Monday, July 26, 2010

Wiki 'Leaks' New Pentagon Papers, Reveals CIA Plans to Destroy Wikileaks

By Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Brass hats and ass hats are not happy about what is called one of the biggest 'leaks in military history', certainly the biggest expose since Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers. Wikileaks has blown the lid off Pentagon cover, exposing the truth about U.S. wars of aggression in the Middle East, primarily Afghanistan with the Pentagon's own documents. The 'leaks' reveal 'chilling details' about the US occupation and war in Afghanistan and numerous civilians deaths at the hands of US occupying forces.
  • The U.S. Military (Pentagon) had plans to destroy Wiki-Leaks
  • The CIA tried to shore up support in Europe for U.S. middle east wars
  • The fall of the Dutch Government over its troop commitment to Afghanistan demonstrates the fragility of European support for the NATO-led ISAF mission. Some NATO states, notably France and Germany, have counted on public apathy about Afghanistan to increase their contributions to the mission, but indifference might turn into active hostility if spring and summer fighting results in an upsurge in military or Afghan civilian casualties and if a Dutch-style debate spills over into other states contributing troops. The Red Cell invited a CIA expert on strategic communication and analysts following public opinion at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) to consider information approaches that might better link the Afghan mission to the priorities of French, German, and other Western European publics.
    Leaked 'New Pentagon Papers'
  • Pakistan has been 'double-crossing the U.S.
WikiLeaks has released a document set called the Afghan War Diary, an extraordinary compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.
The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers, and mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related detail.
The document collection is available on a dedicated webpage.
The reports cover most units from the US Army with the exception of most US Special Forces' activities. The reports do not generally cover top secret operations or European and other ISAF Forces operations.
We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits.
--Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010; also see: Afghan War Logs
More report highlights from Katherine Faulkner of the Daily Mail:
  • Special forces 'black' unit hunts down Taliban leaders
  • French troops shot at a bus full of school children
  • Polish troops killed wedding party in mortar attack
  • Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles
  • --The Daily Mail
This 'massive file of secret military documents' reveals 'chilling details' about the U.S. civilian casualties and deaths by the U.S. Military occupation in Afghanistan.
The Afghan War Diary an extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority of lethal military actions involving the United States military. They include the number of persons internally stated to be killed, wounded, or detained during each action, together with the precise geographical location of each event, and the military units involved and major weapon systems used.
The Afghan War Diary is the most significant archive about the reality of war to have ever been released during the course of a war. The deaths of tens of thousands is normally only a statistic but the archive reveals the locations and the key events behind each most of these deaths. We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary to change its course.

Most entries have been written by soldiers and intelligence officers listening to reports radioed in from front line deployments. However the reports also contain related information from Marines intelligence, US Embassies, and reports about corruption and development activity across Afghanistan.
Each report consists of the time and precise geographic location of an event that the US Army considers significant. It includes several additional standardized fields: The broad type of the event (combat, non-combat, propaganda, etc.); the category of the event as classified by US Forces, how many were detained, wounded, and killed from civilian, allied, host nation, and enemy forces; the name of the reporting unit and a number of other fields, the most significant of which is the summary - an English language description of the events that are covered in the report.
--WikiLeaks today released over 75,000 secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan.
The CIA had plans to 'destroy Wikileaks'.
This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN) 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks. ``The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the U.S. government are providing sensitive or classified information to WikiLeaks.org cannot be ruled out. It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses ``trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers, the report recommends ``The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the WikiLeaks.org Web site. [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective]. As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that ``Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the WikiLeaks.org website. The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks---U.S. equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable U.S. violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.
--U.S. Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks
Truth hurts. The White House and the Pentagon are said to be 'enraged'. I say --so what? I am enraged by the war of naked aggression, fought solely for the benefit of America's increasingly rich but tiny 'ruling elite'and the shills and pimps on K-street who conceived it and assisted Pentagon militarists waging that war on behalf of venal interests throughout America.
The report linked to above is not the only revelation. A 'classified' CIA analysis from March outlines PR strategies that were designed to shore up public support in Germany and France for 'a continued war in Afghanistan'.
After the Dutch government fell on the issue of Dutch troops in Afghanistan last month, the CIA became worried that similar events could happen in the countries that post the third and fourth largest troop contingents to the ISAF mission. The proposed PR strategies focus on pressure points that have been identified within these countries. For France it is the sympathy of the public for Afghan refugees and women. For Germany it is the fear of the consequences of defeat (drugs, more refugees, terrorism) as well as for Germany's standing in NATO. The memo is a recipe for the targeted manipulation of public opinion in two NATO ally countries, written by the CIA. It is classified as Confidential/No Foreign Nationals.

--CIA report into shoring up Afghan war support in Western Europe, 11 Mar 2010
Wikileaks provided additional information from 'media partners'

Mike Gravel on The Pentagon Papers


Sunday, July 25, 2010

Cold War Origins of the CIA Holocaust

By Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

A new book by James W. Douglass [JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters] addresses an "an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe." A few events, many of them very recent, qualify to be so described. The unspeakable 'evil' in this case is the assassination of JFK, in fact, a cold-blooded murder in the streets.

That it was a 'President' so ignominiously gunned-down is in itself appalling, unspeakable but that it was a President who held out our best hopes to survive as a Democratic, free nation makes it all the more tragic in retrospect.

The assassination succeeded, claims Douglass, because Americans can't handle the truth. Americans have not faced up to what has happened to our nation or what has become of our dreams of freedom, democracy, equal rights and liberty.

Douglass's books is not another conspiracy book. Many books, articles, writers, and talk show hosts have proven to my satisfaction and that of millions of Americans that the cold blooded murder of JFK could not have been anything other than a conspiracy. The 'lone nut' theory is subscribed to only by lone nuts and legions of liars. Douglass not only affirms a 'conspiracy' but speaks directly to jaded Americans, addressing in the subtitle: "Why He Died and Why It Matters."

No murder but especially that of JFK can be understood in a vacuum. There is a fateful history leading up to that dreadful day in Dallas, when the United States lost a President, America lost a future, and every American lost the 'Yankee' optimism that had made our nation great.

John F. Kennedy began as a 'Cold Warrior' and ended as and perhaps because he transcended that role, that label. He had become the embodiment of all our hopes for peace as well as prosperity, more mature relations with both allies and adversaries as well as more humane domestic peace with those citizens who had been denied a fair share of that dream.

Today, anyone aspiring to any political office so lofty as that of President risks his/her life. This outcome may not, must not be tolerated if we are ever again to enjoy the blessings of competent government.

Since the murder of John F. Kennedy, it has become clear to every thinking American that the path toward peace is opposed by those who make war for profit. In the U.S., the group is called the Military-Industrial Complex, in short, the M.I.C., whose 'living' is nothing else but industrialized murder. It is also clear to every thinking American that as long as there is a profit motive, as long as there are big bucks to be made manufacturing and selling arms, peace is but an elusive dream. As long as just one percent of the nation's population owns more than the rest of us combined, peace is but a hopeless dream. As long as there is oil in the Middle East, you will find either the American military and/or the CIA.

Doulgass' book identifies a 'designated patsy', the term used by Lee Harvey Oswald himself upon his arrest. Earlier, according to Douglass, there was a 'second Oswald' who was moved about the country 'like a pawn'. This doppelganger was, in fact, setting Oswald up to 'take the fall'. It was, at the time, a mere sub-plot. The Soviet Union was 'set up' as well. The Soviet Union and its satellite China had a role thrust upon them: 'Evil Empire'. As an ironic result, we are now owned by China. Again --ironically --it is the CIAs own 'World Fact Book' which confirms and documents that fact.

It was during the administration of President Harry Truman that the CIA was given near 'unlimited powers'. This event is referred to by Gore Vidal in his 'Decline and Fall of the American Empire'. Sen Arthur Vandenburg is quoted as having told Truman that if he expected to raise taxes in order to pay for 'covert activities' then he must "...scare the hell out of the American people." Thus was born a 'cold war', an incipient empire, and the Orwellian, non-ending war which has, at last, bankrupted America, enslaved its people, enriched but one percent of the population, and incurred the enmity of many throughout the world who see themselves as victim slaves because of it. They are correct.

The goal was nothing less than the destruction of the Russian Communist State. In a shallow sense and in the shorter term, they succeeded. In the longer term, they failed. The costs of waging Orwellian war had not been assayed. In the end, the victory was merely pyrrhic, short-lived and did not justify the lives lost in Viet Nam and every other surrogate battlefield.
Blessed with secrecy and lack of congressional oversight, CIA operations became corrupt almost immediately. Using propaganda stations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the CIA felt justified in manipulating the public for its own good. The broadcasts were so patently false that for a time it was illegal to publish transcripts of them in the U.S. This was a classic case of a powerful organization deciding what was best for the people, and then abusing the powers it had helped itself to.
During the 40s and 50s, most of the public was unaware of what the CIA was doing. Those who knew thought they were fighting the good fight against communism, like James Bond. However, they could not keep their actions secret forever, and by the 60s and 70s, Americans began learning about the agency’s crimes and atrocities. (3) It turns out the CIA has:
  • Corrupted democratic elections in Greece, Italy and dozens of other nations;

  • Been involved to varying degrees in at least 35 assassination plots against foreign heads of state or prominent political leaders. Successful assassinations include democratically elected leaders like Salvador Allende (Chile) and Patrice Lumumba (Belgian Congo); also CIA-created dictators like Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic) and Ngo Dinh Diem (South Vietnam); and popular political leaders like Che Guevara. Unsuccessful attempts range from Fidel Castro to Charles De Gaulle.

  • Helped launch military coups that toppled democratic governments, replacing them with brutal dictatorships or juntas. The list of overthrown democratic leaders includes Mossadegh (Iran, 1953), Arbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Velasco and Arosemena (Ecuador, 1961, 1963), Bosch (Dominican Republic, 1963), Goulart (Brazil, 1964), Sukarno (Indonesia, 1965), Papandreou (Greece, 1965-67), Allende (Chile, 1973), and dozens of others.

  • Undermined the governments of Australia, Guyana, Cambodia, Jamaica and more;

  • Supported murderous dictators like General Pinochet (Chile), the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos (Phillipines), "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier (Haiti), General Noriega (Panama), Mobutu Sese Seko (Ziare), the "reign of the colonels" (Greece), and more;

  • Created, trained and supported death squads and secret police forces that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, leftists and political opponents, in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Iran, Turkey, Angola and others;

  • Helped run the "School of the Americas" at Fort Benning, Georgia, which trains Latin American military officers how to overthrow democratic governments. Subjects include the use of torture, interrogation and murder;

  • Used Michigan State "professors" to train Diem’s secret police in torture;

  • Conducted economic sabotage, including ruining crops, disrupting industry, sinking ships and creating food shortages;

  • Paved the way for the massacre of 200,000 in East Timor, 500,000 in Indonesia and one to two million in Cambodia;

  • Launched secret or illegal military actions or wars in Nicaragua, Angola, Cuba, Laos and Indochina;

  • Planted false stories in the local media;

  • Framed political opponents for crimes, atrocities, political statements and embarrassments that they did not commit;

  • Spied on thousands of American citizens, in defiance of Congressional law;

  • Smuggled Nazi war criminals and weapon scientists into the U.S., unpunished, for their use in the Cold War;

  • Created organizations like the World Anti-Communist League, which became filled with ex-Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, Italian terrorists, Japanese fascists, racist Afrikaaners, Latin American death squad leaders, CIA agents and other extreme right-wing militants;

  • Conducted Operation MK-ULTRA, a mind-control experiment that gave LSD and other drugs to Americans against their will or without their knowledge, causing some to commit suicide;

  • Penetrated and disrupted student antiwar organizations;

  • Kept friendly and extensive working relations with the Mafia;

  • Actively traded in drugs around the world since the 1950s to fund its operations. The Contra/crack scandal is only the tip of the iceberg –- other notorious examples include Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle and Noreiga’s Panama.

  • Had their fingerprints all over the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X. Even if the CIA is not responsible for these killings, the sheer amount of CIA involvement in these cases demands answers;

  • And then routinely lied to Congress about all of the above.
The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (4) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."
We should note that the CIA gets away with this because it is not accountable to democratic government. Former CIA officer Philip Agee put it best: "The CIA is the President's secret army." Prior to 1975, the agency answered only to the President (creating all the usual problems of authoritarianism). And because the CIA’s activities were secret, the President rarely had to worry about public criticism and pressure. After the 1975 Church hearings, Congress tried to create congressional oversight of the CIA, but this has failed miserably. One reason is that the congressional oversight committee is a sham, filled with Cold Warriors, conservatives, businessmen, and even ex-CIA personnel.
--Steve Kangas, The Origins of the Overclass
A summit meeting of U.S. President Eisenhower with Soviet Premier Khrushchev was canceled after a U.S U2 spy plane crashed in Russia. Eisenhower had order such flights canceled. So--who disobeyed or counter-manded orders from the President? It was after this incident that Eisenhower issued his famous warning about the 'Military-Industrial Complex' in his farewell address. It was, thus, left to John F. Kennedy to defy the "conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry."

What is so clear today, in retrospect, may not have been so obvious at the time. Else, we might have avoided the tragic history that has resulted. Clearly, JFKs fate was sealed when he refused to support the CIA invasion of Cuba to regain control of Cuba for organized crime. Think of it this way: the CIA had hoped to hijack the apparatus of the U.S. government and its military in order to make Cuba safe for the Mafia.

Kennedy was not buying it. He knew that he had been lied to by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA. He refused to provide air support for the Cuban brigade. It was not the only time that JFK had run afoul of the military. During the Cuban-Missile Crisis, he resisted 'tremendous pressure' on him to take military action, which in retrospect, it is clear would plunged the nation in a nuclear Armageddon.

JFK intended to end the cold war, establish peaceful relations with the Soviet Union. At this time in our history, the bumper sticker: "better dead than red" was seen on millions of vehicles, often beside the slogan: 'Impeach Earl Warren'. This is the political atmosphere that prevailed in the short years and months preceding JFK's cold-blooded murder.

The bumper stickers, however, were just the political atmosphere that was promoted and exploited. The real power opposing JFK was the arms industry which still controls the United States. At the time, the war machine generated billions of dollars. It was then as now, the producer of America's chief exports: death and destruction.

JFK learned to trust Khrushchev more than the 'people' within his own government. Traitors to the Constitution and the President, they had embarked upon a strategy in which they would oppose him, isolate him and subvert his policies. The gang of traitors included Richard Bissell, Charles Cabell, Henry Cabot Lodge, Lyman Lemnitzer, Curtis LeMay and perhaps the most contemptible of all, Allen Dulles who was, in fact, a traitor.

On June 10, 1963, JFK spoke about his desire for world peace, a new relationship with the Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev with whom he had hope to form a new relationship with the Soviet Union. To these ends, he said that nuclear disarmament was a necessity and to that end proposed a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. And, as 'we are all mortal', he most certainly infuriated the American right wing by declaring that the Russian people wanted peace as much as did the American people.

Just as Dwight David Eisenhower was, as I have called him, the last honest Republican, JFK died a martyr for the cause of peace. The speech also certified JFK's death warrant. With so many powerful enemies opposing his policies and hating him, JFK didn't have a chance. He was craftily maneuvered into the crossfire in Dallas.

The CIA was infuriated when it learned that JFK had exchanged private letters with Khrushchev and had, in secret, planned to seek 'rapprochement' with Cuba. Castro was interested and was, in fact, meeting with American representatives when JFK was murdered. Douglas rightly claims that "JFK died a martyr" to the causes of freedom and peace.

Douglass is right to claim that if JFK had not been murdered, the Cold War would have ended amid 'peace talks' with Khrushchev. The tragedy of Viet Nam might have been avoided or cut short. They're might never have been a 'War on Terrorism'. Within a month of JFKs assassination, Harry Truman wrote an article for the Washington Post warning of a CIA take-over of the United States. Harry was right!


Origins of the CIA Holocaust

Joan Baez: We Shall Overcome