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Obama Belongs on List of World's Tyrants | Against Authoritarian Threat of Far-Right |
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Showing posts with label covert ops. Show all posts
Showing posts with label covert ops. Show all posts
9/11 Terror Targets: Senators Who Hesitated Voting for the 'Patriot Act' Were Targeted With Anthrax
Who Is DeRay Mckesson of Black Lives Matter?: The Man Who Won't Say Where His Money Comes From Appears To Be A Front Man for Privatizing Public Schools
I reached Mckesson by phone soon after he announced his candidacy for mayor. When I asked him how he funded all of his travel despite not having a job, he initially replied, “I don’t have an answer to that. There’s an answer in the New York Times article.”
After being informed that the Times offered no such answer, Mckesson stated, “You know, people ask me this, and I haven’t even had to answer this. I, you know, me and you don’t have a relationship. You know, you’re a reporter to me, you know—I’ve answered it many times. I will put that on my list of things and try to double back with you.” Several hours later, Mckesson texted me the link to a Tweet from last spring claiming that his excursions were funded by unnamed “family and friends.”—Drew Franklin
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| DeRay Mckesson (Screen capture from YouTube video) |
By Drew Franklin
For those who’ve never paid much attention, Teach For America sounds like a benevolent and benign idea: recruit bright college grads, give them some teacher-training and place them in some of the nation’s neediest schools for a two-year commitment to teach kids.
The reality behind TFA’s sunny exterior is somewhat more sinister. Education policy experts today consider the nonprofit founded by Wendy Kopp in 1990 to be at the vanguard of the school privatization movement. TFA is also a media juggernaut in its own right, known for deploying a sophisticated public relations arsenal to advance an agenda focused on crushing teachers’ unions and privatizing public school systems. TFA's funders, including the Waltons, Bill and Melinda Gates and top Fortune 500 corporations, all have plenty to gain from the commodification of public goods and the destruction of public service unions, and its 11,000 corps members provide a valuable service to that end.
Teach for America’s peculiar brand of social justice was on bold display at its 25th Anniversary Summit the weekend of February 5. The confab drew 15,000 corps members, alumni and supporters to Washington for three days of seminars on lofty issues like, “Allies, Co-Conspirators and Coalition Building: Showing Up for Justice Across Lines of Power.” But one of the biggest draws was the discussion on “The New Civil Rights Agenda and Education,” co-headlined by DeRay Mckesson, the TFA alum and 30-year-old Black Lives Matter activist who received a $10,000 award from TFA last year.
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The Cory Booker Effect
How A Republican Operative Turned Black Democrats Into Shills for School
Vouchers, Charter Schools and Public School Privatization
An exposé by activist and journalist Glenn Ford
Vouchers, Charter Schools and Public School Privatization
An exposé by activist and journalist Glenn Ford
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When Mckesson announced his campaign for mayor of Baltimore this month, his name topped the list of trending topics on Twitter for several hours. Even without outlining a strategy to defeat better-known, more entrenched candidates, Mckesson received nearly $130,000 in online donations, met with President Barack Obama (who said Mckesson and associates “were better organizers than I was”), and secured his status as one of the country’s most closely watched political outsiders. Headlines appeared across national media, from Slate to the Guardian to the Washington Post, with the progressive online magazine Truthdig proclaiming Mckesson "Truthdigger of the Week."
With his candidacy for a city whose public schools are a key target of the education reform movement, the time seems right to scrutinize Mckesson’s relationship with Teach for America more closely. His high-profile appearance at the TFA gala only days after filing his last-minute bid to enter the race was only the latest collaboration with the organization spearheading a sustained attack on teacher's unions and traditional public schools.
Promotion From TFA, Shade From Local Organizers
DeRay Mckesson is a prolific Twitter personality who first came to national prominence during the uprising of 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. His live-tweeting of protests in the wake of Michael Brown’s death quickly garnered a massive following, and as a wave of protests swept the United States, Mckesson was consistently among the first on the scene, making him and his Twitter feed an invaluable source of information for journalists.
With his rapid emergence, Mckesson developed a well-tailored image as a media darling, known in equal measure for his ubiquitous blue Patagonia vest and composed attitude, holding his own in interviews with the most confrontational cable news hosts. The name “DeRay” became synonymous with the Black Lives Matter protest movement, boosted by features in mainstream news magazines and promotion from international celebrities like Beyonce. His influence emanates from Twitter, where he maintains over 300,000 followers, mixing live updates from demonstrations against police brutality with commercial-style promotions of corporations like McDonald's and Spotify.
As Mckesson rose to prominence, TFA was there to provide promotion through its powerful PR apparatus.
Mckesson had no connection to Ferguson when he first arrived on Aug. 16, 2014, according to an interview he gave Huffington Post later the same year. But it didn’t take him long to connect with another protester named Brittany Packnett, with whom he began working the same day. The fact that Packnett is executive director of TFA’s St. Louis chapter likely contributed to their immediate rapport.
At the time, Mckesson was senior director of human capital for Minneapolis Public Schools. He says he commuted to Ferguson on weekends before eventually quitting his job to protest full-time.
A Twitter search query produces a clear timeline of Mckesson's subsequent transition from human resources manager to social justice talent, aided by promotion from Teach For America. It begins with a post to TFA’s official blog, in which Mckesson pontificates on his activities in Ferguson. TFA tweeted a link to that post on Aug. 21, 2014, at which point Mckesson would have been in the besieged midwestern town for five days.
The next item on the timeline, dated October 29, is an advertisement for a “national conference call featuring TFA alumni @MsPackyetti [Packnett] and @deray.” Two weeks after that, the Washington Post published a profile of McKesson and TFA promoted it on social media, identifying him again as a “TFA alumnus.” On Dec. 10, Time Magazine named him along with a handful of peers, collectively referred to as the “Ferguson protesters,” as runners-up to its 2014 Person of the Year, and TFA promoted that too.
Mckesson’s big break, however, was a cover story for the May 4 issue of the New York Times Magazine, with the headline "Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us." The
6700-word article profiles McKesson and fellow overnight celebrity
Ferguson protester Johnetta Elzie, as they drop in to demonstrations in
cities across the United States over the course of nine months.
Post-strategy session and training. TFA love. @MsPackyetti and I. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/fBYDDYkL75— deray mckesson (@deray) October 6, 2014
I
reached Mckesson by phone soon after he announced his candidacy for
mayor. When I asked him how he funded all of his travel despite not
having a job, he initially replied, “I don’t have an answer to that.
There’s an answer in the New York Times article.”
After
being informed that the Times offered no such answer, Mckesson stated,
“You know, people ask me this, and I haven’t even had to answer this. I,
you know, me and you don’t have a relationship. You know, you’re a
reporter to me, you know—I’ve answered it many times. I will put that on
my list of things and try to double back with you.” Several hours later, Mckesson texted me the link to a Tweet from last spring claiming that his excursions were funded by unnamed “family and friends.”
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The Cory Booker Effect: How A Republican Operative Turned Black Democrats Into Shills for Public School Privatization (Video)
The Cory Booker Effect:
How A Republican Operative Turned Black Democrats
Into Shills for School Vouchers, Charter Schools
and Public School Privatization
Into Shills for School Vouchers, Charter Schools
and Public School Privatization
An exposé by activist and journalist Glenn Ford
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| Illustration by DonkeyHotey. |
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Nazi Roots of Ukraine’s Conflict
Few Americans understand the ugly history behind the Nazi-affiliated movements that have gained substantial power in today’s U.S.-backed Ukrainian regime. Western propaganda has made these right-wing extremists the “good guys” versus the Russian “bad guys,” as Jonathan Marshall explains.
By Jonathan Marshall
The latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine, one of the leading journals in its field, offers a two-page photo essay on “what to see, do, and buy” in Lviv, a picturesque city in the Western Ukraine. “Amid the turmoil that has rocked Ukraine over the past two years,” the article gushes, “Lviv has stood firmly as a stronghold of national culture, language, and identity.”
That’s one way of putting it. Another, less charitable way would be to note that Lviv has for nearly a century been a breeding ground of extreme Ukrainian nationalism, spawning terrorist movements, rabid anti-Semitism, and outright pro-Nazi political organizations that continue to pollute the country’s politics.
On the lovely cobblestone streets admired today by tourists flowed the blood of some 4,000 Jews who were massacred by locals in 1941, during the German occupation. They were egged on by the radical Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), whose founder and wartime leader is today a national hero to many of his countrymen.
On April 28, 2011, the 68th anniversary of the formation of a Ukrainian Waffen-SS division, hundreds of people marched through Lviv, with support from city council members, chanting slogans like “One race, one nation, one Fatherland!”
Two months later, residents celebrated the 70th anniversary of the German invasion “as a popular festival, where parents with small children waived flags to re-enactors in SS uniforms,” according to the noted Swedish-American historian Per Anders Rudling.
Later that year, extreme right-wing deputies at a nearby town in the Lviv district “renamed a street from the Soviet-era name Peace Street to instead carry the name of the Nachtigall [Nightingale] Battalion, a Ukrainian nationalist formation involved in the mass murder of Jews in 1941, arguing that ‘Peace’ is a holdover from Soviet stereotypes.’”
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The CIA Created the Label 'Conspiracy Theorist' To Combat Questions on its Role in the Kennedy Assassination — Here's the Memo
The CIA was concerned that not enough Americans were buying into the report on the assassination of president John F. Kennedy issued by the Warren Commission. So the CIA issued a memo on how to deal with the "conspiracy theories" (a term coined by the CIA) on JFK's murder. A close look at the 1967 memo suggests that pundits in mainstream media are still using talking points that come almost verbatim from that CIA memo. Here's one of the most overused CIA-provided talking points: "Claim that it would be impossible for so many people to keep quiet about such a big conspiracy." — Sound familiar?
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| Photo by Lucie Höhler. |
By
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In 1967, the CIA Created the Label “Conspiracy Theorists” … to Attack Anyone Who Challenges the “Official” Narrative
Conspiracy Theorists USED TO Be Accepted As Normal
Democracy and free market capitalism were founded on conspiracy theories.
The Magna Carta, the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and other founding Western documents were based on conspiracy theories. Greek democracy and free market capitalism were also based on conspiracy theories.
But those were the bad old days …Things have now changed.
The CIA Coined the Term Conspiracy Theorist In 1967
That all changed in the 1960s.
Specifically, in April 1967, the CIA wrote a dispatch which coined the term “conspiracy theories” … and recommended methods for discrediting such theories. The dispatch was marked “psych” – short for “psychological operations” or disinformation – and “CS” for the CIA’s “Clandestine Services” unit.
The dispatch was produced in responses to a Freedom of Information Act request by the New York Times in 1976.
The dispatch states:
2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization.
The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.
3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the [conspiracy] question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active addresses are requested:
a. To discuss the publicity problem with and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors) , pointing out that the [official investigation of the relevant event] made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by … propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.
b. To employ propaganda assets to and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (II) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories.
4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments should be useful:
a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider.
b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent–and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) …
c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc.
d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other.
f. As to charges that the Commission’s report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticisms.
g. Such vague accusations as that “more than ten people have died mysteriously” can always be explained in some natural way
5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the Commission’s Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics.
Here are screenshots of part of the memo:
Summarizing the tactics which the CIA dispatch recommended:
- Claim that it would be impossible for so many people to keep quiet about such a big conspiracy
- Have people friendly to the CIA attack the claims, and point back to “official” reports
- Claim that eyewitness testimony is unreliable
- Claim that this is all old news, as “no significant new evidence has emerged”
- Ignore conspiracy claims unless discussion about them is already too active
- Claim that it’s irresponsible to speculate
- Accuse theorists of being wedded to and infatuated with their theories
- Accuse theorists of being politically motivated
- Accuse theorists of having financial interests in promoting conspiracy theories
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Something STRANGE Happened in Dubai: A Fire Rages for Hours in a Tall Building - But It Didn't Collapse
A 63-story Address Downtown Dubai hotel went up in flames, New Year’s Eve - 2016: The fire raged for many hours...
but the building didn't collapse.
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On September 11, 2001, three steel-framed buildings in New York City collapsed straight down "due to fires" which lasted a relatively short time. This has never happened in the entire history of building fires, and it hasn't happened since. World Trade Center Building 7 (below) collapsed without even being hit by an airplane.
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Below: A Controlled Demolition of a Skyscraper.
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NOTE: If your favorite "mainstream" or "progressive" news source is refusing to deal with the information provided above... Make sure you don't rely on that "news source" for information during the next emergency: It may cost you your life.
WHO Was Behind America's Crack Epidemic? — It Certainly Wasn't the 'Boyz in the Hood'
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Big Time Drug Wholesaler "Freeway" Rick Ross (left), his CIA cocaine connection, Oscar Danilo Blandon (middle) and Reporter Gary Webb. The US Congress outlawed the use of government money in the funding of the CIA's mercenary army which was being used to attack the government of Nicaragua. So the CIA trafficked massive quantities of cocaine to
dealers like Rick Ross and used the proceeds to fund it's proxy army known as the "Contras." The result was the crack epidemic. Rick Ross and Oscar Blandon both admitted that at their "peak" they were moving over 200 pounds of cocaine a week in the United States. US intelligence agencies have used drugs to fund their operations long before there was a CIA. Gary Webb blew the lid off of the story and was promptly attacked and ostracized by his fellow "journalists" working for big-time newspapers like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Some of the reporters who attacked Webb's reputation have since apologized, but not before Gary Webb was found with two .38 caliber bullets in his head on December 10, 2004. The coroner ruled Webb's death a "suicide." —Ronald David Jackson |
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Managing a Nightmare: How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of the Reporter Who Exposed Its Role in the Crack Epidemic
With their cocaine smuggling the CIA managed to kill two birds with one stone: 1) They funded and armed right-wing terrorist in Latin America, 2) They crippled the black community and destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of black people.
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| Jeremy Renner stars as Gary Webb, in the new film, Kill The Messenger. (Screen capture from YouTube video) |
Eighteen years after it was published, “Dark Alliance,” the San Jose Mercury News’s bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism.
The 20,000-word series enraged black communities, prompted Congressional hearings, and became one of the first major national security stories in history to blow up online. It also sparked an aggressive backlash from the nation’s most powerful media outlets, which devoted considerable resources to discredit author Gary Webb’s reporting. Their efforts succeeded, costing Webb his career. On December 10, 2004, the journalist was found dead in his apartment, having ended his eight-year downfall with two .38-caliber bullets to the head.
Kill The Messenger - Trailer
These days, Webb is being cast in a more sympathetic light. He’s portrayed heroically in a major motion picture set to premiere nationwide next month. And documents newly released by the CIA provide fresh context to the “Dark Alliance” saga — information that paints an ugly portrait of the mainstream media at the time.
RELATED STORY: The CIA and Drugs, Inc - A Covert History — Drug Trafficking as Strategic Intelligence
On September 18, the agency released a trove of documents spanning three decades of secret government operations. Culled from the agency’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, the materials include a previously unreleased six-page article titled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story.” Looking back on the weeks immediately following the publication of “Dark Alliance,” the document offers a unique window into the CIA’s internal reaction to what it called “a genuine public relations crisis” while revealing just how little the agency ultimately had to do to swiftly extinguish the public outcry.
(Dujmovic’s name was redacted in the released version of the CIA document, but was included in a footnote in a 2010 article in the Journal of Intelligence. Dujmovic confirmed his authorship to The Intercept.)
RELATED STORY: EXPOSED - Reporter Who Revealed the True Role of the US Government in the Crack Epidemic Was Discredited By Big Media With CIA HelpWebb’s troubles began in August 1996, when his employer, the San Jose Mercury News, published a groundbreaking, three-part investigation he had worked on for more than a year. Carrying the full title “Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion,” Webb’s series reported that in addition to waging a proxy war for the U.S. government against Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government in the 1980s, elements of the CIA-backed Contra rebels were also involved in trafficking cocaine to the U.S. in order to fund their counter-revolutionary campaign. The secret flow of drugs and money, Webb reported, had a direct link to the subsequent explosion of crack cocaine abuse that had devastated California’s most vulnerable African American neighborhoods.
Derided by some as conspiracy theory and heralded by others as investigative reporting at its finest, Webb’s series spread through extensive talk radio coverage and global availability via the internet, which at the time was still a novel way to promote national news.
Though “Dark Alliance” would eventually morph into a personal crisis for Webb, it was initially a PR disaster for the CIA. In “Managing a Nightmare,” Dujmovic minced no words in describing the potentially devastating effect of the series on the agency’s image:
The charges could hardly be worse. A widely read newspaper series leads many Americans to believe CIA is guilty of at least complicity, if not conspiracy, in the outbreak of crack cocaine in America’s cities. In more extreme versions of the story circulating on talk radio and the internet, the Agency was the instrument of a consistent strategy by the US Government to destroy the black community and keep black Americans from advancing. Denunciations of CIA–reminiscent of the 1970s–abound. Investigations are demanded and initiated. The Congress gets involved.
Dujmovic acknowledged that Webb “did not state outright that CIA ran the drug trade or even knew about it.” In fact, the agency’s central complaint, according to the document, was over the graphics that accompanied the series, which suggested a link between the CIA and the crack scare, and Webb’s description of the Contras as “the CIA’s army” (despite the fact that the Contras were quite literally an armed, militant group not-so-secretly supported by the U.S., at war with the government of Nicaragua).
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But newspapers like the Times and the Post seemed to spend far more time trying to poke holes in the series than in following up on the underreported scandal at its heart, the involvement of U.S.-backed proxy forces in international drug trafficking. The Los Angeles Times was especially aggressive. Scooped in its own backyard, the California paper assigned no fewer than 17 reporters to pick apart Webb’s reporting. While employees denied an outright effort to attack the Mercury News, one of the 17 referred to it as the “get Gary Webb team.” Another said at the time, “We’re going to take away that guy’s Pulitzer,” according to Kornbluh’s CJR piece. Within two months of the publication of “Dark Alliance,” the L.A. Times devoted more words to dismantling its competitor’s breakout hit than comprised the series itself.
RELATED STORY: USA Today - Still Not Too Late to Attack Gary Webb — News Outlet Still Covering For CIA Drug TraffickingThe document chronicles the shift in public opinion as it moved in favor of the CIA, a trend that began about a month and a half after the series was published. “That third week in September was a turning point in media coverage of this story,” Dujmovic wrote, citing “[r]espected columnists, including prominent blacks,” along with the New York Daily News, the Baltimore Sun, The Weekly Standard and the Washington Post. The agency supplied the press, “as well as former Agency officials, who were themselves representing the Agency in interviews with the media,” with “these more balanced stories,” Dujmovic wrote. The Washington Post proved particularly useful. “Because of the Post‘s national reputation, its articles especially were picked up by other papers, helping to create what the Associated Press called a ‘firestorm of reaction’ against the San Jose Mercury News.” Over the month that followed, critical media coverage of the series (“balanced reporting”) far outnumbered supportive stories, a trend the CIA credited to the Post, The New York Times, “and especially the Los Angeles Times.” Webb’s editors began to distance themselves from their reporter.
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WHO Created the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS? — The Answers Might Shock You (Video)
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| Ibrahim al-Badri (Top: foreground on the left) with whom senator John McCain is talking. After his return from his surprise trip to Syria, McCain claimed that all those responsible for the Free Syrian Army were "moderates who can be trusted." Ibrahim al-Badri (aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: Bottom Left) would later announce the formation of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and installed himself as the "Caliph." Bottom Right: The "Inventor" of the Taliban, Zbigniew Brzezinski (President Jimmie Carter's National Security Adviser and author of The Grand Chessboard), speaks with one of his most famous protégées, Osama bin Laden, who he used to coordinate a proxy war against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan and who would become "leader" of Al Qaeda.—Ronald David Jackson |
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The ISIS Conspiracy — Part 1: Origins
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The ISIS Conspiracy — Part 2: US-Israeli-Saudi Intrigue
RELATED STORY: CONFIRMED -- US Predicted the Influx of Islamist Mercenaries into Syria Could Lead To ISIS and a 'Caliphate' — Document
They Are Called 'Neo-Cons' — But Are They In Fact Neo-Nazis?: A List of the Deadly Neoconservatives
They were responsible for the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, the destruction of the secular nations of Iraq, Libya and now Syria and the rise of ISIS. Seven Middle Eastern governments were originally targeted. Their goal is the demolition of the secular Middle Eastern nationalist governments and replacing them with multiple weak, fanatical, infighting Islamic fiefdoms. Mostly for the sake of Israel. They were also recently responsible for the violent neo-Nazi overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine which led to its split into three pieces.
—Ronald David Jackson
The Deadly List
Click on any of the names below for a bio.
Click on any of the names below for a bio.
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*PNAC: Member of Project for the New American Century - The Neocon Think Tank that (just before the 9/11 attacks) called for a "new Pearl Harbor" to galvanize the American populace behind a new push for an ever-expanding global American empire.
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Beware ‘Sunni-Stan’: Neocons are Back and Their ‘Vision’ is Darker than Ever
By
John Bolton is a tarnished character. The once United States Ambassador to the United Nations is now promoted as a ‘scholar’ in the pro-Israel lobby group, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
RELATED STORY: Who Are The Neoconservatives?
Bolton is not a peacemaker, nor, in his defense, did he ever try to appear as if one. When he was appointed as the US Ambassador to the UN by George W. Bush, his stint lasted for only one year, starting August 2005. His time in this position was marked with discord and conflict. He stole the limelight with such statements as “The (UN) Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”
When the Iraq war failed to achieve any of its objectives, thus signaling an American retreat in the Middle East, neo-conservative politicians like Bolton retreated to their right-wing, neo-conservative institutions. Those who did not have one, established an organization of their own and began issuing press releases at random, hailing Israel at times, and chastising their President, Barack Obama, for one thing or another.
When the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ took place, neocons, like Bolton, saw in it an opportunity, but one that was difficult to discern. On one hand, they understood little of the mechanisms that propelled popular actions, for they are used to operate at the highest level of power with total disconnect from the people. On the other hand, it was clear for them from the start that Obama was taking no chances by stepping back into a Middle East quagmire that was originally designed by his predecessor.
Unable to affect much change in the region, as they once envisioned under the leadership of the likes of Richard Perle and his Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the neocons mounted a strategy predicated mostly on discrediting their administration’s lack of strategy.
In a sense the ‘Arab Spring’ invigorated the neocons, but also reminded them of their political impotence. Gone were the days of concocting foreign policies from neo-conservative think tanks such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the Center for Security Policy (CSP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), of which, among others, Perle is an active member.
In fact, Perle is quite a cherished member of the American Enterprise Institute, where Bolton often mounts his occasional articles in mainstream US media, offering a ‘vision’ regarding how to take on Iran, how to reform Arab states and how to redraw the map of the Middle East in ways that are conducive to US foreign policy interests.
The latest of such intellectual charges by Bolton was published in the New York Times on November 24. Under the title, “To Defeat ISIS, Create a Sunni State,” he theorized once more, raging against “Obama’s ineffective efforts” to destroy ISIS and demanding, instead, a “clear view shared by NATO allies.” The main drive behind his logic is that once ISIS is destroyed, the region that the militant group designated as a ‘state’ should be turned into a Sunni state, which, as a working title he called “Sunni-Stan.”
Bolton’s reasoning is as predictable as it is arrogant. It is predictable in the sense that, like other neocon initiatives in the past, it has no respect for the wishes of the people of the Middle East. His arguments are constructed upon the same world view that sees conflict as an opportunity, and warring nations as pawns in a larger game, aimed at subduing people to achieve ‘security’ and ‘stability’ for the US and its supposed allies.
It is also arrogant for the obvious reason that he believes the world should be designed to fit the narrow, self-serving and often violent visions of failed politicians like himself, who, alas, has access to the US’s most respected newspapers.
Bolton’s conceit has completely blinded him to the failures of the Bush administration and the entire collapse of the neo-conservative’s intellectual discourse during, and following the Iraq war. On the contrary, he is asking to repeat exactly what went wrong in Iraq.
“As we did in Iraq with the 2006 ‘Anbar Awakening,’ the counter-insurgency operation that dislodged Al Qaeda from its stronghold in that Iraqi province, we and our allies must empower viable Sunni leaders, including tribal authorities, who prize their existing social structure,” he wrote.
Only an unreasonable person cannot appreciate how the sectarian seed that the US has sowed in Iraq, based on the recommendations of the likes of Bolton, has resulted in the disfiguring of the Iraqi nation. This massive tampering with the social, cultural, religious and political fabric of society – by first empowering the Shia, oppressing the Sunni, then turning the Sunnis against one another, and so forth – has paved the way for unity among various Sunni groups, which ultimately formed ISIS.
It is the grand experimentations of Bolton and his peers that made ISIS the ‘state’ that it is today, which he is proposing to replace with yet another sectarian state, thus slicing up two Arab countries that were once the seats of the two most prominent Caliphate civilizations in history, the Abbasid and the Umayyad.
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Obama is NOT the Commander-in-Chief: Military Went Behind Obama's Back To Assist Syrian Government (Video)
A new report by the Pulitzer-winning veteran journalist Seymour Hersh says the Joint Chiefs of Staff has indirectly supported Bashar al-Assad in an effort to help him defeat jihadist groups.
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| The Military Industrial Complex runs the American presidents, not the other way around. The last president who didn't understand that got his head blown off in front of his wife and the entire nation. |
Seymour Hersh's Latest Bombshell: U.S. Military Undermined Obama on Syria with Tacit Help to Assad
TRANSCRIPT:
AMY GOODMAN: The United Nations Security Council’s passage of a peace plan for Syria has been called perhaps the best chance yet to end the country’s civil war. The measure, approved Friday, calls for a ceasefire, talks between the government and opposition, and a roughly two-year timeline to form a unity government and hold elections. Secretary of State John Kerry outlined the terms.
SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: Under the resolution approved today, the purpose of those negotiations between the responsible opposition and the government is to facilitate a transition within Syria to a credible, inclusive, nonsectarian governance within six months. The process would lead to the drafting of a new constitution and arrangements for internationally supervised election within 18 months.
AMY GOODMAN: The resolution is silent on the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The U.S. has insisted on excluding Assad from a political transition, pointing to the mass killings of his own people throughout the more than four-year war. But Russia and China have staunchly backed Assad. The world powers’ impasse has fueled U.N. inaction amidst a death toll of more than 250,000 and the world’s worst refugee crisis. Although the U.S. remains opposed to Assad, his omission from the Security Council resolution signals a softening stance and a potential diplomatic turning point. The Obama administration has quietly backed off its public insistence that Assad must go, claiming it’s no longer seeking regime change in Syria.
RELATED STORY: CONFIRMED - US Predicted the Influx of Islamist Mercenaries into Syria Could Lead To ISIS and a 'Caliphate' — DocumentNow an explosive new report says U.S. military leadership in the Joint Chiefs of Staff has held that view all along and has taken secret steps to move U.S. policy in that direction. According to award-winning veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the Joint of Chiefs of Staff has tacitly aided the Assad regime to help it defeat radical jihadists. Hersh reports the Joint Chiefs sent intelligence via Russia, Germany and Israel, on the understanding it would be transmitted to help Assad push back Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State. Hersh also claims the military even undermined a U.S. effort to arm Syrian rebels in a bid to prove to Assad it was serious about helping him fight their common enemies. At the Joint Chiefs’ behest, a CIA weapons shipment to the Syrian opposition was allegedly downgraded to include obsolete weapons. Hersh says the Joint Chiefs’ maneuvering was rooted in several concerns, including the U.S. arming of unvetted Syrian rebels with jihadist ties, a belief the administration was overly focused on confronting Assad’s ally in Moscow, and anger the White House was unwilling to confront Turkey and Saudi Arabia over their support of extremist groups in Syria.
Hersh’s report in the London Review of Books follows his controversial story in May challenging the Obama administration’s account of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Like that story, his latest piece relies heavily on a single source, described as a "former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs." And while critics have dismissed both stories as conspiracy theories, it turns out that key aspects of the bin Laden report have since been corroborated. After the bin Laden story came out, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources confirmed Hersh’s reporting that the U.S. discovered bin Laden’s location when a Pakistani officer told the CIA, and that the Pakistani government knew all along where bin Laden was hiding.
RELATED STORY: Military to Military - Seymour M. Hersh on US intelligence sharing in the Syrian warFor more, we’re joined by Seymour Hersh. He won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when U.S. forces killed hundreds of civilians. In 2004, Sy Hersh broke the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. His latest piece in the London Review of Books is headlined "Military to Military: US Intelligence Sharing in the Syrian War." Hersh is working on a study of Dick Cheney’s vice presidency.
We welcome you back to Democracy Now!, Sy Hersh. Why don’t you lay out this very controversial report that you have just published in the London Review of Books. What did you find?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it began, actually, as I wrote, with a very serious, extensive assessment of our policy, that was completed by June—let’s say by middle of 2013, two-and-a-half years ago. It was a study done by the Joint Chiefs and the Defense Intelligence Agency that came to three sort of conclusions, that may seem obvious now but were pretty interesting then.
One is that they said Assad must stay, at least through—through the resolution of the war, because, as we saw in Libya, once you get rid of a leader, like Gaddafi—same, you can argue, in Iraq with the demise of Saddam Hussein—chaos ensues. The second—so that was an issue, that there—the point being, elections at some point, certainly, but for the short term, while we’re still fighting, he has to stay. And that wasn’t the American position then. And, I would argue with you, I still think the American position is very muddled, although they have seemed to soften it.
Secondly, the other point they made is that their investigation showed this notion of a moderate force just was a fiction, was just a fantasy, that most of the Free Syrian Army, by the summer, by mid-2013, were in some sort of an understanding with al-Nusra, or, as you put it, ISIL, the Islamic State. There was a lot of back-and-forth going—arms going into the Free Syrian Army and other moderates were being peddled, sold, or transferred to the more extremist groups.
And the third major finding was about Turkey. It said we simply have to deal with the problem. The Turkish government, led by Erdogan, was—had opened—basically, his borders were open, arms were flying. I had written about that earlier for the London Review, the rat line. There were arms flying since 2012, covertly, with the CIA’s support and the support of the American government. Arms were coming from Tripoli and other places in Benghazi, in Libya, going into Turkey and then being moved across the line. And another interesting point is that a lot of Chinese dissidents, the Uyghurs, the Muslim Chinese that are being pretty much hounded by the Chinese, were also—another rat line existed. They were coming from China into Kazakhstan, into Turkey and into Syria. So, this was a serious finding.
It was not the first time some of these points had been raised. And there was simply no echo. Once you pass this stuff on to the White House or into the other agencies—the Defense Department does this routinely. These are very highly secret. This study was composed of overhead satellite intelligence, human intelligence, etc., very compartmentalized stuff. But it did go to the State Department and to a lot of offices in the White House and National Security Council. No response, no change in policy.
So, at this point, as I wrote, the Joint Chiefs, then headed by an Army general named Dempsey, Martin Dempsey, who has since retired, decided that they had—that there was a chance to do something about it without directly contravening the policy. And that was simply that we were aware that Germany, the German intelligence service, the German General Staff, had been involved pretty closely with Bashar in terms of funneling intelligence. Russia—and it’s— a lot of people will find this surprising, but the United States military, the military has had a very solid relationship with the leadership of the Russian military since the fall of the Soviet Union in '91. And General Dempsey, in particular, had a one-on-one relationship with the general who now runs the military for the Soviet Union. And so, we knew the Russians and the Israelis were also involved in some back-channel conversation with Syria, with the idea being Israel, sort of very on the margin on this, understood that if Bashar went, what comes next would not be healthy for Israel. They share a border with Syria, and you don't want Islamic State or al-Nusra or any of those groups to be that close to the Israelis. It would be a national security threat for them.
So there was a lot of people, a lot of other services communicating, and so what the Joint Chiefs did is they began to pass along some of this very good strategic intelligence and technical intelligence we have—where the bad guys are, you can put it; what they might be thinking; what information we had. That was passed not directly to Assad, but it was passed to the Germans, to the Russians, through the Israelis, etc. The exact process is, of course, way beyond my ken, but there was no question that was a transmission point. The point being that there was no direct contact, but the information certainly got to him, and it certainly had an impact on Saddam’s—the Syrian army’s ability to improve its position by the end of the year, 2013.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Period. That’s the story. Go ahead.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the source that you used for this story and the criticism of your single-source method.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, my god. Well, you know, as you know, it’s usually anonymous sources you get criticized for. That’s always been traditionally, although any day in The New York Times and Washington Post, they’re full of anonymous sources. That’s an easy way out. I wish I could tell you that I haven’t been relying on this particular person for since 9/11, but I have been. And many of the stories I wrote for The New Yorker about what was going on inside Iran, what was going—there was no bombs inside Iraq, part of those early stories I was writing, all came from one particularly well-informed person, who, as—you know, who, for a lot of reasons, I can’t make public. One is them is this government would prosecute him.
So the idea that there’s one source, that’s—I’ve done that—I worked for The New York Times, as you know, for eight or nine years, all during Watergate and the Vietnam War years, and won many, many prizes based on stories based on one source. I don’t know what the public think goes on, but, you know, if you get a very good source who over many years has been totally reliable, I’m not troubled by it at all. And neither—you know, the London Review, as many in America know, is a very, very seriously edited magazine, who did the same amount of very intense fact checking as happened when I worked at The New Yorker, which is famous for its fact checking, and the editing was certainly as competent and as good as you get in The New Yorker. I’m very happy working for them. And so, it’s not as if I’m not put to the same question that you’re putting, that critics may put, by the editors of the magazine. And they get—they have direct contact. They know who the person is. They have discussions with him, and with me not present. All of these standards are met.
AMY GOODMAN: Well—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes, go ahead.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me share with you some of the criticism of your piece—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, oh, spare me.
AMY GOODMAN: —like Max Fisher’s writing in Vox—but let me share it with our audience, as well—who, you know, talks about your relying entirely on one unnamed source for your principal allegation that U.S. defense officials bypassed the Obama administration and shared intelligence with allies, who subsequently shared it with the Assad regime. Fisher goes on to conclude, quote, "We are required to believe that the senior-most leaders of our military one day in 2013 decided to completely transform how they behave and transgress every norm they have in a mass act of treason, despite never having done so before, and then promptly went back to normal this September when Dempsey retired." Can you respond to that?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, there’s—it’s so many instances where the military disagree with a president. We’ve seen this in World War II, MacArthur. I mean, the idea that the Joint Chiefs of Staff—let me just say, in general, when you’re at that level, at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you make an oath of office not to the president of the United States, but to the Constitution. And there’s been many times the military objects. There were times just in the last couple of years, in congressional testimony, that General Dempsey has made it clear he disagrees with the policy.
Specifically about some of the matters that were raised in that article—and I did look at it, of course—is that, for example, Dempsey agreed in testimony that we should arm the moderates—the opposition, rather. And, in fact, what he agreed to—this is with the head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, at the time—when this discussion came up of arming dissident groups, opposition groups inside Syria, Panetta and the chairman both made a point of saying "vetted groups." They said only those groups we really know are reliable, and not wackos and not jihadist groups that want to exclude anybody except those who share their particular beliefs in the future state, if they were to take it over. So there’s a lot of—there’s a lot of contradictory evidence about it. And there are—there certainly can be more sophisticated arguments to make than this has never happened before. This is certainly unusual that, in a time like this, the military would give information to allies, our allies, at their request, that differ from the official policy. Sure, that’s a very complicated thing, and it was a tough thing to do, but it happened.
AMY GOODMAN: Was there direct communication between the United States and Syria?
SEYMOUR HERSH: I’m going to stand by what I wrote in the article.
AMY GOODMAN: Which was?
SEYMOUR HERSH: I wrote in the article that there was no direct contact, that the whole purpose was to use the cutouts, that there was no attempt to directly engage with Bashar al-Assad or his regime.
AMY GOODMAN: And what—
SEYMOUR HERSH: But there—yes?
AMY GOODMAN: What did the U.S. get in return?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, there was an understanding, obviously, conveyed by our allies. And the understanding was that we were going to give this stuff, and if Bashar would, among other things, agree to an election, a monitored election, once the war was over, and presumably he had re-established—you know, Bashar—there’s a lot of talk about the success of the Islamic groups, but Bashar right now, although he doesn’t control 100 percent—much less, 60—I’m not sure of the number, but it was more than 50 percent, less than—the opposition groups controlled large swaths, 30 percent, 40 percent. But he does control as much as—I’ve seen estimates of 86 percent of the population. And the notion that everybody in Syria despises him, etc., all these things you hear, that’s not true. He has a lot of native support, and even from Muslims, because every Muslim in Syria is not a Wahhabi or a Salafist, an extremist. Many are very moderate people who believe they would be in trouble if the Islamic force, the Islamic groups, came into power, because they would go and seek out those fellow Muslims that don’t agree with their extreme views. So he does have an awful lot of support, more than most people think. This is not to say he’s a good guy or bad guy. We’re just talking about reality.
And don’t forget, we are a country that, in World War II, a year after the Russians had done—were in a pact with Hitler, we joined with the Russians against Hitler. So, you know, you sometimes overlook—one of the points also made by—in this article is this incredible hostility towards Russia and these allegations, time and time again, that Russia is not really serious about going after the Islamic State. And there—even just in the debate over at the U.N., a statistic suggesting that 80 percent of the Russian attacks have nothing to do with ISIS, but they’re attacking the ISIS opposition, the moderates. And you just have to say to yourself, "Well, why then did ISIS bomb, as we all believe and the Russians believe, destroy a Russian airliner? Why was ISIS upset with Russia, if Russia was basically bombing their enemy, the moderates?" It doesn’t—it just—the logic in some of the American thinking and the thinking around the world on this, it doesn’t make much sense to me.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. Sy Hersh is our guest, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His latest piece is in the London Review of Books; it’s headlined "Military to Military: US Intelligence Sharing in the Syrian War." This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Pete Seeger singing "If I Had a Hammer." And in our next segment, we’ll be talking about the U.S. government spying on Pete Seeger for close to 30 years. New documents have been released by the government, over 1,700 of them.
There Was NO Kool-Aid - The CIA Jonestown Massacre
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Video Clips Compiled by Ronald David Jackson
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At the Time Jim Jones Was Calling Dan Mitrione His "Close Friend"
Mitrione Was Teaching Latin American Dictatorships Torture Techniques.
Mitrione is depicted by an actor in the classic film, "State of Siege."
He was eventually kidnapped and executed by Tupamaro Guerrillas.
Mitrione Was Teaching Latin American Dictatorships Torture Techniques.
Mitrione is depicted by an actor in the classic film, "State of Siege."
He was eventually kidnapped and executed by Tupamaro Guerrillas.
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LT. COL. JAMES “BO” GRITZ AND JONESTOWN: "All The Niggers Are Dead" (Excerpt)
By "Gunny G"
The officer in charge of all U.S. Army Special Forces for Latin America at the time of the Jonestown holocaust was Lt. Col. James “Bo” Gritz. Gritz was the original soldier after which the movie character “Rambo” was patterned. Gritz was the most decorated soldier to come out of the Vietnam war.
The Guyana massacre was carried out by Bo Gritz’ men (along with British SAS troops). *Flatland* (#10) magazine, in an interview with Gritz, asked him:
Question: You trained Special Forces that went into Jonestown? What was the precise nature of the operation?
“I don’t know precisely because it was a compartmentalized operation. The only thing that I do know for certain is what the Sergeant I quote coming out of Jonestown, he was insistent because he was disgusted, on writing this book. He was, without compromise, going to call it *All the Niggers Are Dead.* I asked him, ‘Why would you want to entitle anything such an offensive way?’ ‘It doesn’t make a difference what your color, your creed, your sex,’ he said, ‘when you are treated the way they were, that’s what you are; you’re a nigger, you’re nothing else.’ I think that those soldiers saw things that affected them and made them very angry. I’ve seen other things like that in combat where there have been abuses. I wrote about one of them in my book where the Captain tortured the young severely and the young Sergeant put on a swastika and said, “If I’m going to act like a Nazi I’m going to look like one.’ I think that the same kind of negative impact occurred in Jonestown.”
Gritz has more about Jonestown in his autobiography, *Called to Serve.* Perhaps you simply cannot believe what I am telling you. Will you believe it if told to you by the Green Beret officer in charge of the men who did the killing? He admits that the information was “compartmentalized” and it was not until later that he learned what his men were actually doing. The following information is from pages 584-587 of his book:
“The true story of the Jonestown camp in Guyana has been brought to light through an extensive investigation conducted by John Judge, from Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and other dedicated researchers and investigators. The truth, which was thoroughly suppressed by the American media, is that it was actually a slave-labor camp run by Jones with the assistance of the CIA. Most of the information which follows is from John Judge’s summary of the investigation, supplemented with information provided by Special Forces teams I had earlier trained and commanded, who were sent in to ‘clean up the remains of Jonestown.’
“Most of the black and Hispanic poor people and social activists who became the inmates of the camp were brought there either by force or coercion, or lured under false pretenses, where extensive experiments of drug-induced mind control were performed on them. Even before they were moved to Guyana, reports of beatings, kidnappings, sexual abuse and mysterious deaths had leaked out to the press about the earlier Peoples’ Temple in Ukiah, California.
“Jim Jones had a very interesting past which was overlooked by the media: During the time his friend Dan Mitrione was teaching torture techniques to the Brazilian and Argentineans, Jones was also sent to Brazil where his house, transportation and groceries were provided to him by the U.S. Embassy, and he frequently traveled to Belo Horizonte, the CIA headquarters in Brazil.
“Jones had been contacted in Ukiah by ‘Christian missionaries’ from World Vision (World Vision is a CIA controlled front operation), an evangelical order which had performed espionage work for the CIA in Southeast Asia. Most of Jones’ top lieutenants were from wealthy, educated backgrounds, many with connections to the military or intelligence agencies. These were the people who were involved in setting up the bank accounts, complex legal transactions and financial agreements which put people under the control of the Peoples’ Temple.
“Some of Jones’ Lieutenants were: Dr. Lawrence Layton was chief of Chemical and Biological Warfare Research at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah for many years and later worked as Director of Missile and Satellite Development at the Navy Propellant Division at Indian Head, Maryland. His wife, Lisa, was the daughter of Hugo Phillips, who had represented the huge Nazi manufacturing cartel, I.G. Farben, as a stockbroker. Their daughter, Debbie, met and married George Philip Blakey, whose parents had extensive stock holdings in Solve Drugs, a division of I.G. Farben.
“Blakey was reputed to be training mercenaries in Jonestown who were sent to work with CIA-backed UNITA forces in Angola. Terri Buford’s father, Admiral Charles T. Buford, worked with Naval Intelligence. Marie Katsaris’ father was minister with the Greek Orthodox Church, thought to be a conduit of CIA funding, and she claimed she had proof he was a CIA agent. The ‘official survivors’ were represented upon their return to the U.S. by Joseph Blatchford, an attorney who had been named in a prior scandal involving CIA infiltration of the Peace Corps.
“The people who were taken from San Francisco to begin their ‘new life’ in Guyana were bussed to Florida and arrived in Guyana bound and gagged, where they were forced to work 16 hours or more daily, and were fed on minimum rations. As more and more rumors began to filter back to the United States of druggings, beatings, torture, sexual humiliations and coercion at the Guyana site, Congressman Leo Ryan decided to go to Guyana and verify the situation for himself.
“Ryan had challenged the CIA’s overseas operations before, as a member of the House Committee responsible for oversight on intelligence. He was co-author of the controversial Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which would have required advance CIA disclosure to the congressional committees of all planned covert operations. The amendment would be defeated shortly after his death in Jonestown.
“With Ryan on the way to Jonestown, the secrecy surrounding the camp would be broken and desperate measures would need to be taken to keep the truth from escaping, much less the inmates. In a futile attempt to test their conditioning methods, the leaders at Jonestown apparently tried to implement an actual suicide drill, but it was obviously ignored. Official stories first numbered the victims at 408, but later revised the toll upward to 913. It was claimed that some 505 bodies had been covered by those of the first 408 who had fallen directly on top of them, confusing those who had been counting from aerial photographs. – a blatant and ridiculous attempt at cover-up.
“However, the first reports were true – 408 had died, and 700 fled to the jungle where British Black Watch troops and American Special Forces were conducting ‘training exercises.’ Of the 700, 505 who had been deliberately shot in the jungle were added to the count of those who had supposedly committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool Aid.
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Was There A CIA Conspiracy to Destroy Jonestown?
(Excerpt)
By Laurie Efrein-Kahalas, San Diego State University
The last person to leave the scene alive, Stanley Clayton, told the coroner’s jury in Matthews Ridge (an adjoining town) that when he left, only 100-200 people were still alive, and that although the scene was gruesome, it was peaceful, with Marceline Jones hugging people saying "I’ll see you in your next life." Indeed, there was an explicit final letter left at Jonestown (see FINAL WITNESS), which is specific about people passing on in a peaceful, if grief-laden procession.
So who was it who desecrated the bodies at Jonestown in such a gruesome manner? First, what might be the motive? One motive is clear: Make Jim Jones look like a brutal murderer of his own people, to bolster the claim that he had "ordered" the assassination of the Congressman. That would deflect investigation of the facts, much less consideration of a frame. Surely Jim Jones was responsible for everything. Case closed.
Who was responsible for the desecration? Who arrived at Jonestown before the coroner; before, indeed, anyone else arrived "officially"? Had forces arrived clandestinely, and if so, who were they, and how much time did they have to make the scene appear as they wanted?
The answer to these two questions appears to be, respectively, "Yes" and "A lot of time." First, the tragedy happened the night of Saturday, November 18th. The first team brought in "officially" was the Guyanese Defense Force, along with survivors from Jonestown brought back to identify bodies. That did not happen until Monday morning, November 20th. For the entire day of Sunday, November 19th, presumably no one was at Jonestown at all.
Yet two completely separate sources confirm that U.S. Special Forces (Green Berets) were in Jonestown within five or six hours. The first was a source from within the U.S. military, one Charles Huff from the U.S. Army Special Forces in Panama. According to FREEDOM Magazine, he was "one of the Green Berets who were the first American troops on the scene following the massacre." He said they were into Jonestown within about five hours. Indeed, Clayton told the coroner’s jury of the community falling completely silent following the deaths for 45 minutes, and that then, suddenly, there was a chorus of shouts, as well as gunfire. The source of the sounds and the gunfire, has never been identified.
Huff elaborated that "’We saw many bullet wounds as well as wounds from crossbow bolts." Huff noted that those with fatal bullet or bolt wounds appeared to have been running towards the jungle that surrounded Jonestown. Huff said that the adults who had not been shot had been killed by injections between the shoulder blades." Then enigmatically, "The killers escaped before the arrival of Huff and his team." Huff also claims that of the troops early into Jonestown, sixteen of them later "committed suicide." Given that only two Peoples Temple survivors committed suicide in the wake of the tragedy, sixteen "suicides" amongst trained combat personnel defies believability. But sixteen "suspicious deaths" is indeed a high figure, which compels investigation.
Who desecrated the bodies? Nearly no one "escaped" from Jonestown except for the tiny handful of people who ran into the jungle, and who were surely not responsible for any carnage. How could one not suspect that it was the Green Beret force itself who inflicted the purported damage?
An unexpected confirmation of U.S. troops clandestinely on site just showed up recently in a Russian book called "The Jonestown Carnage: A CIA Crime" printed by Progress Press in Moscow. Their claim was that "At about 18.00 [that’s 6 p.m. on November 18th], several S-141 military transport planes took off from military bases in Panama and Dover [Delaware] and headed for Guyana. The estimated time of flight was 3 hours 40 minutes. … Two hours later, without notifying the local authorities in the area of Venezuela where the Americans had their private missions (which served as a front for C.I.A. secret operations), three helicopters took off in the direction of Jonestown, which was 1 hour 10 minutes away."
What is startling in the Russian account, is that both their account and the American account of the arrival of Green Berets, designate the country of origin as Panama. The two independent reports tally with each other perfectly.
Equally ominous, the A & E special this past November, called "Jonestown: Mystery of a Massacre" revealed that the deaths at Jonestown were originally confirmed via a CIA radio channel, NOIWON, at 3:29 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, November 19th. The producer speculated that Richard Dwyer, the alleged C.I.A. plant in the State Department who had accompanied the Congressman to Jonestown, was the only one on site who could have made this call. But now we can see that it could have just as easily been made by U.S. Green Berets already on site, and undoubtedly under the control of the C.I.A.
What were Green Berets doing at Jonestown in the middle of the night? The C-141 MEDEVAC plane to assist the survivors of the airport shooting, according to official State Department records, did not even arrive at Georgetown from Charleston, SC until 7:55 a.m.! The Green Berets, meanwhile, were flown in immediately, before the situation at Jonestown had even been officially ascertained. They arrived in the middle of the night, but not to assist medically – rather for secret, classified work specifically at Jonestown, leaving the injured at an airstrip only seven miles away, completely unattended. Meanwhile, the MEDEVAC plane shows up on the official State Department log, but the Green Berets do not.
Was there any real concern for the people of Jonestown – their deaths, rapid evacuation of the bodies, possible survivors? Medical personnel such as the Guyanese coroner, were not sent into Jonestown for two more days! This bizarre reversal of priorities, involving moreover clandestine forces under separate command, is unsettling if not appalling, and requires investigation. Even the fact that confirmation of the suicides was received at 3:29 a.m. on the morning of the 19th, yet the incoming MEDEVAC personnel were not sent to investigate the death of over 900 people a mere seven miles away, implies not just lack of coordination between open and secret military commands, but utter disregard for human life.
Lastly, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty (also uncovered by Freedom Magazine), claimed that "The Joint Chiefs of Staff had prepared air shipments of hundreds of body bags. … Within hours, they began to shuttle them down to Georgetown, the main city. They couldn’t possibly have done that without prior knowledge that it was going to happen. It shows that there was prior planning."
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