Thursday, October 29, 2015

Dulles v. Democracy


THE ABSURD TIMES






Remember, remember, the 5th of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot;
I see of no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.


Dulles v. Democracy
by
Czar Donic


We have just about had it for awhile. There are simply too many things our "free-market" system of arms distribution and "Nation Building," sine we can not even rebuild Detroit or Baltimore, refugees, wars, etc. to keep up with. Furthermore, there are other things to think about and, when the spirit moves, we will publish those in another forum, made available the same way or through the same channels.

We once looked back here in order to find out why each President seemed worse than the last. Of course, Carter was a bit of a relief after Nixon and Obama at least speaks English after 8 years of Georgie and his Oedipus complex, but the serious decline came with the death of JFK. It led to Viet Nam and then eventually Ronald Reagan. How did it come about?

A new book of the Dulles brothers in action sheds some more light on the monumental event. In order to follow, we need to unravel some history and that is never fun. In addition, the careers of the Dulles brothers are so murky that they may never be untangled. And anyway, who cares now? Right?

Allen Dulles was head of the CIA during Eisenhower and Kennedy. He once said that the CIA did nothing without the approval of the "Highest" levels of the government, which meant his brother, John Foster Dulles. Both were from San Francisco and had a law firm in D.C. And were very close to what emerged as Bechtel. Allen had the elected President of Iran overthrown and replaced by the Shah (who is the only leader in the Mideast, except Israel, to ever have any nuclear weapons program).

You may have had of Senator McCarthy and McCarthyism in the 50s. Well, the fascist McCarthy felt that there were "Communists" in the CIA and subpoenaed documents from them. Dulles not only resisted, had Eisenhower block him, but also broke into McCarthy's Senate office to plant "disinformation". We might say good for him, but we have to realize that it was Dulles, not CBS, that eventually "neutralized" McCarthy.

Jumping ahead a few years, JFK was elected and happy to see Lamumba elected President, the first democratically elected African leader. Dulles neutralized him, but Kennedy didn't know this until later. You might want to remember a scene from Godfather II that took place in Cuba: a meeting with a few mobsters, ATT, big food conglomerates, and so on, with Batista, then President of Cuba. Remember also some of the cleaned up scenes of decadent "entertainment" provided for United States investors and tourists. Then the revolution. All during Eisenhower.

Kennedy takes office and already several plots to assassinate Castro are underway and take place without his specific approval. By the Bay of Pigs, he finds out how deeply the CIA is involved and fires Allen Dulles and several of his operatives. Kennedy is knocked off in Dallas, and LBJ forms a "commission" to investigate, named after Warren, Chief Justice, but run by Dulles, one year after Dulles was fired by JFK. Bechtel makes a ton of money in Viet Nam and other wars (LBJ knew how to survive, if nothing else). Robert Kennedy resigned immediately as he had forced Hoover to report to him, not directly to the president (as it should be).

New we can here from the author:


The Rise of America's Secret Government: The Deadly Legacy of Ex-CIADirector Allen Dulles Pt. 2

Extended web-only interview with David Talbot, author of "The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government," about how Dulles' time at the CIA helped shape the current national security state. Talbot discusses Dulles' close ties to The New York Times, the CIA-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and more.

TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Our guest is David Talbot. His book is The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. He's the founder and former CEO and editor-in-chief of Salon. Let's start with the title, The Devil's Chessboard. Why did you call it that, David?
DAVID TALBOT: The Devil's Chessboard refers to the fact that the Dulles brothers—John Foster Dulles, who's secretary of state under Eisenhower, and his brother, Allen Dulles, who I focus on, head of the CIA—they loved to play chess with each other. They would go at it for hours, even when Allen Dulles was about to be married. He kept his wife-to-be waiting around while the two brothers went at it. And they tended to look at the world as their chessboard. People were pawns to be manipulated. So I felt that was a—you know, an apt metaphor.
But, Amy, I wanted to go back to what you were talking about—alternative media—before this. I think—I just want to underline what you were saying about how essential it is to have countervoices. They are the lifeblood of democracy. And shows like yours and public radio are just essential. You know, my book is having a hard time getting through the media gatekeepers. They don't want to hear about this, and in part because the CIA, particularly under Allen Dulles, but even today, are masters at manipulating the media. I've been on shows and been bumped. I was scheduled to be on shows at the last minute, strangely. I was supposed to write something for Politico magazine. Someone there called the book a "masterpiece." They wanted the book to be, you know, showcased there. Instead, I was bumped from Politico. And an articlebased on recently leaked CIA documents—conveniently leaked—was written by a former New York Timesreporter, Phil Shenon, and what he did was to basically accuse Fidel Castro of assassinating President Kennedy. This has been a CIA disinformation line for years. So the CIA is still manipulating the media, and it's essential that independent media exists, like this.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the relationship between The New York Times publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and Allen Dulles?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, the Sulzberger family had a long relationship with Dulles. When he was inaugurated as CIA director, one of the Sulzbergers wrote to him, saying, "This is the best news I've heard in years." In another letter, he calls him affectionately "Ally." They were on a first name basis. They belonged to the same clubs. They were masters at—the Dulles brothers, particularly Allen—at manipulating the media. After the Warren Report comes out, the official investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy, one of the top editors at Newsweek writes to Allen Dulles. And I'm getting all this from Allen Dulles's own files; he was very proud of the fact that he could—he had the media in the palm of his hand. But this Newsweek editor writes to him, "Thank you so much for basically directing our coverage of the Warren Report. We couldn't have done it without you." So, you know, this was the kind of cozy relationship that existed between the CIA and the media in those years. CBS, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, they were all in the palm of the CIA's hands. They all lived together in Georgetown. They had cocktail parties together. It was a very cozy set.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, in Guatemala today, there has been a popular uprising. It has been quite astounding. Otto Pérez Molina, OPM, the president, was thrown out, is in jail right now. I wanted to go toAllan Nairn, longtime investigative reporter, who was in Guatemala during this period. And this also goes back to 1954. But Allan Nairn has been covering Guatemala since the 1980s.
ALLAN NAIRN: This is an oligarchy in Guatemala which kills its own unionists, which kills peasants who try to organize the plantations, which works hand in glove with Washington and is now trying to hold onto their power, because, for the first time, it's under threat. I mean, this is a historic moment. It all began in 1954, when the CIA invaded Guatemala, overthrew a democratically elected government and put the army in power. And now, the people have risen.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that's Allan Nairn talking about this most recent uprising. But, David Talbot, can you go back to 1954, where we left off in Part 1 of our conversation, and talk about what actually happened? Who was Allen Dulles, the CIA director, and his brother, John Foster Dulles, the state—the secretary of state, working for?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, of course, their original power goes back to Sullivan & Cromwell, this very powerful Wall Street law firm that John Foster Dulles ran and where Allen Dulles worked. And among their clients was United Fruit. United Fruit, of course, was this colossus, this corporate colossus, that ruled much of Latin America, owned, you know, vast acreage in Guatemala and many other countries. They weren't just a banana company. They were a multinational real estate company. They owned often the utilities. And they owned the local political elites in those countries.
In the early '50s, Jacobo Árbenz, this young military officer, a reform officer, starts to emerge as a potential leader. He runs for president and is elected by his people on a reform campaign. And one of the first things he does, of course, in this country that's basically a medieval country ruled by land barons, is to begin to nationalize some of the land, that's not being even used by United [Fruit], and give it to the people themselves, the farmers, to work. And this provokes a major backlash from United Fruit, from the local political elites, the oligarchs, and from the CIA. Allen Dulles, working for Eisenhower as CIA director, portrays Jacobo Árbenz as a dangerous communist—he wasn't—and prepares to overthrow him in a military coup, which does occur.
What I tell the story of, mostly I focus on, is the tragic aftermath of that coup, because not only for the Árbenz family, which, in some ways, were the Kennedys of Guatemala—glamorous, young couple, Jacobo and María Árbenz, their children, very good-looking, wealthy, but very committed to uplifting the poor in that country. And after the coup, they're sent into a terrible exile. No country will touch them, because CIApressure. The CIA and the State Department pressure every country, from Mexico throughout Latin America, not to take the Árbenz family in. They're finally forced to go behind the Iron Curtain to Czechoslovakia to seek exile. They're not happy there. They finally end up back in Mexico, but they're under tight supervision. The family is haunted. It's stalked wherever it goes. One of his daughters commits suicide. And Jacobo Árbenz himself ends up dead under mysterious circumstances—scalded to death in a bathtub in a Mexico City hotel. His family today believes that he was assassinated. And given the fact that the CIA had a death list of left-wing figures, journalists, political leaders, after the coup that were to be eliminated, that, you know, is a distinct possibility.
So, these ripples of tragedy, after these coups, go on and on. You know, the CIA and Allen Dulles told Eisenhower after the Guatemala coup, "Oh, it was a clean coup. You know, hardly anyone died." But the fact is, tens of thousands of people died in the killing fields of Guatemala as a result of that coup, and that violence continues today.
AMY GOODMAN: And wasn't it also a precursor to what happened with the Bay of Pigs? Move forward like, what, six years, and explain what happened.
DAVID TALBOT: Right. Well, emboldened by how easy it was to do a regime change in Guatemala, yes, when Fidel Castro comes to power in Cuba, he again antagonizes the same corporate interests that the Dulles brothers represent—oil companies, like the Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil, and others, agribusiness firms. So they believe that Fidel has to be eliminated, and they begin plotting, under the Eisenhower administration, with Eisenhower's approval, to kill, to assassinate Fidel Castro. And, in fact, at one point, Fidel Castro, who was beloved in this country after the revolution—he had overthrown a thug, a Mafia-backed thug, Batista, a very corrupt and violent dictatorship. He was seen as the future, and very glamorous, he and Che Guevara and so on. They would come to New York and would be mobbed by people in the streets. When they came to New York for a U.N. meeting in 1960, though, the Eisenhower administration was already pushing back, and no hotel would take them. Finally, a hotel in Midtown did take them, but there was—they asked for so much money as security, they were basically blackmailing Fidel. He was outraged, and he ended up staying in a hotel in Harlem that took him in.
AMY GOODMAN: Hotel Theresa.
DAVID TALBOT: Hotel Theresa. And they stood up to this Washington pressure, the manager of that hotel, who was African-American. He had grown up in Jim Crow South. And he said, "You know, I know what it's like to be denied a roof over your head. This Cuban delegation can stay here." So it was a very—
AMY GOODMAN: Did he meet Malcolm X there?
DAVID TALBOT: He did. It was a very dramatic moment. Malcolm X makes a visit to the Hotel Theresa. He squeezes into his suite, where there's dozens of people crammed. They have a very interesting encounter, Fidel and Malcolm. And it really changed their lives and had a big impact on both of those men for years afterwards. In fact, Malcolm said he was one of the few white men that he learned to respect and appreciate. And, by the way, there was an FBI guy taking notes the whole time in that hotel room, so we know some of what happened there and the dialogue, because of the FBI report on this.
AMY GOODMAN: Who was it?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, his name was not revealed, but there was an agent surveilling him. But meanwhile, while Fidel is there, meeting with Khrushchev from the Soviet Union and Nasser from Egypt and the world leaders and embarrassing the Eisenhower administration, because here he's gone to Harlem, and, you know, no one else would take him in, in Midtown Manhattan—meanwhile, the Mafia is meeting with CIA agents at the Plaza Hotel, just blocks away, plotting his assassination. So, a lot of intrigue in 1960 going on in New York. And then, to make it even more interesting, a young JFK, who's campaigning for president, after Fidel has left, shows up at the Hotel Theresa and basically says, "This is revolutionary ground I'm standing on. And we should welcome the winds of change and the revolution, the future. We shouldn't be afraid of it." So, very end—and begins to talk about the mortality rate of black infants in Harlem and many of the issues that are still current.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, look at what President Kennedy, then President Kennedy, did, when it came to Cuba—
DAVID TALBOT: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: —what happened under his reign, from the Bay of Pigs to the endless assassination attempts of Fidel Castro.
DAVID TALBOT: Kennedy did do a flip-flop, to an extent, after that. He came in as president. He was young. He was untested, under a lot of pressure from the national security people in his administration. He inherited the Bay of Pigs operation, the plans for that. He was basically told, "Look, if you pull the plug on this thing, it's so far along now, there will be a major political backlash against you." So he was kind of sandbagged by the CIA. He did go through with it, but he had no intention of widening it into an all-out U.S. military assault on the island, on Cuba. But that's what the CIA had in mind. They knew that this motley crew of Cuban exiles they put together to invade the island wasn't sufficient to unseat Castro. But what they hoped and what they planned was that a young President Kennedy, as this invasion was bogged down on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs, would be forced then to send in the Marines and the U.S. Air Force to topple Castro.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, of course, the Cuban missile crisis, the closest we ever came to a nuclear war.
DAVID TALBOT: Well, but Kennedy stood his ground, and he didn't do that. And that was the beginning of his break, at the Bay of Pigs, between the CIA and Cuba—and President Kennedy. And then, yes, that became even more severe with the Cuban missile crisis the following year. Again, the military in this country and the CIA thought that we could take, you know, Castro out. During the Cuban missile crisis, they were prepared to go to a nuclear war to do that. President Kennedy thought people like Curtis LeMay, who was head of the Air Force, General Curtis LeMay, was half-mad. He said, "I don't even see this man in my—you know, in my sight," because he was pushing for a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. And even years later, Curtis LeMay, after years after Kennedy is dead, in an interview that I quote from in the book, bitterly complains that Kennedy didn't take this opportunity to go nuclear over Cuba. So, President Kennedy basically, I think, saved my life—I was 12 years old at the time—saved a lot of our lives, because he did stand his ground. He took a hard line against the national security people and said, "No, we're going to peacefully resolve the Cuban missile crisis."
AMY GOODMAN: And then President Kennedy, on November 22nd, 1963, was assassinated.
DAVID TALBOT: That's right.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to David Talbot, who is author of The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. What did you find when it came to Kennedy's assassination?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, first of all, after Kennedy did fire Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs, Dulles didn't get the memo. He went home to Georgetown and continued to operate from his home as if he were still running the CIA. His top deputies came on a regular basis to meet with him. He—
AMY GOODMAN: You had notes of his wife and his mistress.
DAVID TALBOT: That's right. I found his daybook, who he was meeting with. I read his—the correspondence. I read his mistress's diaries and journals.
AMY GOODMAN: Who was his mistress?
DAVID TALBOT: A woman named Mary Bancroft, a very interesting woman, related to the gentleman who started or was the top editor at The Wall Street Journal. She had aspirations of her own. She became a spy for Allen Dulles in Switzerland during World War II when they started their affair. And curiously, then, when his wife shows up in Switzerland at the end of the war, Clover Dulles, the two women become friends. Clover Dulles figures out what's been going on. She kind of gives it a pass. And the two women then form a tight bond throughout the rest of their lives. And their correspondence is fascinating. They both were patients of Carl Jung, one of the founding fathers of psychiatry in Switzerland.
And they called Allen Dulles "The Shark," these two women, because they both knew the kind of man they were dealing with—full of surface charm and, you know, a very popular party guest on the Washington circuit, but underneath a very cold man, a man who was capable of sending people to their death with the blink of an eye, a man who was capable of putting his own child, Allen Jr., in the hands of an experimental doctor who was working for the CIA in the notorious MKULTRA program, which Naomi Klein and others have written about.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain it very briefly, and what happened to Allen Jr.?
DAVID TALBOT: MKULTRA was—they called it the Manhattan Project of the mind. It was an attempt by the CIA, funding—millions of dollars—funding scientists and doctors around the country, major institutions, to see if we could program people for whatever purpose. It was a mind control program. His son, Allen Jr., came back from the war, Korean War, with a piece of shrapnel in his brain. He was brain-damaged, and the family had difficulty with him. He was trying to find his way. And at one point, Allen Dulles put him in the hands of this scientist here in New York who did unspeakable sort of experiments on him involving insulin overdose therapy, which is a very traumatic therapy—convulsions, sometimes resulting in death. His sister was appalled—Allen Dulles's daughter—when she went to visit him in the hospital. And it was from her that I got this story.
Joan Dulles is a very amazing woman—Joan Talley, as she's known today, a retired Jungian therapist in New Mexico, drives a Prius with an Obama sticker on it. I'm sure her father is spinning in his grave. But she, herself, like many of us, at the age of 90 when I interviewed her, was grappling with this dark legacy in America, that played out within her own family. You know, she's looking back on this now and is appalled, in some way, that she—it was a part of her life. But she's reading the books—and I hope she reads mine—and is coming to some kind of determination about her father.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what MKULTRA was used for.
DAVID TALBOT: Well, MKULTRA, among other things, they were seeing if they could program a Manchurian candidate, assassins who would act in a robotic-like fashion to kill on CIA command. They were also using it as enhanced interrogation, as we call it today. Soviet prisoners who would fall into our hands, they were—
AMY GOODMAN: And the drug is actually?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, many different drugs, psychedelic—LSD was one of the drugs. They subjected—there was a particular place in Canada at the Allan Institute and McGill University in Canada, where one of these doctors, Dr. Ewen Cameron, he operated something called the sleep room, where women, many—mostly women, and patients of his would be put. These were people who were suffering from common neurotic disorders, postpartum depression and so on. And they were put in this sleep room and, through massive doses of various psychedelic drugs, were put into a sleep state, and then tape loops were played over and over again in an attempt to erase their bad patterns of thinking, and often wiping out their memory. They would come out of these experiments not knowing their family, who they were. In one case, a woman was reduced to an infantile state. She couldn't use a toilet. And this was the wife of a Canadian—a member of the Canadian Parliament. So this was all CIA-funded research during the Cold War, and it was, you know, basically the most inhumane sort of methods being used on people.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to David Talbot, and we digressed from the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
DAVID TALBOT: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you learned in writing The Devil's Chessboard.
DAVID TALBOT: Well, as I was saying, after he was fired by Kennedy, Dulles went to his home. He continued—
AMY GOODMAN: And why was he fired?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, he was fired after the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy realized he shouldn't have kept Dulles on from the Eisenhower years. They were philosophically too different. And the Bay of Pigs was the final straw for him. So he was pushed out after that.
And—but Dulles, as I say, continued to sort of set up an anti-Kennedy government in exile in his home in Georgetown. Many of the people he was meeting with, several of the people, including Howard Hunt and others, later became figures of suspicion during the House Select Committee on Assassination hearings in Washington in the 1970s. You know, most Americans don't know that that was the last official statement, the last official report, on the Kennedy assassination, not the Warren Report back in 1964. But the Congress reopened the investigation into John Kennedy's assassination, and they did determine he was killed as the result of a conspiracy.
So a number of the people who came up during this investigation by Congress were figures of interest who were meeting with Allen Dulles. They had no, you know, obvious reason to be meeting with a "retired" CIAofficial. The weekend of Kennedy's assassination, Allen Dulles is not at home watching television like the rest of America. He's at a remote CIA facility, two years after being pushed out of the agency by Kennedy, called The Farm, in northern Virginia, that he used when he was director of the CIA as a kind of an alternate command post. Well, he's there while Kennedy is killed, after Kennedy is killed, when Jack Ruby then kills Lee Harvey Oswald. That whole fateful weekend, he's hunkered down in a CIA command post. So, there are many odd circumstances like this.
I also found out from interviewing the children of another former CIA official that one of the key figures of interest in the Kennedy assassination, a guy named William Harvey, who was head of the CIA-Mafia plot against Castro and hated the Kennedys, thought that they were weak and so on, he was seen leaving his Rome station and flying to Dallas, by his own deputy, on an airplane early in November 1963. This is a remarkable sighting, because to place someone like William Harvey, the head of the CIA's assassination unit, put there by Allen Dulles, in Dallas in November of '63 before the assassination is a very important fact. The CIA, by the way, refuses, even at this late date, to release the travel vouchers for people like William Harvey. Under the JFK Records Act, that was passed back in the 1990s, they are compelled by federal law to release all documents related to the Kennedy assassination, but they're still withholding over 1,100 of these documents, including—and I—
AMY GOODMAN: Fifteen seconds.
DAVID TALBOT: I used the Freedom of Information Act to try and get the travel vouchers for William Harvey. They're still holding onto them.
AMY GOODMAN: How many calls are you getting in the mainstream media to do interviews?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, thank God, I was saying earlier, for alternative media, like this, Amy, because there is resistance to this book. First of all, I call out the mainstream media. I say that New York Times,CBS, Washington Post, Newsweek, they were all under his thumb. They did his bidding.
AMY GOODMAN: Whose thumb?
DAVID TALBOT: Allen Dulles's thumb. So, when the Warren Report came out, I was saying that one of the editors, top editors, at Newsweek wrote to him and said, "Thank you so much, Mr. Dulles, for helping shape our coverage of the Warren Report." Well, of course, Allen Dulles was on the Warren Commission. In fact, some people thought it should have been called the Dulles Commission, because he dominated it so much. So, you know, it's way too cozy, the relationship between Washington power and the media. And—
AMY GOODMAN: What was the relationship between Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, and Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, they were social friends, not just him, but other members of the Sulzberger family. I found, you know, cozy correspondence between them, congratulating him when he was inaugurated, Dulles, as CIA director. They called him "Ally," one of the Sulzberger families, in one letter. They would get together, you know, every year. Dulles would hold these media sort of drink fests for New Year's. And these were, you know, top reporters, top editors, would get together with the CIA guys and rub elbows and get a little drunk. And, you know, when Allen Dulles didn't want a reporter, because he felt he was being overly aggressive, covering, say, Guatemala—Sydney Gruson, the reporter—in the run-up to the coup there in 1954, he had—he made a call to The New York Times and had him removed. That was because of his relationship with Sulzberger, the publisher. So, that was the kind of pull that Allen Dulles had.
AMY GOODMAN: How did that work?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, they just took him out. They removed Gruson. They transferred him, I think to Mexico, at that point.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you compare Smedley Butler, the general, who was—called himself, what? A racketeer for capitalism, when he was asked to overthrow countries and said no—
DAVID TALBOT: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —to Allen Dulles?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, one's a hero, and one's a villain, to put it pure and simple. Smedley Darlington Butler, who I've also written about—I wrote an illustrated history, for readers of all ages, called Devil Dog. Smedley was an American hero. He was a guy who joined the Marines at 16, didn't know any better, ran off all around the world fighting America's imperial wars from China to throughout Latin America, ended up in France during World War I. And by the time he was a middle-aged man, he had seen the kind of dirty work that was done by America's soldiers in the name of American business interests. And he said he was like Al Capone. He said, "We marines were like Al Capone, except that Al Capone couldn't even measure up to us, the kind of thuggery that we were capable of, that we committed in America's name throughout Latin America, particularly."
AMY GOODMAN: And wasn't it just not through Latin America, like overthrowing Árbenz, but wasn't the Pitcairn family in the United States involved with attempting a coup against FDR and wanted to recruit Smedley Butler to do it?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, that's what—as I write in my book, that it was his great moment of heroism, because he was a hero to soldiers, to the rank and file. He had spoken to the famous Bonus Army March, where World War I veterans were demanding pay for the time they had lost when they were overseas. He spoke before them. It was a very controversial thing he did as a retired officer, retired general from the Marines. And so, because he was so popular with the rank and file, when a number of corporate families like the DuPonts and others became furious at FDR for being a class traitor, as they called him, and pushing through these Wall Street reforms and other things that were infuriating them, they went to—representatives of theirs went to Smedley Butler and said, "Would you lead a march again, like the Bonus Army March on Washington? But this time we want them to be armed, the soldiers to be armed." Essentially, "Will you lead a coup against Franklin Roosevelt?" And instead of going along with this, he went before Congress and outed this plot.
AMY GOODMAN: And who were the families? Who were the—
DAVID TALBOT: Well, DuPonts were one of them. The family that owned Remington, the arms factory, was also involved. A number of these people were clients of the Dulleses. Foster Dulles, by the way, John Foster Dulles, who later became secretary of state, ran the Wall Street firm Sullivan & Cromwell. WhenFDR starts to push through some of these reforms, like the Security Exchange Commission and others, Glass-Steagall, he convenes all his wealthy clients in his office on Wall Street and says, "Just ignore this. We'll resist this. We won't go along with these reforms."
AMY GOODMAN: The Nazis? Very quickly.
DAVID TALBOT: The Nazis, well, they have a very tight relationship, many Nazi businessmen, with the Dulles brothers. And when Allen Dulles was in Switzerland, supposedly working for our side, the OSS, during the war, he was actually using that to meet with a lot of Nazis and to cut separate deals with them. He did indeed finally cut a separate peace deal with the Nazi forces in Italy against FDR's wishes. FDR had a policy of unconditional surrender. Don't—
AMY GOODMAN: This was Operation Paperclip?
DAVID TALBOT: This was Operation Sunrise, was this deal that he made. And then he set up these rat-lines, so-called, where Nazis, leading Nazi war criminals, escaped after the war through the Alps in Switzerland, down into Italy and then overseas to Latin America and even in the United States. One of the key Nazis he saved was Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's former chief of intelligence, who he installed, Dulles, as head of West German intelligence after the war, a man who should have stood trial at Nuremberg.
AMY GOODMAN: Who turned you down?
DAVID TALBOT: You know, well, Politico was one. Politico, you know, one of the leading publications, online publications and a print publication, you know, had—I was supposed to write something for them there. Instead, they went with a piece by, as I say, a former New York Times guy named Phil Shenon, based on leaked CIA documents that basically pin the Kennedy assassination on Fidel Castro. This is absurd. Fidel Castro, when he heard about Kennedy's assassination, crumpled. He knew that Kennedy was trying to open back channels with him to establish peace between Cuba and the United States, years before Obama finally did. In fact, Jean Daniel, who was a French reporter, was with Fidel, at Kennedy's behest, in Havana, basically carrying this olive branch to Fidel from Kennedy, when they got the terrible news from Dallas.
AMY GOODMAN: Who do you think killed John Kennedy?
DAVID TALBOT: Well, I believe what Robert Kennedy believed. Robert Kennedy, as I showed in my book earlier, Brothers, and in this book, looked immediately at the killing team that was put together by the CIAto kill Fidel Castro. That CIA killing team, I think, was responsible for killing President Kennedy, as well. That team that was killing foreign leaders, that was targeting foreign leaders, that Dulles had assembled, including men like William Harvey, Howard Hunt, David Morales—these were all key figures of suspicion by Congress during the House Assassinations Committee investigation in the '70s. That was the team that was brought to Dallas. I now identify those men. A couple of them admitted—Howard Hunt, on his death bed, admitted that he was involved in the Kennedy assassination, and the mainstream media completely overlooked this shocking—
AMY GOODMAN: Howard Hunt, who was Watergate.
DAVID TALBOT: He was the leader of the Watergate break-in and a legendary CIA action officer, and very close to Allen Dulles, revered Allen Dulles. On his death bed, he revealed that he was part of that plot. Again, 60 Minutes looked at it and then walked away. I know a lot about this story. But the media has been, I think, shockingly remiss in not looking into this investigation. It's a taboo subject. But it's clear—I think I present overwhelming evidence that Allen Dulles was complicit in this, in the assassination of the president. And he conveniently ran the investigation into the president's murder, because he strong-armed President Johnson into appointing him to the Warren Commission, where he became the dominant figure.
AMY GOODMAN: David Talbot, author of the new book, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government.
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Saturday, October 24, 2015

The Select Idiot Committee


THE ABSURD TIMES



Illustration: When I first saw this, the caption was something like "See, just don't bomb OUR terrorists. It costs too much to create them, ok?"


The Select Idiot Committee
by
Czar Donic


Last week was a demonstration of what we have in charge of our country. All the television "news" networks televised every minute of the absurdity.

We should remind you of what we said several years ago: trying to get rid of Qaddafi was stupid. It was and now just about everyone agrees.

However, a Republican, with a couple exceptions, can not admit that any use of military aggression by the United States is stupid or wrong. I have no doubt that if a President wanted to bomb Brazil the congress would vote in favor of it. Still, they had to find fault with something to do with it, so they focused on e-mails. (She used e-mails.)

For a short time, it almost seemed that something of substance would emerge. A Republican from Illinois, Peter Roskam, read from a list of "talking points" that someone in her office prepared listing a timeline of actions she took to precipitate and foster the invasion. Furthermore, she had complained to her staffer that he had left out a few things and mentioned them. However, it was time for a vote and the matter was dropped with NO indication that he disapproved of those actions anyway.

Nobody mentioned that our stance at the United Nations was that we simply wanted to "protect innocent civilians." Even more, nobody mentioned that it was this blatant lie that led Russia and China to veto any further motions by the U.S. In any other areas. In short, they learned the hard way that they could not, and decided they would not, ever trust us again.

For Putin, it became clear that this was not a new order of things. In fact, it is one of the reasons (others are given in previous editions of the Absurd Times) to actively interfere in Syria and protect its ally.

The rest of the world has seen refugees fleeing Libya and either dying or seeking asylum in Europe. Hundreds of thousands. This did not happen under Gaddafi.

As far as Iraq and Afghanistan, those matters are now understood around the world (with the exception of parts of the U.S.). If anyone thinks there will be some change in attitude now on the part of Putin, or of China, they are subhuman.

As far as Nation Building goes, our guest exclaims "We can't even re-build Baltimore." How do we really think we are going to rebuild some other country? Work on Detroit. Tell Nitwit Yahoo that Palestinians did not start the Holocaust in WWII. Better yet, just send the lot of these morons to a loony bin, or a black site somewhere.

Finally, ISIS decided to tell Palestinians that they should use knives. Now when did they think of that? Maybe Nitwit Yahoo suggested it to them? Makes about as much sense as all the above.

FROM DEMOCRACY NOW:
Former secretary of state and current Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton underwent a marathon day of testimony Thursday before the House Select Committee probing the 2012 attack in Libya, which killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Throughout the hearing, Clinton defended her record on Benghazi in the face of Republican criticism. Republicans say Clinton ignored pre-attack warnings and mishandled its aftermath, even though seven previous congressional probes have found no wrongdoing. Clinton handled Republican questions with a calm demeanor, and afterward panel chair Trey Gowdy, Republican congressmember of South Carolina, admitted the hearing failed to turn up anything new. Melvin Goodman, former CIA and State Department analyst, says the Benghazi hearing has ignored the real issue for Clinton to address: the U.S. bombing of Libya that destabilized the country and set the stage for the fatal 2012 attack. "What was learned was irrelevant," Goodman says. "What was relevant wasn't discussed."

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Former secretary of state, current Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton spent more than eight hours Thursday testifying before the House Select Committee probing the September 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi, Libya, which killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Throughout the hearing, Clinton defended her record as secretary of state on Benghazi in the face of Republican criticism.
HILLARY CLINTON: You know, I would imagine I've thought more about what happened than all of you put together. I've lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been racking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done. And so, when I took responsibility, I took it as a challenge and an obligation to make sure, before I left the State Department, that what we could learn—as I'm sure my predecessors did after Beirut and after Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and after all of the other attacks on our facilities—I'm sure all of them, Republican and Democrat alike, especially where there was loss of American life, said, "OK, what must we do better?"
AMY GOODMAN: The panel was the eighth such committee to investigate the Benghazi attacks, and the hearings largely covered much of the same ground as previous proceedings. Clinton supporters have criticized the Republican-led effort as an attempt to damage the Democratic front-runner's presidential campaign. In his opening statement, committee chair Republican Trey Gowdy addressed those charges.
REP. TREY GOWDY: Madam Secretary, I understand there are people, frankly, in both parties, who have suggested that this investigation is about you. Let me assure you it is not, and let me assure you why it is not. This investigation is about four people who were killed representing our country on foreign soil.
AMY GOODMAN: Elijah Cummings and other Democrats pushed back on Gowdy's assertion, casting the continued investigation as politically motivated. Referencing an interview Gowdy did Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation, Cummings said Gowdy wasn't being truthful when he said he had zero interest in investigating the Clinton Foundation and Clinton's emails other than for evaluating them for information. Gowdy and Cummings then had this tense exchange.
REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS: You issued a subpoena to Sidney Blumenthal on May 19th, 2015, compelling him to appear for a deposition June 16, 2015. You issued this subpoena unilaterally, without giving the Select Committee members the opportunity to debate or vote on it. You sent two armed marshals to serve the subpoena on Mr. Blumenthal's wife at their home without having ever sent him a request to participate voluntarily, which he would have done. Then, Mr. Chairman, you personally attended Mr. Blumenthal's deposition. You personally asked him about the Clinton Foundation, and you personally directed your staff to ask questions about the Clinton Foundation, which they did more than 50 times. Now, these facts directly contradict the statements you made on national television—
REP. TREY GOWDY: No, that's not—
REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS: —this past Sunday.
REP. TREY GOWDY: No, sir. With all due respect, they do not. We're—we just heard email after email after email about Libya and Benghazi that Sidney Blumenthal sent to the secretary of state. I don't care if he sent it by Morse code, carrier pigeon, smoke signals. The fact that he happened to send it by email is irrelevant. What is relevant is that he was sending information to the secretary of state. That is what's relevant. Now, with respect to the subpoena, if he had bothered to answer the telephone calls of our committee, he wouldn't have needed a subpoena.
REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS: Well, would the gentleman yield?
REP. TREY GOWDY: I'll be happy to, but you need to make sure the entire record is correct, Mr. Cummings.
REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS: Yeah, and that's exactly what I want to do.
REP. TREY GOWDY: Well, then go ahead.
REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS: I'm about to tell you. I move that we put into the record the entire transcript of Sidney Blumenthal. If we're going to release the emails, let's do the transcript. That way the world can see it.
AMY GOODMAN: The Obama administration has been criticized for its handling of the aftermath of the Benghazi attack. The White House initially said the consulate was attacked by protesters denouncing a short American film insulting the Prophet Muhammad. But it later turned out the attack was carried out by well-armed militants. The militants first attacked the diplomatic mission, then a secret CIAannex. Republicans say Clinton ignored pre-attack warnings and mishandled its aftermath. While previous reports have been scathing over security failures and have led to firings at the State Department, none have accused Clinton or other top officials of wrongdoing.
Well, joining us for more is Melvin Goodman, former CIA and State Department analyst, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and director of the Center's National Security Project. His latest book, National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Mel Goodman. Can you start off by talking about the significance of the hearing yesterday, what was learned, what wasn't learned, and what you think are the key questions to be asked that may have never been asked formally by any of these committees?
MELVIN GOODMAN: Thank you, Amy. What was learned was irrelevant. What was relevant wasn't discussed. And it was those areas that concern me. Why was the CIAoperating a base out of Benghazi? Why was the State Department operating a transitional mission facility, a TMF—it wasn't a consulate—in Benghazi? Why was Ambassador Stevens, who was aware of the security situation, in Benghazi in the first place? So, none of these questions have been asked.
And remember, when the plane flew these survivors out of Benghazi to get them back to Tripoli, for every State Department official on that plane, there were five or six CIAemployees. And my sources tell me that the CIA was there to buy back weapons that we had given to Gaddafi in the first place. So the question all of this begs—and this is where Hillary Clinton's remarks did concern me—is that we created a disaster in Libya. It was the decision to conduct regime change, the decision to go after Gaddafi, which eventually led to his death. And remember, Hillary Clinton welcomed that news with the words "We came, we saw, he died."
Now, there is a link to what Putin is doing in Syria, because, remember, we had to tell the Russians that we had very limited objectives, a very limited mission in Benghazi, so that they would not veto the U.N. resolution. And then, essentially, Putin finds out that our mission really was to go after Gaddafi, creating this instability, this discontinuity, this chaos in Libya.
So what really needs to be discussed is, what is the role of military power in the making of foreign policy? Why does Hillary Clinton think that Libya is not a disaster? And why was Hillary Clinton pushing for the military role in Libya in the first place? These are important issues.
As far as the hearings were concerned, she testified off and on for nearly 11 hours. She handled herself extremely well, and she essentially exposed the fact that these were a group of Republican troglodytes doing their best to marginalize her and humiliate her. And they totally failed.
AMY GOODMAN: Mel Goodman, the justification at the time, that Gaddafi was going to commit a massacre in Benghazi. Can you take us back to—again, it was September 11th—another September 11th—2012. I think there is so little talked about, about what actually was happening there, that people don't realize exactly what the context was.
MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, in the wake of Gaddafi's death, there was total chaos in Libya. And essentially, there was a civil war being waged between forces in the western part of the country, based around the capital, Tripoli, and forces in the eastern part of the country, based around Benghazi. And what we have learned, essentially, over the last 34 years of foreign policymaking, that when you use military power in areas that are not stable, you usually create a worse situation. Israel invades Lebanon in 1982, and the creation of Hezbollah takes place. We arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and this leads to groups like the Haqqani faction, the Hekmatyar group, and even al-Qaeda. We go into Iraq, there's the Sunni Awakening. Now we're dealing with the Islamic State. So we took a very bad situation, where there was factionalism in Libya, and made it much worse by removing the only person who seemed to hold it together, even though he did it with incredible violence and threat, but Gaddafi was holding that nation, to the extent it was a nation, holding it together. So, we were a major force and a major reason for the instability that took place. We should never have been in Benghazi. All of the other international institutions, both government and nongovernment, had pulled out of Benghazi.
So, what we need to know is why Stevens was there in the first place, what the CIAwas doing, and why there was no—virtually no security around the diplomatic facility, which was just a transitional facility, and because it was a TMF, it wasn't even eligible for an upgrade in security. It didn't come up on the radar screen. And to blame her for that is ridiculous. But to know what her position was on why military force was a good idea is important, particularly since she is going to be the Democratic candidate—she established that last week in the debate. And there's a very good chance she'll be occupying the White House for four to eight years in the near term.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break and then come back to this discussion. We're speaking to Mel Goodman, who is a former CIA and State Department analyst, about the questions, the key questions, about U.S. presence in Libya, to begin with. The real lessons we can learn about what took place on September 11, 2012, don't start and end on that day. This is Democracy Now! We'll be back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "History Repeating," The Propellerheads, featuring the legendary Shirley Bassey, here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. In 2012, then-Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio, spoke at a House committee hearing a month after the attack on the U.S. Consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi. He stated, quote, "The security situation did not happen overnight because of a decision made by someone [at] the State Department." He went on to criticize U.S. policy in Libya.
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: We owe it to the diplomatic corps, who serves our nation, to start at the beginning. And that's what I shall do. The security threats in Libya, including the unchecked extremist groups who are armed to the teeth, exist because our nation spurred on a civil war, destroying the security and stability of Libya. And, you know, no one defends Gaddafi. Libya was not in a meltdown before the war. In 2003, Gaddafi reconciled with the community of nations by giving up his nation's pursuit of nuclear weapons. At the time, President Bush said Gaddafi's actions made our country and our world safer.
Now, during the Arab Spring, uprisings across the Middle East occurred, and Gaddafi made ludicrous threats against Benghazi. Based on those verbal threats, we intervened—absent constitutional authority, I might add. We bombed Libya. We destroyed their army. We obliterated their police stations. Lacking any civil authority, armed brigades control security. Al-Qaeda expanded its presence. Weapons are everywhere. Thousands of shoulder-to-air missiles are on the loose. Our military intervention led to greater instability in Libya.
Many of us, Democrats and Republicans alike, made that argument to try to stop the war. It's not surprising, given the inflated threat and the grandiose expectations inherent in our nation building in Libya, that the State Department was not able to adequately protect our diplomats from this predictable threat. It's not surprising, and it's also not acceptable. ...
We want to stop the attacks on our embassies? Let's stop trying to overthrow governments. This should not be a partisan issue. Let's avoid the hype. Let's look at the real situation here. Interventions do not make us safer. They do not protect our nations They are themselves a threat to America.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Ohio congressman, former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich testifying in 2012. This week is the fourth anniversary of the death of Muammar Gaddafi. He died close to a year before the Benghazi attack. Our guest is Melvin Goodman, former CIA and State Department analyst, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, director of the Center's National Security Project. Can you follow up on what Kucinich is saying and what you think are the critical lessons today that we have or have not learned, Mel Goodman?
MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, I think Kucinich was spot-on. And I would go back to 2003. When we invaded Iraq—under false pretenses, because it was a total corruption of the intelligence process—remember that Gaddafi had been in power for about three decades. Mubarak had been in power for about two or three decades. Libya was stable, Egypt was stable. Saddam Hussein had been in power for several decades, and there was a certain stability in Iraq. The important thing is, these countries were not national security problems for the United States.
Then we use military power in a totally unacceptable fashion in Iraq, and this created the current situation that we're dealing with, in which you have total instability in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq. We now have a power we need to deal with: Iran—and I give high praise to John Kerry for the nuclear agreement with Iran, but we helped to make Iran such an important player by going to war in Afghanistan in an extended fashion, which removed Iran's enemy on the east, and then going into Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein, Iran's enemy on the west. So we've been the source of tremendous instability. In many ways, I think, if you look at the Middle East—and there's an apocalyptic character to what we're seeing in the Middle East—we are the major independent variable. And we do that because we use force.
And this belief in regime change—and sadly enough, it goes back to President Eisenhower in 1953, when we used American power in collusion, conspiratorial collusion, with the British, Operation Ajax, to overthrow the only real democratically elected government Iran has ever had. And, of course, Kennedy followed this up in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs, which the CIA IG called a "perfect failure." Then you jump forward or leap forward to Chile, again a democratically elected government, but it was socialist, so Nixon and Kissinger target that. Go to Reagan and Iran-Contra.
So if you look at American history, you have the United States essentially trying to create an empire with a base structure that involves over 800 facilities all over the world. There's no country that has more than a half-dozen facilities. And Britain and France can claim that in former colonial areas. Russia can claim a few facilities in former Soviet republics, plus Tartus in Syria. But it's the United States that has this huge facility, a forward strategy to project power in order to destabilize situations when it becomes convenient for United States' interest.
AMY GOODMAN: Mel Goodman—
MELVIN GOODMAN: And this is essentially wrong.
AMY GOODMAN: I daresay the Obama administration would say they intervened in Libya to prevent Gaddafi—this is before 2012—committing a massacre of the Libyan uprising, in the same way that they would say they have intervened in Syria for the same reason, to prevent Assad from killing his own people. Your response to both? And what would have been a peaceful alternative?
MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, in the case of Libya, I think there could be an alternative, because Gaddafi had negotiated with the United States in the past. In fact, the reference to Gaddafi giving up his nuclear weapons is extremely important, because that was done in very delicate, private negotiations. And the CIA played a major role in that, even though that's not well known.
So, the essential element is that we should realize that the use of military power should always be the last resort, and, frankly, I think President Obama does understand that. I don't think he's been comfortable with the expansion of power. When the so-called surge happened in Afghanistan in 2009 and he went to West Point to give the important speech that he gave, he made it clear that he was putting the troops in, but it was temporary. In 18 months, he was going to start taking them out. And he knew he needed to get troops out of Iraq. He wanted to get all the troops out of Afghanistan. He led from behind, according to his aides, in Libya, so that was somewhat halfhearted. But the fact is, we used military power in these places, and now they're less stable than they were before.
And to talk about nation building is particularly silly. We can't rebuild Baltimore, so what are we going to do in Aleppo and Mosul and Benghazi and Tripoli? We have to be more balanced and more restrained with our use of power. And Hillary Clinton should have been forced to discuss that yesterday, but I don't think that panel was interested in American national security. These were a bunch of "gotcha" questions that got this country nowhere.
AMY GOODMAN: Mel Goodman, you're a former CIA and State Department analyst. Let's talk about the role of the CIA, for example, in Libya. The CIA and the State Department, are they merging? And does that endanger diplomacy, when people in other countries think it's the same thing?
MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, the problem, I think, is even greater than that. The merger that's taking place, particularly under this director, John Brennan, is the merger between the CIA and the Pentagon. I left the CIA in the 1980s because of the politicization of intelligence under Bill Casey and Bob Gates. But what John Brennan has done is created the CIA as a paramilitary institution that is really doing the bidding of the Pentagon. He said in his confirmation hearings he was going to give up drone warfare, that that properly belonged in the Pentagon—if we should be doing it at all, which is another question. But not only has he not done that, we've expanded the use of the drones. Now he's merging intelligence analysts and operatives, which will further politicize intelligence.
So what I worry about is the CIA that was created by Harry Truman to challenge the Pentagon, to challenge intelligence briefings by the Pentagon, to try to get an understanding of why we need arms control and disarmament—and there, the CIAand the State Department, and when we had an Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which Bill Clinton got rid of, the CIA did some very good work. But if you look at the last 10 years, if you look at politicized intelligence, the phony case to go to war, people like Mike Morell, a deputy director, who was called the "Bob Gates of his generation" by Politico, and we certainly know what that means—the politicization of all the intelligence to invade Iraq, secret prisons, extraordinary renditions, torture and abuse. This is what needs to be addressed, but I think, frankly, President Obama has been intimidated by this process, intimidated by the very military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about in 1961.
AMY GOODMAN: Melvin Goodman, I want to thank you for being with us. The issues, some of them, you raise, we're going to raise with our next guest. Melvin Goodman is former CIA and State Department analyst, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and director of the Center's National Security Project. His latest book is National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism.