the Albert Einstein Institution.
1990 – with his AEI team (according to AEI website), assists Lithuanian opposition leaders in organizing popular resistance against the Red Army. According to the website, the AEI also did trainings with anticommunist opposition groups in Tibet, Estonia, and Belarus.
1998 – travels, with Helvey, to Eastern Europe to train Otpor, a group of Serbian youth opposed to Slobodan Milosevic and Europe’s last communist government. Milosevic was immensely popular with Serbian people for standing up to NATO and for his generous social policies. The trainings were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). (See 2000 New York Times interview with NED officer Paul B. McCarthy).
2004 – Helvey and other AEI members meet with the Ukrainian resistance in Kiev (see Mowat’s Coup d’État in Disguise).
2003-2004 – travels, with Helvey and other AEI team members to Venezuela to meet with wealthy Venezuelan opposition leaders, following the failed 2002 CIA-sponsored coup against Chavez. The AEI advises them in organizing a recall referendum against Chavez. They also train the leaders of Súmate during the August 2004 demonstrations and assist in the formulation of “Operation Guarimba”, a series of often-violent street blockades that result in several deaths. According to an analysis published by Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor), Venezuelan student leaders traveled to Belgrade in 2005 to meet with representatives of AEI-trained OTPOR/CANVAS, before traveling to Boston to consult directly with Sharp himself.
Fast Forward to the “Arab Spring”
In the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) seem to have handed the baton to his disciple Peter Ackerman. It was Ackerman who conducted nonviolence trainings in Cairo and Tunisia in 2009-2010 (see Foreign Policy Journal and New York Times).
As others have documented elsewhere, the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa were neither spontaneous nor indigenous. Many of the individuals and groups who helped organize them received training (in the US) sponsored by the State Department and CIA-linked democracy manipulating foundations (see Tony Cartalucci’s Soros Celebrates the Fall of Tunisia). The New York Times lends further credibility to these claims in their April 2011 U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings.
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About the author: Dr Bramhall is an American child and adolescent psychiatrist and political refugee in New Zealand. She has just published a free non-fiction ebook 21st Century Revolution, which can be downloaded at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/120942. Her first book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee describes the circumstances that led her to leave the US in 2002. Her website is at:
CIA methods of discrediting excellent work such as Dr Bramhall’s above article includes [but is not limited to] leaning hard on the better known progressive sites [alternet killed Dr Bramhalls’ article, probably faced with funding threats] not to run the pieces while providing other so-called ‘alternative’ news sites where the articles CAN be run but subjected to guilt by association and other method of discrediting the information. For instance ‘Daily Censored’ picked up and ran this article but concurrently ran an article supporting David Icke’s ‘lizard DNA’ theories [to associate Dr Bramhall’s work with nut jobs.] It then becomes the dilemma of the author whether to publish in less than optimal circumstance or not get the information a wider audience (beyond one’s personal blog.)
Since Dr Bramhalls’ article had been originally published, the classic ‘color revolution’ model based on U.S, Department of State (Siamese twin to CIA) or ‘the Sharp method’ had been employed (again) in Ukraine.
Other method of disinformation is noted in regards to alternative media’s Robert Parry has misreported events in Ukraine (myself not being the only one to notice), effectively pointing away from actions reflecting the role of ‘covert operations’ intelligence. Now, it can’t hurt (truth) to demonstrate the consequence of Gene Sharp suborning Ghandi’s model to utilitarian ‘Realpolitic’ sans morality. What Robert Parry (and his associate Ray McGovern) inexcusably fail to report in relation to Ukraine is, not only did Department of State/CIA aligned NGO’s organize and train the Maidan protesters based on Gene Sharp’s nonviolence model; the CIA operations sector subsequently organized the deaths of the same when they trained and imported the snipers who murdered them. A conservative Polish Member of European Parliament, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, states in an interview the Maidan snipers were trained in Poland in a joint operation with USA intelligence services:
Question: “[you are] a supporter of the thesis it was a CIA operation?”
Answer: “Maidan was also our operation. The snipers were trained in Poland”
The original interview transcript in Polish language HERE
A reasonable English language summary of the interview by PRAVDA:
An earlier leaked phone call between the European Union’s Cathrine Ashton and the Estonian foreign minister, indicate it was people aligned with the new USA supported Ukrainian administration were behind the snipers who killed both protestors and police during confrontation in Kiev.
Robert Parry points solely to out of control ultra-nationalists behind the snipers. A better explanation (backing up both the Polish MEP and leaked conversation) is found in rogue CIA officer Phillip Agee’s expose: ‘Terrorism and Civil Society‘
Furthermore, Robert Parry has misreported the facts on MH 17, detracting from intelligence operations in effort shifting responsibility, as well has pushed blatant American constitutional history revisions. With Ray McGovern’s former military intelligence and CIA background in close association with Robert Parry’s reporting, it is more than fair to question to what extent the American non-violence movement has been penetrated for purpose of information operation manipulations away from discovering the actual facts of the USA’s geopolitical dirty work.
The New Yorker magazine’s “regular columnist” Seymour Hersh had defected to the The London Review of Books in recent times, in matters of the national security state, apparently because the New Yorker had not been publishing Hersh’s more dangerous or damning materials. There is a full two years gap, March 2013 to March 2015, the New Yorker had not published anything by Hersh at all and those two pieces are mostly more or less ‘harmless’ (to the national security state) materials of either a retrospective or philosophical bent. It had been April 2012 since Hersh’s “Our Men in Iran” had last poked a stick in the American intelligence community’s eye at the New Yorker. Fortunately (or in some cases, perhaps not so fortunately) Hersh found a new platform for his articles.
Now, if I were Seymour Hersh’s ‘national security’ professor at his local community college over the semester and a half since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 (counting semesters in geopolitical decades), now is about the time I would call Hersh into my office and let him know he is in serious danger of flunking the academic year:
One incomplete end of 1st semester assignment he stated he’d be turning in, and has not, on Dick Cheney’s “executive assassination ring”, promised in April, 2009 but still ‘under construction’ a full six years later.
Insofar as the current semester:
January 2011, Class presentation ‘speech at Doha‘ (Qatar) graded B- … Hersh quite accurately describes the Joint Special Operations Command as “Crusaders” with the mission statement equivalent to “‘we’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals'” … however his reduced grade stems from the fact it’s not just the JSOC but the larger command structure at the Pentagon per se. If this crusading element were limited more or less to JSOC (where there is indeed a severe infection) and not the larger Pentagon command structure, e.g. we would have seen the USA military’s number one uber-right evangelical/proselytizing cult, the Air Force Academy, cleaned up. Instead, what we see is a sustained pretense of dealing with the hard core evangelical elements in the USAF officer corps where a necrotic fundamentalism is the demanded, de facto norm, throughout the institution. We’ll come back to this infection.
April 2012, Our Men in Iran; paper graded C+ … excellent beginning work on the Iranian dissident group Mojahedin-e-Khalq having been trained by the Americans on behalf of the Israelis to carry out assassinations in Iran. Reduced grade for overlooking the USA had blackmailed the Mojahedin-e-Khalq into returning to the business of terror (after they’d renounced armed struggle) by holding a large portion of the rank and file membership hostage; initially at Camp Ashraf in Iraq, and subsequently at what amounts to a prison annex at the Baghdad airport. These are a few thousand MeK veteran troops have been imprisoned in Iraq, under threat of being handed over to Iran, since surrendering to the Americans, without hostilities, at the outset of the Iraq invasion. Other MeK dissidents are scattered across Europe, where they operate as an Iranian ‘human rights’ front in Berlin, as well large numbers are in Paris where the leadership enjoys a decadent luxury and the ‘friendship’ of some notable American neocons, not least Rudy Giuliani. Meanwhile, the MeK ‘de-listing’ as a terror group by the USA’s Department of State appears to coincide with MeK re-entering the terror game, under duress, on the side of American and Israeli interests, in a cynicism that is typical of western geopolitical realities.
December 2013 is Hersh’s ‘whose sarin‘ initial outline of doubts Assad’s government is the perpetrator of the ongoing chemical weapons attacks in Syria. We’ll consider this a beginning syllabus on the subject Hersh returns to in the next piece. No grade.
April 2014, with The Red Line and The Rat Line Hersh takes the ball forward on the case for sarin gas employ in Syria in what the spooks call a false flag, in this case Turkey’s MIT or external intelligence has facilitated the delivery of all the necessary components to assemble sarin to al-Nusra (al-Qaida) in Syria. His article, if somewhat incomplete with the details, does nail the real perpetrators. Considering his sources are American, and he actually managed to get into the facts, we have to give him a solid B … the reduced grade reflects either 1) USA intelligence is handicapped in the matter (not likely) or 2) Hersh or his sources are hedging, which is more likely the case. In fact, USA intelligence almost certainly knew it was Turkey behind the gas blamed on Assad by the time of Hersh writing his ‘syllabus’ four months previous to this and either they or Hersh held that card until comfortable with its release. Why the hedge? This professor smells a rat we’ll come back to. Hersh should have smelled it too.
May 2015, Hersh pens The Killing of Osama bin Ladin, a piece detailing too many lies, turnabouts and misleads to count within the American ‘security apparatus’ on the supposed death of a man already dead a full 13 years by the time of the Hersh narrative. Second semester mid-term exam F for EPIC FAIL. Central Intelligence had last met with their long time asset bin Ladin in July of 2001 at the American Hospital in Dubai where he was being treated for renal failure and a diagnosis of two years to live, maximum. Imagine, just three months later, a frail ‘two years to live’ bin-Ladin puts his portable dialysis machine on mules, together with a portable electric grid or generator, diesel or petrol, and goes to live in a cave in the Hindu Kush. Spare parts for all the machines and backup generator included. On top of having escaped Kandahar with the USA invasion of October, this ‘mule train’ (or whatever substituted for travel over terrain that denied motorized vehicle use, I doubt they were using Uzbek ‘coolies’ to haul generators, dialysis machine and fuel) traveled to Tora Bora which immediate vicinity was subsequently bombed to shards by B-52 heavy bombers raining down ordinance to a point “the landscape has been changed” or enough carpet bombing to level a small city. Now, having to escape THAT, bin-Ladin’s ‘mule train’ consisted of (imagine the tune ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’)
12 Uzbek-Qaida muleskinners
11 mules with shoes a-sparkin
10 Jerrycans a-clanging
9 B-40 rockets a-swingin
80 MmmRrrrEees…
7 cases of 7.62 x 39 mm
6 cell phones with no signal
50 TaleeeBan…
4 ISI agents
3 Pashtun guides
2 generators
and a dialysis machine with spare parts.
Supposedly having left Tora Bora unnoticed, bin-Ladin was never heard from again by SIGNIT (signals intelligence, Tora Bora radio intercepts were his last.) The man was dead. He never made it to Pakistan. However he was still useful as a boogeyman because no one could produce his body and the CIA morons on location presumed bin-Ladin escaped (no doubt with his mule train) rather than admit they didn’t (and don’t to this day) know what actually happened. Bonered up CIA cowboy Gary Berntsen (hiya Gary, how tricks since I buggered your ass at San Feliu de Guixols, 2010? FYI what I did to you is called a ‘dry cob’ job) and CIA moron Cofer Black decided to pin their onerous (odious, actually) failure on the military, and Alfreda Bikowsky, who actually sent the FBI to search for Black al-Qaida cells in Montana (what a story that is), was subsequently put in charge of looking for a dead man.
The most likely consequent scenario is, nearly nine years later it was becoming increasingly clear to the Pakistani ISI that in fact bin-Ladin never survived December-January 2001-2002 and the legend has to be finished off. With an axe to grind with the CIA (the botched Khan nuclear black market sting), they set up a ‘dangle’ (a former ISI officer walks in to bag the $25 million reward) for the CIA which rushes to take the bait. What to do when the raid on the Abbottabad kills several harmless people and at best nets a bin-Ladin look-alike? No photo release and bury him at sea without any ships crew witnessed this and all military records seem to be ‘lost?’ Then SEAL Team Six in the hands of some of the best combat aviator coordinators in the world has a totally unprofessional- incompetent demise and we are assured by the DoD this was not the unit involved in the bin-Ladin ‘body snatch’ (we’re supposed to take the DoD’s word for it.) The Abbottabad bin-Ladin relatives are subsequently held incommunicado (no press interviews) by the Pakistanis and simply vanish, supposedly sent off to live happily ever after in some nirvana-like life courtesy of the House of Saud. Sure, that ought to work. Especially when considering the absolute morons running the CIA throughout this period would be perfect to set up for an inter-intelligence-agency sting. Shit happens.
So, what to do when ‘the prez’ has announced to the world that bin-Ladin has been killed before the DNA samples tested negative? Tell him? Probably not. Classify everything ‘lost’ (that’s what the Department of Defense did) and likely put a counterfeit DNA result into whatever report was necessary over at CIA and then bury it in classification at the highest level (with the ‘original samples ‘lost’ or destroyed, no doubt.) The numerous lies and conflicting stories Seymour Hersh turns up in his ‘The Killing of Osama bin Ladin’ make more sense when looked at in the circumstance of an agency (the CIA) which had been ‘snookered’ and no one knew what story to tell because no one wanted to take on the responsibility of getting all the complicit idiots (liars) on the same page in a situation of no competence. The circumstance precluded creating a consistent mythology. But this is not the case with Hersh’s next avowed set of facts:
December 2015 (the January 2016 issue of the London Review of Books) Hersh’s Military to Military sets out a case for the Pentagon flirting with treason (Hersh does not call it that) with undermining Commander-in-Chief Obama’s objectives in Syria. Hersh’s ‘rendition’ of the facts, in short, is the Pentagon has indirectly propped up Assad with intelligence sharing through the Russian military, so as to prevent the collapse of Syria into the chaos that typifies today’s Libya, only worse. The White House didn’t know this, or if they did, they didn’t know what to do about it except to nominate a hard core right wing Catholic and perfect Russophobe-cold-war-dick named Joe Dunford to take over as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and get the loose-cannon generals back under the control of moroness policy advisers like Sam Power and her reptilian reflex approach of ‘if we can fuck it, it will be fucked.’ Hersh’s narrative presents the following, coherent seeming mythology:
Our Generals under recently retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Dempsey, come across as sensible, sane and motivated to the common good in this endeavor.
The White House, by contrast, comes across as senseless, trapped in their incompetence, even insane, or a perfect world peace threatening ‘cluster-fuck’ in the mean vernacular.
Hersh closes his piece with entertaining a mystery; why is it insisted on by the Obama White House we will follow the path of least resistance to absolute world chaos? Or in Hersh’s own words:
The Joint Chiefs and the DIA were constantly telling Washington’s leadership of the jihadist threat in Syria … [t]he message was never listened to. Why not?
The tongue-in-cheek answer would be everyone at the White House is infected with David Icke’s lizard DNA. But not so fast, because I have the real intelligence on the Pentagon and our generals aren’t some crew of goody-two-shoes boy scouts. These guys are real reptiles (a metaphor, let’s not be too friendly with the theology of David Icke) with the ethical motivations of a monitor lizard. This brings us back (as promised) to Hersh’s feeble understanding of the religious right in our military’s officer corps at the very top. General Dempsey, the focus of sanity in Hersh’s presentation, has been little more than an alter boy to the Opus Dei Hersh accuses of hijacking the JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] in his Doha speech, a dyed in the wool, conservative Catholic through and through. Let’s have a look at where the recently retired [former] chairman Dempsy has landed:
American Grand Strategy (AGS) is an interdisciplinary initiative across Duke University that creates and shares new knowledge in the grand strategy field. The program’s mission is to prepare the next generation of strategists by studying past generations and interacting with current strategic leaders. We are building a research community of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates who are committed to deepening their understanding of America’s role in the world – past, present and future.
AGS hosts The Ambassador Dave and Kay Phillips Family International Lecture series: endowed for the purpose of bringing prominent figures in international security, foreign policy, and diplomacy to Duke University in order to engage with students, faculty, and the larger Duke community about issues of international importance. Contemporary leaders who have attended include, Mitt Romney, Stephen Hadley, Ray Odierno, Karl Eikenberry, David Petraeus, Karl Rove, Howard Dean, Condoleezza Rice, Martin Dempsey, Robert Gates, and Fareed Zakaria
If ever there were a snake-pit of ruinous geopolitical policy-makers and pundits (liars for Jesus) on the right wing of American politics, that’s it. This is Seymour Hersh’s protagonist Dempsey in his real colors. Of the no less than four generals and one Secretary of Defense listed; Odierno, Eikenberry, Petraeus, Dempsey and Gates respectively, all were in position to influence and reduce the radical Christian right’s pervasive influence in the USA’s armed forces. None of them did. Eikenberry and Odierno firmly sat on their hands. Dempsey protected them. Petraeus endorsed them. Gates promoted them and what’s more is, was key in setting the Obama administration down the wrong road at its inception when working with Petraeus to more closely integrate the JSOC to the CIA (not to mention instigating the failed Afghanistan ‘surge.’) Of the non-military personalities, Condoleezza Rice is a rabid right wing evangelical. Her deputy, Hadley, had his fingerprints all over the Bush Jr crimes sprees including the frame-up of Saddam for possession of uranium (Plame affair.) Rove devised the strategy which handed the USA, lock, stock & barrel, to the American religious right. Dean is complicit in providing cover for the Mojahedin-e-Khalq terror de-listing even as that group was blackmailed into reentering the game versus Iran but now on the side of Israel with USA supported assassination training, that very training being the subject of Hersh’s ‘Our Men in Iran.’ Zakaria comes up a CIA media whore for geopolitics in nearly every direction one looks, not least his FORD Foundation funding for past projects. Every one of those listed at the Duke program is a snake dripping venom on the right wing of politics, including stealth neocon Dean, who worked together with Rudy Giuliani and Tom Ridge, when ‘rehabilitating’ Mojahedin-e-Khalq for Bibi Netanyahu’s outsourced assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. Now, looking at Dempsey in that cesspool when compared with the sanity assigned by Hersh in his ‘Military to Military’, Hersh’s portrayal of Dempsey can’t hold up.
Then, we have another problem. Why would Hersh’s sympathetic sources rat out the supposedly sane generals trying to keep the insanity from spiraling out of control in Syria? That doesn’t smell right. Not only does it not smell right, it violates his sources intelligence training. All military sources would have the necessary intelligence training to operate at the level Hersh is reporting the leaks from and the discipline not to compromise themselves and associates. Are Hersh’s essential facts on intelligence sharing with Assad through the Russians properly lined up? Probably. So, what’s up? Why the leaks to Hersh?
Behind the Mythology
I’ve seen some of the confidential statements to Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation by the few of our secular General Officers pointing to the rampant treason against our constitution by Christian dominion personalities they dare not speak about or challenge openly. If our secular Generals and Admirals don’t dare speak out, what should that say to a reasonable person? Who controls the tactical nuclear weapons that are held independently of the President’s ‘football’ controlling a strategic nuclear launch? Personalities like NATO Supreme Commander (US Air Force General) Phillip Breedlove who is clearly itching for a war with Russia. It would appear he just got an (Obama appointed) ally in Joe Dunford who has replaced Hersh’s faux hero (snake in the grass) General Dempsey as JCS chairman.
Whoever ratted out the Russian connection to Hersh has an agenda and that agenda is not preserving the sanity (probably accurately) portrayed by Hersh. What we are more likely looking at is, the struggle between the Christian dominion and secular officers, the elephant in the living room no one dares bring up. The radical right wing had got wind of what is up and pulled a bait and switch on the reading public by a duped Seymour Hersh who was used as the ‘cut out’ to 1) collapse the secular officers intelligence sharing scheme 2) take credit in the public eye for sanity by those very same insane officers and most importantly 3) undercut Hillary on whose watch the badly fucked up Syria policy was set in motion. What an irony, because Hillary would so deserve this and double rich in irony as it was then CIA director & rabid right wing evangelical David Petraeus did the dirty work initiating the hit job on the Assad regime.
Don’t worry about this all not making much common sense, if Obama’s ‘national security’ squeeze Susan Rice never saw a ‘humanitarian intervention’ she didn’t like, the religious right generals at the Pentagon will take every one of them gratefully; all the while ‘praising Jesus’ on the road to Armageddon and pointing the finger of blame at people who’re just plain stupid and have been played to precisely the generals agenda of seeing the return of Jesus via apocalyptic events in the middle east per their theology and ‘Bible Prophecy’ … while Obama’s ‘girls’ … Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power and Susan Rice get the full credit for taking us all to hell in a hand-basket when in fact they only deserve the one half of it. Meanwhile you can take in your Pentagon Bible study HERE
Now, on the overdue paper from last semester, if Hersh’s study of Cheney tracks down the Kosovo criminal ring that harvested Cheney’s replacement heart for his transplant, I’ll pass Hersh for the academic year with a solid C grade 😉
This article briefly examines the close resemblance of ‘The Secret Team’ to the Doug Coe “Family” Christian millennial cult, sponsors of the USA’s ‘National Prayer Breakfast.’ We begin with a look at ‘The Secret Team.’
Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty was one of the top Pentagon liaison officers for CIA special operations during the Vietnam war era. A highly ethical and intelligent man, Prouty more than came to have grave doubts about the endeavors he was involved in. He studied what was happening in his line of work closely and subsequently revealed what he had seen. He was, and is, no doubt the most important whistle-blower of the post World War Two era; arguably his revelations have been the most suppressed of any whistle-blower.
Here, I have taken a few key paragraphs from his seminal work, ‘The Secret Team’, to demonstrate what he had written about is as relevant today as when written nearly 45 years ago.
Prouty’s paragraphs are in italics, my clarifications and other observations are NOT in italics and are bracketed [ ]
*
It was the CIA, with help from a few other agencies, that put together the Inter-American Police Academy during the early Kennedy years, which played such an important part in emphasizing national police power in the nations of Latin America. The CIA brought in police instructors from all over the United States and from the military for this school. The success of this school, operating covertly from an Army base in the Canal of Panama, led to other schools in the United States that have carried on this type of work for police forces in this country. Part of the impetus behind the great buildup in the strength of police force all over the country dates back to this CIA police academy work and to the other schools it spawned. This police work not only involved training but it integrated new weapons, new procedures, and new techniques into American police work, some of which has been good and much of which has been quite ominous.
Anyone who doubts that this nation building and police activity has not become real and very effective right here in the United States need only visit the area around Fort Bragg to find one of these early paramilitary CIA-oriented specialists, General Tolson, sending his American soldiers out into the countryside with nation-building programs for the citizens of the United States. If such tactics continue, it is possible that an enlargement of such a program could lead to a pacification program of areas of the United States, such as the CIA and the U.S. Army have carried out in Indochina
*
By the end of 1962 this nation had gone so far down the line following the Agency, the new Special Forces doctrine, the MAP [Military Assistance Plan, for civilian government], and the new U.S. philosophy as outlined in the President’s Committee report, that it was saying openly it was well on its way to carrying out as top national policy a major clandestine operation so big in fact that the entire government would be involved. Obviously, it could not be really clandestine in the sense that it would be kept secret from our enemies; on the contrary, it was a new kind of “clandestine”, so it would be kept secret from all Americans
*
The important thing to understand is that the [Pentagon’s] much-heralded office of SACSA [Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities] had very few military responsibilities. It was almost entirely CIA oriented. Most of its dealings with the services were in areas in which the CIA was most active. For example, the great proportion of its dealing with the Army was strictly limited to Special Forces activity. With the Air Force it was for the most part limited to Special Air Warfare activity, and with the Navy it was active in the Sea, Air, Land (SEAL) teams. There were other duties of course; but most of them gave the office something it could say it was doing while it performed its primary task of supporting the CIA, the ST [Secret Team], and of breathing life into the massive Frankenstein called counterinsurgency
*
All the pieces were coming together, and during this formative period a new special group was formed. This was the Special Group (of the NSC) [National Security Council], Counterinsurgency, better known as the Special Group CI, or CI. This group presided over the CIA, State and Defense Departments, and others, who hastily put together a host of counterinsurgency nations. It was a watch list, which varied from time to time as intelligence inputs rose and fell with the tides of international events. The Special Group CI list usually ran to about sixteen or seventeen countries, in the order of how deep they were along the path to insurgency and decay. It is worth noting that although the automatic target of CI was Communism, not a single “Communist” country, including Cuba, was on the list. It was characteristic of the new ST focus that the United States was to intervene in the affairs of its friends and not in the affairs of Russia’s friends or of China’s friends [this list is about 130 countries today]
*
As countries were added to the list their military aid programs were hastily escalated, and literally hundreds and sometimes thousands of American military personnel of all types descended upon them. Sometimes they arrived in uniform and sometimes in civilian disguise. They went to work immediately in support of the new political-social-economic doctrine, and before long new schools were being built — by the army; new hospitals were being built — by the army; new farming techniques were under way — by the army; irrigation and water purification projects were under way, — again by the army. Underlying all of the paramilitary and sometimes real military work was the CIA, working with the host government to weed out, to identify, and to categorize all of the subversive insurgents. In countries where the word Communism had never been applied to bandits, beggars, and rebels before, all of a sudden all opposition was given the name “Communist”. All the problems were attributed to Communists, and the counterinsurgency action was under way [in today’s world, one sees a greatly enhanced version of this phenomenon, inclusive of World Bank, IMF and related USAID programs, as well as less ‘benign’ or overtly militarized involving the western powers armed forces in circumstance where the term ‘terrorist’ supplants ‘communist’, excepting those cases where the actual terrorists are given cover, for instance the ‘moderate opposition’ in Syria because they serve a means to an end; such as the overthrow of Assad. In less overt circumstance, the example could be Ethiopia where the USA has a low key counter-insugency presence and the Ethiopian military has been forcibly relocating populations to turn fertile farming land over to World Bank associated programs where the actual beneficiaries are western corporations. These dislocated communities risk becoming radicalized and new insurgencies born. In the case of Ethiopia, the counter-insurgency program is already in place, essentially a USA funded police directorate protecting the affluent western stockholder’s bottom line. If, or more likely, when, an Ethiopian insurgency develops, because Ethiopia is a Christian nation, the insurgency will be characterized along the lines of ‘The Lord’s Resistance Army’ or Joseph Kony]
*
For all its fabrication and apparent unreality, especially in this open society, the ST machine does have a central soul or brain… or perhaps… holy spirit. It is the evidence of a form of new religion. It has its secrets. It has its divine and unquestioned rights and obligations. It has self-righteous power over life and death. It does not believe in anything. It does not value anything. It is utterly ruthless [this preceding precisely describes today’s Doug Coe “Family” cult, the sponsor of the National Prayer Breakfast, featuring a membership entirely made up of Christian ‘millennial’ personalities of which many populate the apex of American corporate boardrooms and government institutions; including numerous congressmen, senators and serving generals throughout the USA military structures. ] Its greatest motivating force and drive is entirely undefined, because it moves by pressure. It reacts. It is therefore blind, meaningless, senseless. It will do anything in the name of anti-Communism. Yet in its greatest anti-Communist war it sees no inconsistency in the killing of one of its most anti-Communist creations — Ngo Dinh Diem. In its zeal to rid the Caribbean of Communism, it leaps at the chance to rid the Dominican Republic of Latin America’s strongest non-Communist, Rafael Trujillo. Any person or groups that know how to get to this infrastructure, who have the clearances, who have the need-to-know, can make an input into this ST, and as long as the desired action is anti-Communist, the system will operate [if today you substitute ‘terrorist’ for communist, you see essentially the same behaviors and inconsistencies. Saddam, Gaddafi and Assad all kept a clampdown on al-Qaida until the the USA intervened and Islamic State was born]
The idea “The Secret Team” in fact so closely matches the Doug Coe “Family” cult, they must be identified as one and the same, is not far fetched at all:
“One needn’t be a Marxist to find fault with the Family’s mash-up of New Testament and unfettered capitalism — Adam Smith himself would have recognized that theology as a disingenuous form of self-interest by proxy. Such interests have led the Family into some strange alliances over the years. Seduced by the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s militant anti-communism, they described the murder of hundreds of thousands that brought him to power as a “spiritual revolution,” and sent delegations of congressmen and oil executives to pray to Jesus with the Muslim leader. In Africa, they anointed the Somali killer Siad Barre as God’s man and sent Sen. Grassley and a defense contractor as emissaries. Barre described himself as a “Koranic Marxist,” but he agreed to pray to Grassley’s American Christ in return for American military aid, which he then used to wreak a biblical terror on his nation. It has not yet recovered. More recently, the Family has paid for congressional Christian junkets to bastions of democracy such as Serbia, Sudan, Belarus, Albania, Macedonia and Musharraf’s Pakistan…
“Counseling Rep. Tiahrt, Doug Coe offered Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden as men whose commitment to their causes is to be emulated. Preaching on the meaning of Christ’s words, he says, “You know Jesus said ‘You got to put Him before mother-father-brother sister? Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that’s what they taught the kids. Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn’t murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom” -from investigative journalist Jeff Sharlet’s “C Street”
*
They insist they are just a group of friends, yet they funnel millions of dollars through tax-free corporations. They claim to disdain politics, but congressmen of both parties describe them as the most influential religious organization in Washington. They say they are not Christians, but simply believers.
Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. Their goal is “Jesus plus nothing.” Their method is backroom diplomacy. The Family is the startling story of how their faith—part free-market fundamentalism, part imperial ambition—has come to be interwoven with the affairs of nations around the world -Jeff Sharlet’s “The Family”
A retrospective note would be, a certainty the Doug Coe cult (Secret Team) would have spread throughout NATO and be responsible for both: GLADIO and GLADIO B
Cut out; A mechanism or person used to create a compartment between the members of an operation to allow them to pass material or messages securely; also an agent who functions as an intermediary between a spymaster and other sub-agents.
Well, ok for lay people and beginners, but it doesn’t win a cigar with the real spooks. Let’s say the people over at NATO’s ‘deep state’ GLADIO headquarters needed to pass weapons on to a cell prepared to initiate an act of terror to justify pursuing geopolitical acts on a grand scale. The cell’s actors are bonfide Islamic State combatants, veterans of the Syria conflict, and have no idea their arms suppliers are rogue western intelligence officers. These intelligence officers would need a ‘cut out’ to pass weapons from the NATO aligned covert operations people to the ‘terrorists’ preparing to attack Paris, without the attackers or subsequent police investigators knowing the source of the guns. The weapons provided must be laundered.
Meanwhile, a Department of Defense contract employee from Academi had been providing private security in Afghanistan and decided to purchase an M92 to take with him in 2013. This short, easily concealable, modified model based on the famed Kalishnikov combat automatic rifle, is nothing short of a machine-pistol capable of (designed to) shoot a lot of people in any surprise attack at close quarters. In Afghanistan, the Academi contract employee sells his M92 to a CIA liaised Special Forces team member who desired it for an upcoming special operation run into Tajikistan. In 2014, the CIA liaised Special Forces team rotates out of Afghanistan. Their flight lands at a highly secured CIA compound within a military base in the USA. The Green Beret, without thinking, drops the M92 into the ‘recycle unauthorized/unassigned theater weapons’ bin. The M92, together with a mishmash of untraceable 1980s & 1990s AK type weapons are sent on to the CIA’s secret armory at Camp Stanley, Texas. The M92 doesn’t particularly stand out from the rest of the weapons in inventory. It looks like just another AK 47 clone with folding stock.
The following year, over in Brussels, Belgium, NATO’s rogue intelligence team GLADIO, when preparing an upcoming operation, utilize a GLADIO aligned double-agent who’s a Sephardic MOSSAD officer posing as an Arab black-market arms dealer, to arm the Adelhamid Abaaoud terror cell planning the Paris attacks. This man will be the ‘cut out.’ A CIA member of NATO Team GLADIO in Brussels has access to weapons shipped to the Syrian ‘moderate opposition’ when these shipments transit Brussels. A planeload of AK type weapons departs Camp Stanley, Texas, bound for Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, to be delivered to Hakan Fidan who’ll deliver the arms to Islamic State, a “western powers” project dedicated to the overthrow of Syria’s Basher al-Assad. The plane stops for overnight layover to refuel and change crews in Brussels. Meanwhile our NATO team GLADIO man has perused the cargo and selected several weapons of Serbian manufacture, to make it look like they originated with Europe’s Balkans wars of the 1990s, including the M92 chosen for its ease of concealment. All of the weapons are presumed to be untraceable.
Post Friday the 13th in Paris, a linked M92 machine-pistol is discovered to have been recently made in Serbia and exported to the USA*
“Milojko Brzakovic of the Zastava arms factory told The Associated Press that the M92 semi-automatic pistol’s serial number matched one his company delivered to an American online arms dealer in May 2013. It was not clear how the gun got back to Europe”
Whether you believe the preceding story is plausible or not, one thing is certain; the M92 used in the Paris attacks was very, very unlikely to have been imported to Europe by some terrorist having it mailed to him via the several parcel services delivering from the USA. It is equally unlikely the weapon transited multiple borders from USA to Islamic State in Syria to Brussels and then Paris. The more likely explanation would be something closer to the story preceding. It is actually likelier some intelligence service provided that particular weapon to the attackers in Paris and it was a snafu, because it looked similar to any number of older models and the fact it was a newer and traceable weapon is information that had been somehow been missed in the false-flag laundering process.
If I were the honest cops of Belgium and France, there would be a line of investigation opened into the known to exist NATO ‘deep state’ structures; with particular attention given to CIA and (Turkey’s) MIT operatives in Brussels, as well MOSSAD and any contacts in Paris.
Insofar as any ‘official’ American explanation or NATO related investigation that might be spawned as a result of the M92 turned up in the Paris attacks, only a naïf would trust the result.
* the original AP story has been taken down and replaced with an unconvincing explanation the weapon whose serial number turned up (according to INTERPOL) in the Paris attacks had been recovered at a crime scene in Mexico and is in the custody of the Mexican government. INTERPOL subsequently declined provide any information on how the very same weapon was identified as employed in Paris.
11 March 2016 update: Band Front-man on security absence at the Bataclan when the concert began… “it seemed “obvious” why they didn’t turn up to work”
Hello friends of social consciousness ( I presume ; )
If you would be so kind as to read the text of a linked (below) article on NATO actor Turkey involvement with chemical warfare, a news story not reported on AT ALL in western press, I would like to point you all to a world class criminal event where you could make a difference with little effort. It is as easy as copying and pasting a few addresses from the provided email list of senior members of the German parliament (plus the German constitutional court & office of the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court) into the address field of an email of your own composition or an email that copies the proposed email presented below and demand as little as two words: Do something! The rational here is, German intelligence, or their political bosses are complicit in concealing the truly culpable parties to a gas attack in Syria, a crime where the actual details have become known. It was NATO’s Turkey gassed the Syrians in what’s known in spy-craft as a ‘false flag operation.’ It is unconscionable that German intelligence (or their bosses) would fail to faithfully and honestly report on a war crime or crime against humanity where poison gas had been used.
Thank you and sincerely
Ronald Thomas West
*
Send to a few of the following (not too many, so your mail is not rejected as spam) hans-christian.stroebele@bundestag.de, ulla.jelpke@bundestag.de, irene.mihalic@bundestag.de, michael.hartmann@wk.bundestag.de, armin.schuster.wk@bundestag.de, norbert.lammert@bundestag.de, peter.hintze@bundestag.de, johannes.singhammer@bundestag.de, edelgard.bulmahn@wk.bundestag.de, ursula.schmidt@wk.bundestag.de, petra.pau@bundestag.de, claudia.roth@bundestag.de, marieluise.beck@bundestag.de, omid.nouripour@bundestag.de, stefan.liebich@bundestag.de, niels.annen@bundestag.de, roderich.kiesewetter@bundestag.de, gregor.gysi@bundestag.de, Posteingangsstelle@bgh.bund.de, OTP.InformationDesk@icc-cpi.int,
Dear Members of the German Parliament
I wish to draw attention to recent information regarding your NATO ally Turkey. It had been revealed by two courageous members of Turkey’s parliament that in fact it was Turkey’s federal intelligence services were behind the August 2013 Ghouta, Syria sarin gas attack, killing more than one thousand three hundred ordinary Syrians, an attack NATO nations had blamed on the regime of Basher al-Assad. Your own Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) intelligence agency should have been aware of this fact from very nearly the beginning, as they have been proactively engaged in Syria and the Syrian conflict, as well as spying on Turkey.
This raises strong questions of possible BND criminal complicity considering Germany’s support for certain NATO nations directly in relation to the Syrian conflict. What did the BND know and when? Has the BND, when passing intelligence on Syria to Assad’s opposition through its NATO allies, supported the actors who gassed the Syrians? Is Germany’s supportive relationship to the Erdogan government a lawful one, in light of this recent evidence? Has the BND contributed to the geopolitical disinformation blaming Assad for the August 2013 Sarin attack? Has your parliament been deceived in this matter, particularly your intelligence oversight committee?
Clearly the Sarin case, considering Germany, as a knowledgeable or complicit actor in Syria, should be pursued against the culpable officials in Turkey via the legal mechanism of Völkerstrafgesetzbuch (universal jurisdiction), as well as domestic prosecutions of those German officials, noting the BND particularly, who’ve failed in their reporting requirements and/or conspired to conceal a war crime or crime against humanity.
These should be questions and demand you will present to the federal prosecutor.
What’s more is, state actor Turkey initiating the Sarin attack is not some undocumented allegation. As you can see from the attached reporting, there was a proper investigation by Turkish authorities with developed evidence and indictments. I regret to inform you in this case, President Erdogan is personally demanding or initiating the prosecutions that have seen some 30 journalists jailed or facing jail for making these sort of revelations, as well he jails those lawful authorities who pursue investigating crimes perpetrated by the Edogan administration, undermining de jure government institutions.
Text of the (linked) competent article by reputable Turkish journalists:
Two deputies from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) have claimed that the government is against investigating Turkey’s role in sending toxic sarin gas which was used in an attack on civilians in Syria in 2013 and in which over 1,300 Syrians were killed.
CHP deputies Eren Erdem and Ali Şeker held a press conference in İstanbul on Wednesday in which they claimed the investigation into allegations regarding Turkey’s involvement in the procurement of sarin gas which was used in the chemical attack on a civil population and delivered to the terrorist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to enable the attack was derailed.
Taking the floor first, Erdem stated that the Adana Chief Prosecutor’s Office launched an investigation into allegations that sarin was sent to Syria from Turkey via several businessmen. An indictment followed regarding the accusations targeting the government.
“The MKE [Turkish Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation] is also an actor that is mentioned in the investigation file. Here is the indictment. All the details about how sarin was procured in Turkey and delivered to the terrorists, along with audio recordings, are inside the file,” Erdem said while waving the file.
Erdem also noted that the prosecutor’s office conducted detailed technical surveillance and found that an al-Qaeda militant, Hayyam Kasap, acquired sarin, adding: “Wiretapped phone conversations reveal the process of procuring the gas at specific addresses as well as the process of procuring the rockets that would fire the capsules containing the toxic gas. However, despite such solid evidence there has been no arrest in the case. Thirteen individuals were arrested during the first stage of the investigation but were later released, refuting government claims that it is fighting terrorism,” Erdem noted.
Over 1,300 people were killed in the sarin gas attack in Ghouta and several other neighborhoods near the Syrian capital of Damascus, with the West quickly blaming the regime of Bashar al-Assad and Russia claiming it was a “false flag” operation aimed at making US military intervention in Syria possible.
Suburbs near Damascus were struck by rockets containing the toxic sarin gas in August 2013.
The purpose of the attack was allegedly to provoke a US military operation in Syria which would topple the Assad regime in line with the political agenda of then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his government.
CHP deputy Şeker spoke after Erdem, pointing out that the government misled the public on the issue by asserting that sarin was provided by Russia. The purpose was to create the perception that, according to Şeker, “Assad killed his people with sarin and that requires a US military intervention in Syria.”
He also underlined that all of the files and evidence from the investigation show a war crime was committed within the borders of the Turkish Republic.
“The investigation clearly indicates that those people who smuggled the chemicals required to procure sarin faced no difficulties, proving that Turkish intelligence was aware of their activities. While these people had to be in prison for their illegal acts, not a single person is in jail. Former prime ministers and the interior minister should be held accountable for their negligence in the incident,” Şeker further commented.
Erdem also added that he will launch a criminal complaint against those responsible, including those who issued a verdict of non-prosecution in the case, those who did not prevent the transfer of chemicals and those who first ordered the arrest of the suspects who were later released.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced in late August that an inquiry had been launched into the gas attacks allegedly perpetuated by both Assad’s Syrian regime and rebel groups fighting in Syria since the civil war erupted in 2011.
However, Erdem is not the only figure who has accused Turkey of possible involvement in the gas attack. Pulitzer Prize winner and journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, argued in an article published in 2014 that MİT was involved with extremist Syrian groups fighting against the Assad regime.
In his article, Hersh said Assad was not behind the attack, as claimed by the US and Europe, but that Turkish-Syrian opposition collaboration was trying to provoke a US intervention in Syria in order to bring down the Assad regime.
The original link is no longer good as Turkey’s government seized Today’s Zaman and shut down the English website and deleted all articles but anticipating this, the article is preserved in full HERE with screenshots.
Note on the preceding; all of the allegations concerning the proposed letter are well founded in open source. The Seymour Hersh article on the sarin gas attack: The Redline and the Ratline
Ronald Thomas West 