by cameron | Mar 23, 2008 | capitalism, CIA, US politics
If you’ve seen the recent Hollywood blockbuster “Charlie Wilson’s War”, you probably think you know why the CIA decided to lend support to the mujahadeen in Afghanistan in 1980. It was to help defeat the evil invading Soviet army – right?
Wrong.
According to former CIA director Robert Gates and President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezinski, the CIA were involved in Afghanistan at least six months before the Soviet’s invaded. Okay, I know this isn’t new news, but I’m just catching up.
The CIA, with Presidential approval, were illegally supporting terrorist forces within the country to help them attack and overthrow the pro-Soviet government run by Nur Muhammed Taraki. Taraki, who had taken power via a coup from Mohammed Daoud Khan, a member of the Royal Family, was upsetting Muslims by trying to modernize the country – including the establishment of full women’s rights and the implementation of land reform. These are things you’d think the USA would support, right?
Wrong.
The USA was doing everything they could to prevent the spread of Communism. But why?
I’ve often wondered where this American fear of communism comes from. I know we’ve all been programmed from birth to believe “communism = evil, capitalism = good”, but why? If communism is just another political idea, like being a Democrat versus being a Republican, why not just let “the people” decide what they want? Why the massive scare campaign about the ‘red terror’?
I finally figured it out. Okay, I know, I must be dumb. It’s because the powers than run the USA are wealthy white men, otherwise known as the bourgeoisie. They are, by definition, anti-Communist. They have money and power and communism would take that power away from them and disperse it amongst the people. The success of socialism or communism around the world would encourage the people inside the USA to think about the benefits of Marxism and this would run contrary to the self-interest of the American upper classes. In fact, it is probably the last thing they want the people to think about. Think about football, celebrities, game shows, Saddam Hussein, New York Governors and their expensive hookers, ANYTHING – just don’t think about a different political system which would stop protecting the position of the privileged and the wealthy.
So anyway, back to Afghanistan. When the civil war, funded and supported by the CIA, was getting out of control, President Taraki asked the Soviets to help. They told him that sending troops in would be a VERY BAD IDEA. They knew what would happen. They knew the USA would use it as a pretext for further support.
After Taraki was assassinated, allegedly by a member of his own Government, then the Soviets invaded. And the rest is history.
Why is all this important? Because it goes to show, yet again, how you can’t just believe the official version of events.
If you believe the official version of events, the CIA stopped meddling in the affairs of other countries after the Church Committee Report came out in 1975. Yeah, right.
by cameron | Sep 27, 2007 | CIA, science, Uncategorized
There aren’t many better ways to arrive home than to find multiple Amazon boxes sitting on your front doorstep! Thanks to Nick Hodge, Caitlin Kelly (Aussies) and Wilson Roberto Afonso (Brazil!) for your most generous contribution to my birthday heist! The pile of books beside my bed just rose by six! This is in addition to Andy Brown from the UK who sent me some Napoleon DVD’s a few weeks ago. You guys have significantly improved my week which, with all the server issues I’ve been fighting through, has been incredibly shitty. Thank you for putting a big smile back on my increasingly dour face and stopping me from drinking rat poison for another day at least.
The books I got are:
Bruce Lee’s Fighting Method
Blink
The Case For Mars
Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order
Legacy Of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Accelerando (a sci-fi classic by Charles Stross)
Definitely a bunch of great things to challenge my thinking in a bunch of different ways which will no doubt lead to more interviews! Thanks again folks. You rock.
My birthday (Oct 10) is still a couple of weeks away though, so there is plenty of time for the rest of your to spread the love by buying me shit from my Amazon wishlist and stop me from killing either myself or my IT support people.
by cameron | Jul 28, 2007 | CIA, Podcast, Uncategorized
Just went to pay the speeding fine I got leaving Bundaberg and discovered there are no online payment options?! Can’t even pay it over the phone?!? Have to send a cheque. By post. Wow. Queensland. Amazing.
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I’m fascinated this morning watching the shit-fight between Arrington and Furrier/Scoble over Podtech. Having met all three of those guys over the last couple of years, I would have figured them to be pretty tight. It does sound, though, like Podtech have been burning through their $7 million in funding. The business model for podcasting is still in the early days and I hope they make it through. People tend to forget that new business models tend to take 5 – 10 years to stabilize. The first banner ads were run in 1993, but it took nearly a decade before online advertising started to overtake radio advertising in most markets. I think the time frames will be compressed with podcasting, but it is still going to take a few more years before it’s well understood. Most ad agencies and media buyers still aren’t even considering podcasting in their spread. That’s starting to change, but we’ve got a long road ahead of us yet. The TPN model is to keep our overheads low, grow the audience and the content as much as we can, and grow the business through revenue. It’s a slower path but, hopefully, more sustainable in the long run and you don’t get crunched by investors when the journey takes longer than they would like (which seems to be what is happening to Podtech).
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TPN’s Digital Photography Show has been nominated in TWO categories at the Podcast Awards! Please click on the link below to vote for them in both the Cultural/Arts category and also nominated in the People’s Choice category! Congrats to Scott and Michael, this is just another piece of kudos for the great work they do every week on their show!
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According to this post about the CIA:
There are currently at least two criminal trials underway in Italy and Germany against several dozen CIA officials for felonies committed in those countries, including kidnapping people with a legal right to be in Germany and Italy, illegally transporting them to countries such as Egypt and Jordan for torture, and causing them to “disappear” into secret foreign or CIA-run prisons outside the U.S. without any form of due process of law.
Oh, but you think the CIA is being watched by the Oversight board set up 30 years ago to stop the bullshit they were involved in from the 50s through to the 70s? Think again.
However, on July 15, 2007, John Solomon of the Washington Post reported that, for the first five-and-a-half years of the Bush administration, the Intelligence Oversight Board did nothing — no investigations, no reports, no questioning of CIA officials. It evidently found no reason to inquire into the interrogation methods Agency operatives employed at secret prisons or the transfer of captives to countries that use torture, or domestic wiretapping not warranted by a federal court. Who were the members of this non-oversight board of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys? The board now in place is led by former Bush economic adviser Stephen Friedman. It includes Don Evans, a former commerce secretary and friend of the President, former Admiral David Jeremiah, and lawyer Arthur B. Culvahouse.
And whose daddy ran the CIA in the late 70s? That’s right – Dubya’s. The CIA gets $48 Billion in funding every year, yet nobody knows where it goes or how they spend it and they still haven’t been able to catch bin Laden, they didn’t want America about 9/11 and they were pretty wrong when they said they had conclusive evidence that Saddam had WMD stuffed down his undies. If you want to search for the main reason we have terrorism in our lives these days, start with looking into the activities of the CIA. Get an independent, citizen-helmed inquiry happening. Set it up so it can’t be bought or threatened out of existence. I think we’d all be amazed what it would uncover.
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As my car lease is up in a couple of months, we spent some time this afternoon test driving cars. Or a car, actually. We initially went back to the BMW dealership we bought our last car from. After standing there for 20 minutes without anyone asking if they could help us, we left and went to a Toyota dealership to test drive a Prius. I took a Prius out 3 years ago and couldn’t talk myself into it. This time, I actually quite liked driving it. Okay – it looks ugly and the interior finish just doesn’t compare to a BMW. But I like the efficiency and the tech. And it’s $25k cheaper than an equivalent Beemer. However, on the way home, the wife said to me “I’ll cry if we don’t buy another BMW. I love my BMW.” I asked her how long she’d cry for, thinking, well, I could handle a bit of crying to save the planet. “For the entire time I have to drive a Prius.” Sheesh. And she only drives the car about 30 minutes a week on average! It’s not like she’s even IN it every day. Anyway – score one for BMW’s engineering department. Nobody tell anyone at BMW marketing.
by cameron | Jun 23, 2007 | CIA, US politics
From the BBC:
The US Central Intelligence Agency is to declassify hundreds of documents detailing some of the agency’s worst illegal abuses from the 1950s to 1970s. The papers, to be released next week, will detail assassination plots, domestic spying and wiretapping, kidnapping and human experiments.
Conveniently, the papers being declassified stop in 1975 – the year before the current President’s father became Director of Central Intelligence (1976–1977).
One good thing out of this, I hope, is that fewer people will now call any theory that suggests the CIA is or has been involved in some pretty dirty business a “conspiracy theory”. It shouldn’t be beyond belief that American intelligence has played a fairly critical role in global politics over the last 60 years. They play with the same espionage toolkit as everyone else. Just because America has been the greatest experiment in human democracy, doesn’t mean it hasn’t got it’s fair share of skeletons. And if these things were true in the 50s, 60s and 70s, what makes you think it isn’t still true today?
Now, if we can get FBI to release their documents from that era, we might find out the truth about who ordered the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK and Marilyn….
by cameron | Jun 20, 2007 | CIA, US politics
5am. Haven’t been able to sleep. So I got up about 2am intending to work and have instead done what I always do at this hour – watch YouTube videos on 80s film clips. Sad. Very sad.
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When the JFK Airport bomb plot thing broke in the headlines a few weeks ago, I immediately smelled a rat. So I set up a Google news alert on the name of the main guy, Russell Defreitas, so I could track the developments once the main thrust and hype of the original story had died down.
And in the last week, there has already been a lot of interesting reports picked up.
Wired News has this story about how sensationalist the US media has been over the report.
The recently publicized terrorist plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport, like so many of the terrorist plots over the past few years, is a study in alarmism and incompetence: on the part of the terrorists, our government and the press.
What that story doesn’t explain, as this one does, is that Defrietas once worked for Evergreen International Airlines. Who are Evergreen?
A nine-part series in The Oregonian newspaper in 1988 reported that Evergreen International Airlines has close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and functions as an “ad hoc government air arm that thrives on a combination of covert and commercial work.” Work the company had been contracted for included “black ops” missions in Central America, War on Drugs operations around the world, and delivering arms to the Egyptian military, while non-military contracts included tracking ice floes in the Arctic, providing security for John Paul II, and spraying anti-locust pesticides in the Niger.
(source)
So the main guy accused of plotting to blow up JFK airport used to work for a company that is a front for the CIA. Is this starting to sound like a bad film plot yet?
The other thing about this story which interests me is how the “informant” who gave away the JFK plot, Steve (Toro) Francis, is a twice-convicted convicted drug dealer who entrapped the plotters. According to this article, Defreitas and the informant were introduced “last July by another government operative”.
So… the story shapes up like this.
We have an ex-CIA employee who was introduced by the CIA to a twice-convicted crack dealer who then claims there was a plot to blow up JFK airport. No bombs were ever made, no plans even drawn up.
Kurt Nimmo writing in The Daily Scare has this quote:
As Paul Joseph Watson notes, the JFK case reveals “that the terror threat has been overhyped and magnified a thousand-fold for political propaganda,†a fact demonstrated “by documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act that show only 0.0015 percent of the total number of cases filed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were terrorism related, despite the fact that the Bush administration has repeatedly asserted that it is the primary focus of the DHS.â€
Bruce Schneier. who wrote the Wired News article, hit the nail squarely on the head in an earlier article:
“There are two basic ways to terrorize people. The first is to do something spectacularly horrible, like flying airplanes into skyscrapers and killing thousands. The second is to keep people living in fear through constant threat warnings, security checks, rhetoric, and stories of terrorist plots foiled by the diligent work of the increasingly intrusive Department of Homeland Security.â€
Now – while the mainstream media in the US and Australia blared the details of the JFK plot across front pages and TV news coverage, how much, if any, coverage will they give to these newly-emerging details? Will they get the same treatment? Or will they be either printed down the back of the paper near the obits or ignored altogether?
Don’t buy into the sensationalist press coverage. Read between the lines. Research. Use the web to get the facts.
by cameron | Jun 18, 2007 | CIA, Iran, Iraq, US politics
Charley Reese (ex-Orlando Sentinel) has written an interesting piece for AntiWar.com about Iran. He makes the following points:
I don’t see how any honest man can believe that Iran is a threat to the United States or its neighbors. Iran has not invaded anyone in the past 100 years. Iran has from the beginning insisted that its nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes, and there has been no evidence – I repeat, no evidence – to the contrary. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty explicitly authorizes countries to enrich uranium. In other words, Iran has not done anything illegal.
Iran has no intercontinental missiles, and the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons is Israel. Please note that the United States flatly refuses to endorse the idea of a nuclear-free Middle East. Iran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel has refused to sign it. Iran admits international inspectors. Israel flatly refuses to allow international inspectors. The only country in today’s Middle East with weapons of mass destruction and a history of invading and occupying other people’s countries is Israel.
So why are the US so interested in Iran? According to Wikipedia:
Iran ranks second in the world in natural gas reserves and third in oil reserves.
Or course, the US has been trying to get its hands on Iran for decades. The Iran-Iraq war was started when Saddam Hussein, backed by the USA, invaded Iran in 1980.
According to Robert Parry there was a secret encouragement by the US administration (President Jimmy Carter, conveyed through Saudi Arabia) which was embroiled in a dispute with the new Islamic Republic of Iran. In the words of Alexander Haig, secretary of state from 1981, “It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Fahd.”
(Source: Wikipedia)
Robert Parry, btw, was the journalist who broke the Iran-Contra scandal involving Oliver North. For those of you too young to remember,
It involved several members of the Reagan Administration who in 1986 helped to illegally sell arms to Iran, an avowed enemy, and used the proceeds to fund, also illegally, the Contras, a right-wing insurgent organization in Nicaragua.
(Source: Wikipedia)
They also turned a blind eye to the Contras raising money by exporting crack cocaine to the US.
Ever wondered what happened to the people in the US administration that were convicted in the Iran-Contra affair? Most got away with it, pardoned by George H. W. Bush when he was President. Many of the people involved are now working for the current Bush administration. Including Robert Gates, the guy who replaced Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense.
He served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1991–1993 under George H.W. Bush. During Iran Contra he was Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. In 1984, as deputy director of CIA, Gates advocated that the U.S. initiate a bombing campaign against Nicaragua and that the U.S. do everything in its power short of direct military invasion of the country to remove the democratically-elected Sandinista government.
(Source: Wikipedia)
Where does that leave us?
It’s important to understand that the people running the US at the moment have a history. And anyone who thinks these things are “conspiracy theories” only need to read a couple of books. The Iran-Contra affair wasn’t a conspiracy theory. It happened. Ronald Reagan admitted his involvement in it (after first denying it). He admitted George H. W. Bush knew about it as well.
These things happened.
Israel, on the other hand,
has received substantial direct economic aid from the United States, including approximately $1.2 billion per year since the mid-1970’s, although that regular annual amount has been being tapered off by $120 million per year beginning in 1998.
(Source)
Israel’s relationship with the United Nations is pretty bleak.
From 1967 to 1989 the UN Security Council passed 131 resolutions directly dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Of the 131 resolutions passed, 43 could be considered neutral while the remaining 88 either criticized and opposed the actions of Israel or judged against its interests. Nearly half of the 88 resolutions against Israel “condemned,” “censured,” or “deplored” the member state or its actions. During this time, in the UN General Assembly, 429 resolutions against Israel were passed, and Israel was condemned 321 times.
(Source)
It makes you wonder.
