“We hold that it is substantially likely that social media companies — even the biggest ones — are private actors whose rights the First Amendment protects” –11th Circuit Court of Appeals: NetChoice, LLC v. Attorney General [1]
This will be succinct. The USA Constitution’s preamble’s first words are “We the People”
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America”
There is no ‘we the people & the oligarchs, shareholders, one percent’ and whatever future what-have-you entities such as the propaganda arm of USAID underwriting color revolution.
In the governing of political lies, are ‘private’ corporate parties allowed to decide whose & which lies they’ll feed you, and what truths ‘the people’ must be protected from, under the ‘protected’ rubric of free speech? According to the democratic principles of modern empire, given example of failed attempt to penalize political lies, the clear answer is yes:
“The notion that the government, rather than the people, may be the final arbiter of truth in political debate is fundamentally at odds with the [free speech protecting] First Amendment” -Rickert vs the State of Washington [2]
In the aforementioned case, the hypocritical (equal to Huxley’s ‘war is peace’) legalese translated into common sense speech would read: ‘Because it would be too dangerous for the government to motivate truth (allow prosecutions or lawsuits concerning false statements), the voter base should purchase crystal balls to determine whether, how and when they’re being lied to.’
It follows, our judiciary hands this ‘right to lie to the people’ to the non-living-legal-entity called the corporation:
“A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends. An established body of law specifies the rights and obligations of the people (including shareholders, officers, and employees) who are associated with a corporation in one way or another. When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people” -Citizens United [3]
Or, in short other words, democracy ‘protects’ the ‘rights’ of, example given, war mongering corporate profiteers to purchase and shape reality via mass media.
We will come back to ‘free speech’, but meanwhile, when & how did this ‘legalized corruption’ usurping our constitution’s ‘the people’ begin? This following, directly related, ‘color of law’ (pretense of constitutional authority) matter of government immunity from suit, has consumed the American constitution from our republic’s inception.
To understand the American founding era argument between the Federalists (lobby for empowered central government) and the anti-Federalists (lobby for dis-empowered central government) was never resolved, rather the Federalists (essentially today’s corporate America) have played dirty ever since, one only need examine the history of the 11th Amendment and the associated, patently fraudulent, idea the USA has rightfully asserted the doctrine of Sovereign Immunity:
“The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State” -11th Amendment to the United States Constitution
In short other words, no person shall be empowered to, for reasons of upcoming example given, sue the state of Georgia via a Federal court in South Carolina. There is nothing more than this in the language of the 11th Amendment. You need to sue Georgia? Initiate the lawsuit against Georgia in Georgia’s state courts. The federal option is taken away. There is nothing else there. Nada. Zip. Zero.
What had happened, is a contractor from South Carolina was owed a Revolutionary War debt by the State of Georgia, which didn’t want to pay up. The Supreme Court had ruled there was no such thing as state sovereign immunity, in the case of Chisholm v Georgia.
“Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419 (1793), is considered the first United States Supreme Court case of significance and impact. Since the case was argued prior to the establishment of judicial review by Marbury v. Madison (1803), there was little available legal precedent (particularly in U.S. law). The Court, in a 4-1 decision, ruled in favor of Alexander Chisholm, a citizen of South Carolina, stating that states did not enjoy sovereign immunity from suits made by citizens of other states in federal court” (bold RTW) [4]
Nearly all of the states freaked out at the prospect of having to pay up on their war debts in courts they had no control over (likely motivated from an underlying corrupted jurisdictional issue or matter of ability to influence outcomes) and the 11th Amendment was passed, posthaste, with consequence that should defy belief:
“To this day, Chisholm stands as one of only a handful of Supreme Court rulings that have been overturned by constitutional amendment. Even more important, the Supreme Court has built on the repudiation of Chisholm to hold that the Eleventh Amendment exemplifies a sovereign-immunity principle that sweeps well beyond the amendment’s text” (bold RTW) [5]
No matter the 11th Amendment is narrow & specific to jurisdiction (limits initiating suits against states to the state court system of the state being sued), and doesn’t so much as mention Sovereign Immunity, the legendary English Common Law expert William Blackstone’s Sovereign Immunity doctrine is reinstated in the former colonies:
“The King moreover is not only incapable of doing wrong, but even of thinking wrong; he can never mean to do an improper thing: in him is no folly or weakness.” [6]
Only now, it is no longer the ‘King’ can act with impunity, but the institutions of government in the United States:
“we have understood the Eleventh Amendment to stand not so much for what it says, but for the presupposition of our constitutional structure which it confirms: that the States entered the federal system with their sovereignty intact…” –Blatchford v. Native Village of Noatak (1991), Antonin Scalia writing for the Supreme Court of the United States (bold RTW) [7]
And there you have it, from the early days of the Supreme Court saying sovereignty of the state over citizens (i.e. citizens cannot sue the state, or what became known as sovereign immunity) is a non existent thing in USA constitutional law, to the several states’ legislatures passing the 11th Amendment which doesn’t so much as mention Sovereign Immunity, to escape war debt cases being decided in courts outside the jurisdiction of the state being sued, to the modern Supreme Court stating the language of our constitution’s 11th Amendment absolutely does not mean what it actually says, but instead means what they want it to say, with states (and the USA federal government) consequently able to decide when, how, and even whether they can be sued in matters of manipulating information, political speech, and a plethora of other things; essentially deciding ‘we will extend ‘the King’s prerogative‘ as far as we please, and we will use the 11th Amendment to absurdly assert what amounts to a claim the King’s Sovereign Immunity (impunity) was never a point of the American Revolution.’
This, my friends, is the short of it; the history of ‘legally principled behaviors’ (that’s irony) ultimately leading to ‘color of law’ (a pretense of lawful authority) run amok, supplanting the constitution and now so far removed from the actual ‘original intent’ that, example given, in matters of ‘free speech’, so called ‘equally privileged’ citizens (oligarchs, actually) like Elon Musk (twitter shares acquisition), Bill Gates (foundation) George Soros (foundation) and Mark Zuckerberg (meta) can ‘regulate speech’ (read: buy, produce, reject and/or otherwise disseminate false or undermine true information) as ‘protected’ private corporate entities no matter:
Twitter is a publicly traded, but ‘protected private’ entity (whether Musk takes it private or not), when disseminating and/or deciding which political lies passed off as ‘truths’ should shape entire cultures’ perceptions. Soros ‘Open Society’ foundation can do the same, ditto Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, all empowered to manipulate or shape reality, simply due to the power of their ‘incorporated’ wealth possessing a citizen’s so-called ‘protected constitutional rights’ when it comes to the employ of political lies via mass media. Toss in the military-industrial complex & corporate owned press, add fascist corporate lobbies along the lines of ‘The Federalist Society’, include government social engineering projects (e.g. CIA via USAID) and you see the result; propaganda serving a world-wide havoc threatening World War Three.
‘All men are created equal’ methinks is just another political lie of empire. It is a lie, and can only be a lie, that, or the very idea should expose the lie of American ‘exceptionalism.’ You can’t have it both ways. Moreover, any American with a current passport can read these ‘exceptional’ lies in the visa pages like counting sheep going to sleep.
Ronald Thomas West taught American Constitutional Law as a layman (for English credit) at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, Summer semester 2008.
Had an interesting conversation with Richard Silverstein the other day concerning legitimate comparisons of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to the behaviors of the Nazis and relevant censorship. His article “Jerusalem Day = Nuremberg Day” is well worth a read (as well as follow-up article of recent days.) It was 2012 I was banned by the UK’s Guardian for daring to point out Israeli (especially ‘settler’) behavior towards Palestinians resembles a decades ongoing “kristallnacht” or the 1938 German pogrom terrorizing Jews with murders, arson, looting and so on. My admiration is extended to Richard for daring to make a similar comparison. We did NOT discuss this following piece I had written over ten years ago taken down (censored) by Scribd, and Richard cannot be held accountable for anything having to do with my work. But our conversation recalled [to myself] this piece and in my view this work is as relevant today as when first written:
The Enemy of my Enemy
Cognitive Dissonance/Grotesque Reflex: How the philosophy ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ makes for ludicrous bedfellows & twisted agenda:
About this absurd religious right ‘the Jews murdered Jesus’ thing .. if that were the case, shouldn’t they rather be grateful for being “Covered in the blood” of Jesus [St Paul quote] as they make money hand over fist covering the planet in blood with war profiteering, all the while in swoon over misogynist hate monger Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ”, the church made myth of a man they love to pretend is ‘God’ incarnate so they can engage in cannibalism every ‘Sabbath’ with a ‘Communion’ of eating Jesus flesh and drinking Jesus blood? Y’know, if people really knew how to think for themselves, there would be no such necrotic fantasies and resultant criminal civilization .. just a thought, but meanwhile:
The paranoid Jewish Zionists embrace rabid anti-Semitic Christian Zionists who fully intend the Jewish Zionists will become extinct one they’ve finished the dirty work of retaking the West Bank for the Christian Zionists necrotic vision of a road to Armageddon, meanwhile the Jewish Zionists label the non-Jewish anti-Zionist as anti-Semitic when in fact most of the non-Jewish anti-Zionists are the bitter foes of the rabid anti-Semitic Christian Zionists momentarily embraced by the Jewish Zionists
Now, in the mix of all of this, the anti-Zionist Jewish personalities are in an impossible state of being forced to play a game of ‘shut the fuck up’ or get blasted by all Zionists, Jewish and Christian, while the non-Jewish anti- Zionist is attacked by the paranoid Ashkenazi, who became paranoid and Zionist, on account of the pogroms of anti- Semitic Christian Zionists. These people bite the hand of people who’re actually doing them a favor by taking on the rabidly anti-Semitic Christian Zionists, personalities who intend as soon as the partnership of convenience is over, all those clinging to Judaism will be tossed into a lake of what will almost certainly amount to man-made nuclear fire
Meanwhile, the Sephardic Jews who’d lived for nearly one and a half thousand years in peace and tranquility in the world of Islam (notably excepting that period when they’d fought on the side of the Muslims during the Crusades) have become an extinct species in the Arab countries, not in the least because of both Jewish and Christian Zionism via policy and settlement in the West Bank and the incredibly nasty treatment of the Arabs there. Israeli Zionists have enabled this social injustice together with American Zionists, including countless conservative Christians, have bankrolled these policies abusing the Palestinians. All this came about because of Jewish Zionist paranoia of living in countries with a majority Christian Zionists and history of pogroms, yet are (for reasons of the social psychology phenomena of inter-generational violence) behaving towards the Arabs like the Christian Zionists had treated them, in turn setting up the present cycle of anti-Palestinian pogroms, based on behaviors Jews learned from Christians, now approaching a scale of nukes & nations
It only gets more ridiculous:
The Sephardic Jews who’d relocated to Israel as a result of fallout in the Arab world from Zionist policies are absolutely 2nd class citizens- pointing to the anti-Semitic tendencies of the conservative Ashkenazi Jews, a race based oxymoron of Jewish anti-Semitism. This is obviously as clear as it is ludicrous and self destructive, when a Jewish person in Israel cannot be equal, because this Jew has the appearance, language and customs of an Arab
I think a moral to this story could be: Any Zionism that is literal Zionism (unlike the benign Zionism of Bob Marley) is a loser. Perhaps this could be the idea behind the UN Resolution equating Zionism with Racism?
Inter-generational hate and violence is a known and understood phenomena of social psychology. Many people have not risen above this malevolent infection of the psyche that is imbued in a very literal sense of the Torah or Pentateuch: ‘the child inherits the sin of the father’ (or the sins of a xenophobic & nationalist stepfather)
In the larger picture of nations, relating to this inter- generational violence, should it not be the responsibility of several national leaders to stand up and state to the Israelis, whether the leaders of Russia, Spain, or (especially) Germany, examples given, ‘do not treat the Palestinian as our Christian has treated the Jew’
If only because it is the responsibility of leadership to demonstrate responsible attitudes in relation to the acts of nations. And crucial, is that nation which had transgressed most egregiously in historic times should demonstrate this courage to again confront the worst of these infantile and irrational behaviors, if only to remind the USA, not only Israel, do not dare to go down this road, do not dare to become the Nazis…
The Israeli ‘nationalist step-father’ (based on the principle of “inter-generational violence”)
kill switch
noun
a computer function for disabling software or a device remotely: 100 percent of the French high-tech arms exports concealed a kill switch which could render the weapon useless
“Senior MPs have called for an inquiry into claims that France deliberately withheld secrets about missiles that killed 46 British sailors in the 1982 Falklands War
“The Telegraph has been told that French-made Exocet guided missiles contained a “kill switch” that could have disarmed them, but that France denied such a device existed
“Three Royal Navy ships were hit by Exocets during the Falklands conflict, two of which – HMS Sheffield and the merchant vessel Atlantic Conveyor – sank. Sailors died on all three ships
“The missiles were made by the French firm Aerospatiale and, as the Royal Navy task force sailed south to retake the islands from their Argentinian occupiers, Britain appealed to its ally for information about how they worked and whether they could be disabled
“British experts believed the Exocets contained a kill switch, which arms manufacturers sometimes secretly build into weapons so they can be disabled if they fall into the hands of a hostile state
“According to a highly-placed source, France denied that the kill switches existed, but British officials became convinced it was not telling the truth, partly as a result of investigations carried out on an earlier variant of the missile that had been bought by the UK”
knucklehead |ˈnəkəlˌhed |
noun informal
a stupid person
“Serbia plans to purchase Rafale multipurpose fighter jets from France, President Aleksandar Vucic said … which experts saw as the latest sign of Belgrade distancing itself from its traditional military supplier and ally Russia
“”We have been negotiating this purchase of 12 new jets for a year, and we are also looking at buying another 12 used (Western) planes from another country,” Vucic told Reuters. He did not specify the type of the used planes.
“Serbia and Dassault Aviation discussed the purchase of the 12 Dassault Rafale jets, France’s La Tribune weekly reported last week
“In 2019 Serbia bought France’s Mistral surface-to-air missiles and in 2016 it acquired helicopters from Airbus
“Croatia, which is an EU and NATO member and Serbia’s wartime foe from the 1990s, also operates Rafale jets”
Right. So, Serbia will be ‘BFF‘ with Croatia & NATO and, never a worry shall arise that, when a Croatian/NATO Rafale fighter jet takes on a Serbian Rafale fighter jet, the Croatian/NATO plane will be, in every case, ‘a winner by Dassault’ .. er, excuse me, I meant winner by default (it’s the kill switch for the knucklehead with a short attention span)
So, about those Mistral missiles Serbia purchased which likely won’t touch a NATO jet; Serbia is arming up with systems that will (maybe) work against a single entity and that entity would be Russia.
And then, the preceding brings up the countless shoulder launched anti-tank & anti-aircraft missiles abandoned on the field of battle in Ukraine by Kiev’s forces as though they were useless as the NATO states pour thousands of new man-portable missile systems into the conflict and suddenly the Russians get serious about taking out the NATO supply lines. Did a Russian ‘hack’ driven software change become necessary?
A plausible WWIII footnote would be, if the French made Exocet of 1982 possessed a ‘kill switch’ and it almost certainly did, it stands to reason nearly every subsequent high-tech generation weapons system would be adapted to this ‘furtive’ technology, no matter the geo-political alignment of the manufacturer. Example given, should Russia be concerned about the S-400 system it sold to Turkey in case of hostilities with the double-dealing & back-stabbing Turkish President Erdogan? Probably not.
“Following the transition from foraging to farming, hierarchical societies and, eventually, tax-levying states have emerged. These states played a crucial role in economic development by providing protection, law and order, which eventually enabled industrialization and the unprecedented welfare enjoyed today in many countries”
Yep. In short other words, rich nations versus poor nations.
“Only where the climate and geography favored cereals, was hierarchy likely to develop. Our data shows that the greater the productivity advantage of cereals over tubers, the greater the likelihood of hierarchy emerging”
The lowly sweet potato, turnip, beet, carrot -these stayed in the ground until time for preparation and consumption- none of which led to the ‘hierarchy’ crucial to the rise of civilization where people like Elon Musk dream of leaving a ‘hierarchical development’ called a trashed Earth behind (with all of its’ poor, doomed schmucks abandoned by the elites once enough stupid people have been sacrificed to sort the technical aspect.) They ‘hope’ for ‘escape’ before the war-mongers weapons sales propping up billionaires bring on World War III (noting if weapons sales were halted tomorrow, the Western economies would collapse.)
“We challenge the conventional productivity theory, contending that it was not an increase in food production that led to complex hierarchies and states, but rather the transition to reliance on appropriable cereal grains that facilitate taxation by the emerging elite. When it became possible to appropriate crops, a taxing elite emerged, and this led to the state”
Yep again. In short other words (again) when the theft of foodstuffs became an option, this enabled the sociopath rise to rule.
“Suitability of highly productive roots and tubers is in fact a curse of plenty, which prevented the emergence of states and impeded economic development”
Right. In effect, this “curse of plenty” amounted to a ‘pre-civilized’ clean environment without means of mass destruction, no oligarchs, no 1%, no world wars, and no need to escape a trashed planet (an escape that is little more than a fantasy in any case.)
“The extension of the empire has meant the growth of private fortunes. This is nothing new, indeed it is in keeping with the most ancient history” -Gaius Asinius Gallus (from Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome)
The once upon a time, hardened nuclear command mega-bunker, built inside of Cheyenne Mountain, outside of Colorado Springs, USA, drove the adversarial intelligence agencies crazy. So, what was up with that?
The nuclear command and control system had been moved out of the mountain and onto exposed ground where it was vulnerable to first strike. WTF?? was the reaction of those pesky Russkies, it not only baffled them but the Chinks too… oh, and a few allies and the domestic front. What secret new system, world mayhem, Satanic DARPA project, might be taking shape in this vacated NORAD space? (a reasonable question.)
NOT TO WORRY asserted our Christian Taliban Air Force generals; the Pentagon and Saint Augustine have our back, oh and by way of explanation for those secular infidels, you see, it’s all a command and control redundancy; we need two systems, one exposed so, if or when we miss our ‘first strike’ at the ball and the exposed system gets blown away, there is no problem (they sent this excuse out on Radio Liberty.)
^ “You’re telling me 30% of our military want 8 billion people to die?” “The answer is affirmative”
Question: “Is the ‘just’ in Saint Augustine’s ‘just war theory’ an adverb rather than the widely assumed adjective?”
Answer: “It’s easy to correct the misconstrued interpretation, for the fact our righteous Augustine was a Roman, it can only be ‘just’ the adverb.”
At our next lesson, we’ll have a look at how we’ll be lodging the Air Force Academy leadership of the ‘144,000 Chosen‘, here’s a quick preview:
^ Our repurposed Cheyenne Mountain
Nah. Nothing were ever so simple as an apocalyptic military doomsday cult needed a bit of NORAD’s ‘survival’ space, you think? APRIL FOOL! (for all incapable of wrapping their heads around the point of this ‘satire’)
The devil on the one shoulder and the angel on my other shoulder climb into my head to make love and a satire is born … having little to do with morality and much to do with ethics. So, here’s a portrait of the devil then(whilst noting the angel is still on my other shoulder…)
It came across my mind the thought; with Western Civilization well on its way to collective suicide, it should do to examine the philosophers. Some of what has been set out by the following notable ‘thinkers’ reminds me of nothing so much as a statement by behaviorist Yuval Noah Harari:
“You can’t convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana with the promise it will get 20 more bananas in chimpanzee heaven. It won’t do it. But humans will”
Considering chimps would appear to have more common sense than certain ideas Indo-European-originated mentality worships, here is the satirical consequence of the human experience in the English philosophers’ tradition or, restated, their fundamental contradictions distilled and exposed (good for a cynical laugh but it’s not pretty.)
Assembled thumbnail satires from 2015 revisited (because some things never change)
Francis Bacon
Ever true to his name Buggerer Pedophile Of Star Chamber fame Bacon smelt game
If anyone were inclined to explore scientific ’empiricism’ to its roots, they’d find a real pig of a personality. Sir Francis’ keen sense for detecting political aroma on the breeze had been seldom overcome by his own stark odor of rancid bacon. Sycophant extraordinaire in the courts of Elizabeth I & King James (Stuart), Bacon is portrayed as a tender soul, never mind he promoted the (politically expedient) executions of Mary Queen of Scots and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, his ‘former’ friend, and subsequently tortured to obtain confession from Edmund Peacham. King James (yes, King James of ‘Holy Bible’ fame) instructed (after consulting Bacon on the legality of the procedure) that:
“attorney-general Bacon .. ‘put Peacham to the manacles as in your discretion you shall see occasion if you find him obstinate and perverse, and not otherwise willing or ready to tell the truth.’ Next day the torture was applied in the presence of the persons named, and he was examined ‘before torture, in torture, between tortures, and after torture’ .. Peacham is described as an old man at the time, and the inhumanity of the proceedings was revolting”
Peacham was left hanging (repeatedly) as his body weight, rather slowly, dislocated his wrist, elbow and shoulder joints .. tearing muscles and tendons in the process, a method considered ‘more humane’ than obtaining essentially the same physical result via ‘The Rack.’ This is method reportedly utilized by the CIA at various ‘black site’ jails but glossed over in favor of focus on water-boarding (of Spanish Inquisition fame.) At the time, Bacon was ‘clerk’ of the ‘Star Chamber’ which had been a court resembling the USA’s secret FISA court and why the Americans had founders determined to certain legal insurance via a the Fifth Amendment in the ‘Bill of Rights’ (it would seem no longer in force) and not only prohibition on self-incrimination but as well “cruel and unusual punishment” and clearly the ‘right to face one’s accuser’ and other “enumerated rights” proscribed star-chamber type secret courts.
Bacon’s Star Chamber position allowed for his prisoner facing torture to 1) self-incriminate 2) face charge of perjury if unsatisfactory answers were provided or 3) be held in contempt if no answer was given.
A reputed pederast accused of ‘buggery’ (which he denied), as well a habit his brother, educated by the same cleric, was also reputed to be fond, prosecutions for this in the upper class seemed rare; as King James was apparently of identical persuasion. Bacon went on to write of an utopia where no scent of ‘masculine love’ was to be found; and as if to convince, he married a 14 years old girl at age 48. Her subsequent preference for other men points to a rather starved appetite, which can come as no surprise. And it is of this rancid bacon, folks, inspiration for the modern ’empirical method’ comes to us behaving as an intolerant religion; replete with ‘scientific’ dogma and its narrow rut of inquiry.
“The earliest known version of The King James Bible, perhaps one of the most influential and widely read books in history, has been discovered mislabeled inside an archive at the University of Cambridge. The find is being called one of the most significant revelations in decades. It shows that writing is a process of revising, cutting, and then more rewriting. The Bible is no different in this regard, even though some conservative Christians claim it is the divine word of God himself. Perhaps God, then, is a revisionist. This find certainly seems to suggest that…”
Thomas Hobbes
Beastly
Brute
Bettered?
By
Hobbes-nailed boots!
Thomas Hobbes registers off the scale on the ‘smirk-o-meter’ .. where his greatest contribution to Western philosophy is a typical self-imploding set of contradictions. In an era where Gutenberg had made it possible for anyone who could read to become a blogger (not difficult, ‘mass’ circulation in those days excluded the illiterate masses) Hobbes, finding himself at loose ends, decided he would become a Western philosopher or ‘confidence man’ (the better description.) The recipe is simple; fill a 900 liter bag with verbiage-verbosity (like Bernard-Henry Lévy), slanted as to so incredibly complicate a subject (à la James Joyce), resulting in generations of those less endowed with gifts of BS spending endless semesters wrestling a ‘Leviathan‘, whilst attempting sense of nonsense.
Distilled from Hobbes’ inordinately complex, attempted order of things, his points may be summed up so: In our natural state or in raw ‘nature’, mankind is an inestimable beast prone to every savage act where:
“the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
And in the same moment, without Man’s ‘natural’ understanding, God’s inspirations cannot be known:
“we shouldn’t renounce our senses and experience, or our natural reason, which is the undoubted word of God”
Do you suppose Hobbes actually meant to insinuate understanding derived from a ‘naturally endowed’ beastly nature inspires one to deeper knowledge of God’s message? Is he acknowledging ‘God’s image, man’ is quite naturally possessed of the violence we have seen Englishmen visit upon every culture deemed inferior to their own? Certainly not. If Hobbes were of a proclivity to be honest, he wouldn’t have to bury the contradictions of his culture in a massive circumlocution that can serve no other purpose than to conceal the facts. What we are actually looking at is, the phenomena of Western philosophers burying contradictions in complications, so those contradictions never have to be faced. Hobbes is a master of this common (but patently dishonest) philosophical method.
The result is no surprise, a culturally self-justified, rationalization for an unquestioned, unlimited State authority to rule over men; Hobbes would not only be a supporter of the Divine Right of Kings & colonialism but in today’s world, a modern police state. Hobbes provides apparatus of state with philosophical avenue to know empathy for the Robert Mugabes and Augustino Pinochets of this world (as easily, a Theresa May or Boris Johnson.) They’re all cut from a similar philosophical cloth.
John Locke
And Created Null, Man
-Whilst In God’s Image-
Insisted This Englishman
‘Gnosis’
Cannot Know Oneself!
Ok, so the problem I have with John Locke is his philosophy demands all men are born a completely blank slate upon which everything is drawn subsequently. In effect, there is no innate knowledge bestowed on man. If that is true, then his holding…
“The Bible is one of the greatest blessings bestowed by God on the children of men. It has God for its author; salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture for its matter. It is all pure”
…demands “God” who ‘created man in his image‘ couldn’t know the difference between his own ass and either end of a hollow log, when he’d arrived on the scene in Genesis. No small wonder everything is f**ked up. Well, considering this small aspect of reality, I suppose John Locke could be construed to have done the enlightenment a great favor; except it seems no one had taken note (including Locke) of a phenomena where Locke demands a portrait of god based in our ‘perfect’ human ignorance.
If you enjoy the torture James Joyce puts a reader through, this philosopher is for you; but first check out this butt-kissing introduction of Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” .. if you actually can read through the entire thing and go on to enjoy Locke’s tortured rationalizations, recalling this rank political fellatio over his ‘lordship’s favors’ is no more than a brief foreword to Locke’s treatise, you may award yourself a sadomasochist of philosophy medal (all forgiven for skipping this and moving on to David Hume.)
THIS Treatise, which is grown up under your lordship’s eye, and has ventured into the world by your order, does now, by a natural kind of right, come to your lordship for that protection which you several years since promised it. It is not that I think any name, how great soever, set at the beginning of a book, will be able to cover the faults that are to be found in it. Things in print must stand and fall by their own worth, or the reader’s fancy. But there being nothing more to be desired for truth than a fair unprejudiced hearing, nobody is more likely to procure me that than your lordship, who are allowed to have got so intimate an acquaintance with her, in her more retired recesses. Your lordship is known to have so far advanced your speculations in the most abstract and general knowledge of things, beyond the ordinary reach or common methods, that your allowance and approbation of the design of this Treatise will at least preserve it from being condemned without reading, and will prevail to have those parts a little weighted, which might otherwise perhaps be thought to deserve no consideration, for being somewhat out of the common road. The imputation of Novelty is a terrible charge amongst those who judge of men’s heads, as they do of their perukes, by the fashion, and can allow none to be right but the received doctrines. Truth scarce ever yet carried it by vote anywhere at its first appearance: new opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. But truth, like gold, is not the less so for being newly brought out of the mine. It is trial and examination must give it price, and not any antique fashion; and though it be not yet current by the public stamp, yet it may, for all that, be as old as nature, and is certainly not the less genuine. Your lordship can give great and convincing instances of this, whenever you please to oblige the public with some of those large and comprehensive discoveries you have made of truths hitherto unknown, unless to some few, from whom your lordship has been pleased not wholly to conceal them. This alone were a sufficient reason, were there no other, why I should dedicate this Essay to your lordship; and its having some little correspondence with some parts of that nobler and vast system of the sciences your lordship has made so new, exact, and instructive a draught of, I think it glory enough, if your lordship permit me to boast, that here and there I have fallen into some thoughts not wholly different from yours. If your lordship think fit that, by your encouragement, this should appear in the world, I hope it may be a reason, some time or other, to lead your lordship further; and you will allow me to say, that you here give the world an earnest of something that, if they can bear with this, will be truly worth their expectation. This, my lord, shows what a present I here make to your lordship; just such as the poor man does to his rich and great neighbour, by whom the basket of flowers or fruit is not ill taken, though he has more plenty of his own growth, and in much greater perfection. Worthless things receive a value when they are made the offerings of respect, esteem, and gratitude: these you have given me so mighty and peculiar reasons to have, in the highest degree, for your lordship, that if they can add a price to what they go along with, proportionable to their own greatness, I can with confidence brag, I here make your lordship the richest present you ever received. This I am sure, I am under the greatest obligations to seek all occasions to acknowledge a long train of favours I have received from your lordship; favours, though great and important in themselves, yet made much more so by the forwardness, concern, and kindness, and other obliging circumstances, that never failed to accompany them. To all this you are pleased to add that which gives yet more weight and relish to all the rest: you vouchsafe to continue me in some degrees of your esteem, and allow me a place in your good thoughts, I had almost said friendship. This, my lord, your words and actions so constantly show on all occasions, even to others when I am absent, that it is not vanity in me to mention what everybody knows: but it would be want of good manners not to acknowledge what so many are witnesses of, and every day tell me I am indebted to your lordship for. I wish they could as easily assist my gratitude, as they convince me of the great and growing engagements it has to your lordship. This I am sure, I should write of the Understanding without having any, if I were not extremely sensible of them, and did not lay hold on this opportunity to testify to the world how much I am obliged to be, and how much I am your Lordship’s most humble and obedient servant-
David Hume
What is Had ought Not Wish To wash
David Hume’s impossible postulation…
“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason”
…is summed up in Western ethics as ‘Hume’s guillotine’ or the ‘ought-is problem.’ Now, forgive my naiveté when faced with this immutable Western dilemma of philosophy where the ‘ought-is problem‘ is posed…
“how, exactly can an “ought” be derived from an “is”? The question, prompted by Hume’s small paragraph, has become one of the central questions of ethical theory”
…as it occurs in my small universe if my ass IS dirty I had OUGHT to wash it. Correct? Or, if it is in the natural order of things one were to have a dirty ass as a matter of fact, expectation and normalcy, and those hairy-assed little s**t-balls, quaintly known as ‘dingle-berries’ in the vulgar tongue, must endure .. would it be a violation of IS to pull them out? Had one OUGHT*NOT* do that? What I’m getting at is, there was this time during my progressing baldness I had my head waxed to remove what amounted to an annoying residual fuzz. Now, it’d never occurred to me (previous to faced with Hume’s ‘ought-is problem’) hairy people OUGHT to have an ass-wax-job, but now this seems a logical progression from dirty ass as a result of hairy ass-crack, or that is an IS to an OUGHT.
Jeremy Bentham
It were one Jeremy Put a scare in thee Stuffed wit straw But for his maw Menacing his posterity
Call him ‘The Headless Horseman’ of philosophers. Bentham arranged to have his skeleton padded with straw and stitched into his clothing .. where he’s since dwelled in a closet (for the past nearly 200 years.) This is quite apropos as he was altogether unsuccessful when he’d sought to decriminalize homosexuality. Because his mummified head is too grotesque to gaze upon, it is kept locked away and does not attend those College of London council meetings where Bentham’s wax substitute for his dehydrated brains is perched on his bones and listed at roll call as ‘present but not voting.’
Like so many champions of modern democracy, for instance Theresa May and Boris Johnson, Bentham espoused individual freedoms while in actual fact he’d been busy designing the precursor to our present day surveillance state:
The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a single watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behaviour constantly. The name is also a reference to Panoptes from Greek mythology; he was a giant with a hundred eyes and thus was known to be a very effective watchman
Jeremy Bentham had been the prime candidate for honorary patron of the GCHQ, that is until a debate arose; whether he’d been the inspiration for a shepherd’s sexual encounter with a body of straw stitched into a man’s clothing:
From December 2021 into January 2022, the propaganda prigs have been busy on all surfaces of the geopolitical dodecahedron. There’s no chance getting through the whole of it (not even close) but we can peek at the psyops, manipulation of otherwise intelligent people and the artificially created, deceptive incentives to infighting and destabilizing one’s enemies in a few ways almost no one else will look at.
One would like to see through the whole of it but the picture is so mixed, it defies short description. What in fact seems to be emerging is, when the forces of evil battle each other, it is not something a positive spin can be put on for the simple fact the collateral damage is immense; but we can begin with Russia and the Russian propaganda prigs employing ignorant Americans to propagandize ignorant Americans, that is Ted Rall whose understanding of the USA’s constitutional history is only matched by the ugliness of Rall’s cartoon characters:
“From the electoral college to gun rights to the hilariously archaic right to refuse to quarter troops in your home and the $20 threshold for a civil jury trial, the US Constitution contains many head-scratching relics of an America we wouldn’t recognize. Living in the age of the musket, James Madison might not be so quick to argue for legalizing the AR-15, assuming that a well-regulated state militia was still a thing.
“A work of genius the US Constitution is not. It is almost impossible to amend—it is in fact the hardest to amend in the world. The immutability of the document is highlighted by the inability of the world’s most powerful democracy to enshrine a right as basic as gender equality, a principle that the vast majority of other countries, even dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, have managed to include (at least in theory) in their founding charters” [1]
Going to Rall’s mangled context of the word “state” in Rall’s 1st paragraph, the 2nd Amendment’s “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” is used (as it was meant to be used), at the time of it’s writing, in a singular, greater sense of ‘nation’ as the term ‘state’ is commonly known and used in international relations to this day. This has little to do with any state militia except to put a check on those as well, when the constitutional provision was made to arm the American people. [2]
The 2nd amendment plays big in the propaganda wars, as even sane American conservatives think it is a ‘god given right’ as opposed to the anti-federalists intending it as a check on the very sort of people manipulating today’s outcomes, that is Trump & his religious fanatic allies on the one side and the ‘liberal’ opposition on the other as “American Gladio” falsely convinces liberals all ‘gun rights nuts’ are murderous sociopaths. [3]
If the anti-federalists’ 2nd Amendment had been employed honestly (original intent), we’d be a decentralized nation of stable communities where only permanent community residents in good standing (upright citizens used to be the term) owned the military grade small arms and controlled the keys to the armory where the tanks are parked. There’d be no way we’d be bleeding the common taxpayer into an impossible to solve national debt problem for purpose of supplying truly lethal arms to the world and fanning the aggression demanding immense munitions expenditures (our ‘liberals’ are co-equal or worse offenders) enriching the military industrial complex. Mom & pop businesses would still flourish and a tap you bought for home installation, either in the 1930s or today, would still be working after 100 years.
CORRUPTION is the big alienating factor that in the end frightens people when it is the corrupt spinning the news (corporate owned press, journalism these days is more concerned with job security than deeply delving into reporting on the hand that feeds them, includes ‘journalists’ like Rall working for state owned propaganda machines.) Then there’s the liberal element in power trying to jam their values down everyone’s throat, that radicalizes even the conservatives who aren’t religious nuts, which plays into a feedback loop generating more extreme hype on both sides.
This corruption consumed the American constitution from our republic’s inception; to understand the argument between the Federalists and anti-Federalists was never solved, but the Federalists (essentially today’s corporate America) have played dirty ever since, one only need examine the history of the 11th Amendment and the associated, suspect, idea the USA has rightfully asserted the doctrine of Sovereign Immunity:
The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State. -11th Amendment
What had happened here, is a contractor from South Carolina was owed a Revolutionary War debt by the State of Georgia, which didn’t want to pay up. The Supreme Court had ruled there was no such thing as state sovereign immunity, in the case of Chisholm v Georgia.
“Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419 (1793), is considered the first United States Supreme Court case of significance and impact. Since the case was argued prior to the establishment of judicial review by Marbury v. Madison (1803), there was little available legal precedent (particularly in U.S. law). The Court, in a 4-1 decision, ruled in favor of Alexander Chisholm, a citizen of South Carolina, stating that states did not enjoy sovereign immunity from suits made by citizens of other states in federal court” [4]
Nearly all of the states freaked out at the prospect of having to pay up on their war debts and the 11th Amendment was passed, posthaste:
“To this day, Chisholm stands as one of only a handful of Supreme Court rulings that have been overturned by constitutional amendment. Even more important, the Supreme Court has built on the repudiation of Chisholm to hold that the Eleventh Amendment exemplifies a sovereign-immunity principle that sweeps well beyond the amendment’s text” [5]
And just like that, two immediate and a third, remarkable things happened;
1) Although the 11th Amendment is specific and narrow, and doesn’t so much as mention Sovereign Immunity, the legendary English Common Law expert William Blackstone’s Sovereign Immunity doctrine is reinstated in the former colonies: “The King moreover is not only incapable of doing wrong, but even of thinking wrong; he can never mean to do an improper thing: in him is no folly or weakness.” Only now, suddenly it is no longer the ‘King’ can act with impunity, but the institutions of government in the newly formed United States.
2) With the passing of the 11th Amendment by the several states’ legislators, all of the lawsuits pending in federal court per state war debts had been erased, and half the language of Article One, Section Nine, of the Constitution had been tossed into the ash bin: “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.” Thomas Jefferson indicated this language had been meant to cover both criminal and civil circumstance of law, and the constitutional language supports this assertion by Jefferson; ‘Bill of Attainder’ should refer to criminal, and ‘ex post facto’ should refer to civil liabilities. In other words, the USA should not have been allowed to make law, criminalizing or creating liability, or excusing crime and liability, after the fact, to get the outcome it wants. The 11th Amendment neither mentions nor lifts this other constitutional provision. But now, civil ex post facto law happens frequently, such as Congress ‘forgiving’ the telecom companies illegally spying on Americans, erasing liability and robbing citizens of their day in court.
3) The third thing to happen was, as late as 1991, in Blatchford v. Native Village of Noatak, the Supreme Court wrote:
“we have understood the Eleventh Amendment to stand not so much for what it says, but for the presupposition of our constitutional structure which it confirms: that the States entered the federalfeudal system with their sovereignty intact, that the judicial authority in Article III is limited by this sovereignty, and that a State will therefore not be subject to suit in federal court unless it has consented to suit, either expressly or in the “plan of the convention” [my correction of SCOTUS language in bold]
And there you have it, from the early days of the Supreme Court saying Sovereign Immunity is a non existent thing in immediate post colonial USA law, to the several states’ legislatures passing the 11th Amendment which doesn’t so much as mention Sovereign Immunity, to escape war debt, to the modern Supreme Court stating the language of our constitution’s 11th Amendment doesn’t mean what it actually says, but instead means what they want it to say, essentially stating ‘we’ll extend ‘the King’s prerogative‘ as far as we please, and we’ll use the 11th Amendment to absurdly assert what amounts to a claim the King’s Sovereign Immunity (impunity) was never a point of the American Revolution.’
Here’s the simple math: From King George III was our ‘sovereign’ entitled to immunity (amounting to impunity), to ‘the people’ are sovereign, to politicians claiming they hold the people’s sovereignty (amounting to impunity), to judges appointed by those very politicians upholding this political theft of our freedoms, to the oath to uphold our constitution becoming patently meaningless, even especially when cases come before the courts. [6]
It is in the light of this preceding we can examine (shortly) Rall’s “hilariously” ignorant idea (his second paragraph quoted at the beginning of this article) there is no existing means of enforcing gender equality in our constitution as written. In fact, with the enfranchisement of women (right to vote) via the 19th Amendment, the constitution’s “Equal Protection” of the law should have served as basis for enforcing gender equality. But what is it Rall (and liberals generally) don’t want to be honest about? If THERE WERE gender equality, in a context of ‘equal protection of the law’, women would be subject to military conscription, not only men. People like Rall will never pull that argument (together with their heads) out of where the sun never shines in their small understanding of the difficulties attending social evolution, probably because they fear losing it.
Insofar as Rall asserting the USA constitution “a work of genius it is not” should recall the same people (the anti-federalists which, as a popular movement, ratified the ‘Bill of Rights’ from New Hampshire to Georgia) who wrote the 2nd Amendment also wrote the 4th amendment concerning privacy in one’s papers, a given example of motivation in the anti-federalists’ actual intentions. As well, other rights, for instance prohibition of a bill of attainder, prevention of (warrantless) unreasonable searches & seizures and the right to confront your accuser. To name but a few provisions of the first through eighth amendments authored by the anti-federalists.
If our “Bill of Rights” had been insisted upon by anti-federalists (James Madison was the compromise proxy author), and it most certainly was, the entire world is indebted to our ‘hilariously archaic’ constitution for the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights inspired by the American Bill of Rights and certain of its provisions. The 2nd Amendment’s original intent had been to secure these rights against the state. Well, it didn’t work out as planned because of the Federalist heirs’ dirty play, related dirty propaganda, that, and a self-righteous, arrogant ignorance coupled with moral turpitude & ethical cowardice across all sectors of society. To be honest, humankind is not yet evolved to point of functioning within a democracy. Rall actually seems to believe the other Western democracies, such as Germany, have functioning constitutions because they can be easily amended. Square that with the reality of German politics and its role in imperialism within today’s European Union; the best joke (cartoon in reality) a cynic could dream up: 1) Merkel goes out with a torch-lit parade featuring military sporting Nazi era helmets and music by the lover of an SS criminal executed for war crimes and gets a standing ovation at the Reichstag a day or so later, all a good match for certain NATO aggressive states’ political behaviors embedded in the European Union. [7], [8], [9]
So, going to the history of judicial corruption in the dirty play of the modern Federalists (today’s corporate America, spanning the political spectrum from Chevron’s Condoleezza Rice to Microsoft’s Bill Gates), we can wrap up this ‘Rall Constitutional Vivisection’ with the doctrine of “Strict Scrutiny” which was the WWII era invention of the USA Supreme Court that crucified the anti-federalist personal freedom protections when the new doctrine was employed to over-ride fundamental rights to secure a Federalist ‘compelling state interest’ (includes ‘sovereign immunity’ from suit and suspension of habeas corpus) with the internment of the USA’s Japanese-American population across the board. That was more than a simple prescience constituting a precedent, it was the judicial power grab that prepared the USA for the so-called ‘National Security Act of 1947’, authorizing creation of the CIA, led to the secret FISA court, unaccountable instigation of color revolutions, creation of al Qaida et al, leading ultimately to the so-called ‘Patriot Act’ (and too many more constitutional vulgarities to mention here), and the only thing ‘secured’ was extra-constitutional color of law authorizing empire and the resultant corporate state bringing the USA to ruin. [10]
Meanwhile, let’s do a bit of asymmetrical percentages; you leave both sides responsibility out of your studies and only point the finger at the one side, the left is going to get the right about 50% correct in its complicity and the right is going to get the left about 50% correct in its complicity. The two missing portions equaling 50% each is the 100% complicity both sides share in sending our small world ‘to hell in a hand basket.’
This academic clown correctly points to the USA sliding towards a 2nd civil war and fascist dictatorship but places disproportionate blame on a dead clown:
“But one can’t blame only Mr. Limbaugh, who died in early 2021, and his ilk for America’s dysfunction. These people and their actions are as much symptoms of that dysfunction as its root causes, and those causes are many. Some can be traced to the country’s founding – to an abiding distrust in government baked into the country’s political culture during the Revolution, to slavery, to the political compromise of the Electoral College that slavery spawned, to the over-representation of rural voting power in the Senate, and to the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War. But successful polities around the world have overcome flaws just as fundamental” [11], [12]
Furthermore, in the article, if Tucker Carlson is also to blame for the right’s misinformation, how is it the left’s constitutional attorney Glenn Greenwald frequents his show to discuss these matters of our vanishing personal liberties under the Biden administration, and Trump & Obama before that?
A mini rewrite of what seems basically the same material predicting a 2nd civil war in the USA is hosted at the Guardian and this snippet is not far off the mark:
[Fundamentalist Christian leadership of] “The right has recognized that the system is in collapse, and it has a plan: violence and solidarity with treasonous far-right factions” [13]
Both ignore the perfectly plausible ‘sane’ conservative assessment that, were it ‘antifa’ had ‘stormed’ the capitol on 6 January 2021, you wouldn’t see the intact historical decor in the photos of that event, you’d see the flames that had burned that building out. How is it the Capitol rioters are ‘insurrectionists’ & ‘domestic terrorists’ and the antifa rioters who burned Portland for 100 straight days are not? And both authors are ignorant of the corrupt process in the USA’s constitutional history; leading not only to GW Bush and Dick Cheney, but their co-equal criminal actors Barack Obama and Joe Biden, color revolution perpetrators, war mongers and corporate empire prostitutes, the lot of them.
Let’s (just briefly) back up to “But successful polities around the world have overcome flaws just as fundamental” and ask, ‘Oh yeah, and what’s with those covid lock-down riots across the European Union?’ Oh, that’s right, the Federalist empire’s corporate media doesn’t have an easy spin for that. Must be some imperfection having to do with protecting allies in the West’s empire projects and “Liberal Democracy in Europe.” [14], [15]
At the end of the day, the common sense right invites the left to talk our problems out but nowhere in leadership on the left is there anyone to communicate with…
“Trump supporters were led down some rabbit holes. But they are absolutely right that the institutions and power centers of this country have been monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to prevent them getting it. I encourage people on the Left to recognize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in front of them. You’re not going to agree with the conservatives on everything. But if in 2004 I had told you that the majority of the GOP voter base would soon be seeing the folly of the Iraq War, becoming skeptical of state surveillance, and beginning to see the need for action to help the poor and working classes, you’d have told me such a thing would transform the country. Take the opportunity. These people are not demons, and they are ready to listen in a way they haven’t in a long, long time” [16]
…no differently were the sinking, working class right to cross the boundaries created by history exploited in the propaganda hype, there is no one in the right’s leadership to talk the tensions down and pursue some common sense communications:
“Maybe, just maybe, whitey, y’all should look at setting some history aside and begin negotiating some détente and political alliances with black people in the lower middle class communities you should be grateful hadn’t adopted the attitude of ‘the only good cracker is a dead cracker.’ From there alliances might be bridged deeper into those ghettos with a seething anger at what had happened to them and what is now happening to you. Nobody has to be in love, only reasoned, civil and fair” [17]
*
Peripheral notes:
Question for Russian intelligence: Has anyone informed Putin ivermectin crushes covid? Or is the Russian estate determined Putin will join the roll call of prostitutes history will be unforgiving towards as Russia squeezes down on its populace with mandatory, “gene therapy” vaccination and the related erasure of personal liberties? So, does Big Pharma own you too? Our ‘Dr Mengele’s’ name is Fauci. Who is yours? [18]
Factoid: The covid virus is 1,000 times smaller than the pores in the masks you breathe through. Do ‘mask mandates’ say anything to anyone concerning psychological operations pointing people away from securing so-called ‘personal liberties?’ [19]
Pepe Escobar to The GreyZone’s Ben Norton & Max Blumenthal on the Taliban pledge to wipe out opium production in, and opium export from, Afghanistan:
“This is all Northern Alliance warlords. Once again, there is no Pashtuns involved in this. This is a huge, serious issue, and I’m sure they’re going to fulfill it because this is another eternal clash between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. This is a very, very important point for them in terms of public opinion everywhere, not only in Eurasia but in the rest of the world in terms of anti-drugs and a very good p.r. for them.”
Well, Pepe Escobar is full of shit or full of himself (which is about the same thing.) Opium and heroin production in Afghanistan was never a sole business of the Northern Alliance. Wali Karzai was a Pashtun and key player in the narcotics trade operating out of the Pashtun majority Kandahar Province (Pashtun heartland), by far the most productive opium region in Afghanistan. In fact Kandahar province as a stand alone nation (if the rest of Afghanistan didn’t exist) would be the largest exporter of opium product to the world. No Pashtun opium farmers in Kandahar? I don’t think so. No Pashtuns involved in the production and export of opium and heroin causing problems in Russia and Iran? I don’t think so. And the hundreds of on location Afghanistan heroin processing labs are not so much as mentioned by Escobar. Let’s also not forget Kandahar Province is historically renown as a Taliban sympathetic territory where narcotics trafficking and related corruption was to a point the Taliban were sleeping in the USA supported Afghanistan government’s police barracks:
“Ghulam Haider Hamidi, the mayor of Kandahar … cited corruption … as the worst problem facing his nation. “The biggest problem is corruption in the Afghan government, police and military but also in some of the companies coming from the United States, Canada and England and Germany,” Hamidi said. “There is corruption and drug dealing by the people who are in power, within the police and the military.” Hamidi said just last month he was told that Taliban were sleeping in the police barracks. “The police are taking money from both sides — the government and the Taliban,” he said. “When we have this kind of police and military, the Afghan problem won’t be solved in 20 years””
When Taliban founder Mullah Omar (also from Kandahar) closed down Afghanistan’s opium farming in 2000, he took away many better paying jobs (community cash inflow), generating society-wide resentment on the eve of the American invasion. Strictly from a political/social science point of view, the Taliban likely won’t make that strategic ‘mistake’ again.
The statement by Escobar relevant to the preceding is, in effect, such an egregious lie, it discredits the entire interview with Norton & Blumenthal. Anyone who wants an audio file of the utterly ignorant Escobar quote, email a request to Ron West: penucquemspeaks@googlemail.com.
22 October update: Escobar exposed as the disinformation source on Russia-Turkey relations concerning Cyprus-Crimea HERE.
Another piece of the Escobar legacy is, he often gets things right after the fact (having called it wrong to begin with.) But only when events are big enough to demand a change in story in the line (like his prediction war wouldn’t break out in Ukraine due to Ukrainian attack on Donbass, then exposing the Ukrainian RADA had knowledge Ukraine planned to invade after-all, an aggression pre-empted by Russia, this paragraph added in March 2022.)
Insofar as the rest of the story, I was eyewitness to the CIA trafficking heroin (via Air America) to the US Army in Vietnam and I’ve studied the problem on a global scale. Here’s the reposted overview from 2013:
Deep State Series, part three of eight parts
Heroin, Bags of Cash & the CIA
CIA Narcotics Trafficking, Vietnam to Afghanistan
It had been reported in the New York Times the CIA has been handing off many millions of dollars to individuals in the Afghan government to buy influence. Using open source analysis, I will propose a case for these many millions being heroin trafficking ‘hush money.’ But first, a bit of history:
In 1970, serving in Vietnam, I had transferred from the 199th Light Infantry Brigade based at Long Binh, for extended tour of duty with the 330th Transportation Company located at Vung Tau. The US Army Airfield at Vung Tau was an advanced aircraft maintenance location, primarily, with a runway that could handle freight aircraft up to a C-130. By far, however, it was mainly a service center for helicopters needing advanced repairs, engine overhauls, rotor replacements, et cetera. Among other tasks, I worked airfield perimeter and flight line security. We had fully armed Cobra gun ships for airfield protection that needed secured from possible sapper attack, particularly, as well as the more typical security needs. The period was from October of 1970 to November of 1971.
As an E-5, I had responsibility for men on the perimeter at times, at other times on the flight line. Perimeter duty in my sector was parallel to the landing and take off (main) runway. This was Vietnam approaching late stage conflict. Heroin addiction was estimated by myself and other non-commissioned officers to be about 30% of the US Forces enlisted men on this airfield. Our own company and it’s platoons were about this average level of addicts as was our understanding this being the similar case of the other Army units located there.
Again and again, over this 13 month period, heroin ran out. It could not be missed when nearly a third our soldiers at Vung Tau, a few hundreds of men, went into physical and mental symptom of withdrawal. It was not pretty. This was not the weak, comparatively speaking, heroin someone would needle. It was STRONG. It was smoked or ‘snorted’ up the nose. Intravenous use of this drug would have been almost instantly fatal. Tremendous quantity of the drug was consumed by these horrifically addicted men.
Vung Tau could not be easily supplied with heroin on demand, without some serious interruptions, in the large quantities required to maintain the habits of hundreds of badly addicted soldiers by Viet Cong or North Vietnamese agents. The location was separated from the mainland by bracken marsh, accessed by a single causeway secured in multiple sectors with tightly controlled traffic having to pass American and Australian security checks. By sea would have been more likely, but here it is also problematic for the un-interrupted enemy supply of our soldiers with drugs. Vung Tau was highly secured by sea with armed patrol boats because of the high military value of its mission. It is a small area of land with essentially little coastline to secure. Security was tight. Interdiction would have been a near certainty, at least once in a while. It didn’t happen.
The Viet Cong or North Vietnamese agents of course did not have air access to us. The CIA did.
It was nowhere near rocket science to note the CIA airline Air America flight that parked 1/4 mile away from every other aircraft, never came in to parking area. Typically, 3 people, armed, stayed with the aircraft, command staff car picked up 2 others. Luggage (nearly modern steamer trunks filled with not only heroin but also high grade marijuana) for at least 10 (TEN) people was picked up by a 3/4 ton truck, with 2 persons riding with the baggage, 1 left guarding the aircraft. All airfield personnel were strictly instructed NEVER to approach the Air America flights. They never stayed more than several hours. Bingo, heroin flush by that evening. Again and again. Every time the soldier’s suppliers had run out of heroin, there was an Air America flight landed. Problem solved, the addicted soldiers were functional again.
After Vietnam I served with 19th Special Forces Group as (11F40) Sergeant for Operations and Intelligence, working together with some of the best in the field, a position that eventually pointed to my later career as an investigator. In conversation with special forces veterans of CIA liaised Indochina operations, it became clear CIA narcotics trafficking in Vietnam was not a ‘one off’ by some isolated or small rogue element. I continued to follow the CIA in the available sources and have made some assessments, drawn some conclusions.
The covert, operational or ‘black ops’ sector itself of the CIA has been the source of major narco-trafficking or, there has been a large and well organized rogue element within this sector where oversight is problematic. These people are in major international drug trafficking and their worldwide tracks are beginning to emerge over time, with overwhelming circumstantial evidence.
It had been established by the 1970s and reported on in media that the CIA had bought the loyalties of tribes in the so called ‘Golden Triangle’ opium producing region with cash for their crop, the most likely or closest proximity, raw base or source of the heroin in Vietnam. War zones with covert logistics for intelligence services are perfect opportunities to commercially process on large scale with no effective police oversight. Again and again, reliable CIA narcotics trafficking accounts have surfaced only to be quashed, noting in the linked affidavit, the Iran-Contra’s Robert Gates associated Richard Secord, and George W Bush’s Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage (at time of invasion of Afghanistan.)
After Vietnam, and the loss of direct military backing in force for our covert agency and no longer in control of the necessary areas in the region, heroin waned and cocaine became big. One only has to look at the tracks of the graduates of the School of the Americas, and connect the dots. This is the CIA associated initial source of the leadership training that has today’s Mexican Federal Police sometimes overwhelmed in pitched battles with drug lord militiamen that are now days professional commandos. Move south from there and you had Noriega in Panama, same source of training and a CIA asset, became a major international narco-trafficker.
South farther again and you have Uribe associated with cartels, right wing militias and associated death squads, CIA, School of the Americas training, all in the mix of Colombia, and drug trade and coca production is up there, eradication a farce. In 2005 you find Gulf Stream jets used in the CIA renditions are passing through the hands of known CIA assets, to Uribe family linked cartel, one had crashed in Mexico carrying 4 tons of Cocaine as noted in the narco-sphere news:
“the Gulfstream II was purchased less than two weeks before it crashed in Mexico by a duo that included a U.S. government operative who allegedly had done past contract work for a variety of US law enforcement and intelligence agencies, according to a known CIA asset (Baruch Vega) who is identified as such in public court records. The four tons of cocaine onboard of the Gulfstream II at the time of its crash landing, according Vega, was purchased in Colombia via a syndicate that included a Colombian narco-trafficker named Nelson Urrego, who, according to Panamanian press reports and Vega, is a U.S. government (CIA) asset”
And now Mexico is severing its relationship with the CIA having anything to do with the so-called ‘war on drugs’ and it is a smart move (when considering the Pentagon has enlisted Blackwater as a contractor in the business.) Meanwhile the ‘war on drugs’ discovers the Rick Perry administration in the George W Bush home state of Texas moves very quickly to shut down investigators who’d discovered high powered American judges, politicians and law enforcement at parties thrown by drug cartels. Couple this to a joint Blackwater/CIA covert assassination program that had been run by known cartel killer Enrique Prado, coupled to Erik Prince’s known religious extremism with ties to and funding of the American religious right, one may more than speculate international narcotics trafficking is funding Rick Perry’s Islamophobic Tea Party.
And Bush appointed Robert Mueller’s FBI? NOT INTERESTED, Small wonder with Mueller having been at the center of damage control and cover-up of the Iran-Contra linked BCCI terror and narcotics money laundering scandal. This is reinforced when Attorney General Eric Holder had concealed religious-right big shot Carl Lindner‘s contributions to the Uribe linked AUC death squads in Colombia.
The CIA trafficking in Latin America is the most well documented, on account of the Iran-Contra affair having spilled into the open. And it is here we come up with the Bush family criminal syndicate who’s who of international narcotics traffickers .. oh and that ties into George H.W. Bush’s close buddy Bill Clinton, the business is a bi-partisan bag of maggots.
A Robert Gates linked Iran-Contra player, Duane Clarridge, had a ‘private’ CIA operating in Afghanistan, run by an Air Force contractor named Michael Furlong The New York Times had reported. Some 40 days after this story broke, we see this:
By waiting 40 days since this had spilled, Robert Gates had given damage control in this affair ample time to meet, plan, erase tracks, create false leads, and destroy evidence. Throughout his series, the New York Times reporter neglects to mention Robert Gates is also an Iran-Contra figure with a history of cover-up, investigated by prosecutor Lawrence Walsh who stated:
“By October, when Gates claimed he first remembered hearing of the diversion, Casey ordered an inquiry and later made a report to Poindexter; but, by then, the Hasenfus aircraft had been shot down and Casey and Gates were beginning to cover.”
The now known operation coordinated by Furlong employed International Media Ventures, run by veterans of General McChrystal’s Special Operations forces, American International Security, run by a former Green Beret, and most interestingly, as we have seen, a company belonging to Duane ‘Dewey’ Clarridge, a former top CIA official with close ties to Robert Gates and Iran-Contra, as well utilized by the FBI in Afghanistan. Gates waited well over a month to “open an inquiry” to see whether “rules were violated” (notice contract murder is suddenly a mere ‘rules violation.’) With reports across the globe shouting bloody murder at the trouble he was in, Furlong appears never to have been prosecuted. Where had the Furlong/Clarridge operation been based and run out of? Almost certainly from the government protected Afghan drug lord (and presidential brother) Walid Karzai’s CIA rented compound outside Kandahar. The Clarridge operation is most certainly a cover for heroin trafficking.
Now the clincher. More than 90% of this years Heroin supplied to the world (90% TO THE WORLD) will come from poppies grown in Afghanistan. This is not just the Taliban folks, it is the CIA. Cleaning up the problem or cornering the market? It would very much seem any ‘drug eradication program is window dressing the problem while in actuality cornering the market. This thought is buttressed by the Russian experience with attempting cooperation in cleaning up the hundreds of heroin labs in Afghanistan, with the American military commanders at the top blocking any efforts:
After, (video, above) the Russians’ high visibility whistle-blowing, there is grudging (and minimal) actions by the USA, 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 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. The Taliban’s 15% control of 93% of the world market for opium & heroin is still nearly 14% the world supply, this is no small business in the matter of funding their insurgency, not to mention their product is likely laundered through the CIA for export. As the USA winds down the American military involvement, it is clear the problem had never been honestly addressed.
Meanwhile, a British ambassador had been sent packing for investigating the problem from neighboring Uzbekistan and subsequently pens an article “Britain is Protecting the Biggest Heroin Crop of All Time.” It is interesting to note his linking a murdered former Russian anti-corruption investigator, Alexander Letvnenko working for MI6, had uncovered the Afghan heroin pipeline to St Petersburg… a crime blamed in popular media on Russia with little mention whatsoever of his connections in this regard. Litvenenko’s fatal mistake likely had been to concurrently cooperate with Spanish authorities on Russian mafia, bringing him too close to his expertise on the Afghan heroin pipelines. That MI6 may have been the actual perpetrator of Litvenenko’s murder is almost a certainty, with MI6 now also having been identified as piling ‘off the record’ cash to the government of Karzai and its known close connections to heroin trafficking. In the end, it come down to western complicity in the Afghan heroin trade is old news.
And in a 2009 interview with Phillip Giraldi, former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has the following to say:
EDMONDS: Okay. So these conversations, between 1997 and 2001, had to do with a Central Asia operation that involved bin Laden. Not once did anybody use the word “al-Qaeda.” It was always “mujahideen,” always “bin Laden” and, in fact, not “bin Laden” but “bin Ladens” plural. There were several bin Ladens who were going on private jets to Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. The Turkish ambassador in Azerbaijan worked with them.
There were bin Ladens, with the help of Pakistanis or Saudis, under our management. Marc Grossman was leading it, 100 percent, bringing people from East Turkestan into Kyrgyzstan, from Kyrgyzstan to Azerbaijan, from Azerbaijan some of them were being channeled to Chechnya, some of them were being channeled to Bosnia. From Turkey, they were putting all these bin Ladens on NATO planes. People and weapons went one way, drugs came back.
GIRALDI: Was the U.S. government aware of this circular deal?
EDMONDS: 100 percent. A lot of the drugs were going to Belgium with NATO planes. After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to the U.S. via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago and Paterson, New Jersey. Turkish diplomats who would never be searched were coming with suitcases of heroin.
GIRALDI: And, of course, none of this has been investigated. What do you think the chances are that the Obama administration will try to end this criminal activity?
EDMONDS: Well, even during Obama’s presidential campaign, I did not buy into his slogan of “change” being promoted by the media and, unfortunately, by the naïve blogosphere. First of all, Obama’s record as a senator, short as it was, spoke clearly. For all those changes that he was promising, he had done nothing. In fact, he had taken the opposite position, whether it was regarding the NSA’s wiretapping or the issue of national-security whistleblowers. We whistleblowers had written to his Senate office. He never responded, even though he was on the relevant committees.
As soon as Obama became president, he showed us that the State Secrets Privilege was going to continue to be a tool of choice. It’s an arcane executive privilege to cover up wrongdoing—in many cases, criminal activities. And the Obama administration has not only defended using the State Secrets Privilege, it has been trying to take it even further than the previous terrible administration by maintaining that the U.S. government has sovereign immunity. This is Obama’s change: his administration seems to think it doesn’t even have to invoke state secrets as our leaders are emperors who possess this sovereign immunity. This is not the kind of language that anybody in a democracy would use.
The other thing I noticed is how Chicago, with its culture of political corruption, is central to the new administration. When I saw that Obama’s choice of chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel, knowing his relationship with Mayor Richard Daley and with the Hastert crowd, I knew we were not going to see positive changes. Changes possibly, but changes for the worse. It was no coincidence that the Turkish criminal entity’s operation centered on Chicago.
Criminals do not voluntarily surrender their business models. Cleaning up the problem is not going to happen until the CIA covert operations is brought under control. The CIA, or a rogue element within the organization has been, personally enriching themselves for decades as international narco-traffickers, my assessment. All the while using our nation’s ‘Security’ together with all of the power of the apparatus the term implies, to cover a rogue and criminal club within our ranks. And so, another example of how it is the pursuit of violence through wars corrupts and/or attracts corrupt people. C’est la vie.
Additional Notes
An interesting aside, General Patraeus figures into the Latin America/Iran-Contra era, when he supervised his friend and professional associate from the CIA ‘Dirty Wars’ days, death squad veteran James Steele, when running covert torture centers in Iraq.
These following stories from the AP WIRE [4 years ago] point to, among other things, CIA having wiretapped DEA to prevent DEA stumbling on CIA international narco-trafficking and continued efforts by our Justice Department to cover-up crime with the state secrets doctrine:
Sep 11th, 2009 | WASHINGTON — A federal judge says the CIA is hiding behind dubious national security arguments to shield itself from a potentially embarrassing lawsuit U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who earlier ruled that CIA officials committed fraud to protect a former covert agent accused in the suit, has rejected an emergency request to put the case on hold while the government appeals.
The CIA has argued that allowing the case to proceed would divulge classified information, but, in an opinion made public on Friday, Lamberth said there was no good reason to delay.
In the suit, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent claims the CIA illegally wiretapped his home when stationed in Rangoon, Burma in 1993. The agent, Richard Horn, said he became suspicious when he returned from a trip to find his government-issued rectangular coffee table had been replaced with a round one.
The case has been a test of the Obama administration’s use of the so-called state secrets privilege, when the government seeks to block legal action by saying the details that would be revealed would harm national security.
Administration officials have pledged to review all state secrets claims made by the previous Bush administration, but in many cases the government is still asserting the need to prevent disclosures that it says would harm national security.
In the DEA case, Lamberth has previously rejected the state secrets claim. Government lawyers are attempting to reassert the privilege but on different grounds, but the judge isn’t buying it.
“Having lost on their assertion of the state secrets privilege, the government’s new refrain is heads you lose, tails we win,” the judge wrote.
The court case is rooted in an old squabble between the DEA and CIA operating overseas.
Horn claims Arthur Brown, the former CIA station chief in Burma, and Franklin Huddle Jr., the chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Burma, were trying to get him relocated because they disagreed with his work with Burmese officials on the country’s drug trade.
The CIA has not said in court filings whether or not it monitored Horn, but Horn claims he was monitored without lawful authority and in violation of his constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The CIA buys off the DEA
10 Nov 09-
WASHINGTON — The government has agreed to pay $3 million to a former agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration who sued CIA officers for illegal eavesdropping
The proposed settlement followed a ruling by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in July that CIA officials committed fraud to protect a former covert agent against the eavesdropping allegations.
The lawsuit was brought by former DEA agent Richard Horn, who says his home in Rangoon, Burma, was illegally wiretapped by the CIA in 1993. He says Arthur Brown, the former CIA station chief in Burma, and Franklin Huddle Jr., the chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Burma, were trying to get him transferred because they disagreed with his work with Burmese officials on the country’s drug trade.
Horn sued Brown and Huddle in 1994, seeking monetary damages for violating his civil rights. The CIA itself was a defendant in the lawsuit until early this year…..
Then-CIA Director George Tenet filed an affidavit asking that the case against Brown be dismissed because he was a covert agent whose identity was a state secret that must not be revealed in open court. Lamberth granted the CIA’s request and threw out the case against Brown in 2004.
Lamberth found out last year that Brown’s cover had been lifted in 2002, even though the CIA continued to file legal documents saying his status was covert. The judge found that the CIA intentionally misled the court and he reinstated the case against Brown.
The agreement in the case was revealed in court papers filed Tuesday night, and Lamberth will now consider whether to dismiss the suit. Under the proposed settlement, the government makes no admission as to whether the allegations in the lawsuit are true
And:
WASHINGTON — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the president of Afghanistan, gets regular payments from the CIA and has for much of the past eight years, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
The newspaper said that according to current and former American officials, the CIA pays Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the CIA’s direction in and around Kandahar.
The CIA’s ties to Karzai, who is a suspected player in the country’s illegal opium trade, have created deep divisions within the Obama administration, the Times said
Allegations that Karzai is involved in the drug trade have circulated in Kabul for months. He denies them.
Critics say the ties with Karzai complicate the United States’ increasingly tense relationship with his older brother, President Hamid Karzai. The CIA’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.
Some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, a central figure in the south of the country where the Taliban is dominant, undermines the U.S. push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw.
“If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves,” Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan, was quoted by the Times in an article published on its Web site.
Ahmed Wali Karzai told the Times that he cooperates with American civilian and military officials but does not engage in the drug trade and does not receive payments from the CIA.
Karzai helps the CIA operate a paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspected insurgents and terrorists, according to several American officials. Karzai also is paid for allowing the CIA and American Special Operations troops to rent a large compound outside the city, which also is the base of the Kandahar Strike Force, the Times said.
Karzai also helps the CIA communicate with and sometimes meet with Afghans loyal to the Taliban, the newspaper reported.
CIA spokesman George Little declined to comment on the report.
Followed by this AP story:
“Ghulam Haider Hamidi, the mayor of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan where a large chunk of the new U.S. forces will be deployed, cited corruption — which Karzai has pledged to fight — as the worst problem facing his nation. “The biggest problem is corruption in the Afghan government, police and military but also in some of the companies coming from the United States, Canada and England and Germany,” Hamidi said. “There is corruption and drug dealing by the people who are in power, within the police and the military.”Hamidi said just last month he was told that Taliban were sleeping in the police barracks.”The police are taking money from both sides — the government and the Taliban,” he said. “When we have this kind of police and military, the Afghan problem won’t be solved in 20 years.””
What Hamidi had pointed directly to, is military subcontractors in the employ of CIA, the military and the police, all in bed with both narcotics trafficking and the Taliban.
Wali Karzai and Ghulam Haider Hamidi were both assassinated not long after, Wali Karzai because he was too ‘hot’ (his own CIA liaison killed him) and Ghulam Haider Hamidi because he was too clean ..
27 March 2014 update: Crimea sanctions is the excuse the Obama administration uses to cancel joint efforts with Russia to combat international narcotics trafficking. Read the facts at the Moscow Times
1 May 2014 update: “We are not scared from the government, because most of the officials have their share in the harvesting”Read the article at usnews.com
10 June 2014 update: New information comes to light on the CIA rendition jets subsequently moved over to narcotics traffickers, read the article at narconews.com
9 July 2015 update: Corresponding perfectly with the Department of Defense & CIA gaining control over the opium production in Afghanistan: “CDC health officials said that the US is in the grip of a heroin epidemic, with abuse of the drug doubling among 18-25 year olds, doubling for women, and rising among white people by 114 percent over a decade from 2002 to 2013.” Read the story at RT and see the facts posted at the Center for Disease Control.
Seal worked directly for Sonia Atala, the CIA protected drug baron (Michael … that the Sandinistas were directly involved in drug trafficking into the United States.
Hitz also investigated the claim that the CIA participated in drug trafficking in Central America in the 1980s. A declassified version of his report was released in …
CIA and the Nugan Hand Bank. … Yates later told the Joint Task Force on DrugTrafficking he recruited WerBell as a consultant because he “had extensive …
According to Daniel Sheehan, Hull was a CIA contract operative in Costa Rica where he managed 8,000 … Drug Trafficking by the US National Security Council …
A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror … Paul DeRienzo: What was the CIA’s role in heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia?
(2) David Corn, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine … the contra program who (were) alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking.
In 1971, Edwin P. Wilson left the CIA to run shipping companies for a secret Navy … In 1983 the Australian Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking released a report …
The two men told Sheehan about a group of former CIA agents and assets were … in a racketeering network involved in drug trafficking and arms smuggling.
He remained in prison for three years and according to one source the CIA paid … He was later charged with money laundering, drugs & arms trafficking and …
In 1973 Frank Nugan, an Australian lawyer, and Michael Hand, a former CIA … Yates later told the Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking he recruited WerBell as a …
In 1974 the Nugan Hand Bank got involved in helping the CIA to take part in … Yates later told the Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking he recruited WerBell as a …
… in Defrauding America, when George Bush Sr. and CIA Director William Casey … on allegations of illegal gun-running and narcotics trafficking associated with …
In 1974 the Nugan Hand Bank got involved in helping the CIA to take part in … Yates later told the Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking he recruited WerBell as a …
In 1961 Felix Rodriguez joined the CIA-backed Brigade 2506 and … blame oppressed people for drugs – but international drug trafficking requires fleets of cargo …
According to Alfred W. McCoy (The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global … He was later charged with money laundering, drugs & arms trafficking and …
Second, I was contacted two years ago by a former CIA agent (who worked in the … He had then been a leader of the Corsican drug trafficking network in South …
The bank’s legal counsel was William Colby, a former director of the CIA. The Board … (Before releasing it to the public, the Joint Task Force on DrugTrafficking, …
Summers believes that some members of the CIA took part in this conspiracy. ….. He had then been a leader of the Corsican drug trafficking network in South …
(1) Fabian Escalante, The Secret War: CIA Covert Operations Against Cuba, …… go to prison for 18 months for a drug trafficking charge,” answers the general.
Michael Townley was another CIA agent who was involved in organizing …. the CIA. He was later charged with money laundering, drugs & arms trafficking and …
According to David Corn (Blonde Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA Crusade) in 1985 …. jobs, and became obsessed with the covert world and drug–trafficking.
He had then been a leader of the Corsican drug trafficking network in South ….. the CIA, the military, Johnson’s crooked Texas cronies, and Texas Governor John …
… on subjects such as cross-border narcotics trafficking and monitoring violent …. is laid at the CIA’s feet, where it does not belong, every tree in the forest will fall.
spartacus-educational.com/JFKcaulfieldJ.htm
*
Related:
Profits of War (my book review) Renegade MOSSAD officer Ari Ben Menache writes about (among other things) MOSSAD cooperation with CIA in Iran-Contra linked cocaine trafficking. Buy the book at amazon
Kabul should go down in history as a synonym for American military incompetence (and probably will.) In short, the American withdrawal (whilst noting American military should have never been there to begin with) from Afghanistan should have been an incremental withdrawal with Kabul at the center, with the city fully secured by shrinking a perimeter of American combat forces from across Afghanistan until final departure.
This simple and common sense approach should have allowed 1) all American & other foreign citizens better opportunity to evacuate Afghanistan, and 2) insured safe haven for non-Taliban aligned Afghans with ability to keep a Kabul avenue open to the historically anti-Taliban Panjshir valley to funnel dissident Afghan forces, together with American weapons and equipment. No hostile force, to now, has ever militarily taken the Panjshir valley from the Afghans, including the Taliban. Thus armed and prepared, the Panjshir valley stronghold’s proximity to Kabul should have enabled anti-Taliban Afghan forces of all ethnic groups to secure the city (and its critical resupply infrastructure that is Kabul’s airport) and surrounding districts upon the American departure.
Meanwhile, in the paradox of insanity created by the Americans, the USA freezing and shutting off all Afghan assets and funds to the Taliban (with hints of further hostile acts to come) only increases the possibility opium farming will flourish to fund these so-called ‘Islamic’ militants (noting Islamic fundamentalism is an aberration, there is a philosophically beautiful Sunni Islam that is Sufism) and the CIA & MOSSAD will be right there to do ‘business as usual’ (will remain at the center of international narcotics trafficking, a so-called ‘black budget’ source of mischief.)
Finally, the corporate boards that run the USA using the Bernays ‘public relations’ model of psychological operations sees the criminal Covid psy-op pushed aside for a few weeks while they rethink their information war against common Americans; and their minion Counterfeit News Network (CNN and ‘friends’) gets busy pushing ‘Demented Joe’ aside for their real 2020 election choice of ‘incarceration queen’ Kamala and you all should know the rest of the story (likely a fascist repeat of history on steroids.)
Now you know why this blog has a specific category for “Morons” (that would be criminal morons.)
Ronald Thomas West 