The Shotgun Sings the Song

Posted on December 19, 2015 by camelotkidd

 

It’s becoming clear just what Margaret Thatcher meant when she told everyone that there was no alternative to neoliberalism.

In an absolutely stunning article, economist Michael Hudson explains how the US is wielding the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a weapon against Russia and China as part a new Cold War. “In this U.S.-centered worldview, China and Russia loom as the great potential adversaries – defined as independent power centers from the United States as they create the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an alternative to NATO, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as an alternative to the IMF and World Bank tandem.”

The IMF has quietly changed its rules on paying back loans. Ukraine owes $3 billion to Russia, and the note comes due December 20, 2015. Ukraine, the U.S.-backed regime, has announced its intention to default. Normally a country in arrears is not qualified for new loans. U.S. lobbyists have just changed the IMF rules to remove a critical lever on which Russia and other governments use to enforce payment of their loans.

According to Hudson, the underlying motivation for changing the IMF’s rules was, “…the threat that Chinese lending would provide an alternative to IMF loans and its demands for austerity. “IMF-watchers said the fund was originally thinking of ensuring China wouldn’t be able to foil IMF lending to member countries seeking bailouts as Beijing ramped up loans to developing economies around the world.”[6] In short, U.S. strategists have designed a policy to block trade and financial agreements organized outside of U.S. control and that of the IMF and World Bank in which it holds unique veto power.

This is a pretty amazing demonstration of the power the US maintains through its  manipulation of supposedly non-partisan institutions like the IMF. Anyway, Hudson is a better story teller, so I’m going to quote more from his article.

Read the whole thing.

“This is the back story of the U.S. fight to control the rest of the world. Tearing apart the IMF’s rules is only the most recent chapter. The broad drive against Russia, China and their prospective Eurasian allies has deteriorated into tactics without a realistic understanding of how they are bringing about precisely the kind of world they are seeking to prevent – a multilateral world.

Arena by arena, the core values of what used to be American and European social democratic ideology are being uprooted. The Enlightenment’s ideals of secular democracy and the rule of international law applied equally to all nations, classical free market theory (of markets free from unearned income and rent extraction by special vested interests), and public investment in infrastructure to hold down the cost of living and doing business are to be sacrificed to a militant U.S. unilateralism as “the indispensible nation.” Standing above the rule of law and national interests, American neocons proclaim that their nation’s destiny is to wage war to prevent foreign secular democracy from acting in ways other than submission to U.S. diplomacy. In practice, this means favoring special U.S. financial and corporate interests that control American foreign policy.

The upshot – and new basic guideline for IMF lending – is to create a new Iron Curtain splitting the world into pro-U.S. economies going neoliberal, and all other economies, including those seeking to maintain public investment in infrastructure, progressive taxation and what used to be viewed as progressive capitalism.”

And, here we can see the outlines of a new world order–corporate neofeudalism, where the rule of law is for suckers, and there is no alternative.

“They decide and the shotgun sings the song.”

Update: Naked Capitalism is celebrating their 9th birthday. Bravo!

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Rollback

Posted on December 16, 2015 by camelotkidd

 

The US is waging a novel type of hybrid warfare in a desperate attempt to maintain its hegemony and counter the rise of a multi-polar world led by Russia and China. The war on terror is a hoax, used as a convenient cover story to mask the US’s true intentions.

As I discussed in an earlier post, the return of Russia to the Middle-East with its defense of Syria has meant that the neoconservatives are constrained from outright invasions, like Iraq, and are forced into indirect attacks. This new form of warfare is aimed at removing countries in Russia’s “sphere of influence,” controlling vital resources from North Africa through the Middle East and across Central Asia, establishing military bases wherever necessary, and, most importantly, maintaining the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Andrew Horybko’s book, Hybrid Wars, offers an excellent deconstruction of this new type of warfare. In the case of US foreign policy, a hybrid war is where US intelligence agencies foster civil unrest aimed at regime change within a targeted state/society, which is any country whose leaders choose to support their own citizens’ well-being, independence and quality of life over US transnational corporate interests. The targeted country is attacked economically through sanctions and embargos, politically through propaganda, lies and threats, or militarily, through acts of terrorism, coups and assassinations. Think NGO’s, social media, Color Revolutions, terrorists and Nazi’s

The book focuses on the new strategy of indirect warfare that the US has demonstrated during the Syrian and Ukrainian Crises. Both situations left many wondering whether they were observing the export of Color Revolutions to the Mideast, the arrival of the Arab Spring to Europe, or perhaps some kind of Frankenstein hybrid. It is asserted that when the US’ actions in both countries are objectively compared, one can discern a new patterned approach towards regime change. This model begins by deploying a Color Revolution as a soft coup attempt, only to be followed up by a hard coup Unconventional War if the first plan fails. Unconventional Warfare is defined in this book as any type of nonconventional (i.e. non-official military) force engaged in largely asymmetrical combat against a traditional adversary. Taken together in a two-pronged approach, Color Revolutions and Unconventional Warfare represent the two components that form the theory of Hybrid War, the new method of indirect warfare being waged by the US.

US behavior is a throw back to Cold War doctrine. On one side were US planners who argued for containment, while on the other were the hawks who wanted the Soviets attacked on all fronts as a way to rollback the Iron Curtain.

The policy of rollback is alive and well. Horybko argues that US planners are still seeking to undermine Russia, “Instead of directly confronting the targets on their home turf, proxy conflicts will be waged in their near vicinity in order to destabilize their periphery.”

One of the key elements in hybrid warfare is the media, with its ability to propagandize the masses of an attacked country. These same techniques are imported back to the homeland. The US media is essentially conducting a public diplomacy operation against the American populace, employing advertising, public relations and propaganda. The ease at which they’ve whipped the American populace into a war frenzy over ISIS is a case in point. Even the exposure of the propaganda leading to the invasion of Iraq has not blunted the ability of the corporate media to sell war.

Then, of course, there’s social media.

Horybko, examines how the hybrid warriors utilize this new form of communication. “Nowadays, Google Maps, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are integral parts of the “armory” that Hybrid Warriors use. Recent news stories suggest that instigating civil unrest and fostering a hive mind in targeted states is the true objective of the US government’s covert involvement in Facebook and other social media networks. Facebook conducted secret psychological experiments on over half a million of its users in order “to study how emotional states are transmitted over the platform. The study was called “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks” and concluded the same, namely that “emotions spread via contagion through a network”, thereby increasing the ability for an intelligence organization to socially engineer a hive mind. In the context of Hybrid War, this is the masses swarming the authorities’ symbolic and administrative centers of power as a unified (if decentralized) whole in order to lead to regime change by mob rule (i.e. organized and directed chaos).

Weaponized chaos is an essential component of hybrid warfare, Horybko writes. “The purpose is to engage in de-facto or de-jure strategic state fracturing to destabilize the Eurasian Great Powers (Russia, China, Iran) and prolong American primacy over the supercontinent.”

This is our American foreign policy. It’s not about keeping the American people safe from terrorism, it’s all about maintaining an empire at any cost. For the American people, there’s not a lot of up-side to these policies. Like our economy, the gains of empire disproportionately go to the 1%.

Sadly to say, I’m not sure the American people are capable of comprehending the enormity of our foreign policies and how dangerous they are.

Here’s Colonel Pat Lang discussing these realities with a neighbor. “A well educated woman neighbor explained to me that the American people lack the “software” in their heads to grasp what is being written here on Sic Semper Tyrannis about the Middle East.  I agree.  Borgist repetitive propaganda has IMO re-structured the collective American brain to such an extent that the truth is for most unfathomable.” 

Update: There’s a textbook example of hybrid warfare being carried out in Montenegro, in real time.

“Since Montenegro had regained its independence the U.S. and the EU have created a multi-layered hierarchical system comprising multiple structures and organizations in order to reshape the public consciousness of Montenegrins and guarantee that the country joins NATO. This sophisticated ‘network of networks’ has engulfed government structures, NGOs and commercial companies working for one purpose. This method proved to be successful in Ukraine, where the U.S. and EU have achieved their goals. As for Montenegro, only time will tell.”

 

 

 

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Return to Sender

Posted on December 9, 2015 by camelotkidd

 

Crimes committed by the empire on the periphery always return to the center.

Always.

Bombing, murder, torture, drone assassinations, and employing terrorist proxies as cut-outs are some of the many crimes carried out by the US government in an effort to maintain control of an increasingly chaotic neo-imperium.

Because of these “foreign policies” it was inevitable that we’d have another terrorist attack here in the homeland.

Not if, but when.

Here’s what I wrote a month ago--I feel like a lonely voice in the wilderness, warning of the consequences of US foreign policies.  The polices our elite have chosen– employing Sunni terrorists to smash any secular government that puts its citizens ahead of US corporations–have always contained the seeds of a great tragedy.

It’s pretty simple, really. If we don’t want terrorists attacks here in the homeland, we should stop using terrorists to carry out policies of regime change throughout the world.

The conventional narrative of the war on terror has America beset upon by evil terrorists who hate us for our freedom and way of life. Instead, the harsh reality is that the US has been utilizing terrorists to carry out a divide and rule foreign policy, invading or surreptitiously overthrowing foreign governments for the past 65 years. Consider the covert war waged on Syria where the US utilized the terrorist skills of the exact same Sunni terrorists–Al Qaeda–who attacked us on 9/11, as part of a redirection of US covert policy towards confronting the Shiite crescent.

The American people, by and large, remain blissfully unaware of the true nature of the war on terror. And President Obama seems incapable of informing them, instead offering a misleading narrative.

Daniel Lazare examines President Obama’s speech in the aftermath of the terror attack in San Bernardino and sees the same contradictions that I do. “He supports Sunni extremists in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Syria, yet is shocked, shocked, when they unleash their violence on innocent bystanders in Paris or San Bernardino…Obama claims to be at war with Al Qaeda, yet looks the other way when close friends supply the same group with money and arms. He cautions Americans not to give in to Islamophobia, but says nothing as Wahhabists rage against Christians, Jews and Shi‘ites. The President is all in favor of secularism, yet is seeking to topple the secular Baathist regime in Damascus. Indeed, he is waging war against one of the few secular governments left standing in the Muslim world.

The depressing reality of the latest terrorist attack in San Bernardino is that it’s a win for the terrorists and a win for the worst sort of reactionary right-wing politics. We can witness this phenomenon with the rise of semi-fascists like Donald Trump in the US, and Marine Le Pen in France.

I believe that this turn to reactionary politics here in the US is because voters have lost confidence in our leaders’ ability to tell the the truth about foreign policies. Because of their ignorance of US foreign policy these same voters are lured by demagogues. Panic creates the longing for a strong leader, and therefore there arises a sort of muddled response, with liberals calling for gun control and conservatives calling for the confinement and deportation of Muslims, as well as more unhinged responses. 

Sigh.

We are balanced on the precipice where one more mass-casualty terror attack will be the end of the American Republic. Another attack will bring the deep state out into the open to govern the US under martial law. And, here’s the thing–I don’t know that many American’s would notice or care about this momentous occasion, numbed as they are the constant degradation of American life.

Mike Lofgren, former congressional staffer, and author of Anatomy of the Deep State, describes this reality. “The Deep State’s physical expansion and consolidation around the Beltway would seem to make a mockery of the frequent pronouncement that governance in Washington is dysfunctional and broken. That the secret and unaccountable Deep State floats freely above the gridlock between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the paradox of American government in the 21st century: drone strikes, data mining, secret prisons and Panopticon-like control on the one hand; and on the other, the ordinary, visible parliamentary institutions of self-government declining to the status of a banana republic amid the gradual collapse of public infrastructure.”

Investigative journalist Robert Parry believes that to to end the deceptive and highly destructive war on terror we need a dose of honesty from President Obama. “I have long advocated that Obama should go on television in the style of President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address in 1961, sitting in the Oval Office, hands-folded, none of Obama’s glitzy stage-craft, and simply level with the American people.”

I think this scenario is highly unlikely.

In the wake of Turkey shooting down a Russian bomber, I wondered if President Obama was in on the whole deep state thing or if he was simply a figurehead. With Obama’s subsequent pronouncements and press briefings, I’ve come to think that he’s one evil dude.

Hope and change, indeed.

At times like these, I find myself returning to a familiar poem by William Butler Yeats, entitled The Second Coming.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…

Update: It’s really getting hard to believe that more Americans don’t know about the false war on terror narrative. Here’s another reminder of the consequences of US foreign policy of employing terrorists from Harper’s magazine.

“In 1996, the CIA set up a special unit to track down bin Laden, led by the counterterrorism expert Michael Scheuer. Now settled in Afghanistan, the Al Qaeda chief had at least theoretically fallen out with the Saudi regime that once supported him and other anti-Soviet jihadis. Nevertheless, bin Laden seemed to have maintained links with his homeland — and some in the CIA were sensitive to that fact. When I interviewed Scheuer in 2014 for my book Kill Chain, he told me that one of his first requests to the Saudis was for routine information about his quarry: birth certificate, financial records, and so forth. There was no response. Repeated requests produced nothing. Ultimately, a message arrived from the CIA station chief in Riyadh, John Brennan, who ordered the requests to stop — they were “upsetting the Saudis.”

Five years later, Al Qaeda, employing a largely Saudi suicide squad, destroyed the World Trade Center. In a sane world, this disaster might have permanently ended Washington’s long-standing taste for mixing Islam with politics. But old habits die hard.”

 

 

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Control

Posted on December 2, 2015 by camelotkidd

If Americans appear clueless about foreign policy it’s by design. The rationales offered range from fighting terrorists who threaten our homeland, to protecting helpless civilians, to spreading peace and democracy. Hopefully you, dear reader, don’t need me to point out that none of these reasons given are the true impetus of US foreign policy.

US foreign policy is about control, or if you read the New York Times–“protecting vital interests.”

An article at Global Research, by Stephen Gowans, examines The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and its influence on US foreign policy. Gowans’ argues that US foreign policies formulated by the CFR are those of the wealthy and corporations they own, and it’s their “vital interests” that are being protected.

“US foreign policy has a class content. It is that of bankers, investors and major shareholders of the United States’ key corporations who, through instrumental and functional mechanisms, dominate US public affairs. This class has an interest in unimpeded access to the land, labor, resources and markets of the entire world (and beyond [22]) for purposes of making itself ever wealthier. For this reason, US foreign policy is, and has always been, hostile to the threat posed by the economic self-determination of foreign populations which aspire to control their own wealth-producing assets for their own purposes.”

In recent posts, I’ve been discussing the neoconservative policy of regime change in Syria and how the US became the empire of chaos.  I’ve also been examining the neoconservatives and their iron grip on US foreign policy.

Here, it’s worth asking why does this small clique of neocons holds such outsized influence over Republican and now Democratic administrations? Could it be that the neocons are articulating the preferences of the wealthy elite who actually control the US, despite the veneer of democracy?

It sure looks that way.

The mandarins at the CFR advocate control over worldwide energy supplies, resources, and markets. Overthrowing recalcitrant leaders and governments is how to gain that control. Examining the leaders and governments who have aroused the ire of US planners clearly shows the bias of the wealthy and the corporations they control.

The whole empire of chaos bit is a clever tactic to achieve control over unruly parts of the world that haven’t gotten with the Washington Consensus.  

When viewed in this light events in Syria and Ukraine make a lot more sense. The US is attempting to force Russia out of the European energy market. Russia has already had to abandon its South Stream pipeline project to Europe. Furthermore, by pushing for a pipeline to supply dollar-denominated energy from Qatar through Syria and on into Europe, the US can strengthen the dollar while further driving Russia from Europe. In the meantime, to remove Assad who is regarded as a barrier to this project, US-backed war and destabilisation has resulted in 250,000 Syrians being killed.

Since World War II we’ve trained and armed proxies to fight against leaders and governments that wanted to use the resources of their country for their own advancement rather than letting American corporations profit from them. We’ve overtly or covertly appointed hundreds of dictators, war criminals, drug lords and terrorists. Despite the rhetoric, we don’t care about brutal dictators as long as they get with the program. They only become a problem when they go rogue.

Here’s an example of this concept–the most radical fundamentalist Islamist state is our ally Saudi Arabia. “The fanatacism and medievalism which underpins ISIS/Daesh in Iraq and Syria is indistinguishable from the Wahhabi Sunni doctrine in Riyadh.” The Saudis have used their oil money to fund the building of mosques and other projects across the Muslim world, all with the aim of asserting the dominance of this particularly extreme form of Sunni Islam.

But, the Saudi’s allow US oil companies to profit from their petroleum, they purchase our weapons, and they invest their money in our banks. If they didn’t, we’d invade, or employ terrorist proxies to overthrow their government and put someone in charge who would.

It should be clear by now that many of the Islamist armed groups, whether the Taliban, Al-Qaida or ISIS have been financed and armed by the US as a way to maintain control over its world wide empire. It’s for the same reasons the US waged war on the Third World for decades to combat indigenous nationalism–where the leaders or countries wanted to use their resources to better themselves and their people rather than Wall Street.

I’m more convinced than ever that the Cold War narrative of the heroic US containing the evil Soviets is false. In light of US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, I’m inclined to believe that the US wasn’t containing the Soviets as much as they were containing us. Taking this idea further–the challenge posed by Soviet containment was that it placed communist controlled parts of the world off limits to capitalist penetration in the search for resources, cheap labor, and markets. Communism effectively contained the American empire from expanding into certain areas of the world.

This is a large part of the reason why the neoconservatives are willing to restart the Cold War with Russia.

It’s all about control.

 

 

 

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The Great Game

Posted on November 25, 2015 by camelotkidd

I’ve always wondered if Obama is a figure-head for the deep state or if he’s in on it.

Paul Craig Roberts is wondering the same thing in response to Turkey shooting down a Russian bomber on the Syrian border.

Here’s the money quote–“If the attack was cleared with Washington, was Obama bypassed by the neocons who control his government, or is Obama himself complicit? Clearly the neoconservatives are disturbed by the French president’s call for unity with Russia against ISIL and easily could have used their connections to Turkey to stage an event that Washington can use to prevent cooperation with Russia.”

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We’ve Always Been at War With Eastasia

Posted on November 25, 2015 by camelotkidd

Behind the smokescreen of American exceptionalism, the US is the dominant world-wide empire, working assiduously to prevent other countries from threatening their status.

To the uninitiated US foreign policy appears to be a sea of absolute incoherence, but there is a method to the madness.

The US is the empire of chaos, employing a multitude of proxies against enemies and friends alike as a unorthodox method of control. This amazing article at Sic Semper Tyrannis, helps make sense of this incoherence. Here’s the money quote.

The established strategy of the foreign policy of the United States is to create chaos to destabilize the world.

At the end of the Cold War, neoconservative intellectuals laid out the basis for this uniquely American empire. General Wesley Clark told Amy Goodman about the conversation he had with Paul Wolfowitz. “It came back to me … a 1991 meeting I had with Paul Wolfowitz. In 1991, he was the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy – the number 3 position at the Pentagon. And I had gone to see him when I was a 1-Star General commanding the National Training Center. And I said, “Mr. Secretary, you must be pretty happy with the performance of the troops in Desert Storm.

And he said: “Yeah, but not really, because the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and we didn’t … But one thing we did learn [from the Persian Gulf War] is that we can use our military in the region – in the Middle East – and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes – Syria, Iran, Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.”

Guess what?

It’s now been 24 years since Wolfowitz was waxing on, but now that Russia has intervened in Syria against the terrorist proxies we’re using to carry out regime change–time’s up.

However, the neoconservatives have a plan to deal with Russia.

American planners are obsessed with Russia, and have spent the years since the fall of the Soviet Union surrounding it with bases and allies. NATO, supposedly an alliance to counter the expansionist ideology of the Soviets, never went away, it just expanded eastward. Then there’s the missiles and advanced radar the US is seeking to station in Poland, Czech Republic and Romania, all supposedly to counter Iranian missiles. (If you believe this ABM system is to protect against Iran then I have a bridge to sell you.) In February 2014 came the US-instigated coup d’etat in Ukraine, with the ultimate hope of bringing Ukraine into NATO and seizing the Russian military base in Sevastopol, Crimea.

These belligerent US actions are the largely the result of leading US neoconservatives. For instance, Zbigniew Brzezinski argued in the–Grand Chessboard, that to control the world an empire needs to control Eurasia.

The article, I mentioned earlier lays out the intellectual underpinnings of these neoconservative dreams.

“The New World Order and the strategy of achieving it is Brzezinski’s key idea, of a Balkanized Crescent.  This concept is built on Halford John Mackinder’s concept of the Asian Heartland as the Pivot of History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_History.  The fundamental principle of Balkanizing-the-Crescent is that in a nuclear world where it is too dangerous to take direct action against Russia, Russia can be weakened by the creation of chaos in its near neighbors.  By creating chaos in its neighborhood (Russia’s “Rimland” using Mackinder’s name) in a Balkanized Crescent, Russia is forced to act to protect its interests in its Rimland and is weakened thereby. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimland The necessity of Russia (né the Soviets) tamping out the nearby fires thereby weakens Russia’s power and freedom of action to the benefit of the U.S. and the global power of its Cabal leaders.  Moreover, given the centrality in the Crescent of competing proto-regional hegemons centered around Arabia and Iran, in Kissinger’s words, a pair of Sunni and Shiite Crescents, chaos in those sub-Crescents can prevent the development of either Arabia or Iran from obtaining hegemony in the region. As an added benefit, Israel is contained by being caught in the middle.”

Almost sounds like something out of Lord of the Rings, doesn’t it?

This policy is beyond amoral in that the architects don’t care about anyone, even Americans. If the terrorists strike here, all the better to control the domestic population.

“Even a few hits “over here” or in Paris are good because they reinforce the deception of the American People and increase support for the Cabal’s quest for world domination and increasing authoritarian control at home.  Fear at home is good for the Cabal’s business of chaos for profit.  An examination of the countries destabilized this century confirms the majesty, effectiveness, and extent of the operation. We should have considered ourselves duly warned of the dreams dreamt by Jeb and Dick. They were proclaimed widely and openly as the destiny of American exceptionalism.  Who could have imagined that in just eighteen years from the 1997 proclamation of the Project for a New American Century its program would have been so effective that all of Europe, western Asia, and North Africa would be so completely destabilized and vulnerable to the expanding chaos in a vast and growing Balkanized Crescent now sucking in Russia with a Siren’s song of reviving dreams of empire.”

This is our foreign policy–stirring up the Middle-East, and Eurasia, all against all, divide et impera, American style, and profiting handsomely off the whole scheme.

Well, at least someone is profiting off the whole thing.

Update: Jesus! I hope the lunatics who are steering this sucker don’t crash.

A U.S. official told Reuters that the Russian jet was inside of Syria when it was shot down:

The United States believes that the Russian jet shot down by Turkey on Tuesday was hit inside Syrian airspace after a brief incursion into Turkish airspace, a U.S. official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Russia denies that the Russian fighter jet – which was bombing ISIS – ever entered Turkish air space, and has put out its own map purporting to prove that claim.

The Russian jet pilots who parachutted free of their burning plane were then purportedly killed by Turkish rebelsinside Syria.  If true, this is a war crime.

Then – when a Russian helicopter tried to save the pilots – it was shot down by American-backed Syrian rebels – using weapons provided to them by the United States  – and a Russian marine was killed.

Russia is deploying a warship off the Syrian coast to “destroy any threats to Russian planes”.   Many believe this is the start of World War III.

 

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The Rabbit Hole

Posted on November 19, 2015 by camelotkidd

Why is it that the CIA, while ostensibly an intelligence agency, instead has operated as a para-military unit fomenting coups and instigating regime change in numerous foreign countries?

Also, has the CIA been operating as a rogue agent carrying out these policies or are they working at the behest of a larger cabal that exists both inside and outside of government?

These questions are salient to understanding how a deep state came to exist in a supposed representative democracy like the US.

These questions are also the key to comprehending the US use of the very same terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 to achieve regime change in Syria.

Unfortunately, questions such as these will also take one down a dark and very deep rabbit hole.

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Broken Record

Posted on November 18, 2015 by camelotkidd

At risk of sounding, once again, like a broken record, here’s a very easy point to remember–if you deplore terrorism, don’t employ terrorists.

Also, for those who still have a hard time accepting that our country does bad things, here is further evidence for your consideration– an article at the Jacobin that outlines US support of Sunni terrorism.

“American complicity in the rise of ISIS would hardly be an anomaly. At various times since World War II—most infamously in Afghanistan in the ’70s and ’80s — the United States has armed, allied with, or otherwise strengthened jihadists (and their precursors) for the purpose of undermining its more immediate and authentic adversaries.

And one need not consult history for an antecedent. Right now, as its effort to build a force from scratch founders, the United States is encouraging its proxies in Syria to work with al-Nusra Front and has green-lighted a new coordinated effort of Gulf countries and Turkey to arm an opposition coalition that includes al-Nusra Front and other reactionary groups.

If the United States really wanted to defeat ISIS and al-Qaeda, it would stop empowering them.”

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Reaping the Whirlwind

Posted on November 15, 2015 by camelotkidd

I feel like a lonely voice in the wilderness, warning of the consequences of US foreign policies.  The polices our elite have chosen–that of employing Sunni terrorists to smash any secular government that puts its citizens ahead of US corporations–have always contained the seeds of a great tragedy.

And now with the terrorists attacks in Paris we see again the poison fruit of these policies.

Here’s Chris Floyd, at Empire Burlesque, describing the whirlwind these foreign policies have stirred up.

“Again, let’s be as clear as possible: the hellish world we live in today is the result of deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies over the past decades. It was Washington that led and/or supported the quashing of secular political resistance across the Middle East, in order to bring recalcitrant leaders like Nasser to heel and to back corrupt and brutal dictators who would advance the US agenda of political domination and resource exploitation.”

Update: Investigative journalist Robert Parry asks some great questions about President Obama’s leadership, or lack thereof, in the wake of the Paris attacks.

“Will Obama finally take on Official Washington’s well-entrenched neoconservatives and their “liberal interventionist” junior varsity by challenging their innumerable false narratives? Will he pointedly blame the neocons and the liberal hawks, including those who run the editorial pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times, for the disastrous Iraq War? Will he take on the “deep state” dug in at the big-name think tanks, not just at neocon havens like the American Enterprise Institute but at the center-left Brookings Institution?

Can the President muster the courage to ally himself with the American people, arming them with real information, so they can act like true citizens in a Republic rather than cattle being herded toward the slaughterhouse? Can he shake his own elitism or his fear of social ostracism to somehow become a true leader in his last year in office, rather than a timid follower of the prevailing group think?”

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The Safari Club

Posted on November 14, 2015 by camelotkidd

The Safari Club sounds like a seedy stripper bar on the wrong side of the tracks that sells cheap beer and has a condom machine in the mens room advertising–For Her Pleasure.

In reality the Safari Club is an instructional story of how the American deep state evaded accountability in the wake of the intelligence scandals of the 1970’s.

At The Intercept, Jon Schwarz reviews the new book by David Talbot on Allen Dulles entitled; the Devil’s Chessboard, and reminds me of the Safari Club–a secret, multi-national intelligence cut-out that was created to carry out anti-communist covert operations in the wake of Watergate and Church Committee revelations on the numerous crimes carried out by the CIA.

In his informative article, Schwarz recounts the story of the Saudi intelligence chief Turki Al Faisal, speaking before Georgetown University students. “In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran … so, the Kingdom, with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the world safe when the United States was not able to do that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don’t know.”

This account by Faisal, while somewhat informative also greatly misleads about the nefarious and highly undemocratic nature of the Safari Club, as well as the part about the US not being involved. In fact, as Schwarz recounts, “… the evidence suggests the Safari Club was largely the initiative of powerful Americans…Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, talked a number of rich Arab oil countries into bankrolling operations against growing communist influence on their doorstep in Africa. Alexandre de Marenches, a right-wing aristocrat who headed France’s version of the CIA, eagerly formalized the project and assumed operational leadership. The United States, (however) directed the whole operation,” and “giant U.S. and European corporations with vital interests in Africa” leant a hand. As John K. Cooley, the Christian Science Monitor’s longtime Mideast correspondent, put it, the setup strongly appealed to the U.S. executive branch: “Get others to do what you want done, while avoiding the onus or blame if the operation fails.”

Gee, where have I heard this idea of employing proxies to do the US’s dirty work before?

Anyway, it’s a great story and you should read the whole thing. Here’s Schwarz with more on the relevance of the Safari Club.

Because what the Safari Club demonstrates is that Dulles’ entire spooky world is beyond the reach of American democracy. Even the most energetic post-World War II attempt to rein it in was in the end as effective as trying to lasso mist. And today we’ve largely returned to the balance of power Dulles set up in the 1950s. As Jay Rockefeller said in 2007 when he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, “Don’t you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that because I’m chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say ‘I want it, give it to me’? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time.”

The safari goes on forever.

 

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